The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (131 page)

Kennedy had learned that language was the bearer of power, and his precise words were the best way to contain his subordinates’ actions. In this instance, he gave no clear directive. There are few things more dangerous than powerful men who think that they have covered all contingencies when they have merely justified what they want to see happen. Kennedy had repeatedly said that if the coup started, it had to succeed. Hilsman took that as his mandate. He let Saigon know that if Nhu and his family were “taken alive, [they] should be banished to France or any other country willing to receive them,” but they could not be allowed to stay in Southeast Asia. That was justification for not flying Diem immediately to Bangkok or some other nearby city where he and his brother could have waited to board a flight to Europe. This did not mean that Hilsman was concerned about whether Diem and Nhu lived. “Diem should be treated as the generals wish,” he wrote in his memorandum on August 30.

Diem was learning a lesson that many have learned. At times it was almost as dangerous to be a friend of the United States as to be its enemy, for the Americans often saw friendship as a one-sided contract that had to be filled by an endless array of deeds and that they could summarily cancel.

Diem was a man of ritual, both public and private, and though he said that he did not care if he lived or died, he wanted to be treated with the honor of his status. He was upset when the soldiers arrived at the church in Chalon where he had sought refuge and asked him to get into an army personnel carrier, not into a car worthy of the president of South Vietnam. He and his brother lowered their heads to enter the vehicle. Then their hands were tied behind their backs and the door was shut. When the vehicle arrived at joint general staff headquarters, the door was open. Diem and Nhu were still there, but they had both been shot to death, and Nhu had been stabbed as well.

“
I
t’s hard to believe he’d commit suicide given his strong religious career,” Kennedy said half to himself soon after the generals announced that Diem had killed himself. Catholics believe that eternal damnation is God’s judgment
on those who end their own lives, and he knew that Diem was a man of profound faith.

“He’s Catholic, but he’s an
Asian
Catholic,” Hilsman said.

“What?” Kennedy asked. It may have been that the president was off somewhere in his own thoughts at the Ex Comm meeting on November 2. It was also true that when someone said something especially stupid, the president often asked him to repeat it.

“He’s an
Asian
Catholic, and not only that, he’s a mandarin. It seems to me not at all inconsistent with Armageddon.”

“There’re several different reports here, Mr. President,” Bundy said, having heard enough of this sophomoric digression. He then went on to read an eyewitness report that both Diem and Nhu were dead and had clearly been assassinated. Bundy also read a second report saying the two men had poisoned themselves in the Chalon Catholic church.

Whatever words these men spoke this day, the first order of business was to convince themselves that they could not be rightfully accused either of having ordered the assassination or of creating the climate that felled Diem and Nhu. They had to make themselves believe that they were innocent. Rusk was obviously the most worried about these accusations, and he sought to convince his colleagues before they could convince the world.

“I think our press problem is likely to be pinpointed upon U.S. involvement, and we need to get that straightened out,” the secretary of State said. “The fact is, we were not privy to this plan in the sense that we really didn’t know what they were going to do…. The fact that the coup was reported and rumored is not basically different in character than things that have been happening over the last several months…. It would be to our interest to indicate that this was Vietnamese and that we were not participants in the coup and try to keep that gap as clear as we can.”

Kennedy listened to Rusk’s quasi-dissembling, the words set forth in tedious monologue, devoid of affect, so boring that he did not so much win his arguments as numb his opponents into concession. When the secretary of State finally finished, Kennedy found himself asking questions that should have been asked weeks before. “I think one of the problems … is how we square a military revolt against a constitutionally elected government which we approve as opposed to our position on Honduras and the Dominican. How do we square that?” Kennedy had aides who could square anything, and though they had their answers, the overwhelming question still hung there.

The cabinet officers and other high officials twisted and turned, trying to assure one another that they had done everything possible to get Diem to seek reforms before seeking other ways to remove him, and that they had no complicity in his death. But they were like men standing in front of a small
fire on a frigid day: no matter how they turned, they could never quite warm themselves.

“About this suicide, I’ve brought this to your attention only because there is some question in some of our minds how much we want to know about this, sir, suicide versus assassination,” Hilsman said. The undersecretary may have been a man of bombastic public presentation, but he understood the uses of euphemism and gentle suggestion. He also understood that the ground on which he stood could cave beneath him. The press was already writing about a memo Hilsman had written that the reporters took as giving the generals permission to proceed. He had indeed, at the time of the Buddhist protests, given the embassy in Saigon a secret order approved by the president to “tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [in the] central government.”

“It’s becoming more and more clear that it was assassination, at least I think it was, and people around here do,” Hilsman went on. “Now, this is the cable which suggests that he [Conein] actually go to Big Minh [General Duong Van Minh] and really find out. But there’s some doubt in some of our minds whether we want to or not. Maybe we ought to just let it alone.”

As these men nervously discussed the bloody deed, McCone probably already knew precisely what had happened. “Big Minh offered Conein an opportunity to see the bodies, and he refused,” McCone said, in his bloodless, bureaucratic way. “The suicide story is out. Conein is pretty conscious that it was assassination, and he didn’t want to get involved with it. I would suggest that we not get into, into this story. Knowing it doesn’t do us any good.”

Regicide is the most horrible of murders, for if the king is not safe, then no one is safe. In the Cabinet Room these men usually discussed grand strategies, geopolitical considerations, theories of nuclear deterrence, counterinsurgency, and economic initiatives. They did not talk about a former friend lying in a pool of blood in the back of an army vehicle. There was an unsettling quality to their discourse, as if they had been condemned to look straight at where their ideas had led. Of all the men in the room, Kennedy seemed the most obsessed with what had happened. The president had always had a certain queasiness when it came to blood and death, and he was being led through a chamber of horrors.

“What happens if Conein asks to see the bodies and discovers there were a couple of bullets in the back of the … in the back, of this kind?” said Bundy. “We don’t gain much by that.” The former Harvard dean could hardly get a straight sentence out of his cultured mouth.

“I don’t think we gain anything by it,” McCone said, trying to push the men away from this deadly scene.

“It would look like a planned design to remain uninformed under the circumstances,”
Rusk said, not optimistic about the administration’s chances of pleading ignorance.

“I think we’re going to hear about it in the next twenty-four hours,” Kennedy said. Although the president apparently knew less about what had happened than several of his advisers, he realized that the press was onto the story. He had his own curiosity about the details of the murders.

“If Big Minh ordered the execution, then, then, uh, I don’t know,” Kennedy mused. “Do we know that? Do we think he meant to?”

“Some suspect that,” said Hilsman.

“Some think he did,” said Bundy.

“He’s stupid then,” said Kennedy, half under his breath. No one would be able definitely to link the president to the assassination attempts against Castro, and there would always be uncertainty concerning exactly what he knew.

“I don’t think we should be informed in advance of everyone else on this so that the story gets to be our story,” Rusk said, seeking to push the deed further away from the door of the White House.

“I don’t know why they did that,” Kennedy said quietly, once again returning to the act.

Hilsman was a man who always had a ready answer. “Well, some of the reports show that the only time Minh got emotional was when Diem slammed the phone [down] on him.” It was a curious justification for murder, and the silence in the room signaled Hilsman to move on to a different subject.

“Sir,” Hilsman said, “this morning … this morning there was a discussion of a cable to go out tonight, getting on with the war.” The Americans had a war to fight, and they could not indulge in this speculation any longer.

T
wo days later Kennedy sat in the Oval Office. “One two three four five,” he said into a Dictaphone. “Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place.”

For a man who stood at the epicenter of power, the president was extraordinarily dispassionate, not only in the decisions he made but equally in how he viewed them afterward. In this private moment he did not attempt to polish his image. He was his own best historian, treating himself as but another player in the complex tragicomedy of life.

Kennedy went through the major players one by one, accurately outlining where each man had stood on the coup. At times great events were determined not by principles or ideologies but by nothing greater than personal pique. In Kennedy’s assessment, McCone had opposed the coup “partly because of an old hostility to Lodge, which causes him to lack confidence in
Lodge’s judgment, partly as a result of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his station chief.”

If Kennedy ever wrote this history, he would have first filled his pen with irony. He saw his own culpability not in any strong, willful action he had taken but in nothing more dramatic than the sloppy drafting of a cable at the outset. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup…. That wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent…. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.”

Kennedy went on to talk about the military situation. “Politically the situation was deteriorating,” he said. “Militarily it had not had its effect. There was a feeling that it would.” For all the president’s insights into the world of men and politics, and his ability to spot the justifications and self-promotion of those around him, he had fallen for McNamara and Taylor’s tragic fantasy that the war was going well, and that soon the Americans would be able to go home, leaving their victorious partner behind.

As Kennedy went on, John Jr. entered the room, his entrance signaled by a high-pitched squeal. “Say hi,” the president said.

“Hello,” John Jr. said, speaking into the microphone. “Naughty naughty, Daddy.” An endearing little boy to whom the White House was a great castle, John Jr. would be three years old later in the month and he already had the public presence of a child actor.

“Why do the leaves fall?” Kennedy asked, turning this moment into a learning exercise both humble and poetic.

“Because,” John said.

“Why does the snow come on the ground?” “Because.”

“Why do the leaves turn green?” “Because.”

“And when do we go to the Cape?” the president asked. Hyannis Port was the scene of the most profound and joyous moments of his family life, first as a child and now as a father.

“Summer,” John Jr. answered, though summer was far away.

When John Jr. left his father, he let out a whooping laugh. It was not like the laughs the president usually heard, calculated gestures modulated by what seemed to please him. This was a loving, taunting, wondrous laugh from a son who saw only the happiness of the world.

As his son left, Kennedy turned finally to the most painful matter of all, and he spoke of it without a hint of emotion:

I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nonetheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether … public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, etc., will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not-too-distant future.

While Kennedy looked eastward toward the jungles of Vietnam and fretted about his nation’s future there, Bobby continued to be consumed with Cuba. He was so disdainful of the structures of government that he had gone far toward privatizing the American policy. As attorney general of the United States, he had no institutional right to claim sovereignty over America’s Cuban policy. But he was the force behind the U.S.-funded “autonomous anti-Castro groups.”

There were already important bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua run by Manuel Artime, and a new operation headed by another exile leader, Manolo Ray, was beginning to establish its working base in Central America. The leaders were the attorney general’s friends, comrades he invited to his home, and against them on the island stood implacable enemies. By November 1963, they were ready to escalate their attacks. “Bob Kennedy, it seems, was the person who was pushing them [the CIA] and making them do it,” recalled Rafael Quintero, the deputy leader. “I mean, [he] put the Cubans in charge of their own operation—but they definitely didn’t want to do it.”