JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (36 page)

General Lemnitzer’s next recommendation in “Operation Northwoods” went even more deeply into deception and internal subversion. He urged the Secretary of Defense to support a campaign of terrorism within the United States as a necessary evil in overcoming Communist Cuba:

“4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”
[12]

General Lemnitzer said he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to direct this terrorist campaign that would be blamed on Cuba. He wrote Secretary McNamara that he assumed “a single agency will be given the primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the basic plan.” He recommended “that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
[13]

Lemnitzer submitted his “Operation Northwoods” proposal to McNamara at a meeting on March 13, 1962. There is no record of McNamara’s response.
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However, according to the record of a March 16 White House meeting, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer and other key advisers that he could not foresee any circumstances “that would justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action” in Cuba.
[15]

Although “Operation Northwoods” had been blocked by the president, General Lemnitzer kept pushing on behalf of the Joint Chiefs for a preemptive invasion of Cuba. In an April 10, 1962, memorandum to McNamara, he stated: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future . . . they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime . . . They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action.”
[16]

Kennedy had finally had enough of Lemnitzer. In September 1962 he replaced him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, Lemnitzer was not alone in his beliefs. He claimed that his terrorist “Operation Northwoods” had been backed by the entire Joint Chiefs. Kennedy’s problem was not so much Lemnitzer per se as it was the Cold War mind-set of his government. He had to deal with a block of military and CIA leaders who justified any means whatever of defeating what they saw as the absolute evil of Communism. On the other hand, these men saw President Kennedy’s agreement with Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, his withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Italy, his American University address, the Test Ban Treaty, and his beginning dialogue with Castro, as the initial stages of a Communist victory. They held a dogmatic belief that they thought John Kennedy had forgotten, that there was no alternative to military might when it came to defeating Communism. They thought it was Kennedy, not themselves, who had gone off the deep end. The future of the country was in their hands. For the CIA and the Joint Chiefs, the question was: How could Kennedy’s surrender to the Communists be stopped in time to save America? In their world of victory or defeat, JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam was the last straw.

On the eve of his inauguration, Kennedy had shown his doubts about war in Southeast Asia. When he was given a transitional briefing by President Eisenhower on January 19, 1961, the president-elect asked an unexpected question. It pertained to the rising conflict with Communist forces in Laos, Vietnam’s western neighbor. Which option would Eisenhower prefer, Kennedy asked, a “coalition with the Communists to form a government in Laos or intervening [militarily] through SEATO [the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, to which the U.S. belonged]?”
[17]
Eisenhower was taken aback by his successor’s gall in raising the possibility of a coalition with Communists. He said it would be “far better” to intervene militarily. As his Secretary of State, Christian Herter had already said, any coalition with the Communists would end up with the Communists in control. Even unilateral intervention by U.S. troops was preferable to that. It would be “a last desperate effort to save Laos.”
[18]

Kennedy listened skeptically. He thought he was hearing a prescription for disaster, from a man who in a few hours would no longer have to bear any responsibility for it.

“There he sat,” he told friends later, “telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years.”
[19]

Kennedy knew, on the other hand, that by pursuing the question of a coalition with Communists he was initiating a policy struggle on Southeast Asia in his own administration. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Eisenhower’s support, had already assumed the burden of somehow “saving” Laos and Vietnam. These same men would now become Kennedy’s advisers. Though a Cold Warrior himself, Kennedy was still too critical a thinker not to go ahead and question their consensus, by considering seriously what they felt was a dangerous accommodation with the enemy as preferable to a hopeless war in Asia.

As
The Pentagon Papers
note, Vietnam was of relatively minor importance in 1961, compared to Laos: “Vietnam in 1961 was a peripheral crisis. Even within Southeast Asia it received far less of the Administration’s and the world’s attention than did Laos.”
[20]
For example,
The New York
Times Index for 1961
lists twenty-six columns of items on Laos, but only eight on Vietnam.
[21]
For Kennedy, Laos was a crisis from the beginning, whose settlement would raise the question of Vietnam.

On February 3, 1961, two weeks after he became president, Kennedy met alone with the U.S. ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. The diplomat had a hard time believing his new president’s desire to hear only the truth about Laos. As Brown was explaining the official policy, Kennedy stopped him. He said, “That’s not what I asked you. I said, ‘What do you think,’ you, the Ambassador?”
[22]
Brown opened up. With the president concentrating intently on his words, Brown critiqued the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s endorsement of the anti-communist ruler General Phoumi Nosavan. The autocratic general had risen to power through the CIA’s formation, under the Eisenhower administration, of a Laotian “patriotic organization,” the Committee for the Defense of the National Interest (CDNI).
[23]
Brown told Kennedy frankly that Laos could be united only under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, whose government had been deposed by CIA-Pentagon forces under Eisenhower. JFK questioned Brown extensively about the possibility of a neutral government under Souvanna that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union could all support, if the United States were to change policy.
[24]
Years later, Brown recalled his hour-long conversation with the president on a neutralist Laos as “a very, very moving experience.”
[25]

As Kennedy began to turn toward a neutral Laos, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepped up their pressure for military intervention in support of General Phoumi. Their point was that the Communist Pathet Lao army, supported by the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam, would achieve complete control over Laos unless the United States intervened quickly. Pushed by Cold War dynamics and Pathet Lao advances, Kennedy was tempted yet skeptical.

In a March 9 meeting at the White House, he peppered his National Security Council with questions that exposed contradictions in U.S. policy and pointed the way toward a neutralist Laos. His questioning uncovered the uncomfortable truth that the United States had sent in much more military equipment in the past three months to aid Phoumi Nosavan than the Soviets had in support of the Communist Pathet Lao forces.
[26]
The president then pointed out that it was “a basic problem to us that all the countries who are supposedly our allies favor the same person (Souvanna), as the Communists do.”
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JFK was about to join them. The next day, Kennedy’s Soviet ambassador Llewellyn Thompson told Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow that the United States was now seeking a “neutralization of Laos accomplished by a commission of neutral neighbors.”
[28]
Khrushchev was surprised at Kennedy’s turnaround. He said the new American position differed agreeably from the old one.
[29]

At a March 23 news conference on Laos, Kennedy made his policy change public by stating that the United States “strongly and unreservedly” supported “the goal of a neutral and independent Laos, tied to no outside power or group of powers, threatening no one, and free from any domination.”
[30]
He endorsed the British appeal for a cease-fire between General Phoumi’s army and the neutralist-communist forces arrayed against them. He also joined the British in calling for an international conference on Laos.
[31]

The Russians agreed. Kennedy’s new direction enabled the Russians to come together with the British, the Americans, and eleven other countries in Geneva on May 11 in an effort to resolve the question of Laos.

In the meantime, however, Kennedy was being led to the brink of war. The Communist forces continued to advance in Laos. They seemed to be on their way to total victory before the Geneva Conference even convened. The president was determined not to let them overrun the country. At the same time, as his special counsel Ted Sorensen pointed out, he was unwilling “to provide whatever military backing was necessary to enable the pro-Western forces [of General Phoumi] to prevail. This was in effect the policy he had inherited—and he had also inherited most of the military and intelligence advisers who had formed it.”
[32]
These men kept pressing him to turn back from the neutralist coalition he was pursuing, which they saw as a foolish concession to the Communists. In spite of the president’s turn toward neutralism at his March 23 press conference, on March 30 General Lemnitzer told reporters that the neutralist leader Souvanna Phouma was not to be trusted. While Souvanna might not be a Communist, Lemnitzer said, “he couldn’t be any worse if he were a communist.”
[33]

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs were resisting the president’s new direction. They urged him instead to support Phoumi with U.S. combat troops to halt the Communist offensive before it was too late. Otherwise there would be nothing left to negotiate in Geneva, even in the direction of neutralism. As the crisis deepened in March and April, Kennedy agreed to preparations for a military buildup. However, he emphasized to everyone around him that he had not given a final go-ahead to intervene in Laos.
[34]
Then a series of events convinced him in time that he was being drawn into a trap.

The first was the Bay of Pigs. As we have seen, Kennedy realized that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had set him up at the Bay of Pigs for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, by a scenario designed to fail unless he agreed under overwhelming pressure to send in the troops. When he refused to go along and accepted the defeat, he refocused his attention more critically on Laos. The same CIA and military advisers who had deceived him on Cuba were urging him to intervene in Laos. Moreover, the Joint Chiefs kept revising upward the number of troops they wanted him to deploy there: asking initially for 40,000; raising the number to 60,000 by the end of March; hiking it to 140,000 by the end of April.
[35]
Kennedy began to balk at their scenarios. General Lemnitzer then cabled the president more cautiously from a trip to Laos, recommending a “more limited commitment” there. A suspicious JFK backed away from the entire idea of troops in Laos. As he told Schlesinger at the time, “If it hadn’t been for Cuba, we might be about to intervene in Laos.” Waving Lemnitzer’s cables, he said, “I might have taken this advice seriously.”
[36]

Instead he questioned more sharply his military chiefs, exposing the holes in their thinking. At an April 28 meeting, Admiral Burke said to the president, “Each time you give ground [as he thought JFK was doing in Laos], it is harder to stand next time.” Burke said the U.S. had to be prepared somewhere in Southeast Asia to “throw enough in to win—the works.”
[37]
Army general George H. Decker seconded Burke, saying, “If we go in, we should go in to win, and that means bombing Hanoi, China, and maybe even using nuclear weapons.”
[38]
With his customary insolence toward the president, Air Force general Curtis LeMay told JFK the next day before a room full of national security advisers that he did not know
what
U.S. policy was on Laos. He underlined his disdain by adding that he knew what the president had said, but “the military had been unable to back up the President’s statements.”
[39]
At another meeting, General Lemnitzer provoked deeper questions in Kennedy about the Joint Chiefs by outlining a strategy of unlimited escalation in Southeast Asia, concluding, “If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.”
[40]
The president looked at him, said nothing, and dismissed the meeting. Later he commented, “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory.”
[41]