The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (130 page)

For the president, much of the discussion had a tiresome familiarity. In 1954, three years after Kennedy had visited Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem had become the first postcolonial leader of South Vietnam. Conservative Catholic Americans felt a special affinity for the prime minister. A man of the deepest Catholic faith, Diem had lived in the United States in his years of exile. He had spent years at a seminary in New Jersey and was a daily communicant.

One of Kennedy’s seminal insights during his 1951 trip to Asia was how dangerous politics was in much of the world, and how often assassination stalked those who ascended to power. Diem’s own elder brother, a provincial
governor, had been murdered by the Viet Minh. Diem himself had almost been killed in 1962, and the scent of blood was never far from the palace.

Diem was no tailor of democracy who could sew the many peoples of South Vietnam into even a patchwork quilt of a country. Diem trusted few beyond his two brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, his political counselor, and Ngo Dinh Canh, who ran the northern regions. The brothers established the Can Lao Party, a secret society that dominated the country’s economic and political life. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow described it in 1959 as “an authoritarian organization largely modeled on Communist lines.”

After nearly ten years in power, Diem had come around to where he began, a Catholic mandarin isolated not only from his own people but also from the Americans who thought him in part their creation. On July 11, a Buddhist priest immolated himself in front of the Cambodian embassy in Saigon, protesting the repression of his co-religionists and the deaths of eight Buddhist demonstrators who had sought to display the Buddhist flag. This was an act of moral witness that transcended all logic, all the nuances of policy and procedures, and created its own imperative. Diem’s support in Vietnam had been eroding since almost the day he assumed office, but it took this immolation and the Buddhist civil rights protests to make the men in Washington realize that things could not go on this way with Diem, not when men were burning themselves alive and, in a Buddhist land, only Catholics could freely profess their faith and politics.

In August the president scribbled notes to himself for a speech he was to make to a White House seminar. “To govern is to choose,” he wrote, quoting the French leader Pierre Mendes France. That was precisely the nature of presidential power, expressed as succinctly as possible. The implacable riddles of policy reached his desk, issues on which knowledgeable advisers disagreed, decisions fraught with negative side effects. He looked at each matter like an assayer, weighing all the possibilities, observing the subtleties. Knowing the danger that Vietnam represented politically, he would have delightedly willed it to lie dormant until after his reelection. He was trying not to be sucked into the swamp of Vietnam while not abandoning the beleaguered country in such a way that shouts of betrayal and curses of recrimination would sound through the rest of his presidency.

That summer the president apparently suggested to several people, including Larry Newman, a Hyannis Port neighbor, and Dave Powers, that he planned to withdraw from Vietnam after his 1964 reelection. As much as his auditors thought otherwise, this plan hardly presented as flattering a portrait of their hero as they imagined. If true, Kennedy was willing to let American soldiers die needlessly for over a year because the delay would help his campaign. In all likelihood, Kennedy told his neighbor and Powers what flattered
their own desires, and part of his own instincts. The president understood, however, that history can’t be stopped and started at will. Wide and treacherous water may lie between what one hopes to do and what one can do when time and circumstances allow.

Kennedy faced crucial choices
now,
and he faced them as he had all the major decisions in the White House, parsing the issue back and forth half a dozen ways. He took a few tentative steps one way and then back the other. On September 2, Kennedy gave a lengthy interview on the first half-hour-long CBS evening news program. The journalist Walter Cronkite quizzed the president about “the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment.” In full public view, Kennedy walked backward and forward at the same time. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there,” he said. “In the final analysis, it is their war.” This was Kennedy’s philosophical underpinning. In Vietnam as elsewhere, a man who lets others fight for his own liberty often ends up being shackled anew, and the man who fights for him risks becoming not his liberator but his keeper.

Then, after stepping back from involvement, Kennedy moved forward. “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw,” he told the CBS anchor. “That would be a grave mistake…. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.” There was his political underpinning. After all these years, the domino effect was not just a geopolitical theory but a fundamental axiom of American political life. An American leader who lost even a small, distant, corrupt, tortured land to a regime that carried the banner of communism risked losing his own political head as well. This was the President Kennedy who Bobby said in 1964 “felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.”

In October, Kennedy performed the same dance as he had in the CBS interview. In signing on to national security action memorandum no. 263, he agreed to “plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” There was the step backward. But he did so only because Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor had assured him that “the military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought,” and that “by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn.” That was the step forward. By attempting to have it both ways, Kennedy was beginning the Vietnamization of the war long before that term became common currency.

The immediate problem was Diem and his brother Nhu, who had proved so ineffectual at leading their war-torn nation. And here too Kennedy walked in both directions. In this crisis, Kennedy did not have many advisers who made articulate, spirited presentations based on the knowledge of their agency or institution. Instead, he was overseeing a petty, preening bureaucratic warfare in which egos and personal ambitions outweighed the crucial issues that his administration faced. He had sent Henry Cabot Lodge as ambassador to Vietnam, hoping that the former senator would show the acumen of a professional politician. Instead, Nixon’s vice presidential running mate became so alienated from the American military that he hardly spoke to them and secretly backstabbed his colleagues in Vietnam. Lodge had a savage realism when he talked of Diem, speaking a language rare to diplomatic discourse. “Viet-Nam is not a thoroughly strong police state (much as the ‘family’ would like to make it one),” he cabled Washington on October 26, “because, unlike Hitler’s Germany, it is not efficient and it has in the Viet Cong a large and well-organized underground opponent strongly and ever-freshly motivated by vigorous hatred. And its numbers never diminish.”

Lodge made sure that his own stories got into American papers, but he was appalled at the way Diem, and especially his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, gnawed publicly at the hand that fed them. “The United States can get along with corrupt dictators who manage to stay out of the newspapers,” Lodge wrote later. “But an inefficient Hitlerism, the leaders of which make fantastic statements to the press, is the hardest thing on earth for the U.S. Government to support.”

Lodge called for a coup, as did several of his colleagues at the State Department, including Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman. CIA Director McCone would probably have supported the move as well, but in Bobby’s words, “McCone hated Henry Cabot Lodge, and so he became an ally of McNamara,” who opposed the coup. In essence, the government was split into two unlikely divisions: the State Department favoring the coup, and the CIA and the military leadership opposing it. Those who favored the coup, like Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, tried to convince the president that the die had been cast and Kennedy had no choice but to go along. On August 28, Hilsman told the president that “Diem and Nhu were undoubtedly aware that coup plotting was going on and that the generals probably now had no alternative to going ahead except that of fleeing the country.” Kennedy, for his part, said he “was not sure that we were in that deep.”

Kennedy was infuriated that he was losing the control of government, and he suspected Harriman of leaking stories of this schism. “You’d better get Averell in, for Christ sake,” Kennedy told Undersecretary George Ball.
“The fact of the matter is that Averell was wrong on the coup. We fucked that up. Even though it may have been desirable, so that the Pentagon can go on saying the State Department fucked it up, got us into a lot of trouble, so I think there’s nobody in the position to be pointing the finger at anybody else.”

On October 29, Lodge told the White House that a coup was in place, to be led by dissident generals, and that the United States should do nothing to prevent it. That day in the counsels of government, Kennedy and his associates discussed a possible coup with the hard-edged logic of those serving an imperial power. No one uttered any bromides about trying to help their Asian brothers find the true light of democracy. Nor did they trouble themselves over the question of whether there was a capable leader to replace Diem. Instead, they counted potential coup leaders and their troops, tallying up who would stand with Diem and who would stand against him. “The key units come out about an even match,” William Colby, the CIA’s former Saigon bureau chief, told the president and his other advisers at the Ex Comm meeting that afternoon. “There’s enough, in other words, to have a good fight on both sides.”

“So he [Diem] has sufficient forces to protect himself?” Bobby asked, only half a question. What these men were talking about could easily escalate into a civil war, brother against brother, while the Viet Cong stood by as happy spectators.

“The difficulty is, I’m sure that’s the way it is with every coup, it always looks balanced until somebody acts,” the president said a few minutes later, lighting the tedious discourse with a flash of insight. Kennedy’s overwhelming concern, as he expressed it here and in a subsequent meeting, was whether the coup would succeed, not whether his nation should be promoting or acquiescing in such an action, or whether it would change the dynamics in South Vietnam for the better.

For the most part, this room was full of men acting as technocrats of power, tinkering with formulas, moving their pieces back and forth across their chessboard without seeming to realize that each piece represented a real human being. As they discussed a cable giving Lodge further instructions, Bobby’s voice rose above the banal talk about tank battalions and paratroopers to say something that struck hard and true.

“I may be in a minority, but I just don’t see that this makes any sense, Mr. President,” Bobby said, employing the same deferential formality as the rest of the officials, but speaking with forceful candor. “What we are doing really is we’re putting the whole future of the country, and Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody [General Tran Van Don] we really don’t know very well. One official of the United States government has had contact with him,
and he in turn has lined up some others. It’s clear that Diem is a fighter. He’s not just going to get out of there. If it’s a failure, Diem is going to tell us to get the hell out of the country. He’s going to capture these people. They’re going to say the United States is behind it. I would think we’re just going down the road to disaster. I think this cablegram sounds as if we’re willing to go along with the coup but we think we need a little more information.”

T
he first of November is La fete des morts, the Day of the Dead, or All Saints’ Day. It also happened to be the thirty-sixth birthday of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, a senior naval officer loyal to Diem. At around noon his deputy came by his house in Saigon and got him to leave his children to go to a seaside restaurant for a birthday luncheon. On the drive through the suburbs of Saigon, the deputy shot and killed the captain.

Soon afterward the dissident generals ordered their troops to seize police and naval headquarters, radio stations, and the post office, and to surround Gia Long Palace. The generals took one of their prisoners, Colonel Le Van Tung, head of the notorious Special Forces, and had him telephone Diem to tell him to surrender. The Vietnamese leader refused to give up, and after the phone call Tung and his brother were led away and killed.

In the middle of the night the insurgents attacked the palace. By dawn the battle was over, but Diem and Nhu had escaped to the Chinese quarters of Chalon. Diem probably could have fled farther into the countryside and sought to rally his own loyalist troops, but he decided instead to surrender. He called General Don and told him that he was prepared to surrender to his troops with “military honors.” He said to those who were harboring him that he did not care whether he lived or died. But he knew these generals as his lifelong colleagues, and he surely expected that they would treat him better than if he had the terrible misfortune of falling into the hands of his Communist enemies.

General Don was not a bloodthirsty avenger. He and his colleagues asked the CIA’s Lucien Conein for a plane to fly Diem out of the country, and Conein said that it would take twenty-four hours for a plane to fly from Guam that could carry the former president to exile in Europe. A man could die many times in twenty-four hours. It was not that the Americans wanted Diem to die, but they did not care if he lived.

In all those endless hours of discussion in the White House, no one had ever raised the question of Diem’s fate in a successful coup. A top-secret October 25 State Department “Check-List of Possible U.S. Actions in Case of Coup” mentioned financial inducements to the coup plotters and military
aid, but nothing of what might happen to Diem. This was not an esoteric moral subtlety best left to religious philosophers and college dons, but an essential part of the equation of power. These men had met the South Vietnamese president, and some had spent hours with him. Diem could have been fervently pushed to go into exile on his own and warned that if he did not, all American support would end. Of course, that strategy would have run the risk that Diem would fill the streets of Saigon with the blood of those who dared to oppose him.