An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  Jagan’s selection as prime minister in September, after his party won majority control of a legislative council, gave Kennedy little choice but to try to work with him. In late October, he agreed to receive Jagan at the White House during a trip to America to ask economic assistance. Though Jagan struck a number of responsive chords with Kennedy, he came across as an unreliable romantic who Kennedy believed would eventually suspend constitutional democracy and “cut his opposition off at the knees.” Kennedy refused to give him a relatively large aid package but did agree to some help in the belief that support would reduce the chances of his going communist from 90 percent to 50 percent. To guard against that eventuality, Kennedy approved a covert program aimed at destroying communist influence in the country. But the watchword was caution: The covert program was to “be handled with the utmost discretion and probably confined at the start to intelligence collection.” A wait-and-see attitude would parallel efforts to work “against pro-Communist developments by building up anti-Communist clandestine capabilities.” It was, considering the pressure Kennedy was under, a restrained effort, and would remain so. That would not be the case—tragically—in the next place to which Kennedy turned his attention. That place had only a limited hold on the public’s imagination in 1961, but before long millions of Americans would know about South Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 13

  Reluctant Warrior

  Let us pray . . . that there will be no veterans of any further war—not because all shall have perished but because all shall have learned to live together in peace.

  — John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Arlington National Cemetery, November 11, 1961

  IN 1961, it was unimaginable to Kennedy that within a decade and a half Vietnam would become the locale where more American troops died than in any other foreign conflict except World War II. Nor could he have dreamed that U.S. air forces would drop more than twice the tonnage of bombs used between 1941 and 1945 against Germany, Italy, and Japan in the struggle to contain communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

  If South Vietnam, with its apparently cooperative government, seemed to offer an opportunity to defeat communism in developing nations, it also, as Ros Gilpatric recalled, was a blank slate on which America could write anything it liked. In the many hours of discussion about Vietnam, there would be ample emphasis on South Vietnamese failings, limited U.S. resources in a world crying out for American commitments, and U.S. public reluctance to sacrifice blood and treasure in a place of questionable value to the national security. Some asked: Were not worries about Europe, Latin America, and Africa enough without making Southeast Asia a high priority? But the principal planners assigned to consider the problem of Laos and Vietnam—General Maxwell Taylor, Walt W. Rostow, Robert Komer, and U. Alexis Johnson—were “tasked,” in the language of the day, to come up with a workable design to save Southeast Asia from communism. Confessions of inadequacy, declarations of incapacity to meet the challenge, were simply not acceptable responses. Public servants of the most powerful country in history, men speaking for a nation with almost unimaginable resources, were never going to conclude that this was too complicated or too demanding a job to get done.

  It was as if Vietnam had no past to provide a cautionary tale for any nation trying to shape its destiny. But of course there was a history, a story of unrelenting struggle against centuries of Chinese control, followed by a hundred years of French rule dating from the 1860s and a period of Japanese occupation during World War II. A fight for independence led by Ho Chi Minh beginning in 1946 had culminated in the 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu over the French and the north-south division. American assumptions that the United States would do better than the French in defeating Vietnamese aspirations for a unified independent country rested on the arrogance of a modern superpower battling a so-called backward people. Henry Kissinger had it right, but late, when in 1979 he puzzled over the succession of outsiders (including himself) who had mistakenly entered “that distant monochromatic land” in the name of some principle or other “only to recede in disillusion.”

  Despite Kennedy’s publicly expressed doubts in the 1950s about Western efforts to thwart Vietnamese self-determination, Cold War imperatives, including an Eisenhower domino theory predicting communist control of all Southeast Asia following a South Vietnamese collapse, moved him to continue Eisenhower’s policy of trying to defeat a North Vietnamese takeover of the South. Kennedy had instructed Gilpatric to draft a plan for Saigon’s survival and sent Johnson to bolster South Vietnamese president Diem’s morale and promise more aid. Although there was some discussion of sending U.S. troops to prevent a communist victory, no one, including Johnson, Rusk, and the National Security Council officials responsible for Vietnam planning, recommended it in 1961. Ted Sorensen came closest to Kennedy’s thinking in an April 28 memo declaring, “There is no clearer example of a country that cannot be saved unless it saves itself—through increased popular support; governmental, economic and military reforms and reorganizations; and the encouragement of new political leaders.”

  It was also crystal clear that Kennedy had no immediate intention to allow the country or the region to become an acknowledged battleground for American forces. Acknowledged was key: In March 1961, U.S. war planes were ordered to destroy “hostile aircraft” over South Vietnam, but any such action was to be held as a closely guarded secret. (In the event of U.S. aircraft losses, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group [MAAG] in Saigon planned to describe them as the result of an accident during a “routine operational flight.”) Kennedy wanted to keep such U.S. military actions secret to avoid complaints both that Washington was violating international agreements and that it was provoking expanded communist aid to the Viet Cong. But at the end of May, Rostow, speaking for the State Department’s policy planning council, warned Kennedy that conditions in Vietnam were endangering world peace and that the administration needed to publicly deflate the crisis. “If it comes to an open battle,” Rostow predicted, “the inhibitions on our going in will be less than in Laos; but the challenge to Russia and China will be even greater.”

  Rostow had hoped that the president would speak with Khrushchev in Vienna about Vietnam as another of the trouble spots that could trigger a Soviet-American confrontation. But Kennedy had scarcely mentioned Vietnam to Khrushchev in Vienna. It was not that he was indifferent to America’s stake in Vietnam: Indeed, he was eager to honor promises of increased aid, and before going to Europe he had assured Saigon’s foreign minister that he intended to increase the size of MAAG, even though this meant violating the 1954 Geneva Accords. However, limited appropriations for foreign military aid and Diem’s resistance to pressure for economic and political reforms had sidetracked these commitments.

  Nevertheless, throughout the summer of 1961, while the Berlin crisis commanded most of the president’s attention, planning for increased aid to Vietnam went forward. Kennedy authorized a Special Financial Group under the direction of Eugene A. Staley, a Stanford economist, to work with Saigon in developing means to fund South Vietnamese military, social, and economic programs.

  Kennedy was reluctant to go beyond economic aid. In a White House meeting on Southeast Asia at the end of July, he responded skeptically to proposals for U.S. military intervention in southern Laos. 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.” Some of Kennedy’s advisers “urged that with a proper plan, with outside support, and above all with a clear and open American commitment, the results would be very different from anything that had happened before. But the President remarked that General de Gaulle, out of painful French experience, had spoken with feeling of the difficulty of fighting in that part of the world.”

  After the meeting, Rostow sent Kennedy a memo summarizing his and General Taylor’s understanding that “you would wish to see every avenue of diplomacy exhausted before we accept the necessity for either positioning U.
S. forces on the Southeast Asian mainland or fighting there; you would wish to see the possibilities of economic assistance fully exploited to strengthen the Southeast Asian position; you would wish to see indigenous forces used to the maximum if fighting should occur; and that, should we have to fight, we should use air and sea power to the maximum and engage minimum U.S. forces on the Southeast Asian mainland.” As a prelude to any direct involvement in Vietnam, Kennedy wanted to focus world attention on North Vietnamese aggression against Laos and Saigon. Still smarting over the embarrassment to Washington from the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy believed it essential to prepare public opinion to accept possible U.S. intervention—“otherwise any military action we might take against Northern Vietnam will seem like aggression on our part.” Kennedy’s basic message to his advisers was that U.S. military involvement was to be a last resort.

  In early August, Kennedy sent Diem a letter largely agreeing to the program of support worked out between Staley and the South Vietnamese. He promised to finance the expansion of Diem’s army from 170,000 to 200,000 men, but only on the condition that Saigon had an effective plan for fighting Viet Cong subversion. Kennedy emphasized that U.S. aid was “specifically conditioned upon Vietnamese performance with respect to particular needed reforms.” Indeed, most of Kennedy’s letter focused not on U.S. military aid but on Vietnamese financial and social reforms that “will be most effective to strengthen the vital ties of loyalty between the people of Free Viet-Nam and their government.” In this, he was returning to the argument he had made to the French in the fifties: Stable Vietnamese ties to the West depended on popular self-government. But Diem was proving as resistant to the argument as Paris had been. The South Vietnamese ruler felt that repression of dissenting opinion would save his political future better than democratization. In sticking with Diem, the administration was implicitly admitting that it saw no viable alternative.

  The receding problems over Berlin, joined to the conviction that Laos—headed by an even less reliable ally than Diem—would be a poor place to take a military stand against communist aggression, had moved Kennedy to give Vietnam greater attention. And so, in his U.N. speech at the end of September, when he had reported to the assembly “on two threats to peace,” Vietnam had come first and Germany and Berlin second. “The first threat on which I wish to report,” he said, “is widely misunderstood: the smoldering coals of war in Southeast Asia.” These were not “wars of liberation” but acts of aggression against “free countries living under their own governments.”

  Kennedy’s remarks at the U.N. had been a response to reports that the end of the rainy season in October would bring a major assault on South Vietnam by communist infiltrators from the North. On September 15, Rostow had advised Kennedy of Diem’s belief that Hanoi was about to shift from guerrilla attacks to “open warfare.” Three days later, in response to a query from Kennedy about “guerrilla infiltration routes through Laos into South Vietnam,” Taylor had reported a two-year increase in Viet Cong forces from twenty-five hundred to fifteen thousand, most of which had come from outside the country. In his U.N. address, Kennedy had asked “whether measures can be devised to protect the small and the weak from such tactics. For if they are successful in Laos and South Viet Nam,” he declared, “the gates will be opened wide.”

  The pressure on Kennedy to do something about Vietnam now reached new levels. Before his Bobby-engineered ouster, Bowles had told Rusk on October 5 that an agreement on Laos would not reverse America’s steadily more precarious position throughout Southeast Asia, where it faced “a deteriorating military situation in Vietnam and a highly volatile political position in Thailand.” Diem’s government, which lacked “an effective political base,” was growing weaker, putting the communists “in a position to rapidly increase their military pressure with every prospect for success.” Was the answer U.S. military intervention? Not surprisingly, Bowles had thought not: “A direct military response to increased Communist pressure,” he had said, “has the supreme disadvantage of involving our prestige and power in a remote area under the most adverse circumstances.”

  The journalist Theodore White, whose skeptical writings about Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists during and after World War II had made him famous, sent the president a similar message. On October 11, after returning from a trip to Asia, he wrote Kennedy that “any investment of our troops in the paddies of the [South Vietnamese] delta will, I believe, be useless—or worse. The presence of white American troops will feed the race hatred of the Viet-Namese.” He thought the U.S. would be forced into a guerrilla war that could not be won. “This South Viet-Nam thing 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.”

  But most of Kennedy’s advisers thought otherwise. In a paper titled “Concept for Intervention in Viet-Nam,” U.S. military and State Department officials recommended “the use of SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] (primarily U.S.) Forces ‘to arrest and hopefully to reverse the deteriorating situation’ in Vietnam.” A force of between 22,800 and 40,000 men would be needed, it said, and if the North Vietnamese and Chinese intervened, that might have to increase to four divisions.

  Although he did not openly dismiss the proposal, Kennedy was quite skeptical of military commitments that could become open-ended. At a White House meeting on October 11, he instructed Taylor, Rostow, Lansdale, and several other military and diplomatic officials to visit Vietnam. Kennedy made clear to Taylor that he preferred alternatives to sending American forces. He was willing to send a token contingent that would establish “a U.S. ‘Presence’ in Vietnam,” but he wanted discussions in Saigon to focus on providing more assistance rather than U.S. combat troops. To reduce press speculation that the mission was a prelude to committing American forces, Kennedy considered announcing it as an “economic survey.” At a press conference later that day, Kennedy described the mission as seeking “ways in which we can perhaps better assist the Government of Viet-Nam in meeting this threat to its independence.” But despite his hopes, the press now speculated that Kennedy was preparing to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, Thailand, or Laos.

  Though he did not characterize the mission as limited to economic concerns, Kennedy responded to press reports of possible U.S. military intervention by telling the New York Times off the record that American military chiefs were reluctant to send U.S. troops and that they intended instead to rely on local forces assisted by U.S. advisers. At the same time, Rusk told Budget Director Dave Bell that “Vietnam can be critical and we would like to throw in resources rather than people if we can.” General Lyman Lemnitzer cabled Admiral Harry Felt, the commander of U.S. Pacific forces, that the increase in press reports about sending combat troops was troubling the president; he wanted the Saigon discussions to consider the use of American forces, but only if it were “absolutely essential.” Felt agreed: The introduction of U.S. troops into Vietnam, he said, could identify America with neocolonialism, provoke a communist reaction, and involve it in extended combat.

  The Taylor-Rostow mission, which lasted from October 17 to November 2, produced a blizzard of paper on Vietnam. With rumors flying about what Taylor would recommend, Kennedy instructed him not to discuss his conclusions, “especially those relating to U.S. forces.” Kennedy was eager to prevent leaks about military actions that he did not want to take.

  TAYLOR’S FIFTY-FIVE-PAGE REPORT to the president, which represented the collective judgment of mission members from the State and Defense Departments, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and the intelligence division of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), emphasized the need for an emergency program promptly implemented, including retaliation against North Vietnam if it refused to halt its aggression against the South. Taylor and his colleagues believed that more was at stake here than Vietnam—namely
, the larger question of “Khrushchev’s ‘wars of liberation’,” or “para-wars of guerrilla aggression. This is a new and dangerous Communist technique which bypasses our traditional political and military responses,” Taylor said. But the U.S. was anything but helpless in the face of this new kind of warfare. “We have many assets in this part of the world,” Taylor declared, “which, if properly combined and appropriately supported, offer high odds for ultimate success.”

  The Taylor group recommended that the United States expand its role in Vietnam from advisory to a “limited partnership.” U.S. representatives needed to “participate actively” in Saigon’s economic, political, and military operations. “Only the Vietnamese could defeat the Viet Cong; but at all levels Americans must, as friends and partners—not as arm’s-length advisors—show them how the job might be done—not tell them or do it for them.” Most telling, Taylor’s report recommended introducing a military task force of six to eight thousand men, split between combat and logistical troops operating under U.S. control, in order to raise South Vietnamese morale, give logistical support to South Vietnamese forces, “conduct such combat operations as are necessary for self-defense,” and “provide an emergency reserve to back up the Armed forces of the GVN [Government of Vietnam] in the case of a heightened military crisis.” The American troops could be dispatched under the fiction of helping the Vietnamese recover from a massive flood in the Mekong Delta.