Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the making of Vietnam pacification policy

Parameters, Autumn, 2005 by Frank L. Jones

Lodge opposed the change in concept, which caused the President to again relent momentarily and consider an alternative that Katzenbach proposed on the party's return from Saigon. (46) Katzenbach argued that the US Mission had made progress and that the best approach was to have the US military and ARVN improve security while the civilian agencies were consolidated as a new organization known as the Office of Civil Operations (OCO) that Porter would run after being relieved of his day-to-day Deputy Ambassador duties. (47) Johnson approved the scheme, wanting OCO established "soonest" and to see progress quickly. He set an unworkable deadline of 90 to 120 days for the new organization to demonstrate movement. (48)

Changing Venues

Komer informed Porter immediately that the President's deadline was firm and that he had better "get on the stick," and Johnson personally attested to this view by writing a letter to Lodge urging him to move quickly. (49) Komer and his staff wrote the directive establishing the organization, and then Komer sent Montague and Holbrooke to Saigon to assist with setting up OCO. The Mission refused to take the short deadline seriously. It would not be until 1 December that the office was established. (50) Consequently there was little to show during the months running up to another major US-South Vietnam conference in Guam on 20-21 March 1967. (51) By then, Johnson was ready to move forward with the McNamara-Komer option for organizing pacification support, whereby the US military would have the lead with a civilian deputy running the program. He had decided to make civilian leadership changes in Vietnam as well, since Lodge wanted to leave Saigon. At the Guam conference, Ellsworth Bunker, a distinguished diplomat with a patrician manner, was named the new US Ambassador to South Vietnam, with Ambassador Eugene Locke, one of Johnson's political allies, as his new deputy. Komer was to be the first civilian head of pacification under Westmoreland. (52) Johnson had asked Komer in February if he would be willing to go to Vietnam. Komer had said yes. "As a professional with 25 years' service, when the President says go and do a job, I'll try to do it," Komer recollected in 1969. He continued, "It's simple professionalism." (53)

Immediately following the conference, Komer flew to Saigon and met with Westmoreland to negotiate how the new organization, called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), would be integrated into the existing framework of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. The structure Komer proposed, and which Westmoreland and Bunker supported, brought US civilian agencies and the military into a combined organization run by a single manager at each echelon from the local to the national--the concept Komer had devised earlier. The two men's acceptance of this organizational construct was a unique achievement, attesting to Komer's management acumen and his powers of persuasion. (54) Having reached agreement, Komer returned to Washington to write his final report and to draft the formal presidential directive putting him into business. (55) He had told Johnson earlier that pacification was a problem in field execution, and he would now be responsible for implementing his own proposal. (56)