Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (40 page)

The center was not holding for John Kennedy in the final weeks of his life. The violent overthrow of Diem not only exacerbated the feeling of chaos in Vietnam, it underlined the limits on Kennedy’s ability to control events, in Saigon as well as in Washington. The president who prided himself on his mastery of foreign policy—a man who had been tutored by old pro Joe Kennedy in the wily arts of power—felt the reins slipping from his hands.

After hearing about Diem, JFK called Mary Meyer—whom he turned to in moments of duress—and asked her to join him at the White House for the afternoon. It was the last time they saw each other.

Ironically, the only top national security advisor who came around to supporting Kennedy’s Vietnam pullout plan was the man who would go down in history as one of the war’s most reviled architects, Robert Strange McNamara. After returning from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam in October, the defense secretary met with Kennedy in the White House, telling him, “I think, Mr. President, that we must have a means of disengaging from this area, and we must show our country what that means.” It was McNamara who encouraged Kennedy to withdraw 1,000 soldiers by the end of the year.

But McNamara abruptly shifted his Vietnam thinking under Kennedy’s successor, dutifully realigning himself with the Johnson administration’s escalating violence. The numbers cruncher with the shiny, shoe-polished hair and whiz-kid wire-rims would become an icon of failure, the reigning symbol of the tragic folly of fighting a war against impassioned peasant warriors with the cold logic of a statistician. Why did he allow himself to become the brains of the war under LBJ after plotting with JFK to disengage from it? “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that,” McNamara told me with the clipped, authoritative voice of a CEO shutting down a disagreeable topic at a board meeting.

The Vietnam War mastermind reemerged in 1995 as a critic of the war, publishing a remarkable mea culpa called
In Retrospect
and following up with
The Fog of War
, Errol Morris’s 2004 Academy Award–winning documentary in which McNamara strove to make sense of his life and its hard-earned lessons. But despite the confessional frame of mind that he has adopted late in his life, McNamara is still selective about his revelations. Here is one of the most intriguing personalities that the world of American power has ever produced, all exposed nerves one moment and buttoned-down reserve the next. McNamara has asserted that he and Curtis LeMay, whom he served under during World War II, could have been prosecuted as war criminals if the United States had lost the war. And yet he still loyally dodges questions about Lyndon Johnson’s moral responsibility for Vietnam. He can speak with clinical detachment about the mass civilian casualties for which he bears responsibility in Japan and Vietnam, and yet tears up at the memory of the death of one U.S. airman. He seems both the most human of men to occupy a top post in the American military machine and the most chilling.

As Admiral Anderson, McNamara’s Pentagon adversary, caustically noted, the defense secretary cried easily—a trait that seems to have grown with age. Reliving his life in
The Fog of War
, McNamara’s memories of his seven years as defense secretary inevitably choked him up. “My wife got ulcers from it, my son probably did,” he told the camera. “But it was the best years of our lives.” As he spoke, his watery eyes and twitching mouth betrayed a riot of suffocated emotions.

If his years with Johnson ravaged his family, his years with Kennedy were clearly Robert McNamara’s brief and shining moment. He was helping the young president keep peace in the world, helping keep rational restraints on the country’s military leviathan. And then came Dallas. Robert McNamara would go from glory to infamy. The man whom Kennedy wanted to make secretary of state in his second term, co-architect of his plans for world peace, would instead go down in history as a warmonger. The tears are not just for the fallen president—they’re for McNamara himself, and what he lost.

Other hawks who served with Kennedy, from LBJ on down, claimed there was a seamless narrative between the two Democratic administrations on Vietnam. It would have been easy for McNamara to take the same self-serving line. But he didn’t. He told the truth in his memoir—Kennedy intended to get out—even though it made his own jarring shift from dove to hawk seem all the more bizarre. Of course, McNamara is a company man—he is still loyal to Kennedy, as he is to Johnson. But there is something more at work in his need to set the record straight on JFK and Vietnam. Perhaps he is also being true to his younger self, the brilliant New Frontiersman who was going to make the world a better, safer place.

It would not have been easy for Kennedy to disengage from Vietnam, McNamara said. According to the former Pentagon chief, JFK did not completely reject the assumptions of the Cold War; he still believed in the domino theory that held if Vietnam fell to the Communists, it would lead to the collapse of other free countries throughout the region. But in the end, McNamara said, JFK would have steered the country away from the cataclysm. “My belief is that Kennedy would have had a hell of a problem deciding what to do, because he believed in the domino theory. However, he also believed, as he stated before he died, that it was South Vietnam’s war and the people there had to win it—the United States could help them, but not win it for them. These might have been two contradictory positions. But in the end, I believe he would have decided that the latter position—we couldn’t win the war for them—was more powerful than the domino view.”

“He kept the peace.” That’s what Kennedy often said he wanted as his epitaph. And against all odds, he succeeded in doing just that, remarked McNamara—the man who failed to do so. In the dangerously militarized atmosphere of the Cold War—and under relentless pressure from generals, CIA officials, congressional hawks, and his own national security advisors—Kennedy again and again slipped the knots of war. “I think his view was that the primary responsibility of the president is to keep the nation out of war if at all possible,” McNamara observed at the “Recollecting JFK” forum. Kennedy maintained the peace, his defense chief pointed out, when many powerful figures in Washington believed that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. “They were certain of that.” McNamara painted a sobering picture for the audience of life in Cold War Washington. There were men in power who believed that America could claim victory even if the country lost 20 or 30 million people. “That’s perfectly absurd,” said McNamara. “It sounds today absurd to you, I’m sure.” But you weren’t in power during this period of mass psychosis, he told the crowd. You don’t know what it was like. “You lived the Cold War twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year…those were the attitudes.” But Kennedy stood firmly against these mad delusions. “And he won. We averted a nuclear war. We came that close, but we avoided it.”

Then Kennedy died, and his antagonists got their war. But it was a smaller war, not the one that the generals wanted, and the planet survived. He and Lyndon Johnson made sure of that, says McNamara today. He deservedly takes a deep sense of satisfaction from that.

When
The Fog of War
was released, McNamara appeared onstage at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, to talk about the film’s lessons of war and peace. As the sell-out crowd filled Zellerbach Hall, there was a taut suspense in the air. Would McNamara be safe at this former center of antiwar protest, where the graying audience still had searing memories of his past role? But the old warrior did not hesitate to march onstage. He was on a mission to confront his ghosts, said his middle-aged son Craig, who drove from his organic walnut farm near Davis, California to accompany his father that night. There was a time when the war had torn them apart too.

The Berkeley audience was surprisingly respectful. They applauded McNamara’s passionate jeremiads. “We human beings killed 160 million other human beings in the twentieth century,” he exclaimed. “Is that what we want in this century? I don’t think so!” But loud sighs greeted his refusal to publicly criticize the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, even though he had earlier voiced strong criticisms of the war as “morally wrong” in the Canadian press. “I’m not going to comment on President Bush,” he told the audience. Ever the loyal government man.

In the auditorium that evening was Daniel Ellsberg, the one-time defense intellectual who dared to break ranks by leaking the Pentagon Papers, the government’s own damning report on the Vietnam War. It was the path not taken by McNamara, who called Ellsberg a traitor at the time. But Ellsberg himself, who once viewed McNamara with similar contempt, now has more complicated feelings about the former Pentagon chief. He talked about them at his home in the East Bay hills before the event.

“McNamara believes that he kept Curtis LeMay and the others from doing to Hanoi what they did to Tokyo and Hiroshima in World War II,” said Ellsberg. “And he did do that. It’s possible that no one else in his position could have held back the U.S. Air Force from firebombing or nuking Vietnam, turning it into the parking lot that LeMay wanted to. So yes, that’s how McNamara lives with himself—very easily: ‘I had my finger in the dyke, I am the boy who kept this disaster from happening. No one else could have prevented the Joint Chiefs from forcing Johnson to let them loose on Hanoi. I worked for months and years to prevent that holocaust, and no one else could have succeeded.’ That’s a pretty strong argument for his place in history.”

McNamara, for his part, when later told that Ellsberg was in the Berkeley audience, seemed undisturbed. “I hadn’t any idea. If I had known, it would not have bothered me.”

McNamara is liver-spotted and stoop-shouldered now. He says that his computer brain has memory lapses. But he has the wisdom of an old soldier. Looking back, he can see his fatal mistakes with the same clarity he had before he made them. He likes to quote these days from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:

LISA HOWARD WAS WAITING
for Fidel. It was a ritual with which foreign journalists—as well as visiting dignitaries—were all too familiar. It had taken months for the ABC newswoman just to get a visa out of the Cuban government. She assiduously worked her contacts in the diplomatic corps, including Russian First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. But in the end, it was Jim Donovan, Bobby Kennedy’s unofficial Havana go-between, who finally finagled permission for her. Howard arrived in Havana on April 1, 1963, taking up quarters in the Hotel Riviera, a gleaming, Miami-style high-rise overlooking the city’s seafront. And then she waited some more—three weeks more—while Castro pondered her request for a TV interview.

The thirty-seven-year-old Lisa Howard was an anomaly in the broadcast news world of the Kennedy era, a sexy, stylish, high-profile woman in a business that was the almost exclusive domain of rumpled, sober-faced, middle-aged men. Howard was one of a handful of TV newswomen in the early 1960s that included Nancy Dickerson of NBC and Nancy Clark of CBS. A former actress, she made the leap from Off-Broadway theater and TV soap operas—she was regular on CBS’s
The Edge of Night
in the late 1950s—to broadcast journalism through sheer determination, after deciding that her acting career was stalled. As the United Nations correspondent for Mutual Radio Network, she developed a reputation for brash enterprise, becoming the first American journalist to score an interview with Khrushchev. (She snagged the Soviet leader by using her theatrical wiles, slipping past guards at the Russian consulate in New York by dressing as a maid and then embracing Khrushchev as he walked by her.) Hired away by ABC in 1961 to cover the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna, she continued to make a name for her splashy journalistic coups—years before the rise of Barbara Walters and a future generation of female TV icons—and was rewarded by being given her own show,
The News Hour with Lisa Howard
.

The blonde and curvy Howard, whom
Newsweek
had declared “startlingly good-looking,” was willing to use what she called her “natural advantages” to finally land the interview with Castro. After midnight on April 21, the newswoman was awakened in bed at the Riviera by a diplomat friend who told her to come downstairs to meet Castro. She slipped into a low-cut brown cocktail dress and went down to the lobby, where the Cuban leader greeted her and escorted her into the hotel nightclub, where they talked until after five in the morning. Castro was charmed by Howard. He asked an aide to take photos of them, using a Polaroid camera given to him by his old friend Donovan. In the pictures, a glamorous, bare-shouldered Howard sits snugly next to the uniformed Castro at a cocktail table, regarding him with a bright-eyed intensity. Castro later agreed to be interviewed on camera by Howard, sitting for a forty-five-minute chat in the hotel’s twentieth floor penthouse suite. The interview, the first Castro had granted a U.S. network since 1959, was a major coup for Howard and ABC.

After Howard returned to the United States, she went to the White House, where a curious Kennedy debriefed her. She shared the details of her Castro encounter with the gossip-hungry Kennedy, including the revelation that she had slept with the Cuban leader. “She talked with Jack about it,” Howard’s friend, the equally dishy Gore Vidal, later reported, “and mentioned that Castro hadn’t taken his boots off. Jack liked details like that.” In her diary, Howard wrote that Castro “made love to me efficiently.”