Okay? You want to go back over this, Ed, this question of how your assignment was arranged in 1965...to go back to Lodge.

In 1965 Henry Cabot Lodge had just been appointed as ambassador to Vietnam and asked me to go out there as his assistant to concern myself mostly with the pacification programs that were taking place out there, in which he was personally quite interested.

So I went out there as his assistant. He had told me that his request to me actually had come from President Johnson, though I hadn't seen President Johnson about this and went out as essentially a foreign service observer officer, temporarily. And a little later after I'd gotten out of there...out there President Johnson gave me the rank of minister then.

So this was as a foreign service type that I went out. I had retired from the military by then. When I got out there and tried to cope with the pacification programs, I found that there were a number of US agencies involved in the work. Initially we tried to work out the US part of the effort by committee means, and tried very hard to succeed in this, but we actually had great difficulties with getting true teamwork on the US side in this because each part of our government had its own ideas on what to do and I must admit I wasn't good at getting a single guiding system on the American side and working with the Vietnamese.

Well there's...It's certainly no secret that there was a lot of bureaucratic opposition to you inside of the American mission. Could you describe some of those problems and difficulties?

Thinking back to my later days out in Vietnam and getting along with different parts of the US side of the effort, (cough) I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach just at the memory of some of the types of things that happened and didn't get along. I think it was a very sad thing that happened. That we Americans can't seem to get thoroughly unselfish in serving our country in such situations and be able to work with each other.

I don't know whether some of the Vietnamese habits rubbed off on the Americans out there at the time of mistrust of one another. We didn't have mistrust but we had rivalries, we had people very mindful of the fact that service out in Vietnam seemed to have hampered and ruined some careers by American officials, and that the Americans out there didn't want to have that happen to them, or that they were very ambitious in their own services, which is a proper motive for anybody.

But in a war situation where we had young Americans out there risking their lives and fighting and dying, I felt that we on the civilian end - which I was at the time - should have been far more unselfish in our own looks at our positions and prerogatives and so on than had happened.

Do you think...Could you recall any specific instances or anecdotes in which you ran into the bureaucratic stone wall?

Well, there were many incidents of - fairly small ones - of rivalry running into bureaucratic stone walls and working with the Americans and Vietnamese at the time. I would just say that the American effort out there would...was more to the effect of as though Rochambeau and Lafayette and so on and the American revolution had brought along the court of Versailles with them to this country and the bickerings going on among the court officials was very similar to what the Americans were doing in the way of organization and well, bureaucracy in effect, in the thing. So that any one who wanted to get out and get a single thing done had to run a course of getting agreements from a number of people to go along and even be permitted to do the most simple things.

And I ran into a considerable amount of that since I didn't have any direct orders from Washington about what I'd do. I didn't have funds from Congress to expend. I didn't have a clear rule of...line of authority to do certain things, so sometimes decisions were made and we would go to get things done and it would simply be the bosses of people that I'd gotten the agreement with who'd say, "no, we're going to run that. We want so and so to run that." So that it would just be a slowing down of the effort.

Well, there's been an observation made that in 1965, after 1965 the war had grown to the stage where it was one great big organization against another great big organization and that people like you who were taking a personal and individual approach really had become obsolete or had been ground over by these two great bureaucracies because the...on communist side had also escalated into a great big organization fight. Do you think that's a fair appraisal?

Well, the fact that the war had turned into one bureaucracy against another has some truth in it, but it's only a grain. The...and that a person who was oriented towards individual effort as I was would be a maverick and not part of this would...there's some truth in that.

I think that the same was true on the Vietnamese side, on our side as well as the enemy's, but still there was a relationship there that I adopted myself to between some of the Vietnamese leadership and our mission out there so that my house was constantly a place with an open door to Vietnamese.

It was one of the few American homes that Vietnamese officials would bring their families to visit. It was one of the places where they felt they could visit socially in a feeling...an atmosphere of friendship and affection that they could admit to some of their problems that they would find difficult to do in official gatherings.

What do you think when you look back on those...can I just take that away from you because I think it's making little scratching noises. When you look back on that assignment from '65 to '68, what would you say were your accomplishments and what would you say were your failures? What was your balance sheet?

The balance sheet on my service out there, the failures and accomplishments...I felt that I, in the way of accomplishments, I gave a constant and ready means of Americans and Vietnamese to go through a glass wall that seemed to separate them. To reach an understanding with each other.

This was felt very definitely on the Vietnamese side and I know Ambassador Bunker when I left finally in the middle of '68 thanked me personally for accomplishing this as far as the US mission was concerned. The failures were that the war had grown much larger than any small entity such as an individual or a small group of individuals...Americans could swing the preponderance of the combat one way or another.

My own usefulness in the past had been that American policy was pretty clear cut. There were smaller numbers of Americans involved and that when I would voice something from the ambassador, that that was the only voice at that moment being heard by a Vietnamese official. Later there was in effect too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were all sorts of ideas being put forward and of people dealing with Vietnamese who didn't speak with a single voice, with even a coordinated voice so that many things were being heard by the Vietnamese at the time from the American camp and in this I was not in with the mode of things at the time because wasn't the way I was ever used to carrying out my duties.

I'd always have a very clear understanding how the top Americans on the scene of where the problem was, what should be done about it and what my own part was in that. And by the later end of the sixties this was no longer really what was being done. The Americans had too massive an organization. There were too many things that needed doing, too many people on the link up between Vietnamese and Americans that were trying to solve daily problems and coming to grips with them and coming up with different views to have a clear-cut understanding.

There was at that time one of the members of your team was someone who was later to become either famous or notorious depending on the point of view...was Dan Ellsberg.

Right.

What was he like in the days he was working for you?

Dan Ellsberg who was with me out there in Vietnam was a brilliant younger man who struck me as being a good thinker, a man who took many things into consideration when he was examining a problem, and was quite expert at expressing his views afterwards on this.

I felt that Ellsberg would give me a very fresh view of the country that was new to him, that he was seeing for the first time up close and looking at not only at what was happening at the moment but from a viewpoint that took in discussions that he had had in Washington before that, and had quite a depth of scholarly background on the subject.

He was at the time...initially he was quite gung ho about getting into combat, or coming into contact with the enemy and doing something as an American in that. I had to keep explaining to him that he was out in a civilian capacity, but he was eager to get out in the countryside which I was also eager to have him do. The more he could see the better he would understand the situation.

He became a very close friend of John Paul Vann, who was an advisor, former military officer, who was with our civilian agency on economic aid. And he used to love to run the gauntlet of traveling highways where the VC had set up ambushes. This to him was I feel sure was part of the thrill of serving out in Vietnam.

In any way, does it...Have you ever thought about what may have motivated him to steal the Pentagon Papers and publish them?

What motivated Dan Ellsberg to publish the Pentagon Papers has puzzled me in some ways and I think I understand some of this motives for...originally. Dan tried originally to go through proper channels to get a congressional look at the executive department on what was in the papers.

And I know that he went up to see some of our senators and congressmen and when nothing happened by his so to speak working within the establishment, it was then that he apparently felt that he should go public on that, the American public deserved that. What happened after that has been very much in the public view about him and I haven't had contact with Dan. But I think originally that he was motivated by a high sense of principled morals as is an American citizen.

Well let me ask it this way. As you mentioned, he was gung ho and rather hawkish in the days he was there with you. What changed him from being a hawk to a, if you want, a dove?

I didn't see Dan enough after his initial period of service with me to know what influences were on him that caused him to change. I had no chance to discuss this with him and I simply don't know. I know that he married again and married a girl who had very strong feelings that he later adopted himself.

I know that he...he had had a chance to observe things in Washington that had a very different outlook on Vietnam and on the war than we had known in Saigon together. Someplace in there something happened to him that I simply don't know enough about.

In looking back, you were really involved in Vietnam through three administrations the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, and the Johnson administration.

Right.

Was there any particular way each one operated? Were there any distinctive qualities about different administrations approaches to Vietnam?

That would take...to answer the differences of views on Vietnam and different US administrations is something I'd have to reflect on a very long time and I can't give a quick answer to that.

Let me go back to a personal thing. You were I think sort of immortalized in a couple of books, if you want to use that word.

I know, but...

One is Graham Greene's Quite American and you are a figure in the Ugly American called Colonel Hillindale. How do you feel about becoming a fictitious character in that way?

My feelings about being a fictitious character or identified with various novels and so on...some of which came out when I was still quite active and tried to do things. I felt first of all that it was very harmful. It...the fictional characters were caricatures in part of some of the things I was trying to do, and one of them in the Quiet American, or the Ugly American, pitted the character against the ambassador and others, people who I was actually trying to work with at the time in places, and caused me some personal difficulties in harmonious working relationships immediately.

And parts of the character were completely untrue, of things we were doing, that was a composite character really of other things drawn on as examples. So that there were things happening that would puzzled me at the time but also made it quite difficult for me to work. I wish they'd never done that while I was still active.

Incidentally, the Asians themselves were way ahead in this game. The Indian ambassador when I was in the Philippines had told stories about me being mixed up with Magsaysay there, and how he got elected as President. Sihanouk in Cambodia had made a movie in which he is the hero and a member of the Khmer Royal Navy intelligence that bested a sort of stupid American spy who happened to have my name.

And beat him out for the attentions of the daughter of one of the ambassadors there. And I remember that Chiang Ching-kuo, I was told, had passed out similar stories. There were problems in my going to Korea and that Syngman Rhee in the old days was afraid that I would try and bring free elections into Korea. Things that I hadn't known about but as I was meeting people and talking to them they'd react in ways and I'd say, "what are you doing that for," and they'd tell me these things.

There's some...well, what do you think about the Quiet American as a book?

Graham Green who wrote the Quiet American apparently had some very strange notions about Americans that...I recall one of the things in the novel was that...using air conditioned bathrooms affected the potency of American males. Well, I think the rest of his book was about as true as that notion.

Well, here's a last question for you, and I'll want to, maybe sort of give you a moment of reflection of it. What, looking back on this great experience, tragic experience, what do you think the lessons of Vietnam are? What should we have learned from Vietnam?

The lessons we should have learned from Vietnam and the Vietnam War are first of all that we should always be true to our own principles. American ones. The ones from our own history. The ones that we instinctively tend to follow and are away from any trends and so forth, but are long range in themselves.

We felt that strong viewpoint that sort of taught us not to ever look upon ourselves as a world policeman. I don't think that's the point at all. I think that the Vietnam War should have taught us to be true to our own principles throughout. I think that the separation of military and civilian authority should permit more input on strategy from the military into our political leadership and I think that what happened to us was that in Vietnam we had presidents.

We had...whatever else you think of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, they were professional politicians. They were from a very tough breed of politicians in American. And yet they were commanders-in-chief, were national leaders in the war, in Vietnam, fighting it in a military way. While their opposition, Le Duan and Ho Chi Minh and Giap and others in the politburo in Hanoi fighting it as a political war.

And I cry inside thinking that our tough expert politicians, never used their political sense in the way that we waged war in Vietnam. I don't think that if they ever felt that this was their subject, politics, which the thing needed in Vietnam, if they'd ever used that, the war would have been very different.

Well, can I just ask you for comment on the fact that Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan and Giap were Vietnamese in Vietnam and we were Americans in Vietnam. And if we reversed that, how well would the Vietnamese do if they were trying to wage a war in the United States? I mean it was...I mean, weren't we...

I think the Vietnamese used their political war in the United States. I'm not going to say that they directed all of the popular dissent that was expressed there but they certainly had some influence on it. I don't think that the initial VC movies that were the start of the early sit-ins in colleges and so on just came in like Topsy into this country. Someone got them in here and got them shown up at Columbia University and so on and that what happened in the United States was almost identical with what happened in metropolitan France and then Paris in an earlier war that the communists in Vietnam had waged. In which later on they took great credit for changing Mao's strategy over to fit, hitting an enemy at home which was different than Mao had ever done. So...I lost my trend of thought...

That's ok...I think that, I think that's fine. Unless you have any other questions.

I think what you were...try that last question again, because I...

...that we could have won. And you get into such things as the war crime trials after World War II and so forth. Which were political implements.

Thank you so much.

Alright. Be careful, don't move too far with that.