Kennedy (113 page)

Along with the manpower, the Berlin build-up provided enough equipment and ammunition to supply the new troops, enough sealift and airlift to transport them and enough airpower to cover ground combat. Some three hundred tactical fighter aircraft, more than 100,000 tons of equipment and several thousand tanks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles were placed in position on the European continent, and still more on “floating depot” ships.

A degree of inefficiency and grumbling not surprisingly accompanied this rapid expansion of conventional forces in late 1961. The mobilization
of Reservists in peacetime had traditionally been considered politically suicidal. Newsreels containing Kennedy’s picture were booed in theaters on newly opened Army bases. Some men called to beef up below-strength units at first lacked uniforms and bedding as well as weapons and equipment. Reservists who had assumed that their contract to serve would never be taken up complained to reporters and Congressmen that the interruption of their lives was unnecessary inasmuch as no fighting had broken out at Berlin. Early in 1962 two privates first class—one who organized protest meetings and disparaged his commanding officer’s ban, and another who wrote his Senator, on behalf of seventy-four buddies, attacking Kennedy’s “political maneuvers” in giving their jobs to the unemployed—faced court-martial charges. But “in the spirit of Easter Week” the President directed their release.

“I would hope that any serviceman who is sitting in a camp,” he had said earlier, recalling his own service,

His objectives were achieved. The Berlin crisis eased. He could not claim that he had increased NATO ground forces to a level where Soviet forces could be long contained without resort to nuclear weapons. For our NATO Allies, accustomed to relying wholly on the nuclear bombs they hoped we would never use, responded only partially to his request for more troops. But Berlin remained free. And elsewhere in the world—in Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand and other nations around the Communist perimeter or in danger of Communist penetration—the emphasis on conventional preparations continued through the training and equipping of local armies with American military assistance as a substitute for American forces.
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Throughout his term in office Kennedy’s emphasis on conventional forces continued. Some Senators as well as allies alleged that all this attention to nonnuclear responses signaled a dangerous timidity about
reaching for the nuclear button.
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And in 1963 Kennedy himself wondered aloud in more than one meeting whether, were it not for Berlin, any large-scale armies would ever be needed in Europe. But he believed that his conventional force build-up had helped prevent a confrontation over Berlin that might otherwise have reached the nuclear level. He believed that his increased nonnuclear forces had required Khrushchev to choose at the time of the Cuban crisis between nuclear war and the withdrawal of his missiles. And he believed that the Communists would continue their world-wide pattern of crawling under our nuclear defenses in limited forms of penetration and pressure. To demonstrate his appreciation of the role played by our troops, he made a special effort to visit their operations at home and overseas. He did not share, he said, the sentiment supposedly scrawled on an old sentry box in Gibraltar:

The scrawl was no doubt illegible because the President varied the verse slightly each time he quoted it. But he neither slighted our old soldiers nor lost sight of the need for a wholly new kind of soldier. For even increased conventional power could not root out the assassins, guerrillas, insurgents, saboteurs and terrorists who fought the Communist “wars of liberation.” These wars, as the following chapter illustrates, were designed not to liberate but to undermine the newly independent nations through erosion and exhaustion in the twilight zone between political subversion and limited military action. A small band of guerrillas, for example, might tie down ten to fifteen times as many conventional forces. “We possess weapons of tremendous power,” said the President in 1961, “but they are least effective in combating the weapons most often used by freedom’s foes: subversion, infiltration, guerrilla warfare, civil disorder.” A new kind of effort was required, “a wholly new kind of strategy,” he told a West Point commencement the following year.

Conventional military force alone at the Bay of Pigs, he recognized, had been used to no avail, in the absence of indigenous support. A prime lesson of that disaster, he told the nation’s editors on April 20, 1961, one day after it ended, was that freedom in the 1960’s faced

The lessons of the Bay of Pigs altered Kennedy’s entire approach—to executive management and foreign policy in general and to conflicts in the developing nations in particular. I am not referring to any loss of nerve on his part but to the sweeping changes in procedure, policy and ultimately personnel that followed that April fiasco. At first, in keeping with the “Kennedys never fail” doctrine, he had come closer to being pushed in even deeper, searching for a plan to bring down Castro, emphasizing that “our restraint is not inexhaustible,” appealing to publishers to limit certain stories and sounding a strident note of urgency about improving our paramilitary capacity. But while these public statements were in part deliberately stern to rebuild national unity and morale, Kennedy’s private approach was much more cautious. He placed more emphasis on the positive path of helping Latin Americans build more stable and democratic institutions, a policy aimed at isolating Castro but not removing him. And casting off his own sense of shock and irritability, he focused his attention less on the bearded nuisance ninety miles from our shores and more on our world-wide obligations.

He was unwilling to abandon a capacity for paramilitary action. But his experience at the Bay of Pigs convinced him that the primary responsibility for this kind of effort should be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. The CIA, however, retained operating responsibilities as the “department of dirty tricks”; and to improve his oversight of that agency and its many unbudgeted funds, he reactivated the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under James Killian, tightened White House review procedures under Bundy and Taylor and, upon the voluntary retirement of Allen Dulles, searched for his own man to install as CIA Director.

Kennedy was never angry at Dulles, who manfully shouldered his share of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs. Nor did he lose his personal high regard for the Deputy Director most responsible for that operation, Richard Bissell, who quietly resigned. But it was clearly time for a change. Neither Taylor nor the Attorney General wanted the job of CIA Director. New York Attorney Fowler Hamilton came highly recommended and was nearly nominated, but was finally asked to head the
foreign aid program instead. (“Just tell him,” I suggested to the President, “that you meant to say ICA, not CIA.”) Other names were reviewed and some were interviewed. “We want someone who won’t be too prominent on the social circuit,” the President told a group of us suggesting names.

Finally he selected Republican John McCone, Truman’s Under Secretary of Air and Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission Chairman. It was one of the few Kennedy selections which caused prolonged debate within the White House.
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McCone was extravagantly praised as a dynamic administrator who would revamp and revitalize all intelligence gathering, and he was excessively assailed as a highly prejudiced Republican who was opposed to academic freedom and coexistence. Neither extreme proved correct. Kennedy liked McCone’s keen and quiet achievements and the steady manner in which he carried out his duties.

The President did not doubt either the necessity or the legitimacy of “dirty tricks” when confronted with a covert, conspiratorial adversary in an age of hidden perils. But he believed they should be conducted within the framework of his foreign policy, consistent with his democratic objectives for the developing countries and preceded by more planning and less advertising than preceded the Bay of Pigs. He also believed that the human and psychological side of planning for the cold war in general and “wars of liberation” in particular required a broader effort than those of either the CIA or the Pentagon.

“We cannot,” he said, “as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.” But we could compete in the political and economic tactics required to gain the support of the countryside in the contested developing nations, turning against the Communists their own slogans of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism, and winning to the cause of independence in each country the young men who would be running it five or ten or fifteen years hence. Assisted by Taylor, Murrow and the Attorney General, he set up a new cold war strategy committee to develop these tactics. He gave orders to train our counterguerrilla corps in a host of civilian techniques and to send tens of thousands of civilian officials to counterinsurgency courses. A Civic Action program was initiated in Latin America training local armies in bridge-building and village sanitation as well as preventing civic disorders.

The specific military burden required to combat Communist guerrillas and insurgents, however, rested with the Pentagon—and it truly “rested.” For years this problem had been given a low priority, despite
its prevalence since World War II in Greece, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and China. It was the weakest point in the Western armor. Only eighteen hundred men comprised the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, and they were preparing for a wholly different kind of action in a general war in Eastern Europe. Their equipment was outmoded and insufficient, unchanged since the Second World War.

Even more than money, the whole antiguerrilla effort needed leadership and ingenuity. President Kennedy, far more than any of his generals or even McNamara, supplied that leadership. Finding little to go on in the Army field manuals, he read the classic texts on guerrilla warfare by Red China’s Mao Tse-tung and Cuba’s Che Guevara, and requested the appropriate military men to do the same. He was not counting on American guerrillas to win foreign wars; for he knew that guerrillas depended on the local countryside and must be combated primarily by local countrymen. He quoted Mao’s phrase: “Guerrillas are like fish, and the people are the water in which the fish swim. If the temperature of the water is right, the fish will thrive and multiply.” But the United States, believed Kennedy, could effectively supply training, arms and leadership for this new yet ancient kind of warfare.

At first the top Army generals—accustomed to deploying battle groups and divisions too grand for these mean little messes—were skeptical, if not sullen. Kennedy kept after them. Maxwell Taylor kept after them. Soon the Special Forces—trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina—were growing rapidly in size, skill and stature, becoming steadily better trained and better equipped. In time, all the services wanted to show how much they were doing in this effort. The Air Force came up with an “Operation Farmgate” program to provide air support for jungle warfare and with new commando-type “Jungle Jim” units. The Navy increased its amphibious and underwater demolition teams and created a fleet of Vietnamese fishing junks to harass Vietcong supply lines. Marine forces, all trained in guerrilla combat, were augmented by fifteen thousand men. Military advisers, instructors and attaches in foreign countries were trained in the language of that country at a far higher rate. Guerrilla and counterinsurgency training was added to the curriculum at the service academies and War Colleges.

But the President’s pride was still the Army Special Forces, rapidly growing to a level some five or six times as large as when he took office, although still small both in total numbers and in relation to the need for more. The President directed—again over the opposition of top generals—that the Special Forces wear green berets as a mark of distinction. He wanted them to be a dedicated, high-quality elite corps of specialists, trained to train local partisans in guerrilla warfare, prepared to perform a wide range of civilian as well as military tasks, able to live off the
bush, in a village or behind enemy lines. He personally supervised the selection of new equipment—the replacement of heavy, noisy combat boots with sneakers, for example, and, when the sneakers proved vulnerable to bamboo spikes, their reinforcement with flexible steel inner soles. He ordered more helicopters, lighter field radios and—for use by the smaller Vietnamese—a shorter, lighter rifle, with a less powerful kick, which still provided all the range jungle warfare required.

In time, despite continued opposition from much of the top Army brass, the new antiguerrilla forces proved one of his most important military contributions. In South Vietnam they delivered babies, chopped trails, dug wells, prevented ambushes, raised morale and formed effective bands against the Communists. “You can’t say enough good things about these men,” reported one observer back from that war four years after Kennedy launched the program. “Unfortunately, there aren’t enough green hats…in Vietnam.” More were on the way. But one green hat not in Vietnam that year rested in a place of honor in Arlington Cemetery.