Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents...If it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence...our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.
"(4)...The key position of Vietnam in Southeast Asia...makes inevitable the involvement of this nation's security in any new outbreak of trouble."
Senator Kennedy was followed by Walter S. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, who declared that the U.S. sought:119
"To support a friendly non-Communist government in Vietnam and to help it diminish and eventually eradicate Communist subversion and influence.
"To help the government of Vietnam establish the forces necessary for internal security.
"To encourage support for Free Vietnam by the non-Communist world.
"To aid in the rehabilitation and reconstruction of a country and people ravaged by eight ruinous years of civil and international war.
"War efforts are directed first of all toward helping sustain the internal security forces consisting of a regular army of about 150,000 men, and mobile civil guard of some 45,000 and local defense units which are being formed to give protection against subversion on the village level...."
Dr. Tom Dooley described emotionally the plight of the refugees from North Vietnam, and sketched in graphic terms Viet Minh terrorism. Professor Hans Morganthau extolled the Geneva Settlement and status quo in Vietnam as a logical balancing of the interests of the powers concerned, and General O'Daniel described how the Vietnamese had been given the opportunity to select the type of military organization they like best, and had "followed the U.S. pattern."120
But from Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem addressed a sober, reflective letter to the American Friends of Vietnam on the note that "we have arrived at a critical point in our national life." He concluded with the assertion that: "It is indispensable that our army have the wherewithal to become increasingly capable of preserving the peace which we seek....Economic aid can be only effective once security is restored...."121
From Hanoi to the peoples of Southeast Asia, a commentary on the 1 June conference in Washington was broadcast in Vietnamese headlines:
