 Don't you start out by telling us how you started working at the White House and what you did there? Well, I guess that's a bit of a story in itself. In 1965, I was practicing law in New York and I was bored and I had supported Johnson in 1960 anyway and I wanted to get into the Johnson administration. So I went to speak, well first I came down here and I did a little exploring myself and I saw how tough it was to get into a position of real responsibility. So I went to see a very close friend of the family, one Edwin L. Weisel Sr., who was a close friend and lawyer of President Johnson's. And with Eddie's assistance, I eventually found myself in the chambers of Justice Fortas, who was also an acquaintance of my family, not a close friend. And between the two of them, I eventually, first of all, got an offer from AID to work in the general counsel's office, which I found attractive. And then shortly afterwards, I found myself invited to visit with Marvin Watson. And Marvin interviewed me, then he sent me to see Jim Jones and Jim interviewed me. And at the end of the interview, they said that they wanted me to occupy a second slot that the president had just given Marvin alongside Jim Jones. And I thought that was wonderful and I was set off someplace to fill out a whole bunch of forms. I had never worked for the federal government except when I was in the service. And I found myself cheek by jowl with Bill Moyers, who was, so I must have been in the press section. I don't remember exactly where I was. I filled out these forms and walked out of there on air. Marvin saw to it that my FBI clearance was done in ten days, which I've been thinking about it. It must have been something close to a miracle. And then shortly thereafter, Marvin called me and he said the president had changed his mind about giving him the second slot, but he wanted me in the White House. And why didn't I go and accept the job that I had been offered at AID? And he would call me when he had something. So I did that. I spent four wonderful months in the general counsel's office of AID. And sometime in August, Marvin called me. This is August 1966. Marvin called me and he said, I want you to go over and talk to Bob Comer. So I did. Bob interviewed me and he said that he had read in my resume that I had been a prosecutor in New York. And that's exactly the sort of person he wanted. He didn't want someone who was going to spend all of his time collecting signatures on cables. So I thought that I had my marching orders there. I was told to report for duty at the beginning of September. That was Labor Day weekend and I was told, with absolutely no experience or background in this, that my first duty was going to be to participate in the advance for a trip around the country which the president was taking in support of Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. And I was dispatched to a place called Vandalia, Illinois, which is outside of Dayton, where it was my task to arrange for the reception that the president was going to receive when he arrived by plane at the Vandalia airport. This was a new experience. I loved every minute of it. God, there were some other people around tell me what to do. And that started me off. At the end of that weekend I was in my new office in the EOB and started to work on the task of that office. Now I should explain that that office consisted of the following individuals. It was Bob Comer, KOMER, who ran it. Bob had a career in the CIA. He had served as McGeorge Bundy's deputy in the National Security Council. And not long before I saw him, he had been asked by the president to form a new office separate from the NSC, which would be responsible for coordinating the activities of the stateside agencies that were supporting the war in Vietnam in every respect saved for main force military. That of course was run out of the Pentagon. But it did include such things as aid, information, counterinsurgency, support of the government of South Vietnam and so forth. Not the diplomatic work that was run out of the NSC. So Bob was in charge of the office. His deputy was Bill Lenhart, who was a senior Foreign Service officer. And then there were two economists from RAND, Dick Morstein, who I guess probably died in the 70s, and Chuck Cooper, who I think is still around, I haven't seen him in years. And then there were three others. There was Bob Montague, who was our defense liaison. He was a colonel in the Army, had a very distinguished background and had served four or five years in Vietnam. And Dick Holbrook, who was assigned to the office by the State Department and who had just returned from, I believe, four years in Vietnam. He was a close friend of Bob Montague's and was the person I think who brought Bob into the office. I had a predecessor who was another Foreign Service officer named John Sylvester, who for one reason or another didn't get along with Comer, and Comer was looking for a replacement for him and that was me. So I was the, what is it, seventh member of that staff. We were located just at the main entrance of the EOB, as it was then called, to the left as you walk in the front door. We had a suite of, I don't know, four or five different offices, and we covered all of the agencies that were involved in the support of the war, I think pretty thoroughly, with Moorstein and Cooper handling the economic side of things, Montague handling the liaison with DOD, which became increasingly vital as the work of our office proceeded. Work focused almost exclusively on state and not state's diplomatic work, but the support that state was giving to our advisory effort in Vietnam, which eventually grew into something else that I can talk about later. My task was to deal with information activities and AID, which had an enormous program in Vietnam. One of the interesting and important aspects of this was that the work which these agencies did in Washington somehow got transformed into a different kind of work in Vietnam, so that, for instance, AID's traditional work of economic assistance and training and so forth, when it got to Vietnam involved working very closely with officials of the Vietnamese government to make that government work and to give it the wherewithal, the advice and the money to allow it to function at some at least minimally effective level. This was very often done on the edge of the battlefield, sometimes the battlefield overlapped into the work that AID's people were doing, and the same is true of state's people. They were involved in this advisory effort, as were a fair number of military types. So things that happened out there were different from what the agencies in Washington were accustomed to doing, and it was sometimes difficult to bridge that gap, particularly for the Foreign Service officers who were out there and who were not accustomed to hands-on type of operations. I arrived there on, as I say, early September. By December, I had been told to take my first trip to Vietnam, which I did. That lasted through almost the entire month of December and part of January, and my major task on that trip was to deal with the question of port congestion in Saigon. Things had gotten to the point where the port of Saigon, the Saigon River, was so jam-packed with loaded cargo vessels, which, by the way, were sitting docks for VC on the other side of the river, that stuff simply wasn't getting in where it was needed in any kind of reasonable timeframe. I spent much of the month of December investigating the causes of the tie-ups there and submitted a report. While I was there, I was asked to do some other things, and one of these had to do with the whole question of how we should be dealing with Vietnamese refugees. That later became a major preoccupation of mine while I was there, I mean while I was in this job. The question of how to deal with refugees had a great deal to do with the further question, the fundamental question in the war, of how to control population. Part of the struggle in this war was the issue of who was going to control population. We did not usually deliberately generate refugees, but when we did, the question arose, were we going to let them go back to where they came from, where in most cases they were under VC domination, or were we going to move them someplace where we could control them. So this was a whole issue which I spent much of the next year and a half or so dealing with. There were other issues. My second trip to Vietnam, which occurred at the same time of the next year, that is December, January, and early February of 67, 68, there was a whole question about how to organize the U.S. mission to deal with these very different kinds of issues that we were dealing with basically for the first time. I sat down with Frank Wisner and a few others in the U.S. Embassy and we sketched out the first effort which we made to organize the Vietnam side of our mission. We produced something called OCO, the office, God I can't remember what it stands for anymore, office of, I can't remember, we'll have to leave that to the historians, OCO combined all of the U.S. agencies represented in the embassy with the exception of the military that remained outside of it. And its task was to coordinate aid, information, counterinsurgency, the advisory effort with the Vietnamese government and all related issues. We got that set up and it soon appeared that OCO was not sufficient because it didn't include the military. And so a new organization was formed, and I worked with Frank on this, to create something called CODS, now let me see if I can remember what that meant, something of revolutionary support and development, whatever, anyway it did include all of the agencies including the military involved in counterinsurgency, advisory efforts and so on. And that one lasted until the end of the war and in fact Bob Comer about halfway through my stint in this job was asked to go to Vietnam to take it over and he was succeeded in running the office by Bill Lenhart. Now I can go on and on, what direction do you want me to go in, Harry? First of all, a historical question, was this operation created in the Johnson time or was it a holdover from Kennedy years? You mean his office in the White House? Yeah. No, it was created by Johnson. Just before I got there in 1966, it would have been late 65 or probably early 66 sometime that it was created. And did President Dixon keep it going? You know, I don't know. I can't answer that. But it's not going to end so far as you know. Oh no, no, it was a temporary office and it was specifically for the Vietnam War. When did you first meet President Truman, President Johnson? I had very little contact with him personally. I met him on several occasions in the West Wing when I was taken over there or asked to participate in some meeting. Never spent any time one-on-one with him. I was far too junior. Do you have any impressions of him? Yeah, an overpowering impression. I don't think I have ever encountered a person with such magnetism and such an overpowering personality and physical presence. I was really overwhelmed meeting him. And I can't say that about anybody else that I think of that I've ever met and I've met a lot of people. You were in the job at most of us at that time. You were a supporter of his policies in Vietnam? Very much so. Did you ever change your mind? No. Did you ever have much contact with Walt Rostow? Very little. It was quite clear to me when I first came to Comer's office that Comer wanted to handle all of the outside contacts. Those of us in the office were pretty much told to keep our advice to him and not to talk to others. Now that broke down when fortunately I was invited to join the White House mess. That was invaluable for me because I used to go in very early every morning and have breakfast with some of our colleagues there. That may in fact be how you and I first met. So through the mess I was able to meet a lot of other people in the White House and to establish personal relations which in many respects have lasted, many cases have lasted for years. But our work was all channeled through Comer. What kind of a guy was Comer? Very strong personality, forceful, very intelligent, did not easily tolerate fools. He intimidated a lot of the people who dealt with him and those people who were intimidated by him generally tended to dislike him. Those who were not intimidated by him found him an interesting and I thought a very useful public servant. I liked him very much personally. We got along fine and while I recognized that sometimes there was a bit of excess in the way in which he expressed himself, I thought that I understood that and could discount it and that there was still an awful lot there. I thought he was very good at what he did. And Leonhart? That story entirely. I had the impression that Bill didn't like being where he was, was not a supporter of what the office was trying to do and was pretty well disengaged from it. And after Comer went over to Saigon to head Cords, the office did virtually nothing. And that was the point at which I went back to Marvin and I said, look, I'm wasting my time here. Nothing's going to happen as long as Bill Leonhart is running this office. And Marvin was just about then to be appointed postmaster general and he said, okay, you come with me. So when he went over to run the post office department, which you remember was a very different sort of thing than it is now, he made me his judicial officer, which put me in charge of the in-house legal system of the department. And I think that he relied on me for a lot of advice which he didn't feel comfortable taking from the people who were there and whom he regarded rightly or wrongly as Kennedy people. Incidentally, one of our colleagues, Sherwin Markman, is helping Marvin write his memoirs now. Sherwin and I talk about it a great deal and we counsel, he and I, in many email exchanges about how to deal with this because it's not so easy. Marvin's wife is very ill now and Marvin has been very much distracted by that. Will Leonhart ever know about your dissatisfaction with the way the office has run after Comerlech? I don't know whether he knew it or not. I never sat down with him and said, look, you are not carrying out your mandate. I didn't feel that it was my role to do that. Furthermore, I had been in government a fairly short time when this happened and I was still feeling my way around. I knew what I thought about the way he was running it and maybe he got the feeling that I felt that way because I asked on a number of occasions that the office take certain initiatives which he almost uniformly vetoed. So eventually, as I say, I went to Marvin and I told him what I thought of it. You have mentioned two trips you made to Vietnam. Did you make another one or were those? No, those were two. One was about a month and a half and the other closer to three months. Three months? Yeah. Do you have much contact with General Westmoreland? Some but not much, usually when he came to Washington, not when I was out there. Where, during the three-month trip, where in Vietnam did you go? All over. All over? Yeah. The various things that I was asked to look into when I was there, much of which in the second trip involved this issue of refugees that I mentioned earlier, took me from one end of the country to the other. There was hardly an important part of the country that I didn't visit and so I formed some very clear impressions about what was going on there and what wasn't getting back. What was and getting back? I spent a lot of my time with a young group of Foreign Service officers and military officers whose task it was, largely for cords but also for the embassy, to assess the progress of the war in various different respects. I had enormous respect for them. They remained in many cases lifelong friends and through them and through the observations that I was not uniquely but unusually allowed to make all over the country, I came to the impression that the civilian leadership of the government was not getting the full story of what was happening in Vietnam. Civilian leadership of? Of the government. Our government? Yes. The president, the White House, perhaps even some of the civilian leadership of the agencies. I felt that the biggest single problem that I observed was that our can-do attitude in all respects regarding the civilian aspects of the GVN, the government of Vietnam and the military was causing us to take over functions from the Vietnamese that they should have been performing, that when they didn't perform well we tended to take it over and do it ourselves rather than to work patiently with them to get them to do it properly. And that therefore bit by bit the Vietnamese were becoming disengaged from their own war. This I thought was the fundamental problem that I was able to observe in how we were running things and managing things there. I've served in the military, but I'm not a professional military person and I was somewhat more reluctant to draw conclusions about our grand strategy for dealing with the North Vietnamese. But I also felt there that we might have done better, not in terms of our determination to do things right, but rather the strategy that we were adopting to deal with the war. Did those observations find their way into a report? Yes. To whom? Well, I made these observations orally, first to Comer and then to Lenhart. I specifically asked Lenhart. I was there during the Tet Offensive. I lived in a house which had been occupied by Americans for some years. It was a rather interesting house. If I can digress for a moment, it had been built by the Emperor Bao Dai for his mistress. And it was just on the edge of the city of Saigon, right next to a place called the Bin Wah Bridge, the name of the house that's since become famous, at least among those of us who served there then, was 47 Phan Tanyang. I heard, by the way, just recently from Stanley Karnault that it had been torn down. Great shame. But I lived in 47 Phan Tanyang during the second trip that I took there. It was nominally under the control of Frank Wisner and Paul Hare, but they had been moved out into the provinces. My colleagues there then were David Kenney and Mike Cook, two foreign service officers who were in this assessment operation in Cords that I referred to before. And we went out on the evening of what was it, January 30, 1968, and spent the evening sort of walking around Saigon, looking at the Tet celebrations. And later that night, at about two o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by the sound of gunfire and explosions, and Mike and Dave and I grabbed the weapons that we had in the house. We had no idea whether they would fire or not, and looked out and saw that our neighborhood was pretty well occupied by the North Vietnamese Army. And in fact, one of my colleagues said that he had seen a North Vietnamese machine gun nest right outside the house. We stood at the doors of the house with our weapons and waited for something to happen, which, thank God, didn't. The next morning, we saw that our immediate neighborhood had been cleared by the South Vietnamese Army, Arvin. And we heard a lot of firing a couple of blocks away, so we walked out and we saw that the Arvin troops were just in the process of clearing the North Vietnamese out of the radio station that was two blocks from our house. We gathered in all of the stray cats and dogs of Americans who were in nearby places, and we all lived in 47 Phnom Tynan until we were able to move around. We also had reports from others in nearby buildings that, on that first evening, they had seen North Vietnamese troops crossing the Benoit Bridge near our house and that they had been calling out to all of the people of the neighborhood to rise, throw the Americans out and so forth. And they got a stony reception. No one opened the door. They were left to wander up and down the streets. They got just a complete brick wall. All of this and the observations I was able to make of the fighting around Saigon after the first night, which was quite extensive, brought me back here in mid-February with some fairly sharp observations. Again, to Lenhart. To Lenhart. And I thought that it might be useful if he could arrange for me to see the President to report to him what I had seen. I asked him to do that on a couple of occasions after my return, but it never happened. And it was quite obvious that he was not interested in having me do so. Do you think that the LBJ Library would have anything that reflected this at all? I doubt it. It's interesting. The only person I've ever told this to is Marvin. I mean, you know, in the official chain. An ancillary question first. Do you have any interest in going back to Vietnam? Oh, I'd love to. Yeah. I haven't been there since February 11, 1968, when I left after Tad. Peter, what are you, in your judgment, what should have been done? What went wrong in the war? Well, I think what started to be done after General Abrams took over was what should have been done much earlier. I think Abrams had a completely different strategy. He was more interested in control of territory and people, which was one of the subjects that I was involved in, and less interested in chasing around to try and find North Vietnamese units to attack. I mean, he did that too. But he felt, I think quite rightly, that by controlling territory, by controlling people, he would eventually put the North Vietnamese army in a condition where it could be much more successfully attacked. And I, as I understand it, well into the Nixon administration, say around 1991-92, that strategy had really begun to pay off. And it was the action of our party that controlled Congress, which I hold chiefly responsible for the ultimate failure of our policies in Vietnam. Which took place during the Ford administration. Yes. And just incidentally, Bob Hardison interviewed President Ford and asked him about that day. And Ford said that was the saddest day of his life when he watched those helicopters take off. But on television, he watched the end of the war. I was awful, awful. You know, I think this, I had no idea that it was going in this direction, but I think this observation of yours, it didn't make its way to the President is really quite fascinating. You've never told that story before. No. I mean, not officially, of course, to friends. What did you think of Marvin? I loved Marvin. I thought, Marvin, first of all, you must understand that I came from a very different part of the country in a different background than Marvin. And I doubt that I had met more than a small number of Texans in my life before I came to work in the Johnson White House. And I was charmed by those whom I met there, so many of you and my friends. And Marvin was a character, a personality, the likes of which I had never encountered before anywhere in my army service or anywhere else. And I liked him so much. And I think he felt the same way about me, and perhaps I was as strange to him as he was to me. But he was part of an atmosphere in a White House that I grew to love while I was there. And I can say with absolute honesty that in all of my years in Washington since then, I have never seen a White House that I thought worked as well or that was as resourceful as Johnson's or obviously as well-run. I mean, there was never any question about who was in charge. And I doubt very much that I will ever see another one like it in my lifetime. I did have an opportunity to serve in one other directly in the Carter White House where I was running an office that was in many respects similar to the one in which I had served in the Johnson administration. It was an interagency office, and its task was to end the trusteeship in Micronesia and work out some successor relationship, which I did. But the contrast between the two White Houses is just startling and the two presidents. How did you, how did that happen, how did you get into the Carter operation? By accident. It was all due to my service in the Johnson White House. What had happened was that after that terrible 1968 Chicago convention, whereby the way I accompanied Marvin, Marvin had been sent there by the president and he brought two or three of us along with him and I was one of those, after the experience of that convention and all of the political fragmentation within the Democratic Party that accompanied it, I, feeling as I did about Vietnam and about everything that Johnson had tried to do, I was, I could not have been more opposed to the people who then proceeded to take over the Democratic Party. And I decided that even though I very much favored Scoop Jackson for the nomination, I didn't think he was going to make it. And I thought that a decent compromise would be Ed Muskie. So in 1970 I started to work for Muskie. We all know what happened to that. At his request, I, even after he had withdrawn, I went down to the Miami convention in 1972 to work for him. I had never seen such a zoo in my life and I was really, really turned off by everything I saw. And later in the year, after the election, a group of us put together an organization called Coalition for a Democratic Majority, CDM. There were a number of veterans of the Johnson White House in it. And in company with many of them, I then started to work as best I could for Scoop to be nominated in 1976. Well we know what happened to that. Scoop thought that he had an understanding with Carter about what kind of policies Carter would pursue if he were elected. He was elected and one of the first things he did was to purge from his sight anybody that had anything to do with Scoop. One of the really fundamental mistakes that he made in setting up his administration. So. .