Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (32 page)

Rostow was outraged at the resistance to bringing U.S. military power to bear against the communists. He thought discussions with Moscow a terrible idea, and sensing Kennedy’s worries about the political fallout from losing Vietnam, he told him: “I submit that it would be unwise and contrary to the lessons of the past and current experience to negotiate with the Communists before we have moved to buy time in Viet-Nam.” Discussions would provoke “a major crisis of nerve in Viet-Nam and throughout Southeast Asia. . . . There will be real panic and disarray.” Rostow was apocalyptic about the consequences of inaction: “The whole world is asking . . . what will the U.S. do . . . ?” The outcome of indecisive U.S. action would be nothing less than the fall of Southeast Asia and a larger war. Schlesinger privately attacked Rostow as a “Chester Bowles with machine guns.”

Rostow wasn’t the only one to raise warnings about appeasement. Stuart Symington, who was Air Force secretary under Truman and at this time a leading Senate Democrat on national security, cautioned that U.S. prestige was on a global decline and required demonstrations of firmness to shift the balance in the Cold War. “Whether it be in Saigon, or Berlin, or some other place,” he told Kennedy on November 10, “I do not believe this nation can afford to bend further.” A policy of “whatever is necessary” was essential to save Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia.

In so heated an environment, it was difficult to chart a reasonable course. But Bundy tried to find a middle ground among the competing opinions. With so many advisers voicing strong judgments on Vietnam, Bundy was reluctant to say anything. But during a midday break at the White House swimming pool, where Kennedy would retreat from the pressures of decision-making, he pressed Bundy to add his voice to the mix. Bundy did not think a loss of Vietnam would resonate all that much globally. But he believed that “a victory . . . would produce great effects all over the world.” And so he recommended that Kennedy agree to send one division when necessary. The troops didn’t need to go now, but such a commitment would signal U.S. determination to save Vietnam. In the meantime, Kennedy should replace Nolting as the chief U.S. representative in Saigon with a military man who would make “a much clearer statement that Diem must take U.S. military counsel on a wholly new basis.” It was the sort of response that gave something to both those urging action and those counseling caution.

Bundy’s advice resonated with Kennedy. Unconvinced that losing Vietnam would be so catastrophic, but unwilling to risk the public outcry that would follow such a collapse, Kennedy responded ambiguously to the pressure for a coherent policy. At a November 15 NSC meeting, “he expressed the fear of becoming involved simultaneously on two fronts on opposite sides of the world. He questioned the wisdom of involvement in Viet Nam since the basis thereof is not completely clear.” U.S. involvement in the conflict seemed likely to provoke “sharp domestic partisan criticism as well as strong objections from other nations. . . . He could even make a rather strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles away against 16,000 guerrillas [fighting] a native army of 200,000, where millions have been sent for years with no success.” Sending U.S. troops to Vietnam would mean struggling against “phantom-like” guerrillas.

Taylor challenged the president by saying he was optimistic that the United States could work its will in Vietnam if it took clear-cut actions to defeat the communist guerrillas. McNamara cautioned that this could lead to the need for U.S. troops, planes, and other resources. Kennedy asked McNamara if he favored U.S. action. When he said yes, Kennedy asked for his reasoning. Before he could answer, Lemnitzer stepped in with a reply, offering the familiar argument “that Communist conquest would deal a severe blow to freedom and extend Communism to a great portion of the world.” Kennedy wanted to know how he could justify action in Vietnam while ignoring Cuba. Lemnitzer had a ready answer: Even after the Bay of Pigs, the Joint Chiefs supported going into Cuba.

Kennedy refused to sign on to anything until he had a chance to discuss his options with the vice president. It was a ploy to delay making any decisions: Kennedy was not in the habit of discussing anything of importance with Johnson, a fact that had left LBJ frustrated and angry. At the same time, Kennedy instructed Rusk and McNamara to consider Harriman’s proposals and asked whether they thought he should write to Khrushchev about Vietnam, explaining “how dangerous we thought the situation was.”

Yet for all his skepticism, Kennedy could not resist the pressure for a demonstration of U.S. determination to save Vietnam. He asked McNamara and Rusk to consider Bundy’s proposal to have a four-star general command U.S. operations in Saigon. He also agreed to have the Defense Department plan to send combat forces to Vietnam. Plans, of course, were not the same as action, but they certainly increased the possibility of active military participation, especially after Kennedy ordered the Chiefs to send additional advisers to Vietnam to help with military operations. Nolting was to make an immediate approach to Diem to propose a great increase in U.S.-Vietnamese cooperation, but only if Diem would promise a total mobilization of his own resources. Kennedy wanted a letter drafted in the State Department and signed by Diem stating this commitment.

McNamara later asserted that the pressure on Diem to pledge domestic reforms and all-out mobilization had the ironic effect of drawing the United States into irreversible commitments. The letter described an international partnership for the benefit of the Vietnamese people and a “mutual determination to defend the frontiers of the Free World against Communist aggression. . . . Together we have laid the material foundations of a new and modern Viet-Nam,” Diem was asked to say. “Together we have checked the thrust of Communist tyranny in Southeast Asia. . . . If we lose this war, our people will be swallowed by the Communist Bloc.” Diem pledged to mobilize all his country’s resources. But because Vietnam lacked the wherewithal to meet the onslaught, “we must have further assistance from the United States.”

At the same time, Kennedy wrote Khrushchev that the United States viewed the threat to Vietnam “with the utmost gravity. . . . Our support for the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem we regard as a serious obligation.” Rusk then told a press conference that the communist attack on Vietnam worried all free nations and represented a threat to the peace. As a result, the United States was increasing its commitment to supplying and training of Vietnamese forces. The full meaning of the U.S. commitment was not lost on the
Washington Evening Star
, which reported that the White House was pressing Diem “to broaden participation in his Government and has offered him every aid short of combat troops if he does.”

In retrospect, McNamara saw these developments as the beginning of America’s substantial and long-term commitment to save Vietnam. In his later recollections about the war, he anguished over the failure of the Kennedy administration to ask five basic questions before becoming deeply involved: “Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia? Would that constitute a grave threat to the west’s security? What kind of war—conventional or guerrilla—might develop? Could we win it with U.S. troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should we not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?” Recalling the terrible consequences of America’s involvement in the conflict, McNamara found it “beyond understanding, incredible, that we did not force ourselves to confront such issues head-on.”

The mistakes he saw were innocence, overconfidence, ignorance about the region, inexperience in dealing with crises, “other pressing international matters [that] clamored for our attention during that first year,” and perhaps most important, problems “for which there were no ready, or good, answers.” All of it generated a tendency “to stick their heads in the sand.”

Writing thirty-five years after the 1961 events, McNamara forgot or overlooked the fact that questions about Vietnam’s importance in heading off communist domination of Southeast Asia and its impact on long-term U.S. national security were very much in the forefront of discussions about Kennedy’s response to the crisis in Saigon. And while it is certainly true that no one could confidently predict the outcome of increased U.S. involvement, and that anticipating a constructive result from American intervention was not without plausibility, the most compelling reason for Kennedy’s decision to expand U.S. commitments in Vietnam was not a conviction that we might lose the Cold War if that country came under communist control. As Kennedy told
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock in October 1961, “United States troops should not be involved on the Asian mainland.” Truman’s decision in the 1940s not to send U.S. forces to fight the communists in the Chinese civil war and the stalemate in Korea powerfully resonated with Kennedy.

Kennedy was more concerned about the political ramifications of “losing” Vietnam. He told Galbraith: “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period. I’ve had the Bay of Pigs, and pulling out of Laos, and I can’t accept a third.” In short, a communist takeover of Saigon would raise concerns abroad and at home: The Soviets and Chinese might see him as irresolute or weak and might become more aggressive about ousting the West from Berlin and/or try to subvert other weak governments in Asia; and conservatives or militant anticommunists in the United States, borrowing from Joseph McCarthy in the early fifties, would launch another “Who lost China?” or “Who lost Vietnam?” campaign.

In November 1961, Kennedy hoped to muddle through on Vietnam: Send more military advisers, increase the financial and material support of the Saigon regime, and press Diem into effective reforms that improved his popular standing. And maybe, just maybe, it would fend off a communist victory and keep Diem’s government afloat.

In the meantime, Kennedy believed it essential to keep questions about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam as low-key as possible. George C. McGhee, the State Department counselor and chairman of the Policy Planning Staff, warned against “prolonged involvement of American soldiers in . . . indecisive anti-guerrilla operations.” Recalling the collapse of Truman’s public standing, he worried that “we would be back in the atmosphere of Korea 1950–1953—only more so.” He predicted that a faltering conflict in Vietnam would agitate the public and stimulate demands for more forceful measures to prevent another Korean stalemate. Pressures for escalation could propel us into an “all-out struggle with Peiping.” As increased U.S. involvement became a reality, a principal administration objective became guarding against press leaks about U.S. operations in Vietnam. Rusk cabled the embassy in Saigon: “Do not give other than routine cooperation to correspondents on current military activities in Vietnam. No comment at all on classified activities.” Theodore White’s warning—“a real bastard to solve”—was more evident than ever.

As 1961 came to an end, Kennedy understood what John Steinbeck meant when he said, “We give the President . . . more pressure than a man can bear.” Kennedy described himself as “always on the edge of irritability.” The strains on him were so evident that a reporter asked, “I wonder if you could tell us if you had to do it over again, you would work for the presidency.” Reporters asked Bobby, “Do you think your brother can handle the presidency without harming his health?” Bobby assured them that the pressures on him were no more than what he had dealt with during the presidential campaign. He admitted, however, that “the responsibilities are so great and weigh so heavily on him that it is bound” to affect him. Kennedy was learning what Jefferson meant when he said that the presidency is a splendid misery.

C
HAPTER
7

“The Greatest Adventure of Our Century”

A
t the start of 1962, Kennedy felt pressured to speak forcefully about the country’s domestic challenges. But his heart wasn’t in it. Although he devoted the first half of his State of the Union address to the economy, civil rights, health, and education, Schlesinger complained that “the domestic section . . . had been reduced to a laundry list.” And though Kennedy agreed to add a paragraph Schlesinger wrote giving the program “a philosophical coherence” that related it to the New Frontier, Kennedy remained grudging about having to appease liberals. “What more do the liberals want me to do that is politically possible?” he asked.

In an era before television prompters, Kennedy read the speech haltingly, turning pages and looking down at his text rather than keeping continuous eye contact with his congressional audience. His remarks evoked only occasional applause and less overt enthusiasm than his first State of the Union a year before. While that speech also began with a discussion of the country’s economic travails, it, like the Inaugural Address and the second State of the Union speech, principally focused on foreign affairs.

What they were trying to do at home “gives meaning to our efforts abroad,” Kennedy said. “The successes and the setbacks of the past year remain on our agenda of unfinished business. . . . Yet our basic goal remains the same: a peaceful world community of free and independent states.” He did not see that goal within reach “today or tomorrow. We may not reach it in our own lifetime. But the quest is the greatest adventure of our century.” America “had been granted the role of being the great defender of freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” While hyperbole is not uncommon in presidential annual messages, Kennedy had good reason to worry about threats to the peace.

But he could not escape questions about domestic change, especially about civil rights. In January 1962, when a reporter pressed Kennedy on his administration’s civil rights record, he defensively asserted that his White House had “made more progress in the field of civil rights on a whole variety of fronts than were made in the last 8 years.” Kennedy could point to the fact that the majority of the government’s contractors had agreed to plans for progress, with compliance now mandatory rather than voluntary, efforts to expand integration in the armed services, seven lawsuits against southern states to compel school integration, seventy-five suits to force southern counties into facilitating black voting, and the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to serve on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—only the second black to be appointed to that federal court. At the same time, however, a failure to issue a promised order to integrate federally supported public housing, five southern racists appointed to federal judgeships, and a refusal to put a comprehensive civil rights bill before Congress gave resonance to liberal complaints about excessive White House caution in advancing equal rights. As Roy Wilkins told Kennedy, he had not “gained anything [in 1961] by refusing to put a civil rights bill before” Congress. His hope that he could garner southern support for a tax cut, federal aid to education, and medical insurance for seniors by not pressing for desegregation was unfounded.

Kennedy did not dispute the failure to do big things at home. But for the time being, he felt that foreign dangers still had to command his primary attention. And Latin America, where he continued to see communism as an aggressive competitor for regional control, posed a grave potential setback for the United States in the Cold War. He was determined to counter the threat with the Alliance for Progress. True, it was just getting started in improving the southern republics, but Kennedy described the hemisphere as alive with “the quickening of hope” and the Latin republics as committed to “a new and strenuous effort of self-help and self-reform.” Yet “the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.”

In Kennedy’s view, the greatest danger to Western Hemisphere freedom remained Castro’s hopes of exporting his revolutionary fervor. At a National Security Council meeting on January 18, 1962, Kennedy wanted to make sure that Castro would be isolated at a coming meeting at Punta del Este. But even if they could blunt his influence at the conference, Kennedy expected Castro still to be a very large problem. While he believed that some way would eventually have to be found to deal with the Cuban dilemma, he saw nothing that could be done at once. The next day, when Bobby Kennedy met with CIA and military officials, Bobby explained that the administration had been lying low since the failure at the Bay of Pigs. But because Cuba was so rapidly becoming a communist police state, the ousting of Castro was “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.” There could be no misunderstanding on the responsibility of the country’s defense agencies “to carry out this job.” Bobby quoted the president as telling him that “the final chapter on Cuba has not been written,” and Bobby added, with a pugnacity that reflected his combativeness, “it’s going to be done and will be done.”

On January 20, Lansdale gave marching orders to members of a Caribbean Survey Group. Invoking Bobby’s directive, he said that “it is untenable to say that the United States is unable to achieve its vital national security and foreign policy goal re Cuba. . . . We have all the men, money, material, and spiritual assets of this most powerful nation on earth.” Every member of the group was instructed to meet and if possible exceed deadlines in reaching the goal of turning Cuba away from communism. In February, Lansdale set a timetable stretching from March to October 1962, when Castro was to be overthrown and a new government put in place. In the meantime, the Joint Chiefs were to make contingency plans for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. In March, however, Kennedy put a damper on plans for direct military action. Still concerned that U.S. military intervention would undermine the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy discouraged all talk of air or ground attacks on the island. At a meeting with Bobby, McGeorge Bundy, McCone, Gilpatric, Taylor, and Lemnitzer, he foresaw no immediate circumstances that would justify military steps.

Yet the administration’s determination to bring down Castro remained as evident as it had been during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Khrushchev, who saw Castro’s government in Cuba as a valuable encroachment into America’s sphere of control and a blow to U.S. prestige, believed that renewed Soviet threats to Berlin could keep Kennedy from attacking the island. He had no doubt, however, that the Americans, short of an invasion, would continue to do everything possible to subvert Castro’s regime.

Khrushchev also worried that the U.S. planned a first nuclear strike against Russia. When Georgi Bolshakov, the ostensible Soviet Embassy press officer in Washington, asked Bobby Kennedy about the influence of war hawks in the government, Bobby explained that there were some in the Pentagon as well as other opinion makers who were eager to attack the Soviet Union. He had in mind E. M. Dealey, the conservative publisher of the
Dallas Morning News
, who made no secret of his belief that Kennedy headed an administration of “weak sisters.” During a White House luncheon, he told the president that the country needed “a man on horseback. Many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy angrily replied that “wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight.”

Yet he could not discount war talk as long as Khrushchev engaged in provocations that made people in the West think that he was intent on destroying anticommunist opponents. During the first half of 1962, Khrushchev renewed his threats to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, which would once more endanger U.S. access to West Berlin. Kennedy could not understand Khrushchev’s belligerence. He described him as unstable and irresponsible, which were frightening traits in someone who could trigger a nuclear war. But Khrushchev saw his own behavior as calculated pushback. During a visit to Moscow by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Khrushchev made clear that he would not be intimidated. If “any lunatics in your country want war,” he said, “Western Europe will hold them back. War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour.”

Khrushchev’s aggressiveness made Kennedy all the more eager to end a U.S.-Soviet deadlock over limits on nuclear testing and an arms control agreement that would reduce the possibility of a nuclear war. As he wrote Prime Minister Macmillan on January 13, 1962, “we must do all we can to turn the nuclear spiral downward, and to save mankind from the increasing threat of events of surpassing horror.”

But Seaborg saw “the realities of American politics” as more compelling in shaping Kennedy’s actions, particularly the constraints put on him by winning Senate approval of any test ban agreement he might negotiate in the future. And as Rusk, who had been well disposed to a test ban, now advised, the Soviets “did not seem to be suffering greatly from the public indignation which had greeted its tests last fall.” Rusk also thought that it would be a mistake to reach a point where anyone thought that we had fallen behind in the arms race. In April 1962, after the Soviets stubbornly continued their opposition to inspections of any kind in their country, Kennedy concluded that prospects for a test ban treaty were all but gone and that he had no choice but to order atmospheric tests in the Pacific over Britain’s Christmas Island. He remained skeptical about the wisdom of testing and did not want them on U.S. territory, where a mushroom cloud could frighten Americans sensitive to the dangers from nuclear pollution. Nonetheless, the political pressure demanding a response to the Soviet challenge, coupled with advice from responsible scientists warning of national security perils, made a decision to test in the atmosphere irresistible.

Yet Kennedy was unwilling to let matters rest there. He agreed to continue negotiations in Geneva and urged Khrushchev to join him in reaching for “real progress toward disarmament and not to engage in sterile exchanges of propaganda.” Kennedy also told his advisers that he “wanted the world to know that we were prepared to walk the last mile to obtain” a treaty. At a meeting with Gromyko, Rusk said that he did not see disarmament as a hopeless problem, and recalled French foreign minister Aristide Briand’s precept that “disarmament should be such as would leave no one a dupe or a victim.”

Kennedy assumed that meaningful negotiations were unlikely until both sides completed their current round of tests toward the end of 1962, and then they could decide whether to make another offer limited to tests in the atmosphere or work for a comprehensive test ban that included underground explosions. A limited ban had the advantage of being something the Soviets could accept without feeling that they had backtracked from earlier positions. Stevenson thought it a fine idea that could prevent “a non-stop series of competitive nuclear tests in the atmosphere.” Pressure from the Joint Chiefs to exclude a comprehensive agreement that could not ensure “full verification” through “unhampered verification” largely persuaded the White House to propose a limited ban.

It also had the advantage of simpler, less intrusive verification. Unlike underground tests, which seemed to require monitoring stations on Soviet and U.S. territory, atmospheric tests of any significant size were impossible to hide. In addition, the unintended release of a Defense Department seismic study concluding that detection facilities in the Soviet Union might be unnecessary to track underground explosions undermined Pentagon insistence on such stations as an essential element of a comprehensive treaty. When Arthur Dean, the U.S. representative to the Geneva disarmament talks, acknowledged that the verification stations might be superfluous, it made convincing Moscow of their need impossible.

The inability of Kennedy’s diplomatic and military advisers to find the means to negotiate a nuclear test ban with the Soviets had frustrated and demoralized him. The blunder in releasing information that heightened the difficulties of finding some common ground between Soviet opposition to monitors and Pentagon insistence on them left Kennedy feeling angry at advisers who were not only falling short in identifying means to overcome differences but also now adding to them. Kennedy complained that “the U.S. had worked itself into a deplorable situation by releasing the . . . data on enhanced detection possibilities.” Bundy told a member of Dean’s delegation that “the president was very upset. He liked to have things done well and the idea that we had made a proposition and now we were saying something else—he had a rather adverse reaction to that, to put it mildly.”

In a conversation with Rusk and Bundy, Kennedy was scathing: Of the Foreign Service types or professional diplomats like Dean, he said, “I just see an awful lot of fellows . . . who don’t seem to have cojones. . . . The Defense Department looks as if that’s all they got. They haven’t any brains. . . . And I know that you get all this sort of virility over at the Pentagon and you get a lot of Arleigh Burkes: admirable, nice figure, without any brains.”

The disappointments over Castro’s unshaken control in Cuba and Moscow’s refusal to come to terms on a test ban agreement were compounded by Kennedy’s continuing struggles with health problems and a stroke that left the seventy-three-year-old Joe Kennedy barely able to speak or walk. Joe’s illness depressed Kennedy. The sight of someone as active and vital as his father being so disabled heightened his sense of vulnerability to his own medical difficulties and his premonition that he would not have a long life.

The resurfacing of the civil rights struggle added to Kennedy’s worries. In March 1962, civil rights advocates complained that the White House had not laid the proper groundwork for a major rights law. “Negroes are not convinced that the Administration is
really
on their side, ” Kennedy was told. He hadn’t made clear that this was a “moral issue.” Moreover, unlike Bobby and the president, who felt that pressing Congress to do something about civil rights would jeopardize the rest of their legislative program, rights supporters predicted that if he lost the fight for a civil rights law, “the President’s whole program will go down the drain.” Kennedy was urged to take the issue to the public in a nationally televised Oval Office address.