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Using his prosecuting-attorney technique, Johnson suddenly wheeled on Ky and demanded: "If you were General Giap [chief of the North Vietnamese forces], what would you do to cause us the most trouble?" Ky replied in considerable-and secret-detail. When Johnson turned to U.S. Commander in Viet Nam, General Westmoreland, to ask the same questions, the lights suddenly failed in the hotel. Without breaking stride, the interrogation proceeded by candlelight until the lights snapped back on again seven minutes later. When Ky insisted that the Viet Cong would wage economic war against the South, illustrating the point with an explanation of how disruption of the pig market could cause harmful swings in prices, L.B.J. picked up the phone and called U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. The message to the Secretary: to take a hog expert along with him to Saigon to look into the marketing setup in pigs.
"We Have Not Changed." Meanwhile, the nearly 200 experts and advisers from both sides in Honolulu had drafted a declaration and a communique describing the two-pronged effort that henceforth the allies would wage in Viet Nam. One prong was the vigorous prosecution of the war, the other a conjoint attack on South Viet Nam's failings as a nation. To help ram the second prong home, the U.S. indicated that it was willing to double its current nonmilitary aid of $300 million to South Viet Nam.
The conference over, Ky and Thieu appeared for a final press conference. Nervous at first, sipping coffee and chain-smoking Salem cigarettes, Ky parried questions impatiently. When a reporter started to ask a question about dealing with the enemy's National Liberation Front, Ky cut him off: "No, it should be called the National Assassination Front." Later, as Thieu answered the last question, Ky leaped to the microphone for a final impromptu word.
"More than anything we love peace, we are not warmongers," Ky said in a tremulous, deep voice, poking his chest with his forefinger. "All we are trying to do in South Viet Nam now is to stop aggression. It is not good to be a young man and to risk your life daily. But that must be done. I do not even own my own car, not even an old second-hand American car. I do not even own an inch of land. If you can hear and understand all of this, then you will be a big, beautiful American."
The U.S., by its renewed pledge in Honolulu to fight the other half of the war in Viet Nam, the hidden war for the simplest welfare of the Vietnamese people, had been clearly heard and understood. But much depended on Nguyen Cao Ky and his fellow officers in the weeks and months ahead. As the Premier told several thousand waiting at the Saigon airport on his return from the summit: "When we took power, we said we were a government of the poor, the oppressed. We have not changed, but today we bring back the full assistance of the U.S. in our fight against oppression and against poverty."
The Job of Nationhood
"The United States," said the Declaration of Honolulu, "will give its full support to measures of social revolution based upon the principle of building upward from the hopes of all the people of Viet Nam."