Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (21 page)

The principal consequence of the post–Bay of Pigs pressure on White House subordinates to march in lockstep with the president was a sterile approach to Cuba that did far more harm than good. After the Bay of Pigs failure and Bobby Kennedy’s warning that they could not afford to ignore the Cuban danger and might have to reconsider armed action, Secretary of Defense McNamara directed the military to “develop a plan for the overthrow of the Castro government by the application of U.S. military force.” He cautioned the Chiefs against seeing U.S. military action as probable, but he acknowledged that the defeat had compelled its reconsideration.

Kennedy, however, had no intention of rushing into anything. The Cuban failure had made him more cautious and determined to ensure that any future action would be effective. He was mindful of what Eisenhower had told him after Kennedy had asked his advice about how to avoid another failure like the Bay of Pigs. “I believe there is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,” Eisenhower said. “It must be a success.” Kennedy assured him “that hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.” Moreover, the “disaster,” as many were calling it, intensified whatever doubts he had about listening to advisers, or at least to the men at the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department who had misled him or had passively joined in accepting the bad advice. As Bobby told him, “What comes out of this whole Cuban matter is that a good deal of thought has to go into whether you are going to accept the ideas, advice and even the facts that are presented by your subordinates.” Bobby expected the president to ask a lot harder questions of his counselors in the future: “And that is going to be the difference between the President before Cuba and after Cuba. The fact that we have gone through this experience in Cuba has made the President a different man,” Bobby asserted. Or at least it had convinced him and Kennedy that they needed to treat advice from experts and even their closest confidants more critically.

Kennedy now wanted a new voice in future discussions of military action. He turned to General Maxwell Taylor, a retired Army commander with impeccable credentials for intelligence and integrity. The fifty-nine-year-old Taylor was a storybook figure—six feet tall, handsome, the model of what a general should look like, in a perfectly pressed uniform with four stars on the epaulettes and twelve rows of battle ribbons beneath the insignia of the 101st Airborne Division, which he commanded when parachuting into France on D-Day in June 1944; he had been the first general to land in France during the invasion. A secret mission to Nazi-occupied Italy the previous year, which Dwight Eisenhower described as the riskiest undertaken by any agent or emissary he dispatched during the war, had made Taylor a prime candidate for command in the post-invasion campaign, which included leadership of the division that won high regard for its courageous stand at Bastogne in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.

At the end of World War II, Taylor continued to serve with distinction: first, as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy between 1945 and 1949, where he established West Point’s Code of Honor; then as commander of Western Allied forces in Berlin from 1949 to 1951; followed by combat duty in Korea in 1953 and service as Army chief of staff from 1955 to 1959. An unqualified opponent of President Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation, which focused U.S. defense on building a nuclear arsenal, Taylor retired from active duty as a protest against the downgrading of the country’s land army. In 1960, he made his opposition public in
The Uncertain Trumpet
, in which he argued that excessive reliance on nuclear weapons, which could not be used in brushfire wars, limited America’s ability to meet the variety of threats communist insurgents in Asia, Africa, and Latin America seemed likely to pose. The United States needed an army and a variety of forces that could give it the flexibility to meet every sort of peril. “Flexible response,” as Taylor’s strategy was called, coincided with Kennedy’s criticism of Eisenhower’s “brinksmanship” or Maginot Line mentality, which left little room for alternative answers to communist aggression. Described as “articulate, dashing, urbane,” Taylor was not only a battle-tested hero, but also a veteran of Pentagon politics, which recommended him to Kennedy as someone who might be more helpful than any of his current military or national security advisers in future debates about how to manage Cold War tensions and conflicts.

In the first weeks of his term, it was not only the Bay of Pigs that had soured Kennedy on the military chiefs; it was also advice they had given him on Laos. Like Cuba, the small landlocked country had seemed like a proving ground of Kennedy’s ability to stand up to the communists. But everything told Kennedy that getting drawn into a land war in the Laotian jungles was a losing proposition. At the end of April, as he was reeling from the Cuban defeat, the Joint Chiefs recommended that he blunt a North Vietnamese–sponsored communist offensive in Laos with air strikes and the use of army units ferried into the country’s two small airports. Kennedy wanted to know what the Chiefs proposed if the communists bombed the airports after the United States had put a few thousand men on the ground and they were faced with defeat. “You drop a bomb on Hanoi—and you start using atomic weapons!” Lemnitzer replied. In this and other discussions about combating North Vietnam and China or intervening in Southeast Asia, Lemnitzer promised, “If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” Kennedy dismissed this sort of thinking as absurd: “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy was not indifferent to the fate of Southeast Asia. He had a long-standing concern with how the United States should deal with former colonial regimes. In 1957, after visits to the Middle East and Asia, he had said in a Senate speech, “The most important single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” A great test for U.S. foreign policy, he added, was how former colonial nations viewed America’s attitude toward imperialism. Current wisdom described the struggle for hearts and minds in the Third World as crucial in shaping the outcome of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons had made an all-out conflict like World War II an anachronism—an event that could only lead to what strategists called MAD, mutual assured destruction. The alternative was the contest of ideologies—communism with its command economy versus democracy and free enterprise. The winning side in that argument seemed likely to flourish in emerging societies, with the likelihood that the less attractive way of life would eventually wilt and disappear.

The most immediate and concrete examples of this competition Kennedy saw were in Latin America, where Castro’s Cuba vied to become a model for other Western Hemisphere nations, and Southeast Asia, where the former French colonies of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were battlegrounds between pro-Western and communist forces. Kennedy’s support of the Bay of Pigs operation had rested on the hope of turning Cuba away from socialism and toward progressive democracy promoted by the Alliance for Progress.

But the uncertainty of ousting Castro made Kennedy eager to avoid any defeat in Southeast Asia. Laos, however, was not a high priority. With the exception of some of the Joint Chiefs, all his advisers agreed that a military adventure in that landlocked country would be a terrible drain on resources, with little chance of a decisive outcome. Khrushchev’s understanding that Moscow as well would not profit from an extended contest in Laos persuaded him to endorse a coalition government that would largely mute Soviet-American tensions over that tiny country, whose only strategic value was as a North Vietnamese supply route to Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam.

The much greater concern than Laos was Vietnam. While hardly anyone in the United States knew much, if anything, about Laos, Vietnam had registered forcefully on Americans attentive to Cold War ups and downs. French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 had disturbing repercussions in Washington. Was the Viet Minh’s victory, a triumph of Vietnamese nationalism, an indication that anticolonial movements across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were about to be co-opted by the communist drive for world control?

A conference in Geneva, Switzerland, that included the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China divided Vietnam into northern and southern states, with unifying elections slated by 1956. The refusal of the United States and South Vietnam to sign the Geneva accords without assurances that free elections would be supervised by the United Nations left Vietnam divided into opposing regimes. The outbreak of a Viet Cong communist insurgency against the pro-Western South’s government led the Eisenhower administration to provide financial and military aid to Saigon. The support became emblematic of the struggle to contain communist expansion. Eisenhower’s comparison of South Vietnam to a leading domino that, if toppled, could result in communist control of all Southeast Asia endowed that country with a strategic importance comparable to that of Western Europe. Losing South Vietnam to indigenous Viet Cong guerrillas backed by North Vietnam’s communists invoked memories of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, which led to World War II and the near defeat of Great Britain. Communist conquest of the South loomed as an apocalyptic event that could translate into a worldwide victory for Soviet Russia.

More than thirty-five years after North Vietnam’s conquest of the South, such fears seem ill-considered. But memories of the global struggle against Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism that had caused so much suffering shadowed any potential defeat in the new clash with communism for international dominance and discredited suggestions of passivity in response to any acts of perceived aggression. In 1961, Americans were fixated on Churchill’s observation about Munich: Chamberlain had a choice between war and dishonor; he chose dishonor and got war. They ignored Churchill’s later adage: Oppose the strong and appease the weak.

At the end of January 1961, Kennedy convened a high-level White House meeting to discuss a plan for saving South Vietnam from a communist takeover. He was responding to a report by the counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Following a two-week visit to Southeast Asia, Lansdale declared Vietnam in critical condition. He described the country “as a combat area of the Cold War . . . requiring emergency treatment.” Kennedy saw the situation in Vietnam as “the worst one we’ve got,” complained that Eisenhower had never discussed the country with him, despite having committed U.S. resources to preserving Saigon’s autonomy after French defeat in 1954, and praised Lansdale’s report as giving him “a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem in Vietnam.”

Suggestions that helping South Vietnam increase its army from 150,000 to 170,000 men could turn the tide in the conflict, however, left Kennedy unconvinced. He thought that politics and morale rather than military capacity would make the difference in combating the communists. But his advisers weren’t so sure. The French failed to hold Vietnam by strength of arms, but the United States wasn’t France. Despite the conviction of some in the State Department and at the Pentagon that expanded military operations in Vietnam would make a difference, Kennedy doubted that this was the key to victory. He believed that South Vietnam’s survival depended less on growing its army than on political reforms that could increase the government’s popularity. His national security advisers were skeptical about the viability of democratic reforms and believed, at any rate, that military capacity had to come first.

Because political change at best would be slow, Kennedy’s advisers said that prompt effective military action to combat the Viet Cong, the communist insurgents, was essential. It needed to rest, however, not on pitched Korean-style battles for which the military had prepared, but on an innovative strategy that met the challenge of guerrilla operations in jungle terrain. In February, remembering the adage that generals always prepare to fight the last war, Kennedy pressed the case for novel counterinsurgency units, telling McNamara and the Joint Chiefs that he expected there to be “more guerrillas and counter-guerrilla activity in Africa and Asia in the near future.” McNamara advised the Chiefs that the president wanted these forces and plans to use them to be pursued “with all possible vigor.” Rusk cabled the U.S. Embassy in Saigon that the “White House ranks defense Vietnam among highest priorities US foreign policy. Having approved Counterinsurgency Plan, President concerned whether Vietnam can resist Communist pressure during 18–24 month period before Plan takes full effect.”

And, Rusk might have added, until political reforms could take hold. No one, however, thought it would happen as long as Elbridge Durbrow, the current ambassador, remained in office. Durbrow was a plainspoken diplomat encouraged to be blunt about the radical reforms needed to save Vietnam, and the Vietnamese, who complained that the Americans had replaced the French as their colonial masters, dismissed Durbrow’s hectoring as offensively imperious. During his four years as ambassador beginning in 1957, Durbrow’s relations with South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem had deteriorated into mutual contempt. Durbrow viewed Diem as a corrupt dictator, whose indifference to his people’s sufferings doomed his regime, and Diem considered Durbrow a neocolonialist trying to reimpose Western control over Vietnam. By 1961, they were barely speaking to one another.

To implement the political side of his strategy, Kennedy appointed Frederick E. Nolting, Jr. as the new ambassador. A highly recommended Foreign Service officer, who had been a U.S. representative to NATO but was unfamiliar with Asia and knew nothing about Vietnam, the fifty-year-old Nolting had a reputation for tact and ability to ingratiate himself with others that made him an attractive candidate for the job. Besides, Kennedy didn’t want an Asian expert with fixed ideas about Southeast Asia. Part of Nolting’s appeal was that he could bring a fresh perspective to fixing the Vietnam problem. Fearful that Vietnam faced an imminent collapse, Kennedy wanted Nolting to take up his post as quickly as possible. Convinced that the Vietnamese would be more responsive to cooperation between equals—an approach reinforced by Lansdale’s recommendation that a pat on the back would be far more effective with the Vietnamese than harsh directives—Kennedy hoped that skillful diplomacy could persuade South Vietnamese president Diem to enact reforms that would outdo the Viet Cong’s popular appeal.