Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
[176-10030-10168.pdf — page 75]
-73-products. I saw them working on it at thetime, and all I know is they had tremendousstacks of papers with the results of theirtyped-out work and were putting it together.[^9] And the interpretation of this was apparently wasto start increasing staff and American militarypersonnel to handle whatever whatever wascoming up out of this whole process. Thefeeling was was that there should be closerAmerican supervision of what was happeningunits,out in Eunice which meant you'd putdown your Americans at lower echelons andthen get a separate reporting system on back,feeding in the research process of the Americansinitially more than anything else. [^9] It wasn'tfor control; it was just for information thatwould go into fields of study and this lead ledAmericanto a proliferation of an military presencethat was intended sort of for the educationof Americans, I think, more than anything else,but of course didn't work out that way. You[^9]: [^9]:
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put some red-blooded American boys in uniformout someplace, and they're going to start doingother things as well. In collecting information,they couldn't help but tell a guy, "Well, ifyou didn't do it this way and did it the otherway, it would work better, and so on. It wasa very human thing that started working andas this happened, we started building up ouradvisory effort more and more.O'BRIEN:Well, in the meantime, while this is going on,the insurgency's building up, isn't it?LANSDALE: Yes.O'BRIEN:Just what is the condition of the country-side that's different from when you're therein the middle fifties and when you goback in 1960?LANSDALE:Oh, there were guerrilla operations by an enemy, whichthere hadn't been in the period from Genevaon up to the time I left in the end of '56You could drive roads at night and so forth
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-75-and not be worrying about guerrillas. Therewere isolated incidents of violence, butthey were very minor--it would be aboutwhat you'd expect in any country with the crime rategoing the fact that former Vietnam-guerrillaswere the guys pulling the trigger didn'tmatter too much as far as the overall crimerate went. It was in a nature of minorthatterrorism was going on. By my next visitsfiftieslater in the '50's, there were areas ofguerrilla bands at work, with roads that wereunsafe and so on, in areas that were unsafe,with great problems of police posts beingattacked and with their families being wipedout in small massacre type of things, thoughthe type and degree of violence had increaseda great deal. By the end of '60--when I gotthere in Christmas of '60--there were fair -size enemy, Vietcong units operating anddominating areas it had escalated considerablyby then.
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-76-O'BRIEN: Is this terrorism campaign on the local officials as serious as some of the people have written, about-itLANSDALE: Oh, yes.O'BRIEN: Do you ever get any feeling about the number of people? I've heard all kinds of estimates.LANSDALE: No, I've got [Stephen T.] Hosmer's study there on that, and I haven't read it yet.I just got that from him. I imagine he's got a figure in there. The last figure I remember on it was--in about '66 around 40,000 or something.O'BRIEN: Forty thousand. That many?LANSDALE: Yes. These were officials not their families or anything. But these were village officials and district officials and sort of federal government officials.O'BRIEN: Well, what do you see happening as a result of this in terms of Diem to just simply govern in those years? Is the ability to govern deteriorating?
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-77-LANSDALE: Yes. In some ways it was. Initially, he was unwilling to delegate any authority at all in the thing! and he had the tendency to try and do everything himself. If the problem came up in agriculture, he would be the guy to do all the paper work and the deciding rather than his Minister of Agriculture and so on. He had gotten over that to a very large extent later so he had learned to be more the administrator and executive later on, as far as putting some authority in the hands of others. But at the same time, he also seemed to have lost some of his critical faculty, of some of the things that were going wrong, of not being able to see it. He was getting around the country and visiting, but not as much anymore because of the security problems. He had been shot at several times, so that he had a larger and larger security guard around him all the time, which meant that when he went in and talked to people,
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-78-they were very much aware of plain_clothes policemen, secret service types, all around him, and others, that were screening out people so that the dialogue between the president and the people became thinner and thinner, and less and less meaningful. So while he was on paper becoming a better executive, he was, in terms of being the national leader, was being less effective all the time because he had no means of measuring what was true and what wasn't, what was worth doing and wasn't, and what was work and what wasn't. It was a considerable impairment of his critical faculty. This was one of the reasons I was urging him to start dialogues with his political opposition, even if it started at opposite poles and led to tremendous emotional clashes that there would be some means for dialogue to take place that would have been useful to him, particularly if he had invited them into a
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-79-meal or something, and had some way of dampening fattening the most emotional irritations that would take place, just how the people seemed polite at the time, so the content of what they had to say would be something that he wasn't getting elsewise.O'BRIEN: Yes, well, as I understand it, the Viet Cong] make a great deal of headway in those years on the basis of the land system.LANSDALE: That was one of them.O'BRIEN: Well what... As I understand it, there's some rub between the U.S. in this regard and Diem about putting through some land reform which would cure some of the rural cultural problems that the French had sort of created, as I understand, from you know the Vietnamese moving into the country.LANSDALE: Yes, yes..O'BRIEN: Well, how do you see that? Are you pushing him for this sort of things at that point?LANSDALE: Yes. Actually, we have some very sound land
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-80-reform measures on the books and had issued decrees on them that were good. As usual, the difficulty is, when you get a piece of legislation or something, is then implementing it correctly, and I was pushing him mostly on implementing his measures. Now the land reform worker that Diem approved and used as the basis for his decrees came from Wolf Ladejinsky, and Wolf, was, when he left U.S. employment, was actually employed by Diem as his advisor on the subject, and Wolf was getting over and having breakfast with Diem quite a bit.Wolf is a very articulate, personable type of a guy, and there was a great deal of affectionate friendship between the two men so that Wolf, who is a champion of reforms and of helping the man on the land, had full access to this guy and had a way of doing things. And I felt that the main thing that needed doing was demonstrating to President Diem, who was sympathetic towards this, of where
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-81-things weren't going right and changing somethisof the inner workings of the thing, insteadof just falting him on intent. And hisintent was very sound, very good. I thinkhe was ignorant of some of these thingsgoing wrong. I felt that we should haveborne down on the matters in which he wasignorant and tried to get some changes thereand make these things work, because certainlylandlords and others were circumventingthe law of the land that Diem thought wasoperating or when he circumvented it, hewas doing it for good reasons of his own,which was again open to education by somebodyof him but he was moving in people whom hecould trust--who were refugees--into farmcommunities and distributing land to themfor security reasons and political reasonsand so on, and then dictating what theywould grow and so on cause he'd just figure,Well, in the national economy, we need this
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-82-type of fiber grown or this type of crop or something, and the land will produce it up there, and so they should do that. So he was only circumventing the law for the greater good, in his own mind, in his own extent.O'BRIEN:: This centralization brings about a reaction, though, doesn't it?LANSDALE: Yes.TAPE II SIDE ILANSDALE: You asked about the falling out between Ladejinsky and Diem. I know there was something of that nature, but what it consisted of, or why, I don't know. I remember that the American ambassador...O'BRIEN: It would have been (Elbridge) Durbrow?LANSDALE: ... Durbrow was mindful of the fact that Ladejensky was having breakfast with Diem and was close to him, and, in a rather general way to bring up thoughts of corruptions in
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-83-the government and subjects beyond anythinglike land reform. And I suspect thatLadejinsky had started getting very politicalin his talk,as a result of this, with Diem,and that Diem had resented it. But beyondthis, there was a very deep affection betweenthe two. When I was there in '59 or '60,Ladejinsky had wanted to go someplace andI forget where it was. . . . I know oneof the places was Indonesia, but there wasanother country he wanted to go to, and Diemhadn't wanted him to go and suggestedthat he attend a conference--I think inLatin America finally, they had agreedbetween the two of them, and Ladejinsky hadgone on to do these other things that takensort of a sabbatical leave to do that. Butthis was a very personal thing between twomen, and it was two friends rather than apresident and his consultant working. Iknow Ladejinsky is very sentimental about
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-84-Diem as a man, and I know that Diem recipro-cated this very much. There was a pointwhere the rational thought would end, andthe feelings of affection and so forthwould come over, and say, "Well, even if thatis true and everything, I still like theguy, and want to help him, and so on andthis existed between the two. So theymight have differed on some things and perhapson carrying out land reform exactly the way thatWolf wanted, but the two men kept seeingeach other all the time, and he had ampleopportunity to work on that.O'BRIEN: that'sthe suggestion is made sometimes isthat the Vietnamese military has not beentrained for the kind of war and the kindof insurgency that they did encounter in1960-61--they had not been properly trainedfor that before. Is there any validityin this at all?
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-85-LANSDALE: Oh yes, They were being trained actually to meet the challenge that the Vietnamese and American top officials foresaw, and they were thinking that this--and incidentally, the French General [Paul] Ely before he left was thinking the same way--just in terms of contigency planning, they saw a lot of artillery and armor being given the North Vietnamese army. So, being given that information, they saw any attack or military trouble in Vietnam as consisting of divisions of North Vietnamese with a lot of artillery and armor coming across the border. So they built up an army to meet the foreseeable thing that was happening, that they thought might happen. Instead of this, of course, it was more of the same old story again and there were many of the officers in the Vietnamese armed forces who had formerly been guerrillas themselves, who had formerly had been Viet men in the old days of fighting the French, who had broken with the Communists and wanted no part of the Communists and were very sincere, patriotic Nationalists. But
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since they had had this former affiliation and had taken their basic military training with the enemy, so to speak, they never quite had the same stature among their fellow officers in the Vietnamese army, for example, as graduates of the Vietnamese Military Academy and the others coming right out of high school and so on. So as a result, the officers corps who were knowledgeable of how to counter what was happening were kept at fairly junior grades, and in the late fifties the highest any of them got that I ever knew about was rank of Major, and they had to take orders from Colonels and so forth who had served under the French in very much the same type of a conventional military organization as the Americans had put up and were advocating. And these junior types who wanted to do different things were simply too junior to do it and were unable to convince anyone of the need. The initial meeting of the threat was thought to be a police problem than an army problem, and there was a lot of work
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-87-on trying to equip and train the nationalpolice to cope with it, and we Americansdid that through our economic mission andthrough Michigan State University had agroup helping on administration there. Theyrecruited some very good police officials fromthe U.S. who were quite used to dealing withurban crime problems in the U.S. Well, youcan't take a man who is very good at precinctwork in Detroit, Michigan, or Burmingham, Alabama,or something, and move him out to an Asiancountry where his problem is: What do you dowhen a company of guerrillas comes in andambushes your police station? A completelyforeign type of a thing so that we hadpolice advisors who were insisting on allpolicemen being armored with nothing morethan, say, a 38-caliber revolver, with thepolicemen saying, "Yes, but people areshooting at us with rifles, and we need riflesor something like that to shoot back at them,or how about sub-machine guns or some--weneed more fire power." Well, it was foreign
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-88-to them. So there was a mixup on a number ofthings on this coping with the insurgencythat was growing, not only the conventionalformation of the Vietnamese army but of aconventional urban police formation of thepolice. And yet, throughout the systems there,there were many individuals who knew better,and who knew how to cope with it, and whowere continually begging, "Give us a chanceto do it some other way."O'BRIEN: Well, in terms of these people we were talkingabout a little earlier--the late Eisenhowerpeople, like Fitzgerald and Irwin and Parsons--Do they conceive of the kind of insurgencythat's developing in South Vietnam at that point, or arethey . . .LANSDALE: Fairly well. Fairly well. They were moreaware of, or had more understanding of, theneeds than did some of the folks that werecoming in sort of brand new to the problemor who had been steeped in a far moreconventional approach to the problem,as weresome of our military leaders at the time.But, as I remarked earlier, these were personal
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-89-friends of mine, and when I'd talk to them and tell them my views, there was always sympathy for them, so I might have mistaken that for understanding and so on, and even that was rare enough so that I felt that, [Interruption]O'BRIEN: How long is the manuscript?LANSDALE: Ho ho. I went through first, the publishers wanted me to tell all; another words, just write as much as I could for later editing, and said this is the way people do it. So I wound up with really three of really long books, and since I was writing one not too long book, why I wound up with a tremendously long manuscript. And urged that I could cut it down to two books, and publish it as two different things, and the subject matter would have permitted me. They still want just one book, so I am now going back with editor's notes and with my own notes and trying to. I started off initially with a cut-and-paste job, but I discovered I couldn't do that and retain the proper narrative and entries on the thing, but I wound up having
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-90-to rewrite almost of all of it, and recast it,and retell it in a somewhat different form.I'm about half-way through with that, but it'll bea fair-size book even so.O'BRIEN: Well that's good mainly on the Philippinesand the early period in Vietnam?LANSDALE: Umhmm.O'BRIEN: Good, you know that's really . . .LANSDALE: Well, there's really one big period in Vietnamthat isn't known too well, and most historianshave passed over it, and the ones who haven'thave been championing a cause, and their workis quite suspect. Some of the French weresort of agents and provocateurs at the time,and they are more or less justifying whatthey did and leaving out important parts ofit.O'BRIEN: How about the French journalist [Jean] Lacouture?What do you think of his work? Is it Lacouturethat's done the thing on Ho [Chi Minh]?LANSDALE: Yes, I'm trying to remember. I think that'swho it was. Well, most of the French writingsabout Ho and some of the explanations in
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-91-official documents of the French, tryingto explain him and so on, by friends, I foundvery interesting and I had no way of judgingreally on it-there was a tremendous sympathyand so forth being expressed, and then a verystrong attempt to work out an accomodationwith him afterwards, with him, by the French.And again, a highly emotional sensitivity toany interference was what they were trying todo, and they saw almost anything as interference.So what is written by them, I read mindfulof their sensitivities at the time and whatthey're trying to prevent anybody ever believingthat would be opposite at all, or somethingdifferent at least and it was just amazing.The French press was screaming that I wasstarting World War III in Vietnam in '55 . . .O'BRIEN: Mind if I get this on tape--well, it ison tape, I'm sorry I didn't realize it wasgoing.LANSDALE: . . . simply because I think there was a feelingby the French colonialists in Indochina, of notwanting to give up the French presence there
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-92-and it's a human, understandable type of a thing. They had been there and associated there, and some of them had spent their entire lives there, and here they were having to give up something. A Swiss journalist once explained it to me: It was like a man giving up his mistress and seeing some *big* guy in a big car driving by in the street and even though he'd given *him* up, he'd just say, well, he hates that guy *because* he got the mistress allegedly with material means such as an automobile and maybe a fur coat and so on, and he isn't the man that the former guy was. So some of this feeling was very prevalent there and for some reason or other, I happened to suddenly become the focal point of it, through my name or something *or other* so that they went to great *lengths* of charging me with all sorts of things that I was doing: I was out buying up the loyalties of *sect forces* with millions of dollars, and things that would be hard to prove that I wasn't, mind you, except *they'd* to say, "Look, I didn't have a million dollars to buy anything with." And they'd
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-93-say, "Well, the U.S. government did, and youwere a secret agent for them and so on. Itwas very hard to disprove some of their talkand say, "Well, that just isn't so." Exceptonce in a while they'd get really wild andclaim I was down--I walked in on a briefing,for example, with French officers tellingsome American visitors from Washingtonat that very moment I was trying to buy offa sect leader, and very naively, with asuitcase full of money and I didn't knowbut the guy was going to ambush me and takeall the money and not do whatever I was goingto plan to do. And at that moment, I justasked him, I said, "Well, please keep on withyour briefing I want to know whether theguy killed me or not. "It was crazy. Now thesewere very responsible French officials andthe fact that I'd be miles away from the sceneof some of these things never stopped the damncirculation of these stories. I don't knowhow you ever stop that stuff.O'BRIEN: Yeah, well how about people like Bernard Falland Patty Huny and their writings? Are they . . .[P.J.] Honey
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-94-LANSDALE: Well, they're very sound, very sound. Fall's background, as was Honey's, was out of intelligence or information collection units and their different countries. Fall's initial writings were all out of a French army historical section[^1] and I had to tell him one time I read some of his work originally by the original author. But it was a detailed military history of operations that he'd delved into and I don't know, I doubt that it was intentional plagarism on his part. He was probably rushing through, getting a book published for academic credits and so on. And Honey the same way with British intelligence, who were quite active in Indochina during the French days. But it was -- some of the stories and happenings and everything were just almost incredible. Some of the French journalists were politically partisan. They had connections with the Communist Party or sympathies with them of some sort. And Ho had been one of the founders of the French Communist Party, so that there was always a cultural or comradeship feeling of some sort there, and when the[^1]: section
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-95-Americans started showing up on the scene, there was very paternalistic feeling of."Well, these are our people, these Vietnamese, or Khmer or Lao, and you keep your cotton-picking fingers off of them" type of a thing that went to very great lengths.Volatile emotions erupting on this type of a thing. [^9] I remember one of the journalists, John Beret, published a newspaper in Saigon and wrote a lot of the early propaganda for individuals in the French army and had sort adventurer/types among them. He then went to Pnohm Penh, where he started a weekly newspaper and started also writing speeches for [Norodom Sihanouk] and the next thing I knew, Sihanouk was accusing me of plotting to murder him or assassinate him and I hadn't even been near Cambodia, and I hadn't thought of Sihanouk when this happened. The governor of Siem Reap, who had been very close to Sihanouk before--and Siem Reap is where Angkor Wak and the historical ruins are--suddenly died, and the story started seeping out a little bit with Sihanouk charging that this governor, whose[^9]:
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-96-name was Dap Chhnun, and I were in a conspiracy to murder him and take over the government of Cambodia. And it didn't do any good that I had never met Chhnun and never had any dealings with him, and Cambodia was way outside my bailiwick but this is the story that's gone on and on and on.O'BRIEN: Well, there was a little bit of truth to that, wasn't there some involvement of CIA.LANSDALE: Yeah Well, he was a national leader and actually had formed the political groupings initially that supported Sihanouk and gave him his political power--he was the organizer; he was the chief political lieutenant of Sihanouk. And then apparently, he felt that Sihanouk was going sour, and he wanted to get the government back into reflecting more the will of the people. How far he got, I don't know but this was really something that was foreign to me at the time. I got sent back into Cambodia afterwards, from Washington, with various military assistance groups or economic groups or presidential commissions