JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (41 page)

When Rice tried to re-introduce Kennedy’s peaceful initiative into the telegram, Harriman intervened. He again crossed out the de-escalation proposal, then “simply killed the telegram altogether.”
[131]
As a result of Harriman’s obstruction, Galbraith never did receive JFK’s mutual de-escalation proposal to North Vietnam.
[132]

The president continued to remind his aides of the need to move in the direction Galbraith recommended. He told Harriman and the State Department’s Michael Forrestal that, in Forrestal’s words, “He wished us to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement [in Vietnam], recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.”
[133]
JFK then made his own preparations, through his Secretary of Defense, to seize that favorable moment to reverse course in Vietnam.

In the spring of 1962, as Kennedy moved steadily toward a Laotian settlement, he instructed Robert McNamara to initiate a plan to withdraw the U.S. military from Vietnam. The first step was taken by McNamara at a Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) conference on the Vietnam War held in Saigon on May 8, 1962.

When the Saigon conference was almost over, McNamara said there would be a special briefing for a few of his top decision makers. Those he asked to remain in the room included Joint Chiefs chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer, Admiral Harry Felt, General Paul Harkins, Ambassador Frederick Nolting, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top expert on Vietnam, civilian analyst George Allen. It was George Allen who would describe this closed-door meeting in an interview and an unpublished manuscript decades later.
[134]

When the door had shut, McNamara began examining the men on how each thought the United States should respond to an imminent Communist victory in Laos. The question, not on the conference agenda, took them by surprise. Admiral Felt’s response was typical of the group’s big-bang attitude that John Kennedy knew all too well. Felt said they could “launch air strikes immediately, and in forty-eight hours, for example, we could wipe the town of Tchepone right off the face of the map.”
[135]

McNamara pointed out that such an assault could easily provoke nearby North Vietnamese and Chinese forces to counterattack. What then? Should U.S. forces strike the North Vietnamese and Chinese bases, too? And what next? The men remained silent.

By his quick examination the Secretary of Defense had demonstrated the president’s position that the United States had nowhere to go militarily in Laos. The choice they had to make was between the negotiated compromise JFK was seeking (which the military regarded as a sellout to the Communists) and an absurd commitment to wage an ever-escalating war in Laos, North Vietnam, and China.

With the necessity of negotiating a neutral Laos as his preamble, McNamara introduced the military leaders to an even more unthinkable policy—withdrawal from Vietnam. He said, “It is not the job of the U.S. to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.”
[136]
He asked the men in the room when they thought the point would be reached when the South Vietnamese army could take over completely.

George Allen has described the response to this question by the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam. He said, “Harkins’ chin nearly hit the table.”
[137]
General Harkins told McNamara they “had scarcely thought about that.” They had been much too busy, he said, with plans to expand their military structure in South Vietnam “to think about how it might all be dismantled.”
[138]

But that is what McNamara told them they now had to do. They not only had to think about “how it might all be dismantled,” but to prepare a concrete plan to do so. He ordered Harkins, as the commander of MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam], “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.”
[139]
The die was cast.

Thus began President John F. Kennedy’s policy to withdraw U.S. military personnel from Vietnam. As of May 1962, Kennedy simply wanted his generals to draw up a plan for withdrawal. He had not yet reached the point of ordering a withdrawal. But he wanted that concrete option on the table in front of him. His military chiefs were shocked. They thought Kennedy had already surrendered to the Communists in Laos. For the United States to withdraw from Vietnam was unthinkable.

JFK knew the depth of their hostility. The previous fall he had told Galbraith, in reference to the Bay of Pigs and a neutral Laos, “You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year.”
[140]
By McNamara’s order to Harkins, Kennedy was telegraphing a punch to the stomach of his military—withdrawal from Vietnam. He was thereby provoking them to launch a preemptive punch at himself.

JFK tried to override what he knew would be the Pentagon’s resistance to a plan for a Vietnam withdrawal by having his Secretary of Defense introduce the idea as a matter-of-fact order to a small circle of commanders at the Saigon conference. It was a strategy he had used before. Robert McNamara served as Kennedy’s buffer to military heads whose rising anger toward the president gave way to insubordination. When Kennedy told Galbraith in August 1963 that after the election he might replace Rusk with McNamara as his Secretary of State, he said revealingly, “But then if I don’t have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won’t have a foreign policy.”
[141]

However, McNamara had at first agreed with the generals, not the president, on the critical issue of introducing combat troops into Vietnam. And when it came to enforcing the president’s will over the Pentagon’s, McNamara was not always that effective. His order to the generals to draw up a plan to withdraw from Vietnam would take more than a year to come back in a form the president could consider for approval.

On July 23, 1962, the day on which the United States joined thirteen other nations at Geneva in signing the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos,” Robert McNamara convened another Secretary of Defense Conference on the Vietnam War, this one at Camp Smith, Hawaii. McNamara’s May 8 order to General Harkins to submit a plan for withdrawal from Vietnam had been ignored. On July 23, the Defense Secretary repeated the order, directing Harkins once again to lay out a long-range program for the completion of training for the South Vietnamese army, so that U.S. advisers could be withdrawn. McNamara specified what he called a “conservative” three-year time line for the end of U.S. military assistance. He also indicated an early awareness in John Kennedy of what an antiwar movement would demand if the United States did not withdraw.

McNamara said, “We must line up our long range program [for withdrawal] as it may become difficult to retain public support for our operations in Vietnam. The political pressure will build up as U.S. losses continue to occur. In other words, we must assume the worst and make our plans accordingly.”
[142]

“Therefore,” he concluded, “planning must be undertaken now and a program devised to phase out U.S. military involvement.”
[143]

The
Pentagon Papers
note that three days later, on July 26, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally directed the commander in chief of the Pacific to develop such a Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam (CPSVN). The plan’s stated objective reads like an elephant trying to tiptoe through a mine field so as to avoid an explosion into the word “withdrawal.” The Joint Chiefs said the plan’s objective was to “develop a capability within military and para-military forces of the GVN [Government of Vietnam] by the end of Calendar Year 65 that will help the GVN to achieve the strength necessary to exercise permanent and continued sovereignty over that part of Vietnam which lies below the demarcation line [of the 1954 Geneva Agreement, which established no separate “South Vietnam”] without the need for continued U.S. special military assistance.”
[144]
Although the Joint Chiefs refused to identify Kennedy’s plan for withdrawal as what it was,
[145]
the plan had at least begun to move through military channels—like molasses.

In the meantime, Kennedy was making piecemeal concessions to the military on Vietnam. That fall marked one of the worst. On October 2, 1962, he authorized a “limited crop destruction operation” in Phu Yen Province by South Vietnamese helicopters spraying U.S.-furnished herbicides.
[146]
Dean Rusk had argued against the military’s push for crop destruction, saying that even though “the most effective way to hurt the Viet Cong is to deprive them of food,” nevertheless those doing it “will gain the enmity of people whose crops are destroyed and whose
wives and children will either have to stay in place and suffer hunger or become homeless refugees living on the uncertain bounty of a not-too-efficient government.”
[147]
While sensitive to Rusk’s argument, Kennedy had yielded to the pressures of McNamara, Taylor, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and approved a criminal action.

By going along with the military on crop destruction, Kennedy was violating both his conscience and international law. In August he had already approved a separate herbicide
operation whose purpose of defoliation, as recommended by McNamara, was to “deny concealed forward areas, attack positions, and ambush sites to the Viet Cong.”
[148]
However, in his August approval, Kennedy had asked “that every effort be made to avoid accidental destruction of the food crops in the areas to be sprayed.”
[149]

In October, the actual purpose of the program he approved was crop destruction. Why did he do it? According to Michael Forrestal, “I believe his main train of thinking was that you cannot say no to your military advisors all the time.”
[150]

JFK had in fact said yes in 1961 to a policy of widening military support to South Vietnam. The consequences were adding up. By November 1963, there would be a total of 16,500 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. Although they were identified as “advisers,” many were fighting alongside the South Vietnamese troops they were advising. In spite of JFK’s having ruled out U.S. combat units, he was being moved along step by step by his military command toward the brink of just such a commitment.

His order to McNamara, and from McNamara to the generals, to open up the opposite option of withdrawal, was going nowhere. General Harkins continued to drag his heels on a withdrawal plan. A report on McNamara’s next SECDEF conference, held October 8, 1962, in Honolulu, states: “General Harkins did not have time to present his plan for phasing out US personnel in Viet-Nam within 3 years.”
[151]
At this meeting McNamara did not push Harkins, probably because Kennedy did not push McNamara. At the time JFK was preoccupied with reports of Soviet missiles being sent secretly to Cuba, which when confirmed a week later would begin the October 16-28, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis.

However, he did find time in the midst of the crisis to write an important letter to his friend Senator Mike Mansfield, who was becoming more and more critical of JFK’s Vietnam policy. Kennedy asked Mansfield to visit Vietnam and report back to him on what he learned there. It would turn out to be more than the president wanted to hear.

Mike Mansfield was in a unique position to advise Kennedy on Vietnam. When Lyndon Johnson became Vice President, Mansfield succeeded him as Senate Majority Leader, thereby becoming one of the most influential people in Washington. Like John Kennedy, Mansfield had for years taken a special interest in Southeast Asia. He had visited Vietnam three times in the 1950s. He was known as the Senate’s authority on Indochina. Moreover, he had been singularly responsible for convincing the Eisenhower administration to support the rise to power of Ngo Dinh Diem. Mansfield had endorsed Diem as a Vietnamese nationalist independent of both the French and the Viet Minh. The Senator’s support proved so critical to the survival of Diem’s government in the late fifties that Mansfield was known popularly as “Diem’s godfather.”
[152]
Nevertheless, by the fall of 1962, Mansfield had become opposed to the increasing U.S. commitment to a war in support of that same government. His reversal moved JFK to ask him to investigate the situation firsthand.

Mansfield’s December 18, 1962, report was uncomfortable reading for the president. Mansfield wrote that Vietnam, outside its cities, was “run at least at night largely by the Vietcong. The government in Saigon is still seeking acceptance by the ordinary people in large areas of the countryside. Out of fear or indifference or hostility the peasants still withhold acquiescence, let alone approval of that government. In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.”
[153]
While continuing to praise Ngo Dinh Diem, Mansfield questioned the capacity of the Saigon government—under the increasing dominance of Diem’s manipulative brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu—to gain any popular support.