JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (44 page)

“How long must the United States help President Diem to lose his war and waste its money, to delay the reforms that alone might gather his regime the popular support that victory requires?”
[200]

Kennedy’s Cold War advisers were also alarmed. Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled the U.S. Embassy in Saigon he was worried that Nhu’s public call for a cut in U.S. forces was “likely [to] generate new and reinforce already existing US domestic pressures for complete withdrawal from SVN.”
[201]
Roger Hilsman appealed to Ambassador Nolting to try to restrain Nhu in his public remarks lest there be “considerable domestic criticism and opposition to our Viet-Nam policy as direct result.”
[202]

The only person in the administration who seems to have welcomed Nhu’s encouragement of a U.S. withdrawal was President Kennedy. Asked about it at his May 22 press conference, JFK said all the Ngo brothers had to do was make their request official, then the process of withdrawal would begin: “we would withdraw the troops, any number of troops, any time the Government of South Viet-Nam would suggest it. The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on their way home. That is number one.”
[203]

Kennedy then took advantage of the opportunity to introduce the public gingerly to his own closely held withdrawal plan:

“Number two is: we are hopeful that the situation in South Viet-Nam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can’t possibly make that judgment at the present time . . . I couldn’t say that today the situation is such that we could look for a brightening in the skies that would permit us to withdraw troops or begin to by the end of this year. But I would say,
if requested to, we will do it immediately
.”
[204]

JFK and Diem were signaling their mutual hopes for a U.S. withdrawal. But Diem was too late in doing so to join forces with Kennedy. Any hope of his coming together with JFK in a withdrawal policy had already been effectively blocked by the opposite forces released in the Buddhist movement and Diem’s government by the explosions in Hue on May 8.

The Buddhist crisis was gaining steam. On May 15, a delegation of Buddhist leaders met with Diem, demanding that discrimination against Buddhists cease and that his government accept responsibility for those killed at Hue. Diem agreed to investigate the charges of discrimination. But he said that the Buddhists were “damn fools” to be concerned about a right of religious freedom guaranteed by the constitution. “And I
am
the constitution,” Diem added.
[205]

In regard to May 8, he again promised aid to the victims’ families, but refused to declare the government at fault for a crime he thought others had committed. Ambassador Nolting wired Washington that, on the contrary, the South Vietnamese government needed to accept “responsibility for actions [of] its authorities during Hue riot.”
[206]

The Buddhists were frustrated by their meeting with Diem. They organized marches, hunger strikes, and memorial services honoring the dead at Hue. Diem chose a hard line in response to the protests. Demonstrators were dispersed by government troops using tear gas.

Even as President Kennedy said eagerly of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, “if requested to, we will do it immediately,” the only government that could have made such a request was discrediting itself beyond any possibility of recovery. Diem’s increasingly brutal response to a movement he didn’t understand was turning his already unpopular government into an international pariah. As the Buddhist crisis deepened, Kennedy saw Diem’s repression of the Buddhists as a confirmation of Mansfield’s diagnosis that Diem was unable to gain popular support from the Vietnamese people. It strengthened JFK’s decision to carry out in Vietnam the same kind of neutralization policy he had chosen for Laos. However, he would have to overcome the political obstacle of a South Vietnamese government that was becoming notorious.

On May 9, the day after the Hue explosions, Roger Hilsman had been confirmed by the Senate in his new State Department position as the primary officer responsible for Vietnam. During the next month, President Kennedy ordered Hilsman to prepare for the neutralization of Vietnam. Hilsman said later in an interview:

“[Kennedy] began to instruct me, as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, to position ourselves to do in Vietnam what we had done in Laos, i.e., to negotiate the neutralization of Vietnam. He had made a decision on this. He did not make it public of course, but he had certainly communicated it to me as I say, in four-letter words, good earthy anglo-saxon four-letter words, and every time that I failed to do something [in a way] he felt endangered this position, he let me know in very clear language.”
[207]

As spring turned into the summer of 1963, President John F. Kennedy had decided to withdraw the U.S. military and neutralize Vietnam, just as he had done in Laos. When he said that one day to his aides Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, they asked him bluntly: How could he do it? How could he carry out a military withdrawal from Vietnam without losing American prestige in Southeast Asia?

“Easy,” the president said. “Put a government in there that will ask us to leave.”
[208]

It was a contradictory formula for peace. It was also easier said than done. By June 1963, Kennedy had been manipulated by forces more powerful than his presidency into the beginning stages of a process that was the opposite of his stated intention. He was succumbing to pressures to take out a government in Vietnam that had just shown itself on the verge of asking the U.S. to leave—precisely what Kennedy knew he most needed to facilitate a withdrawal. While aware of the irony, JFK was afraid that Diem was personally incapable of reversing the suicidal course he had chosen. Under his brother Nhu’s dominant influence, Diem was trying to repress a popular Buddhist uprising, which was thereby bound to turn into a revolution. Diem, Kennedy concluded, was a hopeless case. JFK’s now more extended hope was that, after the Diem government’s inevitable fall, he would then be able to “put a government in there that will ask us to leave.”

Besides the inherent contradiction of trying to impose peace on a client state, Kennedy also had the problem of time. He only had six months left to live. On June 10, 1963, at American University, he began those six months by turning toward an inspiring vision of peace. But how much of that vision could he realize, in Vietnam and elsewhere, before his assassins would strike?

NOTES

[
1
]. Richard D. Mahoney,
JFK: Ordeal in Africa
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 108.

[
2
]. From an interview with Edmund Gullion by Richard Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
(New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 254.

[
3
]. National Security Action Memorandum No. 263, October 11, 1963,
Foreign Relations of the United States
(FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume IV: Vietnam: August-December 1963
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), p. 396.

[
4
].
Pacific Stars and Stripes
(October 4, 1963), p. 1.

[
5
].
New York Times
(November 16, 1963), p. 1.

[
6
].
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam
,
Senator Gravel Edition,
5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), vol. 2, p. 303.

[
7
]. From Thomas Merton’s January 18, 1962, letter to W. H. Ferry, in
Letters from Tom: A Selection of Letters from Father Thomas Merton, Monk of Gethsemani, to W. H. Ferry, 1961-1968,
edited by W. H. Ferry (Scarsdale, N.Y.: Fort Hill Press, 1983), p. 15.

[
8
]. Paul B. Fay, Jr.,
The Pleasure of His Company
(New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 162-63.

[
9
]. Drew Pearson, “Kennedy Has Chance to End the Cold War,”
Washington Merry-Go-Round
(January 23, 1963; syndicated in numerous U.S. newspapers).

[
10
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 268.

[
11
]. Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, March 13, 1962; “Subject: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (Top Secret)”; L. L. Lemnitzer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; pp. 7-9. Available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/ northwoods.pdf.

[
12
]. Ibid.

[
13
]. Ibid., p. l.

[
14
]. James Bamford,
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency: From the Cold War through the Dawn of a New Century
(New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 86-87. It was Bamford who discovered and first cited parts of “Operation Northwoods.” Ibid., pp. 82-86.

[
15
].
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume X, Cuba 1961-1962
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 771.

[
16
]. Bamford,
Body of Secrets,
p. 87.

[
17
].
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume XXIV, Laos Crisis
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 21.

[
18
]. Ibid., pp. 19, 21.

[
19
]. Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 244.

[
20
].
Pentagon Papers,
vol. 2, p. 18.

[
21
]. Ibid.

[
22
]. Winthrop Brown, oral history interview in 1968 by Larry J. Hackman, 14-15, JFK Library. Cited by Edmund F. Wehrle, “‘A Good, Bad Deal’: John F. Kennedy, W. Averell Harriman, and the Neutralization of Laos, 1961-1962,”
Pacific Historical Review
(August 1998), p. 355.

[
23
]. Roger Hilsman,
To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Delta, 1964), p. 115.

[
24
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. XXIV, pp. 45-47.

[
25
]. Wehrle, “Good, Bad Deal,” p. 355.