Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (55 page)

But the civil rights issue would not go away. As the Kennedy brothers pondered their options - most importantly the question of whether the administration should seek Congressional approval of a new federal Civil Rights Bill - they used a surprising system of information gathering. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, supposedly investigating Communist influence on the civil rights movement, had tapped the phone lines of King’s lawyer and counsellor, Stanley Levison. When Hoover first proposed this step to the Attorney-General, his nominal superior, Robert could only assent: the FBI Director’s evidence of Jack’s sexual activities had made both the President and Attorney-General his prisoners. Although the Kennedy brothers did not use their knowledge about King’s sex life (he shared Kennedy’s proclivities), the information they obtained increased their reluctance to deal with King.
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In the end, it took George Wallace, the theatrical Governor of Alabama, to force Kennedy to make the televised address on civil rights he had long avoided. The President had to respond in kind to Wallace’s stance in the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa on nationwide television. His eighteen-minute address on 21 May 1963, invoking the spirit of Lincoln, finally gave the principled call white Americans could not ignore. One week later Kennedy asked Congress to pass a civil rights law that provided for desegregated public housing and included federal enforcement provisions. The price was immediately made clear: on 22 June the administration’s anodyne funding Bill for the Area Redevelopment Act was defeated in the House of Representatives by a margin of 209-204. The difference was made by nineteen Southern Democrats and twenty Republicans who voted against the Bill after Kennedy’s civil rights speech.
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In fact, the legislation that Kennedy had requested languished in Congress, becoming law only in July 1964. Only Kennedy’s death made its passage possible. For the assassination removed from office a president who at heart was not committed to civil rights, substituting one who was. Johnson, from an impoverished Texas family, had a gut-level commitment to poor people of whatever race. It was he who believed in the principles which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 embodied. Moreover, Johnson had the legislative skill to obtain passage of these Acts. Johnson was not naive. He knew that his legislation would cost the Democratic party the ‘solid South’ - its complete domination of that part of the United States. Yet he exerted all his skill to turn Kennedy’s original civil rights proposal into the 1964 Act. Johnson, arguably the most talented senator of his generation, alternately cajoled and strong-armed senators, beating down a filibuster that lasted eighty days. Aided by the large majority he had racked up in the 1964 presidental election, he persevered. During that campaign, Johnson had launched the War on Poverty designed to banish want and deprivation ‘by opening to everyone the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.’
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The next year he obtained from Congress the legislation that transformed an agenda into reality. At the same time he introduced and achieved passage of the Voting Rights Act. The President from Texas empathised with the underprivileged of America as the rich boy John Kennedy never could do. The consequent revolution, redistributive of rights and riches, was possible only with a president who had experienced poverty and discrimination himself and was willing to pay a stiff political price for their amelioration.

Kennedy would never have put his future on the line for civil rights as Johnson did. As we shall see, he would almost certainly have faced a tougher fight in 1964 than Johnson. And, even if he had emerged victorious, he would not have spent political points in the profligate manner Johnson did to achieve his civil rights programme. Splitting the difference between the options on offer, Kennedy’s habitual
modus operandi
, would have denied AfricanAmericans the legal, moral and economic support that made possible the massive changes in American society during the 1960s.

The American involvement in Vietnam began in 1945 when Washington decided not to oppose British on-the-ground decisions favouring French imperial dominance over Indo-China.
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It ended thirty years later when the last remaining Americans in Saigon ignominiously fled as Communist forces overwhelmed the city.

This conflict was the third American-Communist confrontation of the Cold War to take place in Asia. In 1949 Mao Zedong had succeeded in capturing control over China. Many Americans had long believed in a special relationship between the United States and China. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had elevated China to the status of the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States as one of the ‘Four Policemen’ which would govern the postwar world. The question of ‘who lost China?’ would haunt the Democratic party for the next twenty years. Then, in 1950, another American confrontation on the Asian mainland began. The decision by Communist North Korea to invade the South placed the Truman administration at war in a conflict few Americans had envisaged. In the process of fighting to a bloody stalemate the United States decided to grant significant aid to France, whose battle to retain control over Indo-china had grown progressively more difficult. The death of 50,000 Americans to restore only the Korean status quo ante was another black mark for Democratic administrations; Truman’s brave words about a rollback of Communist forces dissolved in the Chinese onslaught that followed General Douglas MacArthur’s drive to the north.

The Geneva Conference of 1954, co-chaired by Britain and the Soviet Union, designated Laos an independent, neutralist monarchy. Chronic civil war among the Communist Pathet Lao faction, a neutralist group and a pro-American military cadre bedevilled the country thereafter. The Geneva Conference also attempted to carve a settlement of the Vietnam conflict. France renounced control over the country. The Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh, who had defeated the imperialist forces, were given temporary control over the northern half of the nation. The southern half of Vietnam rejected the leadership of the Emperor of Annam province, Bao Dai, in favour of a republic, proclaimed on 26 October 1955, with Ngo Dinh Diem at its head. The Geneva accords called for all-Vietnam elections to be held in the summer of 1956. Understanding that Ho’s popularity as a nationalist leader and the larger population of the North ensured a Communist victory, Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles encouraged Diem to cancel the elections.
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Eisenhower avoided sending American fighting soldiers to Vietnam; but the American government during his term of office assumed the French responsibilities for training the Vietnamese army as well as funding Vietnamese needs. By 1961 Diem’s government ranked fifth among all recipients of American foreign aid; the US mission in South Vietnam was the largest in the world. Part of the funding went to assist the resettlement of refugees. With American encouragement almost 1,000,000 North Vietnamese fled to the South. These overwhelmingly Catholic exiles supported their coreligionist Diem. In return he favoured them over the indigenous Buddhist majority.
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Diem also appealed to the American Catholic community and the ‘China-lobby’ which had kept American support for the former Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek at fever pitch since his flight to Taiwan in 1949. Significantly, Jack Kennedy was one of the organisers of the American Friends of Vietnam, explaining in 1956 that ‘Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in South-east Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike’. The son of an official at the imperial court at Hué, Diem shared the Kennedys’ paramount belief in family. His paranoid, drug-addicted brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had charge of internal security, including the feared national police force; another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was the Catholic Archbishop of Hué; while a third brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, was ambassador to Great Britain. His sister-in-law Madame Nhu, much to the regret of the Americans, became a leading spokesperson for the regime. Her father, Tran Van Choung, became South Vietnam’s Ambassador to Washington.
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The prevailing anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s obliged putative Democratic candidates to fight over the right side of the foreign policy spectrum in their race for the presidency. Kennedy was an ardent critic of Eisenhower’s foreign and defence policies. The young Massachusetts Senator argued that the aged General-turned-President had permitted American prestige to decline and its defences to weaken. As a result, Kennedy claimed, the Soviet Union stood poised to triumph in the Cold War. At the same time Kennedy used his televised debates against Nixon to criticise the Eisenhower administration for taking a weak stance against the Chinese Communists on the Quemoy and Matsu islands and for abandoning Cuba to the Communists. Kennedy’s inaugural address reflected this martial attitude:

Once elected Kennedy learnt that the Eisenhower administration did have a plan against Castro - a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored coup. Much to his later regret, Kennedy made the plan his own. The failure of the Bay of Pigs operation, launched on 17 April 1961, proved the worst defeat of the Kennedy administration. The United States and its leader appeared both incompetent and impotent. Six months later the Berlin crisis seemed to give further evidence of American debility. The decision by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and East German leader Walter Ulbricht to construct a wall around West Berlin posed an apparently unanswerable challenge to the Western alliance. Apparently Khrushchev, having sized up his opponent at the Vienna summit, had found him wanting. Historians have now concluded that the building of the wall actually signalled a Soviet acknowledgement of American strength; at the time it symbolised American weakness, as did Kennedy’s decision to accept a negotiated cease-fire in Laos.

The Laotian settlement had made the position of Vietnam more vulnerable at the same time as it became more valuable to the United States in its struggle against international Communism. At their final meeting on 19 January 1961 Eisenhower informed Kennedy that the situation in Laos had deteriorated to the point of crisis.
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But as Kennedy told his officials, ‘If we have to fight in South-east Asia, let’s fight in Vietnam.’
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Conditions in the South had steadily deteriorated since 1959, when the Communist guerrilla forces there, the Vietcong, had received the permission of the Ho Chi Minh government to step up their campaign against Diem’s regime. In 1960 the North Vietnamese party Congress reaffirmed this decision. Two months later a military uprising shook Saigon.
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Diem’s decisions eased the way for the Vietcong’s insurgency. His system of enforcing control over the peasants won the Vietcong converts rapidly while his ‘autocratic methods and lack of communication’ alienated even those willing to support anti-Communist efforts.
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Diem had imported Northern officials to run the countryside; they quickly reduced peasants to the same quasi-serf status they had loathed under the French. With the Vietcong willing to use less gentle methods of persuasion when propaganda failed, the Saigon government’s control over the countryside rapidly diminished.

Panicking Kennedy administration officials devised a two-step response. Accused of being soft on Communism by no less an authority than
Time
magazine, the President knew that he had to draw a line in the sand in Vietnam, a country which was important not so much for its own sake but because the United States could not afford another defeat in the struggle against international Communism. The President created a Task Force on Vietnam and sent Vice-President Lyndon Johnson to South Vietnam. The Task Force report, delivered on 3 May 1961, recommended that the US government ‘undertake military security arrangements which establish beyond doubt our intention to stand behind Viet Nam’s resistance to Communist aggression ...’. At the same time the Task Force report urged a crash effort to bolster the economic and political viability of Diem’s administration.
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One week later Kennedy approved National Security Action Memorandum No. 52, embodying many of the ideas of the Task Force report. Reiterating that the American objective was to prevent Communist domination in South Vietnam by ‘a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and government character’, it directed that the Defense Department make a ‘full examination’ of the size and composition of forces which would be desirable in the case of a possible commitment of U.S. forces to Vietnam’. At the same time Washington would ‘seek to increase the confidence of President Diem and his government in the United States’. Crucial to this effort was Johnson’s trip.
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The Vice-President, decidedly not part of the Kennedy inner circle, arrived in Vietnam on 11 May for a thirty-six hour visit. In company with most visiting dignitaries, Johnson could barely get a word in edgewise as Diem, in a windy monologue, explored the history and trials and tribulations of South Vietnam. The bottom line was that America’s ally proved far less interested in Washington’s ideas than in increased American aid. Although he publicly lauded him in Saigon as the Winston Churchill of Vietnam, Johnson had no illusions about the Vietnamese leader. During the plane ride out of Saigon, a reporter asked the Vice-President if he really meant what he said. ‘Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there,’ replied Johnson.
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His report expressed support for the regime while stressing the need for the United States to aid South Vietnam’s creation of an extensive network of military and economic reforms.
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