Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (52 page)

The directive might have given Kennedy greater influence over future embassy actions in Saigon, but having encouraged the generals to act, Lodge believed that it was too late for the White House to pull back from a coup. He reported that a rebellion was “imminent” and that the United States was likely to be blamed, regardless of whether it succeeded or failed. Moreover, he saw no way to deter the generals from acting “short of informing Diem and Nhu with all the opprobrium that such an action would entail.”

The limits of White House control became all too apparent on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when Kennedy met with all his principal advisers. Was the pending coup likely to succeed? he asked. Kennedy thought that the odds were against success, but his calculations were little more than guesswork. Bobby Kennedy, undoubtedly reflecting his brother’s concerns, asserted that a coup would put America’s position in Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia at risk. Rusk worried that if we opposed a coup, the generals would “turn against us and the war effort will drop off rapidly.” Taylor sided with Bobby, warning that even “a successful coup would have a harmful effect on the war effort.” McCone shared Taylor’s view, but Rusk warned that if Diem remained in power, it would continue to jeopardize success against the Viet Cong. Harriman agreed. Kennedy now came out against the coup, saying that the opposing forces in Saigon were about equal, which made a coup “silly. If Lodge agrees with this point of view, then we should instruct him to discourage a coup.” Caught between concerns that a failed coup would destroy U.S. ability to shape events in Vietnam and staying with a government that some believed was destined to lose the war, Kennedy abdicated control to Lodge, who had made his eagerness for a change of government clear.

At a subsequent meeting later that afternoon, Kennedy reiterated his eagerness to discourage the generals unless they were absolutely certain they could succeed. “We could lose our entire position in Southeast Asia overnight,” he said. A cable to Lodge reiterated Kennedy’s insistence on only supporting a coup that promised victory: The “burden of proof must be on coup group to show a substantial possibility of quick success. . . . A miscalculation could result in jeopardizing U.S. position in Southeast Asia.”

But Lodge, who remained convinced that a coup was essential, dismissed Kennedy’s demands for guaranteed success as beyond U.S. freedom to arrange. “Do not think we have the power to delay or discourage a coup,” he responded. “We have very little influence on what is essentially a Vietnamese affair.” He agreed “that a miscalculation could jeopardize position in Southeast Asia. We also run tremendous risks by doing nothing.” Speaking for the president, Bundy replied, “We do not accept as a basis for U.S. policy that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup.” He instructed him “to persuade” the generals “to desist at least until chances are better” if “there is not clearly a high prospect of success.” In sum, the United States and Lodge specifically should only back a coup if they were sure it would succeed.

But the exchanges between the embassy and Washington had become irrelevant. On November 1, convinced by embassy indications that the United States would ensure their success, the generals overturned Diem’s government and assassinated him and Nhu. Lodge was full of enthusiasm at the turn of events. He counseled prompt support and recognition of the new government: “We should, of course, give unmistakable signs of our satisfaction to the new leadership.” He stressed “the very great popularity of this coup. . . . Every Vietnamese has a grin on his face today. Am told that the jubilation in the streets exceeds that which comes every New Year.”

On learning that the coup was succeeding, Kennedy met with ten of his advisers to decide on whether to promptly recognize the new government. A few minutes into the meeting Forrestal brought in a cable reporting that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Kennedy was horrified. Taylor recorded: He “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.” Shortly after, Schlesinger saw the president and remembered him as “somber and shaken.” He could not believe that Diem and Nhu, good Catholics, had killed themselves, as the generals were alleging. He thought that they deserved a better fate. Moreover, the political repercussions of their deaths were not lost on him. As Bundy told Lodge, “there is danger that standing and reputation of incoming government may be significantly damaged if conviction spreads of their assassination.”

In a recording on November 4, Kennedy ruminated about the coup, his part in encouraging it, and the prospects for the new government and the war. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable in early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment, that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views” against a coup.

Kennedy then described himself as “shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu.” He recalled his contacts with Diem dating back many years and lamented his demise: “He’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.” And so “the question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether Saigon will begin—whether public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”

Regardless of what happened next, Kennedy was determined to separate the United States from Vietnam’s future struggles. But having failed to bring Cuba, a much smaller island country in America’s closest sphere of control, into line with administration goals, he doubted his capacity to dictate Vietnam’s fate. His public posture was to do everything possible to ensure the autonomy of that country. “We must all intensify our efforts to help it [the new government] deal with its many hard problems,” he told Lodge. Having encouraged the change in Saigon, “we thus have a responsibility to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can.” He endorsed holding a conference in Honolulu on how to intensify the struggle against the Viet Cong. He also wanted the participants to discuss “how we can bring Americans out of there.” Asked at a November 14 press conference if he still intended to bring home a thousand troops before the end of the year, he said it would be several hundred, but that he would wait to determine exact numbers until after the Honolulu meeting.

His eagerness to find a way out of Vietnam registered forcefully in a memo to Forrestal on November 21. As he was about to leave for a political fence-mending trip in Texas, where a division between Democratic Party conservatives and liberals threatened Kennedy’s reelection prospects in 1964, he instructed Forrestal “to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review the whole thing from the bottom to the top.” In 1971, Forrestal told CBS that in an Oval Office conversation on November 21, Kennedy told him: “I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, and what we thought we were doing, and what we think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.” It is impossible to say just what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam in a second term, if he had had one. But given the hesitation he showed about Vietnam during his thousand-day administration, it is entirely plausible that he would have found a way out of the conflict or at least not to expand the war to the extent Lyndon Johnson did.

E
PILOGUE

“What He Is Slated to Become Depends on Us”

K
ennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, was a national trauma that continues to haunt Americans. Although solid evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman, some 70 percent of the country holds to the belief that a conspiracy cannot be ruled out. It is difficult for most people to accept that someone as inconsequential as Oswald—a dysfunctional, erratic character, who had an undistinguished period of service in the Marines and lived for two years in the Soviet Union before coming to Dallas, and working a menial job in the Texas Book Depository—could have killed someone as closely guarded as the president of the United States. Yet Kennedy himself—who had a keen sense of irony, the unpredictability of events, and the tragic nature of human affairs—would have been more accepting of the single gunman narrative. He would not have been surprised that the back brace he wore to help him get through the day without agonizing discomfort made a difference in ending his life: Had he not been wearing it, Oswald’s first shot, which passed through his neck, would have toppled him and prevented a second fatal bullet from striking him in the back of the head.

Kennedy’s interactions with his ministry of talent throw new light on his presidential performance as well as the agony of decision-making agitated by the uncertainties every adviser faced in trying to shape a better future. The retrospective judgments of some of Kennedy’s associates on his leadership and what they believed he intended give us additional insights into his presidency. But they also expand our understanding of the advisers, whose reflections on the past tell us as much about them as the history they recount.

For those who saw themselves as best able to describe and defend Kennedy’s presidency—his wife, brother, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorensen—the public’s elevated opinion of him was justified by his actions. Devastated and anguished by Kennedy’s assassination, they launched a campaign to promote a romanticized picture of a heroic leader selflessly serving the nation’s best interests. Quoting the poet W. H. Auden, Sorensen said, “What he was he was; what he is slated to become depends on us.”

On November 29, 1963, only a week after the president was slain, Jackie Kennedy led the way, sitting down with the journalist Theodore White to recount her husband’s accomplishments. The interview, which appeared a week later in
Life
magazine, famously compared Kennedy’s White House to King Arthur’s Court, “the one brief shining moment” known as Camelot. She preserved the president’s memory by lighting an eternal flame at his grave and renaming Florida’s Cape Canaveral as Cape Kennedy; the manned spacecraft to the moon would be launched from that site in 1969. In December 1963, grieving New Yorkers renamed Queens’s Idlewild Airport as John F. Kennedy International Airport.

In March 1964, Jackie Kennedy expanded on her campaign to memorialize her husband in a series of interviews with Arthur Schlesinger. Concerned that part of her remarks would offend some of the president’s associates, and principally aiming to shape historical judgments, she instructed that they be closed until fifty years after her death. In 2011, however, her daughter, Caroline, published the interviews in a three-hundred-page book to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy presidency. Despite some interesting revelations about Kennedy and the men around him, the book is mostly a continuation of the Camelot romance. Caroline Kennedy was not unmindful of the interviews’ exaggerated, but understandable, regard for her father. In a foreword, she described the book as the product of “a young widow in the extreme stages of grief” and asserted that were her mother alive, she would have revised some of what she said in 1964.

Although she never retracted anything she told Schlesinger, during the thirty years after 1964 Jackie Kennedy became much more than John Kennedy’s widow. In 1968, she married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and spent considerable time abroad until Onassis died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1975. She then took up a career as a book editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday. In 1980 she began a relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, a wealthy businessman, with whom she shared an interest in the arts and architecture. In 1994, she passed away from cancer at the age of sixty-four.

Jackie’s recollections could be seen as a stand-in for what Kennedy himself would have done in a volume of memoirs: defend his historical record. In 1964, since she had no intention of publishing her memories in her lifetime and feared that Kennedy’s standing would wane with the passage of time, she urged Schlesinger to write a book describing Kennedy’s hopes of being a great president. She believed that Schlesinger’s recollections and history would not only preserve Kennedy’s memory but also advance the causes he believed in.

Schlesinger was more than happy to oblige. Although he was never a principal adviser and was mostly on the fringe of Kennedy’s administration, mainly helping with speeches, as a professional historian he, along with Sorensen, was the White House official most capable of writing about JFK’s presidency.

Within days of Lyndon Johnson’s succession, Schlesinger concluded that Johnson saw him as a Kennedy devotee and was not keen to have him at the White House. As 1963 came to an end, Schlesinger recorded in a diary, “I have not had a single communication from the President or his staff for the last month—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion. . . . It seems clear that they are prepared to have me fade away, which is OK by me.” On January 27, 1964, Schlesinger submitted his resignation, which was accepted with “alacrity.”

Johnson was eager to separate himself as much as possible from the Kennedys. Although he saw initial political advantages from a close association with the martyred president, at least until he could win and hold the office in his own right, Johnson was determined to establish his administration as distinct from and superior to John Kennedy’s. In January 1964, he began charting his own legacy by announcing a War on Poverty, and in May he described his administration not as continuing the New Frontier but as building a Great Society.

As soon as Schlesinger left the White House, he began working on a book about Kennedy’s presidency. While he had been in the habit of keeping a diary, his part in the 1960 campaign and appointment as special assistant to the president had persuaded him to become a more fastidious recorder of daily events. Jackie Kennedy’s suggestion to him confirmed his own intentions, and within a year, excerpts of a Kennedy book,
A Thousand Days
, began appearing in
Life
. Schlesinger described the book he published in 1966 as more “a personal memoir” that presented “only a partial view” rather than “a comprehensive history.” He predicted that it would be some distant time in the future before a historian will “immerse himself in the flood of papers in the Kennedy Library” and write a more definitive, less subjective account of the Kennedy term. He hoped, however, that his book would contribute to a positive assessment of Kennedy’s leadership. Although many books have been written about Kennedy and various aspects of his administration, some of them highly critical of his temporizing on civil rights, obsessive womanizing, and a hidden medical history that might have cost him the 1960 election if known, Schlesinger’s volume still commands a significant readership and continues to shape judgments about Kennedy’s place in history.

Like Jackie Kennedy and Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen struggled to make sense of Kennedy’s death and committed himself to advancing his historical reputation. Although, as the record of Kennedy’s interactions with his advisers shows, Sorensen played a limited role in policymaking, he was Kennedy’s principal wordsmith. But Johnson viewed him as among the White House officials most closely identified with Kennedy and believed that his continuing presence as a speechwriter, at least for a time, would help to preserve the country’s sense of continuity. Johnson pressed Sorensen to remain in his job and convinced him to help write a post-assassination speech for delivery on November 27. In the address, Sorensen had Johnson declare, “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.” Johnson, however, deleted Sorensen’s opening statement: “I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” There were limits to how far Johnson would go in paying tribute to the fallen president. Sorensen resented the deletion at the time and was eager to begin work toward the goal he set for himself of advancing Kennedy’s “ideals and objectives.” Vowing to “do all I could to keep John F. Kennedy’s legacy alive,” Sorensen persuaded Johnson to let him resign at the end of February 1964.

At once, he began writing
Kennedy
, which was published the following year to much acclaim. While he announced his determination not to produce a eulogy, noting Kennedy’s acknowledgment of “imperfections and ignorance in many areas,” the biography was a celebration of Kennedy’s many personal and political attributes. Sorensen decried those who spoke more of Kennedy’s “style than of his substance.” Yes, his “style
was
special—the grace, the wit, the elegance, the youthful looks will rightly be long remembered. But what mattered most to him, and what in my opinion will matter most to history, was the substance—the strength of his ideas and ideals, his courage and judgment.”

Forty-three years later, in 2008, two years before his own death at the age of eighty-two, Sorensen returned to the subject of his years with Kennedy in a memoir,
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.
“For eleven years,” he wrote, “it had been my full-time job to advance his interests, invoke his name, and articulate his message in the struggles for justice at home and peace around the world. For the succeeding forty-plus years, I have made it my part-time mission to do the same.” And in
Counselor
, he continued his efforts to secure Kennedy’s historical reputation.

No one was more determined to carry John Kennedy’s legacy forward than brother Bobby. His presence in the Johnson administration as attorney general was a source of mutual tension; their interactions during Kennedy’s thousand days had intensified their reciprocal antagonism dating from the fifties. Bobby was angry at what he saw as Johnson’s excessive haste in taking control of Air Force One and the Oval Office following the assassination, while Bobby angered Johnson when he ran past him to comfort Jackie after she had returned to Washington with the president’s body. Momentarily, however, each saw a need to mute their differences for the sake of the country. At two meetings in the days immediately after Kennedy’s death, Johnson told Bobby, “I need you more than the President needed you.”

But the truce could last only so long. Tension between the two remained palpable. During Johnson’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress on November 27, Bobby sat “pale, somber, and inscrutable, applauding faithfully, but his face set and his lips compressed.” It impressed Schlesinger as “a particularly unbearable moment.” Conflict over Bobby’s possible candidacy for the vice presidency emerged during the first half of 1964. Johnson didn’t want him, believing history would say that Bobby’s presence on the ticket elected him president. Even though he told Bobby that he was out of the running and described it as part of a decision not to take anyone in the cabinet, Johnson couldn’t free himself from the overdrawn fear that Bobby would steamroll the Democratic convention in August into selecting him anyway. That summer, after Johnson won passage of JFK’s civil rights bill, Bobby decided to resign and run for a New York U.S. Senate seat. It was a relief to both him and Johnson.

After Bobby won his Senate election in November, he spent the next four years promoting the causes he associated with his brother’s agenda. He wrote
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis
, which celebrated John’s masterful resolution of the potentially disastrous confrontation with Moscow. He also sat for a number of oral history interviews with
New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis; John Bartlow Martin, a journalist and JFK ambassador to the Dominican Republic; Burke Marshall, an attorney and head of the Kennedy Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Schlesinger. Covering everything from civil rights, with which Bobby was most intimately involved, to Kennedy’s decision to name Johnson vice president, to his choice of advisers and cabinet officers, and the administration’s Cuban and Vietnam policies, Bobby, like Schlesinger and Sorensen, recounted events as Kennedy might have described them in a memoir. Like Jackie Kennedy’s reflections, some of Bobby’s descriptions of people and events were seen as too candid to release while he remained actively involved in politics. In 1988, twenty years after he had run for president and been assassinated at the age of forty-two, Bobby Kennedy’s recollections, which had become less controversial with the passage of time, appeared in print.

Bobby’s own unrealized potential and his brother’s unfinished presidency have given both of them an enduring hold on the public’s imagination as heroic leaders who could have spared the country from missteps at home and abroad. They answer yearnings for better leadership in a more harmonious nation and world.

McGeorge Bundy was one member of a quartet of advisers who hoped to advance Kennedy’s legacy by remaining at their jobs. The day after the assassination, Bundy told Schlesinger that “he intended to stay on as long as Johnson wanted him.” Bundy was particularly intent on making sure that Vietnam was not lost to the communists, seeing this as a fixed Kennedy aim. When Johnson began expanding the war in March 1965 with Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, Bundy warmly supported the decision. In the spring, he was eager to debate antiwar opponents, whom he saw as undermining the public backing he believed essential to a sustained war effort.

Although Bundy had serious doubts about the wisdom of dispatching large numbers of ground forces to Vietnam, he did not raise them directly with Johnson. He believed that “an effort had to be made” to save Vietnam “even if the odds favored defeat.” Bundy’s focus remained on the need to educate the public about the necessity of making the commitment to prevent a communist victory. But he and Johnson fell into conflict over building a consensus for the war effort. Bundy was critical of Johnson’s decision to announce the first troop escalation in Vietnam in July 1965 at a noon press conference, “when no one was watching TV.” Johnson dismissed Bundy’s pressure for greater openness, saying, “If your mother-in-law . . . has only one eye, and it happens to be right in the middle of her forehead, then the best place for her is not in the livin’ room with all of the company!” Mindful that Johnson “doesn’t pay any attention to what I’m telling him,” Bundy decided to resign in February 1966. He compared his last days in the White House to advisers in the Kremlin who were ignored and abused by Stalin.