Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (30 page)

The clash of opinions demonstrated how imperfect the views of even the most experienced and intelligent observers on current events could be: Taylor, Acheson, and de Gaulle misread Khrushchev’s interest in negotiations that would put aside his threats to seize West Berlin. In September, Khrushchev sent a series of messages, including a lengthy letter, encouraging bilateral talks about Berlin that were designed to give him a retreat from his bullying. The message sent to Kennedy through Pierre Salinger, who received it from a Russian journalist, was “The storm in Berlin is over.” When Salinger delivered the message to Kennedy at one in the morning, he declared with no small relief: “There’s only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he’s not going to recognize the Ulbricht regime in East Germany—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”

With the opening of negotiations, Khrushchev announced in a speech on October 17, 1961, at a Communist Party congress that “the western powers were showing some understanding of the situation, and were inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the issue of West Berlin.” And so, “We shall not insist on signing a peace treaty absolutely before December 31, 1961.” Schlesinger recorded: “The crisis was suddenly over.”

The end of the Berlin crisis was a welcome respite from the constant drumbeat of trouble that had beset Kennedy and his advisers from day one of his presidency. But even with Berlin momentarily put aside as a source of daily tension, Kennedy found no easing of the pressure to save Vietnam. Arguments among his advisers about what to do about Berlin now gave way to sharp and sometimes personally caustic disputes about how to defeat communist aggression against Diem’s government in Saigon.

Kennedy’s decision in early July to put off expanding U.S. commitments to Vietnam produced an immediate pushback from Rostow, who worried that Kennedy underestimated the need for force in combating the Viet Cong. On July 13, Rostow urged Rusk, who shared his concern about saving Vietnam, to consider three alternatives that he might put before the president: “A sharp increase in the number of Americans in South Vietnam for training and support purposes; a counter-guerrilla operation in the north, possibly using American Air and Naval strength to impose about the same level of damage and inconvenience that the Viet Cong are imposing in the South; and . . . a limited military operation in the North; e.g., capture and holding the port of Haiphong.” Except for item one, the proposals were way beyond anything Kennedy was ready to entertain. The stages of economic growth Rostow had written about so persuasively had given way to the stages of military action he saw as the only immediate formula for securing U.S. interests in South Vietnam. Rostow’s evangelism about beating back the communist challenge in Vietnam had made him a convert from faith in social engineering to a believer in the use of American power.

Rostow was not alone in believing that Vietnam could be saved by a more assertive U.S. policy. By the middle of July, after only two months in Saigon, Nolting had become a full convert to the can-do school—principally, the work of turning Diem into a liberal reformer ready to take up American ideas. But Diem was anything but a willing pupil. More French than Vietnamese, or at least more schooled in Western ways than traditional Vietnamese culture—a staunch anticommunist Catholic—Diem understood perfectly how to deal with a conventional American diplomat: talk up social and political reform that could outdo the communists in winning the hearts and minds of the country’s masses. It was a façade calculated to deceive Nolting. As the journalist David Halberstam, who arrived in Saigon as a reporter for the
New York Times
in 1962, said, “Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a Central Vietnamese in the South, but most important of all, he was a mandarin, a member of the feudal aristocracy in a country swept by revolution.”

By contrast, Nolting saw Diem as the right man in the right place at the right time. He told Rusk that a number of trips around Vietnam with Diem had convinced him that Diem was an honorable man committed to “sound and good” objectives for his country. “He is no dictator”: He didn’t relish concentrating power in his hands. Nolting thought Diem “would prefer to be a monk rather than a political leader. . . . I think the United States should have no hesitation on moral grounds in backing Diem to the hilt. Where we think he is wrong, we can bring about amelioration and improvement gradually in proportion to the confidence he has in us. . . . I believe we [are] taking the right track.” Few diplomatic assessments in U.S. history were more off target than Nolting’s of Diem: He loved power, was contemptuous of American preachments about democracy, and had much less of a hold on his country than Nolting believed.

Others in the Kennedy administration, led by Taylor, Rostow, and Robert Komer, the National Security Council expert on Southeast Asia, shared Nolting’s hope of relying on Diem to stem the communist surge in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. But they were less optimistic than Nolting and pressed Kennedy to understand that he would have to make some difficult choices. Komer wanted Kennedy to go “all-out in cleaning up South Vietnam.” Taylor and Rostow were no less eager to save the country but were less blunt in urging a rescue operation. They urged Kennedy to choose either “to disengage from the area as gracefully as possible,” which U.S. domestic politics alone made an unpalatable choice; find “a convenient political pretext and attack with American military force the regional source of aggression in Hanoi; or build as much indigenous military, political and economic strength as we can in the area, in order to contain the thrust from Hanoi while preparing to intervene with U.S. military force if the Chinese Communists come in or the situation otherwise gets out of hand.”

John Steeves, a State Department expert on Asia and the chairman of the multi-agency Southeast Asia Task Force, simultaneously warned against the growing dangers of communist aggression in the region: He advised the president to “make the basic decision now to resist this encroachment by appropriate military means. . . . The loss of Southeast Asia to the free world would be highly inimical to our future strategy and interest.” Although North Vietnam was not China or Russia threatening to expand its reach in Asia or Europe, it was a communist country about to bring another free people under its control. Most American policymakers believed that if South Vietnam fell into the communist orbit, it would be a blow to free peoples everywhere. Anticommunism was the prevailing mind-set and memories of Hitler made a failure to combat totalitarian aggression anywhere look like a fatal mistake.

Three days after his July 25, 1961, speech addressing the Berlin crisis, Kennedy met with Rusk, Taylor, Bundy, Ball, Rostow, and the task force advisers on Vietnam to discuss the dangers in Southeast Asia. They warned him that the United States was on a treadmill in Vietnam, while Laos remained a matter of grave concern. To protect Vietnam from communist infiltration, they urged Kennedy to consider using U.S., Lao, Thai, and South Vietnamese forces to occupy southern Laos, which Hanoi was using as a supply route to insurgents in South Vietnam. They also described plans for air and naval operations against Haiphong or Hanoi, North Vietnam’s principal port and capital.

Kennedy thought their suggestions absurd. But he politely said that he doubted the “realism and accuracy in such military planning.” As for Laos, “optimistic estimates were invariably proved false.” He did not think that any operation could save southern Laos, “and he emphasized the reluctance of the American people and of many distinguished military leaders to see any direct involvement of U.S. troops in that part of the world.” When some of the advisers predicted that “with a proper plan . . . the results would be very different from anything that happened before,” Kennedy put them off by pointing out that “General de Gaulle, out of painful French experience, had spoken with feeling [to him] of the difficulty of fighting in this part of the world.”

Kennedy made no mention of a letter from Galbraith that supported his reluctance to join the fighting in Southeast Asia: “These jungle regimes, where the writ of government runs only as far as the airport,” Galbraith warned, “are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead. . . . The rulers do not control or particularly influence their own people; and they neither have nor warrant their people’s support.” As for relying on Southeast Asian forces, Galbraith thought that “the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.” He counseled that losing Laos would not be the disaster some were describing. “We must not allow ourselves or the country to imagine that gains or losses in these incoherent lands are the same as gains or losses in the organized world.”

Most of Kennedy’s White House advisers disagreed with Galbraith’s assessment. They said that “it would be most helpful in planning if it could be understood that the President would at some future time have a willingness to decide to intervene if the situation seemed to him to require it.” Kennedy refused to commit himself to anything. He was especially resistant to sending Americans to block Hanoi’s supply route through Laos. He thought “that nothing could be worse than an unsuccessful intervention in this area.” He was willing, however, to soften his rejection of this advice by having studies done of how to deal with the region and sending a high-level team to check the facts on the ground. For all his skepticism about sending military forces into far-off places, where they would come up against skillful guerrilla fighters and former colonial peoples suspicious of another Western power compromising their autonomy, Kennedy could not entirely dismiss hawkish demands for military intervention in Southeast Asia. He would shortly say in a speech at the U.N.: “The very simple question confronting the world community is whether measures can be devised to protect the small and the weak from” communist attackers threatening their independence. “For if they are successful in Laos and South Vietnam, the gates will be opened wide.”

But opened wide to what: the defeat of the West, of freedom? Hyperbole had become the accepted wisdom about communist dangers. For all Kennedy’s reluctance to rely on military action in a region of questionable importance to long-term U.S. security, he gave voice to the undertone of fear reflected in his rhetoric about protecting “the small and the weak” and ultimately the nuclear-armed United States from insurgents in Laos and Vietnam.

Mindful that Kennedy was under pressure to expand U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, Galbraith offered another counterargument. “South Vietnam is exceedingly bad,” he reported in a July letter. “I hope, incidentally, that your information from there is good and I have an uneasy feeling that what comes in regular channels is very bad. Unless I am mistaken Diem has alienated his people to a far greater extent than we allow ourselves to know. This is our old mistake. We take the ruler’s word and that of our own people who have become committed to him. . . . I fear that we have one more government which, in present form, no one will support.”

Galbraith thought that Kennedy and the United States would be best served if Vietnam were left to work out its own problems. But the collective wisdom was against giving up on the country and for pressing ahead in search of solutions. And because Kennedy said he was prepared to hear policy proposals, on July 20 Rostow reported that he and Taylor had come up with questions that if answered wisely could turn failure into success. Eager to keep the initiative on meeting what they considered a crisis, they sent Kennedy a memo in line with his position. They echoed his reluctance to rely on force of arms but emphasized that military action was not being ruled out: “You would wish to see every avenue of diplomacy exhausted before we accept the necessity for . . . fighting” in South Vietnam. They also understood that he would prefer using economic assistance as fully as possible, having indigenous forces do the fighting, and that “should we have to fight, we should use air and sea power to the maximum and engage minimum U.S. forces.”

In an August meeting with Rusk in Paris, French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville, drawing on the French experience, cautioned against excessive optimism on what any westerner could achieve in Vietnam: “The real problem is always the same,” Couve de Murville said. “The difficulty is to change the present government, which is a strong government, into a popular government. . . . We had all more or less failed in our efforts.”

The continuing reports from Vietnam echoed Couve de Murville’s doubts. The journalist Theodore White, whose 1946 book,
Thunder Out of China
, had foreseen the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, visited Vietnam in August 1961. He reported that “no American wanted to drive outside of Saigon even during the day without military convoy.” At the beginning of September, the Viet Cong gave fresh evidence of how uncertain Diem’s future was by launching their largest attack to date. On October 11, White wrote to warn Kennedy against sending troops to South Vietnam, where they would “be useless—or worse. The presence of white American troops will feed the race hatred of the Viet-Namese. This South Viet-Nam is a real bastard to solve—either we have to let the younger military officers knock off Diem in a coup and take our chances on a military regime . . . or else we have to give it up. To commit troops there is unwise—for the problem is political and doctrinal.”

With the Berlin Wall having just gone up, Kennedy wanted no part of a crisis in Vietnam or Laos. Moreover, he tried to rein in the Rostow-Taylor talk of air and naval strikes against Hanoi by emphasizing that world public opinion would see any U.S. military action against North Vietnam as an act of aggression. But Rostow tried to convince him that striking at North Vietnam ultimately would be seen as comparable to the Truman Doctrine: “Your decision here is not easy,” he told Kennedy. “It involves making an uncertain commitment in cold blood. It is not unlike Truman’s commitment on Greece and Turkey in March 1947; for, in truth, Southeast Asia is in as uncertain shape as Southeast Europe at that time.” It was a false analogy: Southeast Asia was not Europe, which millions of Americans were much more ready to save from communism by investing hundreds of millions of dollars, as Truman had requested. For Rostow the threat to Southeast Asia was another crucial moment in the Cold War, and he believed that world opinion would rally behind a bold policy of expanded containment. From a post–Cold War perspective, however, it is clearly an all-too-familiar misreading of history: The defense of Southeast Asia had nowhere near the importance of the eastern Mediterranean for the United States and its European allies.