Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (33 page)

The Civil Rights Commission, headed by Father Theodore Hesburgh, weighed in with demands for bolder action. Bobby and Hesburgh clashed over the commission’s decision to hold hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi to underscore abuses of blacks by police and local authorities. Fearful that the commission’s presence in the South would provoke violence, Bobby urged them to spend more time looking into violations of black rights in the North. But seeing the commission as a “burr under the saddle of the administration,” Hesburgh would not give ground. After the hearing, which passed off without riots, the commission’s report described the terror tactics that Mississippi officials used to inhibit black voting. “You’re making my life difficult,” Kennedy told two commissioners. They were not very sympathetic. They thought that Kennedy was too insensitive to the miserable conditions under which so many southern blacks lived.

Kennedy took comfort in knowing that the public was on his side. A January 1962 Gallup Poll showed a 77 percent approval rating, while 62 percent said they had a highly favorable view of the president. Moreover, the public sided with him on what it saw as the most important problems facing the country: 63 percent said it was war and peace and only 6 percent mentioned racial tensions. 32 percent of Americans thought that Kennedy was pushing racial integration too fast, 35 percent thought his actions were “about right,” and only 11 percent said he was not moving fast enough. His press conferences were a huge hit—91 percent viewed them favorably. When Gallup asked voters in a trial heat who they preferred between Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy won decisively—65 percent to 35 percent.

In the spring of 1962, part of Kennedy’s upbeat ratings resulted from his effectiveness in winning a battle against corporation executives. On April 10, the nation’s steel companies announced a 3.5 percent price increase, which threatened to trigger greater inflation and an economic downturn. Kennedy was furious at what he described as a “double-cross” by industry chiefs, who had promised to cooperate with labor unions and the White House in holding down prices and avoiding a recession. At a stormy Oval Office meeting, Kennedy told aides that steel executives “fucked me. They fucked us and we’ve got to try to fuck them.” They had “made a fool of him.” He quoted his father as having told him that “businessmen were all pricks. . . . God, I hate the bastards,” he said. “They kicked us right in the balls.” He not only saw the steel chiefs’ action as a personal blow to his political standing and the country’s well-being; he was also irritated at having to shift his focus from more important foreign policy issues to something he considered an unnecessary fight. They had reached a settlement that had served the national interest, and now he had to spend time, energy, and political capital on a needless struggle. The episode also put his impatience with domestic affairs on display. He was hardly indifferent to the country’s economic condition or its fundamental tie to his political standing, but foreign dangers, especially the fear of Soviet or American missteps that might bring them to the brink of war, remained his greatest concern.

He now took his case to the public, holding a press conference in which he declared the price increase an “irresponsible defiance of the public interest” and a “ruthless disregard of public responsibilities.” Invoking the sacrifices being made by reservists risking their lives in Vietnam, he denounced “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceed their sense of public responsibility” and demonstrates “utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” At the same time, Bobby Kennedy, at the president’s behest, unleashed the FBI to investigate and intimidate the steel executives, while the IRS threatened to audit their tax returns. After the companies relented and announced a rollback in their price increases, Kennedy, with feigned horror, joked at a dinner party that his brother would never have investigated steel executives’ tax returns or tapped their phones, which is exactly what he or, more precisely, his subordinates did. As far as the Kennedys were concerned, they were simply meeting fire with fire.

The struggle to find answers to the conflict in Vietnam was less satisfying. On January 3, 1962, when Kennedy met with the Joint Chiefs, General Paul Harkins, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, Johnson, and McNamara at his winter retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, he instructed that “no publicity would be given, at least for the time being, to General Harkins’ new mission.” Kennedy made clear that he did not want the United States more greatly involved in Southeast Asia than we already were. He wanted the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam to be kept as quiet as possible. Moreover, any discussion of what U.S. troops were doing there “should emphasize their role as advisers and deny that they were in any way engaged in combat.”

Three days later, when McNamara lifted a Kennedy-imposed embargo on information about the meeting, Lemnitzer informed Admiral Harry Felt and General Lionel McGarr about the change in the command structure in Vietnam and the importance of keeping this secret. He said nothing, however, about Kennedy’s determination to limit and mute the U.S. role in the fighting. He and the other Chiefs were determined to challenge Kennedy’s injunction against the introduction of ground forces. They shared Nolting’s belief, which he articulated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 12, “that the situation in Vietnam was primarily the result of Chinese Communist expansionism” and that the United States could not fail to meet this challenge—even at the risk of deploying combat forces. Nolting’s image of red China winning control across Asia echoed the fears of millions of Americans.

On January 13, the Chiefs sent McNamara a memo for consideration by the president. They urged Kennedy to reconsider his ban on direct U.S. participation in the fighting, arguing that it was essential to prevent the loss of Vietnam and that American troops were the best and perhaps only way to ensure this. Unwilling to challenge Kennedy’s clear opposition to ground forces, McNamara refused to endorse the Chiefs’ views but waffled on their recommendation by saying that the present U.S. program in Vietnam should be tried first. However, he would not rule out in the future joining in the Chiefs’ call for U.S. fighting men to take on the Viet Cong.

But Kennedy remained determined to limit U.S. involvement in the conflict. He knew, of course, that attacks by U.S. aircraft and increasing the number of advisers, who would accompany South Vietnamese troops on search-and-destroy missions, would put Americans in harm’s way, with inevitable casualties. But this was to be kept out of the news, with private and public declarations that American advisers were not actively fighting the war. At a press conference on January 15, although one U.S. adviser had already been killed and U.S. aircraft were providing cover for Vietnamese forces, Kennedy emphatically denied that American military personnel were involved in combat.

As the American role in the fighting grew, Kennedy and his advisers became more aggressive about hiding the truth. To acknowledge that the United States was becoming the principal combatant in the conflict with the Viet Cong would make Diem’s dependence on a Western power transparent and would strengthen the insurgency’s appeal as an anticolonial defender of Vietnamese independence. It would also provoke unwanted pressures in the United States for a victory over the communists that had eluded Kennedy in Cuba, Berlin, and Laos, and the Democrats in Korea. Nolting urged that all press briefings on Vietnam “should give full credit to the GVN [government of Vietnam] and not make it look as though the U.S. were running the war in SVN, making the plans, or pulling all the strings.”

Hiding America’s role in the conflict was a terrible error. Franklin Roosevelt had understood that the country could not fight World War II without full public backing. The lesson was lost on Harry Truman, whose decision to cross the 38th Parallel and fight a wider war in Korea without building a national consensus for the coming sacrifices had destroyed his political support, with his approval rating falling to 23 percent. An undeclared and secret war in Vietnam risked Kennedy’s credibility and ability to lead the nation.

Yet nothing gave the lie to denials of U.S. control over the fighting in Vietnam more than a seventeen-page paper prepared at the request of the president and Taylor. On February 3, Roger Hilsman, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who had visited Vietnam for two weeks in January, outlined “A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam.” The plan described in precise detail the matériel and numbers of Vietnamese and American forces needed to fight the war and how they were to be used.

As a Joint Operations Center with limited Vietnamese participation began controlling air strikes and the U.S. Military Assistance Command began directing ground operations, U.S. newsmen in Saigon complained about an embassy blackout or exclusion from helicopter missions; they also objected to the “clamming up by U.S. officials” to prevent them from writing “bad stories” about “press censorship.”
U.S. News & World Report
described a “Curtain of Secrecy” that had descended on Saigon, “a U.S. Embassy effort to confuse and disguise the situation.” The repression had the opposite effect than intended: It attracted a large number of experienced, responsible American journalists to Vietnam to cover what they saw as the participation of U.S. military men in South Vietnam’s war and the South Vietnamese government’s attempt to conceal it from the public.

On February 14, the
New York Times
made the issue a subject for national discussion when it ran an editorial asserting that Washington was hiding America’s growing military involvement in Vietnam, and predicting that this could lead the country into a major conflict. In his widely read column, James Reston asserted that the United States was already “involved in an undeclared war in South Vietnam.”

At a press conference later that day, a reporter asked Kennedy to respond to an allegation in a Republican National Committee publication that he had “been less than candid with the American people as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.” Kennedy was prepared for the question. He launched into a lengthy explanation of American commitments to South Vietnam’s independence dating from 1950, noting a military training mission and economic assistance during the Eisenhower presidency: He described a long history of working to prevent Vietnam from falling under communist control. As the insurgency had become more aggressive, the United States had responded in kind. When a reporter asked Kennedy if he was telling the American people the full story of our involvement, he acknowledged that assistance had been increased but denied sending “combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.” The president added that he was being as frank as he could be without jeopardizing U.S. security needs.

But the reporters in Vietnam didn’t think so. They complained that embassy regulations were making it impossible for them to do their job. They were being refused permission to travel to areas where they could report on what U.S. military men were doing. A press officer in the State Department thought the censorship would have the exact wrong effect. He warned that it was creating a hostile press, which was writing unfavorable stories criticizing Diem’s regime and describing deepening U.S. involvement in directing the war against the Viet Cong. The department’s public affairs expert predicted that a more flexible policy would make the reporters more cooperative and easier to manage. He was on the mark, but his recommendation was not seen as important enough to reach the White House.

Kennedy and his national security advisers refused to bend on allowing reporters in Vietnam to accompany U.S. advisers serving with Vietnamese units. William Shannon at the
New York Post
complained that “Kennedy devotes such a considerable portion of his attention to leaking news, planting rumors, and playing off one reporter against another, that it sometimes seems that his dream job is not being Chief Executive of the nation but Managing Editor of a hypothetical newspaper.”

Press officers in the State and Defense departments and in the United States Information Agency (USIA) thought that press problems in Saigon were becoming serious and recommended that a skilled public relations expert be sent to Vietnam, where he could try to foster greater cooperation with the newsmen. Kennedy grudgingly agreed to give Nolting authority to allow a limited number of journalists to monitor some U.S. air operations, but only if the reporters were willing to emphasize the U.S. support function and South Vietnam’s primary role in fighting the war. Convinced that speculative stories were doing more harm than any reporting of the facts, the White House agreed to a policy of “maximum feasible cooperation, guidance and appeal to good faith of correspondents.”

At all times, however, the embassy needed to reinforce the idea that “this is not a US war” and that participation was only in training and advising the local forces. Managing the news remained a central part of the agenda: Criticism of Diem was to be discouraged as undermining U.S. aims in the conflict, and “correspondents should not be taken on missions whose nature such that undesirable dispatches would be highly probable.” As in World War II, when the press accepted broad and effective censorship, self-restraint now was just as important. But this was not World War II, and reporters wondered whether expanded involvement in the conflict served national security interests; at the very least they believed that an open discussion of America’s growing part in the fighting was essential before any additional future commitments were made.

In February, as the U.S. effort to save Vietnam expanded, Rusk and Lansdale gave voice to the administration’s determination to combat the insurgency. Rusk reassured Nolting, who feared that divided authority between himself and Harkins might undermine the effort to save Diem and defeat the communists, that he and the president were fully committed, promising to help all they could. Lansdale met with the editors of
Life
magazine to convince them to get behind the war effort. Instead of “treating Vietnam as some strange and quaint place, full of peculiar little people, out at the end of nowhere where our good ‘American boys’ don’t belong anyhow,” he urged, the editors should present the Vietnamese “as real people not too unlike us, people fighting against tyranny today.” The editors needed to tell the American people that U.S. advisers in Vietnam are “good guys” and that every American should feel it when any of them suffered a casualty rather than wondering what they were doing in harm’s way. No one should think of American support as anything less than a defense of U.S. national security. Lansdale’s intimidating message: Criticism is unpatriotic.