JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (64 page)

We have already seen how deeply entwined the CIA had become in the infrastructure of the South Vietnamese government. As former Saigon station chief William Colby said, by early 1962, “the station had contacts and influence throughout Vietnam, from the front and rear doors of the Palace, to the rural communities, among the civilian opponents of the regime and the commanders of all the key military units.”
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Through its front, the Agency for International Development (AID), the CIA had placed advisers in at least twenty of the government’s forty-one provinces.
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By the fall of 1963, when John Kennedy was trying to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War, the CIA had become heavily invested in continuing the war under its own control.

Even the Pentagon found itself in a supporting role to the CIA’s covert rule over South Vietnam. The agency’s dominance reached back to its installation of Diem as Saigon’s ruler in 1954. By funding and advising the Saigon government’s security forces, the CIA was the ultimate power behind the throne. The CIA also had operatives in key positions in the U.S. and South Vietnamese military.
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In addition, it was advising tens of thousands of armed “Meo” (actually Hmong) tribal members. By its further infiltration of the South Vietnamese government, the CIA was virtually running the show in 1963—as Diem and his brother Nhu were aware and deeply resented. Their alternating dependence on and resistance to the CIA was the undercurrent to their sinking ship of state.

American journalists had begun to break the silence on the CIA’s covert control of South Vietnam.
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock commented on the CIA’s growing notoriety in Saigon. Krock began his October 3, 1963, column by observing: “The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in dispatches from Vietnam to American newspapers and in articles originating in Washington.”
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Krock noted that the CIA in Vietnam was coming under fire “almost every day now in dispatches from reporters—in close touch with intra-Administration critics of the CIA—with excellent reputations for reliability.”
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His prime example was Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, whose dispatch on the CIA the same day had shocked readers of the
Washington
Daily News
. Starnes’s provocative theme was how the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” in Vietnam had become a threat to its own government back in Washington.
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Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s response to the CIA’s ominous seizure of power in Vietnam was to harness that power to his own ambition to overthrow Diem.

On September 13, 1963, Lodge sent a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk asking him to send longtime CIA operative Edward Lansdale to Saigon “at once to take charge, under my supervision, of all U.S. relationships with a change of government here.”
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Lodge wanted Lansdale’s expertise in “changing governments” so as to facilitate, “under my supervision,” the stalled coup. For Lansdale to be effective, Lodge wrote, he “must have a staff and I therefore ask that he be put in charge of the CAS [“Controlled American Source,” meaning the CIA] station in the Embassy, relieving the present incumbent, Mr. John Richardson.”
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Although CIA director McCone denied Lodge’s request for Lansdale, Richardson, whom Lodge thought too close to Diem, was recalled to Washington, just as Lodge wished. The ambassador then became in effect his own CIA station chief in Saigon. He could now supervise directly Lucien Conein, the CIA’s intermediary to the South Vietnamese generals plotting against Diem.
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Lodge’s commitment to engineering a coup against Diem was no problem to the CIA’s chief of covert operations, Richard Helms, who had the same goal. When Helms allied the CIA to the State Department circle pressuring Kennedy for a coup, he told Harriman, “It’s about time we bit this bullet.”
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Helms could only welcome Lodge’s and the State Department’s enthusiasm for a coup as additional cover for company business. Whether knowingly or not, Henry Cabot Lodge, in his push to carry out a Saigon coup that was facilitated by the CIA, was helping to provide the impetus for a Washington coup as well.

Kennedy had continued to puzzle over the question: How could he begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam when practically his entire military command and circle of advisers wanted to expand the war?

The president knew his key ally in the Pentagon was his loyal civilian bureaucrat Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. However, McNamara’s power on his behalf was hedged in by the noncooperation of the top brass. McNamara had been stalled by his generals for a full year from getting the Vietnam withdrawal plan JFK wanted drawn up. When the Pacific Command did finally come up with a plan in May 1963, McNamara had to reject its time line as at least a year too slow.
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After the Defense Secretary ordered an expedited plan, the Joint Chiefs balked again. They wrote McNamara on August 20 that “until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased,” “no US units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam.”
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They now wanted any decision on a withdrawal put on hold until late October.
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Pushed by his recognition of the war’s futility and its rising death toll, John Kennedy had waited long enough to begin withdrawing from Vietnam. Although pressured by the Pentagon for a bigger war and by the State Department for a CIA-aided coup, the president decided to authorize a troop withdrawal, while continuing to hold off a coup. He did so through his stratagem of the McNamara-Taylor mission to Vietnam.

When Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor returned from their trip to Vietnam on October 2, President Kennedy already knew the recommendations of the report they delivered to him. They had originally come from the president himself.

While McNamara and Taylor were gathering information in Vietnam, they cabled their data back to General Victor Krulak’s Pentagon office. Krulak’s editorial and stenographic team worked twenty-four hours a day to put together the fact-finding trip’s report. As one of the report’s authors, Colonel Fletcher Prouty, later revealed, Krulak went regularly to the White House to confer confidentially with John and Robert Kennedy.
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There the president and his brother dictated to Krulak the recommendations of the “McNamara-Taylor Report.” When the secretaries finished typing up the report in Krulak’s office, it was then bound in a leather cover, flown to Hawaii, and placed in the hands of McNamara and Taylor on their way back from Vietnam. They read the report on their flight to Washington, and presented it to Kennedy at the White House on the morning of October 2.
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JFK accepted its recommendations, most significantly one for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel from Vietnam by the end of that year. That 1963 withdrawal, together with Kennedy’s plan “to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965,” became official government policy on October 11, 1963, in the president’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) Number 263.
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However, the process wasn’t easy. Kennedy convened a National Security Council (NSC) meeting the evening of October 2 to discuss the McNamara-Taylor Report. What ensued was, as McNamara said, “heated debate about our recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 men by the end of the year . . . once discussion began, we battled over the recommendation.”
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Not surprisingly, the majority of the NSC members were opposed to the withdrawal.
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The president himself hesitated over the critical phrase “by the end of this year” as a preface to the sentence, “The U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel can be withdrawn.” He wavered, saying, “If we are not able to take this action by the end of the year, we will be accused of being overoptimistic.”
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McNamara argued in favor of the time commitment, saying, “It will meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam. It reveals that we have a withdrawal plan.”
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Kennedy agreed, so long as the time limits were presented as a part of the report rather than his own predictions. He then bypassed the National Security Council majority and endorsed the report’s withdrawal recommendations that had come from himself. He also agreed with McNamara that the withdrawal plan should be announced publicly after the meeting to “set it in concrete.”
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As McNamara was leaving the room to give the news of the withdrawal to White House reporters, Kennedy called out to him, “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too.”
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Nine days later he signed NSAM 263, thus making official government policy the McNamara-Taylor recommendations for the withdrawal of “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963” and “by the end of 1965 . . . the bulk of U.S. personnel.”
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Nevertheless, Kennedy still hesitated as to how he was going to justify the withdrawal in political terms. Although CIA and military intelligence reports from Vietnam continued to be optimistic, the president had seen through to the truth, thanks especially to MacArthur, Galbraith, and Mansfield. As he told Charles Bartlett, “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there.”
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While he knew the optimistic intelligence reports being used to justify the war were wrong, he now used the momentum of those same reports, like a judo expert, to justify a withdrawal.
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Kennedy was no fool when presented with disinformation by his intelligence agencies. He had learned from the Bay of Pigs. He sensed the intelligence reports from Vietnam might suddenly turn sour, now that he had reversed their intention and was using them to justify a withdrawal. If they in turn became more realistic, threatening defeat, the president needed to turn them around again, using the basis of a new argument for escalation as a reason instead for withdrawal. Thus we can understand the tension between his agreement with McNamara, that it was good to set the withdrawal policy in concrete by a public announcement, and his repeated hesitation to do so, because the policy’s political justification might have to change according to shifting reports from the battlefield.

In NSAM 263, he therefore “directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.”
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Yet as he agreed, the White House had already made an announcement on the withdrawal after the meeting on October 2, generating front-page headlines in the
New York Times
and the Armed Forces newspaper,
Pacific Stars and
Stripes
.
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Moreover, by signing NSAM 263, Kennedy had officially ordered the implementation of the withdrawal plans. But he sensed that the CIA and the military would now try to cut the political ground out from under his withdrawal plans by changing their reports from good to bad. Hence his continuing caution on saying what he had done, and why, as an election year approached.

He also needed to finesse his way around his publicly stated opposition to a withdrawal he had already been planning.

On September 2, he had been interviewed by television anchorman Walter Cronkite, who said, “Mr. President, the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment is of course the one in Vietnam, and we have our difficulties there quite obviously.”

The first part of Kennedy’s reply was consistent with his Vietnam policy from the beginning. He said: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”
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Here was Kennedy’s basic assumption all along, that this was the non-Communist Vietnamese’s war to win or to lose, not the United States’. “In the final analysis, it is their war.” In October he would use that assumption consistently in the logic of NSAM 263 as the basis for a U.S. withdrawal.

He also said that the war could not be won without important changes being made by the Saigon government to win popular support. Neither Diem nor his authoritarian successors would allow those changes to be made. That political fact could also serve as a reason for withdrawal.

However, Kennedy did not tell Walter Cronkite what he would tell his Hyannis Port neighbor Larry Newman on October 20, nine days after signing NSAM 263 for his Vietnam withdrawal: “I’m going to get those guys out because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war that it’s impossible to win.”