JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (35 page)

[
185
]. Ibid., pp. 97-98. Castro showed his good faith behind this extraordinary no-retaliation proposal by his response to an incident described by Peter Kornbluh: “When a Marine at Guantanamo shot a Cuban on the base, Castro used this channel [via Lisa Howard and Adlai Stevenson] to inquire if the incident had been an isolated act or a provocation. After informing President Johnson, Bundy authorized Stevenson to tell Howard to tell Castro that there was no plan of provocation at the base, and the episode was contained.”

[
186
]. Ibid.

[
187
]. Ibid., p. 98.

[
188
]. Ibid.

[
189
]. Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones,
With Fidel: A Portrait of Castro and Cuba
(Chicago: Playboy Press, 1975), p. 173.

CHAPTER THREE

JFK and Vietnam

Ten years before he became president, John F. Kennedy learned that it would be impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam.

In 1951, when he was a young member of Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his twenty-two-year-old brother, Robert. At the time France was trying to reassert control over its pre–World War II colony of Indochina. Although the French army’s commander in Saigon insisted to the Kennedys that his 250,000 troops couldn’t possibly lose to the Viet Minh guerrillas, JFK knew better. He was convinced by the more skeptical view of Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate. Kennedy knew and trusted Gullion, who had helped him earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy.
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At an evening meeting on top of a Saigon hotel, in a conversation punctuated by distant blasts from the Viet Minh’s artillery, Gullion told Kennedy: “In twenty years there will be no more colonies. We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The homefront is lost. The same thing would happen to us.”
[2]

After becoming president, Kennedy would cite Edmund Gullion’s farsighted analysis to his military advisers, as they pushed hard for the combat troops that JFK would never send to Vietnam. Instead, on October 11, 1963, six weeks before he was assassinated, President Kennedy issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263.
[3]
It was an order that would never be obeyed because of his murder.

Kennedy had decided to pull out one thousand members of the U.S. military by the end of 1963, and all of them by the end of 1965. In the month and a half before his death, this welcome decision received front page headlines in both the military and civilian press: in the Armed Forces’
Pacific Stars and Stripes
, “White House Report: U.S. Troops Seen Out of Viet[nam] by ’65”;
[4]
in the
New York Times
, “1,000 U.S. Troops to Leave Vietnam.”
[5]

However, because of the president’s assassination, even the first phase of his withdrawal plan was quietly gutted.
The Pentagon Papers
, a revealing Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that was made public by defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, points out: “Plans for phased withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. advisers by end-1963 went through the motions by concentrating rotations home in December and letting strength rebound in the subsequent two months.”
[6]

JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam was part of the larger strategy for peace that he and Nikita Khrushchev had become mutually committed to, which in Kennedy’s case would result in his death. Thomas Merton had seen it all coming. He had said prophetically in a Cold War letter that if President Kennedy broke through to a deeper, more universal humanity, he would before long be “marked out for assassination.”
[7]
Kennedy agreed. As we have seen, he even described the logic of a coming coup d’etat in his comments on the novel
Seven
Days in May
.
[8]
JFK felt that his own demise was increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers. He then proceeded to do exactly that. After vetoing the introduction of U.S. troops at the Bay of Pigs, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ even more intense pressures to bomb and invade Cuba in the October 1962 missile crisis. Then he simply ignored his military and CIA advisers by turning sharply toward peace in his American University address, his Partial Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and his quest for a dialogue with Fidel Castro. His October 1963 decision to withdraw from Vietnam once again broke the Cold War rule of his national security state. As Merton had hoped, Kennedy was breaking through to a deeper humanity—and to its fatal consequences.

Yet for those who could see beyond the East–West conflict, Kennedy’s high-risk steps for peace made political sense. Four decades after these events, we have lost their historical context. It was a time of hope. JFK, like many, was inspired by the yearning for peace spanning the world like a rainbow after the barely averted storm of the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and even Khrushchev’s Caribbean partner Fidel Castro were, in the relief of those months, all beginning to break free from their respective military establishments and ideologies. As 1963 began, political commentators sensed a new morning after the long night of the Cold War.

For example, Drew Pearson in his
Washington Merry-Go-Round
column datelined January 23, 1963, headlined the presidential challenge of the year ahead, “Kennedy Has Chance to End the Cold War.” Pearson stressed the need for the president to seize the time for peace:

“President Kennedy today faces his greatest opportunity to negotiate a permanent peace, but because of division inside his own Administration he may miss the boat.

“That is the consensus of friendly diplomats long trained in watching the ebb and flow of world events.

“They add that Europe is moving so fast that it may take the leadership away from Mr. Kennedy and patch up its own peace with Soviet Premier Khrushchev.”
[9]

The diplomats Pearson was drawing upon could already discern a massive shifting of political fault lines beneath the Kennedy-Khrushchev settlement of the missile crisis. At the same time they had identified the primary obstacle to an end of the Cold War—powerful forces in the U.S. government who did not believe in such a change, and who were throwing their weight against it.

Pearson noted that, in spite of this deep opposition within the government, the president was nevertheless “sitting on top of the diplomatic world” in settling the problems of the Cold War. He cited Kennedy’s decision to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy without fanfare:

“This should decrease tension between the U.S.A. and USSR, but the United States has neither taken credit for it nor used it as Khrushchev used his removal of missiles from Cuba.”

Pearson was unaware that Kennedy was already collaborating with Khrushchev, and that the president’s withdrawal of missiles was actually a quiet fulfillment of his October pledge to his Soviet counterpart.

The columnist had interviewed Khrushchev at his villa on the shores of the Black Sea over a year before. He believed the Soviet leader sincerely wanted peace. Khrushchev’s retreat from Cuba and his subsequent statements for peace reinforced that conclusion. “The latest,” Pearson wrote in his January 1963 column, “is his amazing speech in East Berlin last week in which he renounced war as an instrument of Communist policy.”

As a result of these swirling currents of change, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the “brink of peace,” especially on nuclear testing and Berlin. However, Pearson emphasized, if the sharply divided Kennedy administration kept “gazing passively at this rapidly changing picture,” other Western leaders such as President de Gaulle would jump ahead of Kennedy and make their own peace with Khrushchev. The moment was ripe for change. Would the President seize it? In the hopeful summer of 1963, Kennedy responded to that question with his American University address, the Test Ban Treaty, and his deepening détente with Khrushchev. Then, showing that anything was becoming possible, Kennedy sought out a dialogue with his greatest nemesis, Fidel Castro. JFK’s October decision to withdraw from Vietnam was the next logical step in the increasingly hopeful process that he and Khrushchev had become engaged in.

These now forgotten winds of change in which John Kennedy had set sail in 1963 put him in the position of becoming a peacemaker while still commanding a military force with the capacity to destroy the world many times over. He was trapped in a contradiction between the mandate of peace in his American University address and the continuing Cold War dogmas of his national security state. Kennedy heightened the conflict himself by getting caught up in Cold War rhetoric, as when he spoke dramatically to a vast crowd in front of West Berlin’s city hall on June 26, 1963. After seeing the barbarity of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. president said exuberantly, to his later chagrin, “there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists [as he himself had said and was doing]. Let them come to Berlin.”
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Yet despite his own inner conflicts and the deeper tensions between himself and his advisers, Kennedy had rejected the dominant mythology of his time, according to which a victory over Communism was the supreme value. Kennedy had chosen an alternative to victory—an end to the Cold War. He was breaking free from the contradiction of his Cold War presidency. To advisers like the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that presidential turn from a reliance on war seemed like a surrender to the enemy. Whatever the president might say or do, the military knew they had their own mandate to follow—victory over the enemy.

What is unrecognized about JFK’s presidency, which then makes his assassination a false mystery, is that he was locked in a struggle with his national security state. That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a president who wanted peace. The defeat of Communism was number one. As JFK sought an alternative to victory or defeat in a world of nuclear weapons, he became increasingly isolated in his own government. He had been freed from the demonizing theology of the Cold War by the grace of his deepening relationship to his enemy Khrushchev. At the same time he was forced to realize that, in his own administration, he was becoming more and more isolated. His isolation grew as he rejected his military advisers’ most creatively destructive proposals on how to win the Cold War.

On March 13, 1962, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, proposed such a secret victory plan to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. It was called “Operation Northwoods.” Its purpose was to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Reading this clandestine Cold War proposal today gives one a sense of the mentality of Kennedy’s military advisers and the victory schemes he was being urged to adopt. In “Operation Northwoods,” General Lemnitzer recommended the following steps to pave the way for a U.S. invasion of Cuba:

“1. . . . Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.

“2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around [the U.S. Marine base at] Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):

(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.

(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform ‘over-the-fence’ to stage attack on base.

(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.

(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).

(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.

(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).

(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.

(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.

(9) Capture militia group which storms the base.

(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napthalene.

(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be lieu of (10)).

b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.

c. Commence large scale United States military operations.

“3. A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”
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