Listening In (40 page)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE CABLE 243 DISPATCHED ON AUGUST 24, 1963, TO U.S. AMBASSADOR TO VIETNAM HENRY CABOT LODGE, JR., CALLING FOR PRESIDENT DIEM TO REMOVE HIS BROTHER NGO DINH NHU FROM A POSITION OF POWER IN SOUTH VIETNAM

MEETING WITH VIETNAM ADVISORS, AUGUST 28, 1963

On the same day as the March on Washington, Kennedy convened a long meeting on Vietnam and responded to the recommendations he was receiving to support a coup by Vietnamese generals against President Diem.

JFK:
I don’t think we ought to let the coup … maybe they know about it, maybe the generals are going to have to run out of the country, maybe we’re going to have to help them get out. But still it’s not a good enough reason to go ahead if we don’t think the prospects are good enough. I don’t think we’re in that deep. I am not sure the generals are, they’ve been probably bellyaching for months. So I don’t know whether they’re, how many of them are really up to here. I don’t see any reason to go ahead unless we think we have a good chance of success.

FRENCH GENERAL JEAN DE LATTRE DE TASSIGNY IN VIETNAM. CONGRESSMAN JOHN F. KENNEDY (CIRCLED) APPEARS IN THE BACK ROW. 1951

MEETING WITH ADVISORS ON VIETNAM, OCTOBER 29, 1963

The planning of the coup continued into the fall and reached a terminal phase in late October. President Kennedy sought the counsel of his advisors, who included William Colby, chief of the CIA’s Far East Division; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy; Maxwell Taylor, military advisor to the President; Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; CIA Director John McCone; and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Always quick to protect his brother, and eager to avoid the kind of ill-advised planning that had led to the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy here spoke forcefully of his reservations about the timing and benefits of a coup. His criticism of the war would only deepen as the United States escalated its involvement under President Lyndon Johnson, and led to his own candidacy for the presidency in 1968.

RFK:
Could I make a suggestion?

JFK:
Yeah.

RFK:
I, this may be a minority, but I just don’t see that this makes any sense on the face of it, Mr. President. I mean, it’s different from a coup in Iraq or a South American country. We are so intimately involved with this. What we are doing really is what we talked about when we were sitting around this table talking about almost the same thing we talked about four weeks ago. We’re putting the whole future of the country, and really Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody that we don’t know very well, that one official of the United States government has had contact with him, and he in turn says he’s lined up some others. It’s clear from the map [math?] and from Diem,
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he’s a fighter. I mean, he’s not somebody that’s like Bosch,
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who’s just going to get out of there. He’s a determined figure who’s going to stick around and I should think go down fighting, that he’s going to have some troops there that are going to fight, too. That if it’s a failure, that we risk such a hell of a lot. Because the war, as I understood from Bob McNamara, was going reasonably well. And whether, just based on these rather flimsy reports, that a coup is going to take place in two or three days, to risk the whole future of the United States in that area on these kinds of reports, which are not extensive and which don’t go into any detail, which don’t list, I mean, the reports that come in from the ambassador don’t really list our assets or throw out or give a plan as to what’s going to occur or how it’s going to take place. I would think we have some very large stakes to balance here.

I mean, we certainly, I think, should be entitled to know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to be effective, and not just hope that the coup is going to go through and they’re going to be able to work it out satisfactorily. I would think unless we knew we were going to be involved—everybody’s going to say we did it—then if we think that’s the right thing, I think we should play a major role. I don’t think we can go halfway on it, because we’re going to get the blame for it. If it’s a failure, I would think Diem’s going to tell us to get the hell out of the country and, see, he’s going to have enough with his intelligence to know that there’s been these contacts and these conversations, and he’s going to capture these people. They’re going to say the United States is behind it. I would think then that we’re just going down the road to disaster. Now maybe this is going to be successful, but I don’t think that anybody, any reports that I’ve seen, indicate that anybody has a plan to show where this is going. And I think this cablegram, sent out like it is, indicates that we are willing to go ahead with the coup, but we think that we should have a little bit more information.