Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (34 page)

Nothing demonstrated U.S. intentions in Vietnam more clearly than a statement to reporters by Bobby Kennedy during a refueling stop in Saigon on a return journey from Asia. Asked about America’s role in the conflict, Kennedy did not hesitate to avow the administration’s determination to defeat the communist insurgency. “We are going to win in Vietnam. We will remain here until we do win,” he declared, as defiant of the reporters as he was toward the Viet Cong. When Wayne Morse, a skeptical Oregon senator, asked the White House whether the attorney general’s statements represented administration policy, the State Department, speaking for the White House, replied that Kennedy’s remarks had not been cleared by the White House but did reflect the government’s outlook. Although Bobby’s comments could be attributed to his characteristic combativeness in his brother’s behalf, especially against the backdrop of the administration’s recent setbacks, no one could doubt that the president and his advisers were all speaking with one voice on Vietnam.

On February 27, when dissident South Vietnamese pilots unsuccessfully bombed the presidential palace in an attempt to kill Diem, Nolting and the White House sprang to Diem’s defense. The State Department approved a request to have U.S. helicopters temporarily provide close support of operations by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) while Saigon investigated its air force. In a press conference on March 1, after the press in the United States and abroad asserted that the conflict in Vietnam was rapidly becoming a U.S. war, Rusk reassured reporters that the United States would not send combat troops. He emphasized, however, that the United States remained determined to assist the South Vietnamese until the threat to their autonomy ended. Tensions between the embassy in Saigon and U.S. reporters increased when the latter described the attack as evidence of Diem’s basic unpopularity. Nolting, by contrast, dismissed the incident as of no great consequence and predicted that the South Vietnam government was minimizing the effects.

As all too often with embassy staffs in a friendly country, Nolting identified with the existing regime. His reporting was the captive of a favorable bias or an inclination to put the best possible face on unwanted events. With the administration in Washington eager for good news or evidence that, unlike in Cuba and Berlin, it had found the right formula for success, Nolting and his military counterparts in Saigon talked themselves into believing that Diem could rally his country against the Hanoi-backed Viet Cong. The American journalists watching developments with greater detachment saw a distinctly less rosy outcome to Diem’s governance and the civil war.

While Kennedy battled the steel companies, Secretary of Defense McNamara, the U.S. military, and the embassy in Saigon were more than ready to take over the management of America’s expanding role in Vietnam. As McNamara recalled later, “I increasingly made Vietnam my personal responsibility. That was only right: it was the one place where Americans were in a shooting war, albeit as advisers. I felt a very heavy responsibility for it, and I got involved as deeply as I could and be effective. That is what ultimately led people to call Vietnam McNamara’s war.” Meetings in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor with the U.S. military commander in the Pacific, the principal officers in Vietnam, and civilian national security officials in Washington and Saigon became a monthly exercise.

Regular visits to Vietnam following the ten-hour trips to Hawaii were part of the routine that brought McNamara in repeated contact with Diem and his military and civilian advisers. It gave Diem the opportunity to persuade McNamara and his aides that he was intent on making Vietnam free and democratic. He impressed them as someone who had absorbed Western values during his studies at a Catholic seminary in New Jersey in the early 1950s. Seeing that Diem was under the influence of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, the “bright, forceful, beautiful” Madame Nhu, who was “also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress,” McNamara had some misgivings about the reliability of the South Vietnamese government as a partner in the conflict. But the need to get on with the war and the belief that there was no good alternative to Diem and the Nhus disarmed McNamara’s doubts.

In the first half of 1962, the Pentagon took over the complete development of an overall military strategy for South Vietnam, mapping out resources needed from the United States, organizing Vietnamese forces, and how they should be used to defeat the Viet Cong in the quickest and least costly way. Rusk told the embassy that the administration in Washington saw the program as workable and worthy of all-out support. A closed hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made clear to Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse that U.S. military personnel were transporting South Vietnamese troops into combat, engaging in firefights with the North Vietnamese, patrolling the sea approaches to South Vietnam, and dropping propaganda leaflets over guerrilla-held areas.

By late March, Rusk had pressed to ensure that Hanoi could not resupply the Viet Cong by airdrops; he urged that hostile aircraft over South Vietnam be shot down. Kennedy wanted an assessment of progress in the conflict by April 1, with contingency planning in case current efforts to defend South Vietnam were falling short. McNamara instructed the Pentagon to plan the introduction of U.S. ground troops if the interior of South Vietnam were in danger of collapse.

Kennedy had a sense of urgency about removing the threat to South Vietnam’s autonomy and ending the national discussion about a wider U.S. role in an Asian war. During February and March, the
New York Times
had carried numerous front-page stories about America’s expanding role in the conflict, the prospect of a prolonged fight with increasing U.S. casualties, and Soviet warnings that American actions were jeopardizing world peace. With reporters revealing that U.S. forces were actively engaged in combat operations both in the air and on the ground, the embassy and the White House became more eager to mute the talk of America’s engagement. Kennedy approved a directive for U.S. fighter planes to intercept and destroy communist resupply aircraft over South Vietnam, but he wanted to assure that “public handling will be simply that Communist plane crashed, thus attempting avoid problem of degree to which Americans engaged in active hostilities in SVN.” The cover-up of U.S. actions in Vietnam was a clear administration aim.

The message to the field went out over George Ball’s signature—even the most critical of Kennedy’s advisers on the expanding conflict followed the party line. “We’re heading hell-bent into a mess, and there’s not a Goddamn thing I can do about it,” Ball recalled telling his chief of staff. Kennedy resisted a large, high-visibility military commitment, but a shadow war was another matter, and Ball, however great his doubts, followed the president’s lead.

On April 4, Harriman, who had become the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and chairman of the Southeast Asia Task Force, cabled Nolting about growing concern over the flow of news stories about U.S. direction of South Vietnamese forces and American participation in the fighting. The stories could only lead people to believe that the conflict was becoming more of a U.S. than a Vietnamese war. It was essential that U.S. involvement be seen as strictly advisory. Harriman complained that U.S. military actions were too conspicuous and needed to be conducted under a greater cloak of secrecy. It gave the communists a propaganda advantage that helped their war effort—not to mention the danger of provoking a firestorm of criticism in the United States.

Kennedy’s eagerness for a solution to his Vietnam problem made him receptive to a proposal from Ken Galbraith for escaping what Galbraith saw as a losing effort. Our involvement, he had told Kennedy in a March 2 letter, is increasingly like that of the French, a “colonial military force” that stirs resentments. The Russians were delighted at the prospect of an America spending “our billions in distant jungles where it does us no good and them no harm. Incidentally, who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? . . . What is so important about this real estate in the space age? What strength do we gain from alliance with an incompetent government and a people who are so largely indifferent to their own salvation?”

Galbraith understood perfectly well that the man setting policy on Vietnam was the president. But cautious about challenging Kennedy directly and eager to move him in a different direction, Galbraith laid the blame for “the political poison” shaping policy on the military and State Department. Knowing Kennedy’s “distaste for diagnosis without remedy,” he proposed four rules for change in dealing with Vietnam: Keep up the commitment against deploying U.S. forces, ensure that U.S. civilians and not military men manage policy in Saigon, stay alert to the possibility of any kind of a political settlement, and be open to any alternative to Diem, which was bound to be an improvement. Galbraith urged Kennedy to understand that “politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. I wonder if those who talk of a ten-year war really know what they are saying in terms of American attitudes. We are not as forgiving as the French.” Was he fearful that the United States might unleash unprecedented atomic attacks on the North Vietnamese if it found itself in the sort of stalemate it had in Korea?

Skeptical of his military and State Department advisers, Kennedy invited Galbraith, during an early April visit to the United States, to spend an evening with him at Glen Ora, his four-hundred-acre estate in Middleburg, Virginia. Encouraged by Kennedy to provide a more formal policy statement that he could use in prodding his advisers to consider an alternative to the current reliance on military and economic support of Diem, Galbraith sent a memo the next day that repeated the points in his March letter. He added the suggestion that the United States initiate the search for a political solution by approaching the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, an agency with Canadian, Indian, and Polish representatives that was set up in 1954 to monitor the Geneva accords ending French occupation of Southeast Asia and was responsible for the election of a government for all of Vietnam. Galbraith also suggested possible talks with the Russians and Indians about an end to the Viet Cong insurgency in exchange for phased U.S. withdrawal and a goal of unifying Vietnam under a noncommunist, progressively democratic government.

The same day Galbraith sent his memo to Kennedy, Chet Bowles, back from a fact-finding tour of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, sent the president a fifty-four-page memorandum that echoed Galbraith’s advice on Vietnam. Where Galbraith punctuated his letter with witticisms and a bit of self-deprecation that amused Kennedy, Bowles was his usual intense, ponderous self. His analysis was every bit as keen as Galbraith’s: He saw our involvement in Vietnam as producing “neither total victory nor total defeat but rather the development of an uneasy fluid stalemate with the Viet Cong unable to crack the U.S.-supported government forces, yet still able to maintain an effective opposition.” He thought it provided the opportunity to reach for a permanent negotiated political settlement. He also thought it could open the way to the neutralization of all Southeast Asia.

Bowles did not discount the importance of a U.S. military presence in the region to discourage Chinese adventurism. But the length of Bowles’s report instantly reminded Kennedy of Dean Acheson’s view of him as “a garrulous windbag and an ineffectual do-gooder,” which had been confirmed for the president and Bobby by his response to the Bay of Pigs failure and had triggered his demotion from undersecretary to roving ambassador. A fifty-four-page sermon on how to set matters right in a contested Vietnam by someone consigned to the fringes of the administration did not command Kennedy’s attention. He ignored Bowles’s request for a meeting to discuss his proposals.

By contrast, on April 6, the day after Galbraith wrote him, Kennedy discussed his suggestions for neutralizing Vietnam with Harriman. Harriman agreed with Galbraith’s advice to minimize the U.S. military role in the conflict. He showed Kennedy his April 4 cable to Nolting emphasizing the need to keep U.S. military activities in Vietnam as quiet as possible and saying that we had no intention of fighting Vietnam’s war. Harriman, however, rejected the proposal to seek a neutral solution in Vietnam and the suggestion that the U.S. dump Diem: While “Diem was a losing horse in the long run . . . there was nobody to replace him.” Despite Harriman’s response, Kennedy told him to forward Galbraith’s memo to McNamara and to instruct Galbraith to discuss a mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese and American forces from South Vietnam with the Indians.

Kennedy didn’t trust that Harriman would follow his directive. He saw Harriman as intent on making Vietnamese policy without regard for his wishes. He sensed that Harriman thought he knew better than the president how to deal with this crisis. Kennedy continued to worry that Harriman and other hawks in the State Department and Pentagon were more inclined to fight in Vietnam than he was. He wanted to be sure that Galbraith would be instructed to seize upon any opportunity that might allow the United States to reduce its involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy wasn’t ready to sign on to negotiations, but he didn’t want to exclude that possibility; at least, not yet.

After reviewing Galbraith’s argument for a political solution, McNamara and the military chiefs emphatically dissented. They argued that the policies in place had not been given a fair trial and that a negotiated settlement in Vietnam would have disastrous effects on U.S. relations with allies everywhere. Galbraith’s proposals were “tantamount to abandoning South Vietnam to the Communists” and losing Southeast Asia. The country was “a testing ground of U.S. resolution in Asia. . . . The Department of Defense cannot concur in the policy advanced by Ambassador Galbraith,” the Chiefs told Kennedy, “but believe strongly that present policy toward South Vietnam should be pursued vigorously to a successful conclusion.”

When Bowles followed in June and July with additional memos urging consideration of neutralizing Vietnam, Rusk told him, “You realize, of course, you’re spouting the Communist line.” The State Department’s Far Eastern Bureau called Bowles’s initiatives “unrealistic, impractical and premature.” Bowles warned that a likely deterioration in South Vietnam would force a choice between increased troop commitments and an embarrassing withdrawal, but his prediction was dismissed as unworthy of further discussion. It was a measure of how intense the argument over Vietnam had become that Rusk would accuse Bowles of communist sympathies. Vietnam had taken on meaning in the Cold War that greatly exceeded its importance for U.S. national security. But any officeholder who might have pointed out Vietnam’s inflated importance would have exposed himself to attacks not only on his judgment but also on his commitment to defeating the communists.