An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (111 page)

With Adlai Stevenson’s support and the president’s approval, Attwood secretly discussed the possibility of a Cuban-American dialogue with Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s U.N. ambassador. Lechuga urged that someone travel to Havana for an initial talk with Castro. Attwood was not hopeful. Lechuga and Castro might be interested, but they were “too well boxed in by such hardliners as Guevara to be able to maneuver much.” But Attwood, who believed that he could handle the assignment in secret, was eager to try. After a meeting with Bobby about possible negotiations, Attwood suggested to Lechuga that they hold secret talks at the U.N. “The ball is in Cuban hands and the door is ajar,” Attwood told Bundy in October.

Kennedy’s receptivity to a possible accommodation with Castro registered forcefully on Jean Daniel, a French journalist on his way to Havana at the end of October. Agreeing to a meeting with Daniel at Ben Bradlee’s urging, Kennedy did not want to talk about Vietnam or say much about de Gaulle. “I’d like to talk to you about Cuba,” Kennedy said. He began by acknowledging U.S. responsibility for Cuban miseries perpetrated by Batista. “I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it,” he declared. Batista was “the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States.” All this, which Kennedy assumed would be repeated to Castro, was meant to suggest that he had genuine concern for Cuba’s well-being. Castro’s willingness to act as an agent of Soviet communism in Cuba and the hemisphere, Kennedy added, had put them at odds; indeed, Castro had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war. Kennedy did not know whether Castro understood this or even cared. Kennedy stood up at this point to signal an end to the conversation, but Daniel asked him about the economic blockade of Cuba. The end of subversive activities in the hemisphere could bring an end to the blockade, Kennedy replied. Kennedy asked Daniel to see him again after returning from Cuba. “Castro’s reactions interest me,” he said.

Castro surprised the Americans by sending word that he “would very much like to talk,” but that it would have to be in Cuba, not at the U.N. He “appreciated the importance of discretion” and offered to send a plane to Mexico or Key West to fly an American official to Cuba, where they could meet in a secret airfield near Havana. Castro did not wish to be seen as in any way soliciting U.S. friendship. As a Greek intermediary told Attwood, “Castro would welcome a normalization of relations with the United States if he could do so without losing too much face.” Similarly, Bobby told Attwood that the administration could not risk accusations that it was “trying to make a deal with Castro.”

On November 12, Bundy advised Attwood that the president saw the visit of any U.S. official to Cuba now as impractical. Instead, he, as Bobby had before him, suggested that Castro send his personal envoy to see Attwood in New York. Kennedy wanted Castro to say first whether there was any prospect of Cuban independence from Moscow and an end to hemisphere subversion. “Without an indication of readiness to move in these directions, it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Bundy advised Attwood to make clear to the Cubans “that we were not supplicants in this matter and the initiative for exploratory conversations was coming from the Cubans.” On the eighteenth, Castro sent word to Attwood that the invitation to come to Cuba remained open and that the security of the visit was guaranteed. When Attwood said that a preliminary meeting “was essential to make sure there was something useful to talk about,” Castro’s emissary promised to send an “agenda” for discussion between Attwood and Lechuga as a prelude to a future meeting with Castro.

On the same day, Kennedy spoke in Miami before the Inter-American Press Association. His speech included veiled references to an altered relationship with Cuba. Latin America’s problems would “not be solved simply by complaining about Castro, by blaming all problems on communism, or generals or nationalism,” he said. He declared it “important to restate what now divides Cuba from my country and from the other countries of this hemisphere. It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba . . . a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American Republics. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes and the sympathy of many people throughout the hemisphere.”

The Cuban community in Florida did not miss the president’s implied receptivity to a fresh start in relations with Cuba. In general, the exiles saw the speech as “expressions of willingness to accept ‘Fidelismo sin Fidel.’” This did not please the substantial number of conservatives in the community. If they had known about the Attwood initiative and the Daniel conversation, they would have been up in arms.

There was still intense pressure for covert action. On October 1, Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA’s director of planning and new head of secret operations, described a 5 to 7 percent decline in Cuban production, with a 20 percent drop in the sugar harvest, which had caused a deterioration in living conditions and undermined Castro’s popularity. The fact that the economic downturn had not yet affected the Cuban military made it difficult to foresee a coup. But when the decline continued into November, “causing increasing hardships to the civilian population,” U.S. analysts thought that Castro’s “grip [was] weakening.” Since U.S.-sponsored sabotage seemed likely to further weaken the economy and Castro’s popularity, McCone urged a continuation of such harassment.

Kennedy, however, had heard too much optimistic talk about bringing down Castro to trust current assessments and predictions. At a November 12 meeting on Cuba, he asked whether the sabotage program “was worthwhile and whether it would accomplish our purpose.” Nevertheless, his unresolved problems with Cuba and continuing worries about threats to the hemisphere and his own reelection made him reluctantly receptive to continuing subversion. Indeed, no one listening to his Inter-American Press Association speech on the eighteenth could have doubted that overturning Castro’s government remained an active option.

Kennedy’s dual-track Cuban policy in 1963 did not, however, include assassinating Castro. A CIA scheme (or, more precisely, a Desmond Fitzgerald scheme) set in motion on November 22, to have Rolando Cubela Secades, an anti-Castro member of the Cuban government, kill Castro with an injection from a hypodermic needle hidden in a ballpoint pen, was directly at odds with Kennedy’s policies. It was one thing to hope that hit-and-run raids and economic sanctions could provoke an internal uprising, but assassinating Castro seemed certain to make things worse. The devoted communists, who were allegedly holding Castro back from a rapprochement, seemed likely to react to a martyred Castro by ending any chance of accommodation.

No one knows what the future of Cuban-American relations would have been after November 22 or during a second Kennedy term, when he would not have had to answer to American voters again. The great likelihood that Castro was going to outlast U.S. plotting against him made it almost certain that Kennedy would have had to deal with him during that second term. And given the growing interest in moving beyond the stale conflict of the previous five years, who can doubt that a Cuban-American accommodation might have been an achievement of Kennedy’s second four years? Whatever the uncertainties in November 1963 about future Castro-Kennedy dealings, it is clear that they signaled a mutual interest in finding a way through their antagonisms, which were doing neither of them any good.

UNCERTAINTIES OVER CUBA
were matched by those on Vietnam. Back in February 1962, after the administration announced the creation of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), and an anonymous official told the press that the United States was determined “to win” the war, a reporter had pressed the president to answer a Republican charge that he had been less than candid with the public about U.S. involvement. Kennedy had reviewed the “long history” of U.S. commitment, urged a continuation of the “very strong bipartisan consensus,” and described U.S. assistance as logistics and “training missions,” not combat. In March and April, reporters had only three brief questions about Vietnam: How was the war going? Would he ask Congress for approval before sending combat troops? And what did he intend to do about American soldiers being killed? Kennedy’s assurances that the South Vietnamese were holding their own, that he did not plan to send combat troops, and that the handful of losses were regrettable accidents of war had satisfied the press, which asked nothing more about the war in the President’s twice monthly news conferences during the rest of the year.

The lull in discussion about Vietnam, however, ended in November and December 1962 when conflicting reports about progress in the strategic hamlet program reached Washington and then leaked to the press. Indications that Diem saw the program more as a way to control rural areas than to ensure their security, coupled with a paucity of hard information from the hamlets themselves, provoked questions in the executive branch about the program’s effectiveness. In early November, Mike Forrestal, the State Department’s official most responsible for Vietnam, told Bobby that “Averell and I feel that the war is not going as well out there as one might be led to believe. . . . The political problem is growing relatively worse. . . . The major fault lies with the GVN.” To get a clearer picture of developments, Kennedy asked Mike Mansfield, who enjoyed a reputation as an Asian expert, to visit Vietnam.

On December 18, Kennedy received two conflicting reports on Vietnamese conditions and prospects. Theodore Heaver, the State Department’s Vietnam specialist, who had spent March and April in the country and then another forty days visiting seventeen provinces in the fall of 1962, acknowledged that “fact is not always easy to come by in Viet-Nam.” He had concluded nevertheless that a standoff in the war was now more likely than Saigon’s defeat. “But the tide has not turned. The VC are still very strong, and our key programs are still in many respects experimental.” If they worked, he foresaw a GVN standing on its own “with greatly reduced US military assistance.”

Mike Mansfield had been less confident. He said, “[It distresses me] to hear the situation described in much the same terms as on my last visit, although it is seven years and billions of dollars later. In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.” He certainly had heard “extremely optimistic” evaluations of the strategic hamlet program, which Vietnamese and Americans in Saigon predicted would solve the insurgency problem in a year or two. But having heard optimistic talk like this from the French in the early 1950s, he doubted the wisdom of uncritically accepting such current hopes. The “real tests [of strategic hamlets] are yet to come.” They involved “an immense job of social engineering, dependent on great outlays of aid on our part for many years and a most responsive, alert and enlightened leadership in the government of Vietnam.” If current remedies failed, Mansfield foresaw “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short, going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam. That is an alternative which I most emphatically do not recommend,” he had told Kennedy. “Our role is and must remain secondary. . . . It is their country, their future which is most at stake, not ours.” The alternative to being trapped in unwanted commitments in Vietnam was to press for negotiations that could neutralize all of Southeast Asia.

At a December 1962 news conference, Kennedy took a wait-and-see attitude. “As you know, we have about 10 or 11 times as many men there as we had a year ago. We’ve had a number of casualties. We put in an awful lot of equipment. We are going ahead with the strategic hamlet proposal.” But he acknowledged “the great difficulty . . . in fighting a guerrilla war . . . especially in terrain as difficult as South Viet-Nam. So we don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say I don’t think it is darker than it was a year ago, and in some ways lighter.” Privately, Kennedy was less sanguine. He had angrily told Mansfield during a meeting in Palm Beach that his advisers were giving him more optimistic assessments of what to expect in Vietnam. “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” Kennedy later told O’Donnell, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Kennedy’s public conformity with optimistic estimates, however, served a useful political purpose: If he was going to get out of Vietnam, it was essential to encourage the idea that there was progress in the war and that the United States could soon reduce its role in the fighting. As Defense Department public affairs officer Arthur Sylvester famously said, “It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself.”

On February 1, Kennedy met with army Chief of Staff General Wheeler, who had assessed conditions in Vietnam during a January visit. Wheeler frustrated and irritated Kennedy with a report Forrestal described as “rosy euphoria” and “a complete waste of . . . time.” Wheeler also was no help in suggesting how to bring the GVN more closely into line with “U.S. views on fighting the war and on foreign policy,” or how to “develop gradually a more independent posture for the U.S. in South Vietnam and very carefully dissociate ourselves from those policies and practices of the GVN of which we disapprove.”

Troubled by the different assessments of South Vietnamese effectiveness, Kennedy sent Roger Hilsman, still the head of the State Department’s intelligence division, and Forrestal to Vietnam to give him their appraisal of the war. Although they believed that things were “going much better than they were a year ago,” they did not see them “going nearly so well as the people here in Saigon both military and civilian think they are.” The Viet Cong were “being hurt,” but “the negative side of the ledger” was “still awesome.” Their overall judgment was that the United States was “probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped,” and they expected the war to “last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated, and prolong the period in which a sudden and dramatic event would upset the gains already made.” The CIA, which weighed in with a report now as well, said “the war remains a slowly escalating stalemate.”