The Kennedy Half-Century (26 page)

Despite U.S. warnings and protests, Diem continued to clamp down on dissenters. His troops raided Buddhist pagodas, desecrated religious statues and holy relics, and threw monks and nuns in prison. For many South Vietnamese, Communism began to look like the lesser of two evils. Aware that the situation was spiraling out of control, JFK made a shrewd political move: he replaced Ambassador Frederick “Fritz” Nolting with his old Bay State rival, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who had lost his U.S. Senate reelection bid to Kennedy in 1952 and later served as Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960. JFK knew that having a Republican plenipotentiary would provide him with useful political cover if the worst-case scenario unfolded in Vietnam. He also genuinely liked and respected Lodge, a seasoned diplomat who spoke fluent French. Lodge’s appointment came at a time when the administration understood that
Diem’s days were numbered. Rumors of a revolt against Diem circulated freely on the streets of Saigon.

Diem’s stubborn refusal to embrace reform convinced JFK to support his ouster.
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Kennedy could not let Vietnam fall to the Communists, especially right before the 1964 election. He remembered the severe criticism that Harry Truman had received for letting Mao Zedong’s forces overrun China and, after considerable debate, “agreed to a U.S.backed coup.” At the same time, he reserved the right to change his mind up to the last minute. On August 30, 1963, Lodge sent a top secret cable to Washington intended for the president’s eyes only: “I fully understand that you have the right and responsibility to change course at any time,” he wrote. “Of course I will always respect that right. To be successful, this operation must be essentially a Vietnamese affair with a momentum of its own. Should this happen you may not be able to control it, i.e. the ‘go signal’ may be given by the generals.”
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Roger Hilsman, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, sent his own top secret memo to Rusk about how the administration should respond when the putsch came. “We should encourage the coup group to fight the battle to the end and destroy the [presidential palace] if necessary to gain victory,” he wrote, adding that if Diem’s family were taken alive, they “should be banished to France or any other European country willing to receive them.” As for the leader himself, he “should be treated as the generals wish.”
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On November 1, 1963, twenty-one days before the president went to Dallas, soldiers surrounded Diem’s palace. The Vietnamese leader immediately phoned Lodge. “Some units have made a rebellion and I want to know what is the attitude of the United States?” he asked. “I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you,” the ambassador replied coyly. “I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all of the facts. Also it is four thirty A.M. in Washington and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view.” Diem couldn’t believe his ears—Washington must have some sort of position! Lodge remained evasive and “told Diem to phone him if he could do anything for his personal safety.”

The South Vietnamese president was brutally executed the next day, along with his brother. When JFK heard the news, he “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with … a look of shock and dismay,” recalled Maxwell Taylor. Another aide remembered JFK blaming the CIA for Diem’s murder. “I’ve got to do something about those bastards,” he said. “They should be stripped of their exorbitant power.” In the months leading up to the assassination, Kennedy had tried to warn Diem that his life was in danger. He sent a trusted friend, Torby Macdonald, to Saigon to plead with the South Vietnamese president to purge his government of corrupt officials and “take refuge in the American embassy.” Diem had stubbornly refused. On November 4, the
president recorded what amounted to a personal confession of his role in the assassination. “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he admitted. “The way he was killed … made it particularly abhorrent.”
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When the coup occurred, Kennedy was still unsure about the right road to take on Vietnam. He had inherited the problem from Eisenhower and arguably made it worse by sending additional military advisers to Saigon. His unwillingness to set firm policy stemmed in part from the conflicting reports he was receiving. When one general and a State Department employee who had both visited Vietnam gave him opposing accounts of the war’s progress, JFK joked, “You both went to the same country?”
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At this early stage, few in power or in the general public understood the dangers of Vietnam, or how events were inexorably drawing the United States into an explosive civil war. In the spring of 1962, when a reporter asked him what he planned to do about mounting casualties in Vietnam (a quartet of sergeants had recently died), Kennedy called the conflict “a very hazardous operation, in the same sense that World War II, World War I, Korea” had been when “a good many thousands and hundreds of thousands of Americans” had perished. “So that these four sergeants are in that long roll. But we cannot desist in Vietnam.” During his 1963 State of the Union address, Kennedy claimed that the “spearpoint of aggression” in Vietnam had been “blunted.” The address Kennedy was supposed to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart on the day he died contained an equally firm message: “Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task.”
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In public, then, President Kennedy had been consistent and resolute, for the most part, about American involvement in Vietnam. In private, at least as his closest associates told it later, he remained skeptical about U.S. intervention in the region. “They keep telling me to send combat units over there,” he said with regard to his generals’ demands for additional troops. “That means sending draftees, along with regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I’ll never send draftees over there to fight.”
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However, JFK never made his doubts clear on the record, never outlined precisely his intentions for Vietnam, leaving his successor the ability to follow his own path while claiming it was Kennedy’s. Undeniably, there were contradictions in JFK’s Vietnam record; he said one thing but did another. In October 1963, President Kennedy announced that the United States would withdraw one thousand military personnel by the end of the year. At first
glance, this announcement seems to indicate that Kennedy was ready to wind down some operations in Vietnam. But months earlier, a British counterin-surgency expert, Robert K. G. Thompson, had told him that withdrawing a thousand men “would show that (1) [the Republic of Vietnam] is winning; (2) take steam out of anti-Diemists; and (3) dramatically illustrate honesty of U.S. intentions.” Point two became moot after Diem’s death, but Kennedy knew that points one and three could still affect the outcome of the 1964 election. Although most voters at the time could not have found Vietnam on a map, some political opponents—and friends, too—began to criticize the administration for its handling of the war. The Republican National Committee demanded that the president give “a full report to the American people” on the situation in Vietnam, even while adding that it was “firmly behind any policy which will block the Communist conquest of Southeast Asia.” In April 1962, a group of academics, businessmen, theologians, and journalists had published “an open letter to President John F. Kennedy against U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam.” “Frankly, we believe that the United States intervention in South Vietnam constitutes a violation of international law, of United Nations principles, and of America’s own highest ideals,” the group argued. “We urge, Mr. President, that you bring this intervention to an immediate end and that you initiate a special international conference to work out a peaceful solution to the crisis in Vietnam, as you have endeavored to do in Laos.” Signatories included Roland Bainton, a Yale divinity professor and author of a well-known book on Martin Luther, and Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The group published a second, similar letter the following year.
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Kennedy did not respond to the appeals. But on November 21, the day he departed for Texas, he told an aide to put together “an indepth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there.” He wanted to review the “whole thing from the bottom to the top.”
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What would have happened if JFK had lived? Though pro-Kennedy advocates and anti-Kennedy detractors have attempted to project a future agreeable to their own perspectives, there is no inarguable answer. As the historian Stephen Rabe notes, Kennedy “would have faced the same crisis that President Johnson encountered in 1964–1965. Communist forces would win the war in South Vietnam if the United States did not use its military might to stop them.” JFK’s life lessons, before and during his presidency, had taught him not to accept anything short of victory, and so in all likelihood he would have avoided a hasty retreat.
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And he might have accelerated troop deployments in the run-up to the 1964 election. The conservative Barry Goldwater, destined to be the Republican presidential nominee whether or not Kennedy had lived, would have insisted on toughness, and Kennedy would not have wanted to
give his opponent an opening. On the other hand, a number of prominent Kennedy administration officials, most notably Robert Kennedy but many others, too, changed their minds about the Vietnam War when the carnage mounted and it became likely that the war was unwinnable. They would probably have advised the president in a second term to negotiate a settlement or at least keep the Southeast Asian engagement modest.

John Kennedy had far more international and foreign policy experience than Lyndon Johnson, a classic domestic policy politician. Kennedy had seen the horror of war close up, in PT 109 and when his brother Joe died in a plane crash; Johnson had never seen real combat. JFK also had searing, unpleasant experiences involving the competency and prejudices of his generals and the CIA during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other events—an education LBJ apparently missed or ignored. No one will ever know for sure, but the weight of evidence, looking at the whole of Kennedy’s career, would argue against his committing more than a half million troops to the fight in Vietnam, or doing so in such a foolishly slow manner as Johnson chose (which allowed the enemy to keep up). Having seen how difficult it could be to manage a tiny secret war against Cuba—just ninety miles from U.S. shores—would JFK have bet his entire presidency on a major Cold War confrontation in Vietnam, six thousand miles away? It is hard to believe that the Kennedy image makers, especially Bobby, would have permitted JFK to be burned in effigy all over the country, letting the intelligentsia JFK admired and considered himself a part of slip away because of the Vietnam draft. University communities and well-educated elites were a key part of Kennedy’s political base, and good politicians always try hard to avoid alienating their base. Further, the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how clever and resourceful Kennedy could be under pressure. At a minimum, we can say that during his final weeks in office, JFK was reconsidering his Vietnam policy and refused to take any options off the table.
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Kennedy’s final days also paint a picture of a man who craved excitement. Perhaps because two of his siblings, Joe and Kathleen, had died young and the president himself had repeatedly faced death—as a youth, in World War II, and after a back operation in the 1950s—JFK seemed unusually conscious that his time on earth was fleeting. Kennedy could be humorously morbid, joking about the best ways to die (war and poisoning were his choices) and how short his life would be (he once guessed he would make it to forty-five, only a year off the final mark).
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He strove to secure a place in the history books before it was too late. Friend and foe alike agree that John Kennedy seized every moment, embraced every challenge, and lived life to its
absolute fullest. This restless ambition sometimes produced great blessings for the nation. In September 1963 the Senate approved his Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty; never again would the Soviet Union or the United States detonate nuclear devices above ground. According to Ted Sorensen, “No other single accomplishment in the White House ever gave him greater satisfaction.” The treaty helped preserve the environment and also reduced tensions between the two superpowers, while paving the way for future Cold War agreements.

Moreover, JFK convinced the country that, however huge the obstacles, it could land a man on the moon. Twenty-four hours before he died, Kennedy spoke at the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio, where he encouraged his fellow citizens to keep their eyes on the heavens:

We have a long way to go. Many weeks and months and years of long, tedious work lie ahead. There will be setbacks and frustrations and disappointments. There will be, as there always are, pressures in this country to do less in this area as in so many others, and temptations to do something else that is perhaps easier. But this research here must go on. This space effort must go on. The conquest of space must and will go ahead. That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.

Other, small achievements toward the conclusion of the Kennedy presidency are often overlooked but deserve mention. After standing up to Soviet aggression in Cuba, Kennedy offered his enemy an olive branch when the threat diminished. In October 1963 he authorized the sale of American wheat to the Soviets in order to help them cope with a poor harvest. The same month, while Congress debated his civil rights bill, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women issued its final report. In response, JFK created the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women and the Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Both committees “provided ongoing leadership” on gender issues which, according to some Kennedy advocates, helped usher in the modern women’s rights movement.
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Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda also included the Equal Pay Act, signed by JFK in June 1963, which claimed to eliminate pay inequities based on gender. In practice, it had little effect in most economic sectors until strengthened by court decisions in the 1970s and further congressional action in subsequent administrations.
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Otherwise, Kennedy produced few advances for women in politics or government. His cabinet, for example, did not include a single woman, and he was certainly no feminist in his professional or private life. Offsetting his
accomplishments, JFK had a much darker side. The same internal fire that fueled his political success could also burn out of control. A ten-year-old John Kennedy had once noted in a letter to his father (requesting an allowance increase) that he had “put away childish things.”
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He achieved that goal in many areas of life, but not in his irresponsible relationships with young, beautiful women. In July 1963 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that he knew about the president’s past relationship with an alleged East German spy named Ellen Rometsch. The wife of an army officer who had been assigned to the West German embassy, Rometsch supplemented her income by turning tricks for Washington’s best and brightest. Her pimp was a high-profile Senate aide named Bobby Baker, who had close ties to Lyndon Johnson. In late August 1963, Rometsch was flown back to Germany on a U.S. Air Force transport plane at the behest of the State Department. According to author Seymour Hersh, she was accompanied by La-Vern Duffy, one of Bobby Kennedy’s colleagues from his days on the McClellan Committee. Records related to Rometsch’s deportation have either vanished or were never created in the first place.
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