Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

  For all these doubts, it was clear to Kennedy that he could not abandon Vietnam or effectively refute assertions about its importance to the United States. It might be that no one knew what to do about South Vietnam, but letting the communists in Hanoi seize it did not seem like an acceptable option. On May 3, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric sent Kennedy an interdepartmental task force proposal urging consideration of a defensive alliance, including stationing U.S. forces in Vietnam. Speaking for the Joint Chiefs and a larger body of American opinion, which after other communist gains in Europe and Asia saw Vietnam as a line in the sand, Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer asked: “Does the U.S. intend to take the necessary military action now to defeat the Viet Cong threat or do we intend to quibble for weeks and months over details of general policy, finances, Vietnamese Govt organization, etc., while Vietnam slowly but surely goes down the drain of Communism?”

  For all Kennedy’s skepticism about involvement in a jungle war that could provoke cries of U.S. imperialism, he also saw Vietnam as a testing ground the United States could not ignore: It fit Khrushchev’s description in a January 1961 speech of a war of national liberation, which, if successful, could become a model for other Third World communist insurgencies. Kennedy wanted to discourage the belief that the United States could not defeat these guerrilla movements or that the will and means was lacking to promote democratic freedoms and prosperity, if necessary by military might, but principally by cooperative initiatives of the kind proposed in the Alliance for Progress.

  A Johnson trip to Asia from May 9 to May 24 was meant to signal Kennedy’s determination to hold the line in the region against communist advance. There is no record of a conversation between Kennedy and Johnson preceding the trip, but based on Johnson’s behavior in the seven countries he visited—Laos, South Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and Pakistan—it is hard to believe that Kennedy did not give him marching orders to draw all possible attention to his presence in these East-West contested nations or at least did not counsel him against typical high-visibility Johnson pronouncements and actions.

  It is clear that Kennedy wanted to give a rudderless, energetic vice president something to fill his time and get him out of Washington, where his frustration at being a fifth wheel was evident to White House observers. As Kennedy told Florida senator George Smathers, an old friend with whom he could speak openly, Johnson was something of an eyesore: He came to cabinet meetings, said nothing, and sat looking forlorn and rejected—a sad child excluded from the circle of most popular teenage boys and girls. When Smathers urged Kennedy to send Johnson abroad to visit countries where he could become the center of attention and “all of the smoke-blowing will be directed at him,” Kennedy called it “a damn good idea.”

  Kennedy didn’t need to urge Johnson to draw attention to himself. LBJ had a lifelong affinity for center stage, including outlandish actions that were familiar Washington gossip and a source of much amusement. During his time in the House, visitors to his office described how he would keep a conversation going while he urinated in a sink screened off behind his desk. Or when he was Senate majority leader, how he would engage in recreational sex in what he called his nookie room.

  In Vietnam, where a motorcade from the airport turned into a campaign-style event, Johnson repeatedly stopped his limo to shake hands with obedient onlookers directed by the government to give the American a warm reception. Handing out pens, cigarette lighters, and visitors’ passes for the U.S. Senate gallery, Johnson told bewildered Vietnamese recipients to come see American democracy at work. In a passionate, arm-waving speech in the center of Saigon, before many who knew no English, he praised Diem as the Winston Churchill of Asia, suggesting that the South Vietnamese president was filling the role of a savior against totalitarian communism just as Churchill had saved Europe from Nazism. A photo op in a pasture with a herd of Texas-bred cattle followed by a press conference in his hotel room, where he un-self-consciously changed clothes in front of reporters, were meant to demonstrate that Americans were not haughty imperialists but plain good folks who wanted nothing more for their Vietnamese cousins than the chance to enjoy traditional American freedoms.

  Clearly, more was at work here than just a feel-good trip for Johnson. Kenneth Young, the American ambassador in Bangkok, Thailand, saw Johnson’s tour as a “timely and gallant enterprise of purpose [that] accomplished the missions originally conceived in Washington. He reached the politicos, the administrators, and the people. Saigon, Manila, Taipei, and Bangkok will never be quite the same again, for a new chapter has opened in US relations with Southeast Asia. The friendship and sincerity of the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson were felt and returned. They came, saw, and won over.”

  Yet as Johnson told Kennedy in a written report that was promptly leaked to both American and Vietnamese journalists, this was an administration that understood the dangers in Southeast Asia and how to combat them. Johnson warned that “the battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination . . . or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores.” Unless America exercised an “inhibitory influence . . . the vast Pacific becomes a Red Sea.” If so stark a description wasn’t enough to scare anyone who read it, Johnson added, “The decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept.” No one reading Johnson’s report could doubt that the Kennedy administration was determined to save Vietnam. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was declaring that he could not be accused of appeasing the communists.

  Yet alongside so stark a description of the red menace, Johnson’s recommendations—reflecting Kennedy’s caution about unwanted and unproductive commitments—were distinctly restrained. Johnson saw “an obsessive concern with security on the part of many of our mission people.” He discounted it by saying that “occasional murders in Rock Creek Park . . . do not mean that the United States is about to fall apart.” He stressed that “a mere increase in the level of military aid on our part to Vietnam will not necessarily solve the difficulty. . . . There must be a simultaneous, vigorous and integrated attack on the economic, social and other ills of the Vietnamese peoples. The leadership and initiative in this attack must rest with the Vietnamese leaders.” Above all, Johnson saw a need for stronger “democratic institutions in Vietnam.” America’s “mission people” in Saigon “must by . . . subtle persuasion encourage the Saigon Government from the President down to get close to the people, to mingle with them, to listen for their grievances and to act upon them.”

  Under prodding from the White House, Johnson offered unqualified advice against a substantial U.S. military effort in South Vietnam’s conflict: “Barring an unmistakable and massive invasion of South Vietnam from without,” he declared, “we have no intention of employing combat U.S. forces in Viet Nam or using even naval or air-support which is but the first step in that direction. If the Vietnamese government backed by a three-year liberal aid program cannot do this job, then we had better remember the experience of the French who wound up with several hundred thousand men in Vietnam and were still unable to do it. . . . Before we take any such plunge we had better be sure we are prepared to become bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength.”

  Would that Johnson had listened to his own counsel beginning in 1965. But when some in the American press criticized him for his flamboyance and public overstatements about Diem during his 1961 trip, Johnson complained that he was only acting “under orders.” He told aides, “Hell, they don’t even know I took a marked deck out there with me.” He prided himself on being a team player, never publicly taking issue with Kennedy and always showing the flag for the administration.
In the long run, the lasting effect of the trip would be much more on Johnson than Diem. Whatever his words about recalling French failure and avoiding military involvement, Johnson returned home with a sense of commitment to Vietnam that would only reveal itself in years to come.

  Walt Rostow didn’t wait until 1965 to ignore Johnson’s warnings about overcommitting ourselves to the fight in Vietnam. At the end of May 1961, after Johnson reported his findings, Rostow told Kennedy that Vietnam was endangering world peace and that the United States needed to deflate that crisis. He wasn’t ready to recommend direct U.S. military involvement, or he at least understood that Kennedy wasn’t yet receptive to any such recommendation. So instead he urged Kennedy to build Diem’s strength and encourage the international community to recognize Hanoi’s assault on the South. Rostow also advised Kennedy to press Khrushchev to rein in his surrogates in Vietnam, as he seemed agreeable to doing in Laos. Rostow’s advice resonated with Kennedy as a way to defuse a volatile situation that could generate demands for U.S. military action. In the meantime, Kennedy told Rusk that he was very anxious to implement the promises that Johnson had made during his recent trip to Vietnam.

  Despite Kennedy’s directive, Diem complained that the United States was not fulfilling its commitments. Kennedy’s aides warned of a collapse without some kind of prompt action. During a mid-June meeting with South Vietnam’s visiting secretary of state, Kennedy promised to increase the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam but warned against any public discussion of his decision as likely to provoke protests that he was violating commitments made at an international conference on Vietnam in 1954 to limit U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. He also feared that press notices about expanded U.S. support for a collapsing Vietnam would trigger conservative demands in Congress and the press for more decisive action to save Diem’s regime.

  As it was, White House and Pentagon pressure for a more aggressive response to the Vietnam crisis was more than Kennedy wanted. When the deputy director of a Vietnam task force told Rostow about a plan that worked in British Malaya for sweeping Vietnam clean of communist guerrillas, Rostow “jumped to his feet” and said, “This is the first time I have heard a practical suggestion as to how we should carry out our operations in Viet-Nam.” To make any such operation work, Diem wanted U.S. financing for an additional hundred thousand South Vietnamese troops. Kennedy remained skeptical about the effectiveness of such an offensive and was loath to ask Congress for the money—not only because he feared that Vietnam might become an open-ended drain on the U.S. Treasury, but also because it could touch off a public debate about involvement in that country’s conflict. On July 3, Kennedy held off Diem by instructing the Pentagon to send a qualified military team to Vietnam to study his request. Still hoping that Diem could find an alternative to a wider civil war, Kennedy urged him to get on with the economic, political, and social reforms that Kennedy said would nourish the aspirations of the Vietnamese and boost Diem’s popularity.

  With the Cuban failure still casting a shadow over Kennedy’s competence, he was eager to keep Vietnam from erupting into a public dispute that could add to a sense of national drift. By May, only four months into his presidency, he was downcast about his performance and his advisers’ ability to help him achieve big things. When asked in an off-the-record discussion if he was “disappointed or frustrated in . . . luring the kind of men you want in your administration,” he replied: “It is frustrating. . . . It is hard to get people, and we have had some turndowns on some good men who I think could have been better off in the government.” Or at least his administration would have been better served if they had come on board. The immediate task he and Bobby now saw was to find ways to rekindle the excitement and optimism that had been so evident at the start of his term.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Roughest Thing in My Life”

  During his first months in office, foreign challenges had tested Kennedy’s skills as a political leader, but so had civil rights disputes. On one occasion, when these problems became too exasperating, Bobby said to his brother, “Ah, Jack, let’s go start our own country.” The levity provided only momentary relief from the unrelenting demands of governing.

  America’s long history of racial divisions and a Congress dominated by southerners determined to resist pressures for change made civil rights a losing struggle for the most adroit president. Yet after so long a battle for equal justice, civil rights advocates were in no mood to settle for anything less than demonstrable progress. And in Kennedy, they saw someone who impressed them as less than fully committed to their cause. Martin Luther King complained that Kennedy was intent on no more than “token integration.” He thought that the president lacked the “moral passion” to fight for equal rights. Expectations of executive action, including pressure on Congress to outlaw segregation, were being disappointed. Kennedy was a “quick talking double dealing” politician, one rights leader said. Bayard Rustin of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) believed that Kennedy would only react to pressure. “Anything we got out of Kennedy” would be the product of “political necessity, and not out of the spirit of John Kennedy. He was a reactor.” A black official at the Democratic National Committee warned the White House that its timidity on civil rights was allowing the president’s political enemies “to charge him with inaction in a very vital area.”

  Kennedy hoped that the Justice Department might have some suggestions for actions that could advance the cause of equal rights without congressional action. But Burke Marshall in the Civil Rights Division offered little help. He saw distinct limits to what the federal government could do to compel southern state and local officials to promote desegregation and ensure blacks equal access to the ballot box.

  An executive order increasing the powers of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) became the administration’s principal vehicle for meeting black demands. Lyndon Johnson’s chairmanship of the committee, however, raised doubts among civil rights leaders that much would come of its charge to compel businesses with government contracts to hire more blacks. As a former Texas senator, Johnson seemed unlikely to press very hard for any kind of integration. Given that 15.5 million people were employed by government-financed businesses, the White House hoped that the CEEO could advance the economic well-being of African Americans. But Johnson, who genuinely wanted to make the committee an effective instrument of black gains, was nonetheless reluctant to pressure southern businessmen or corporations with factories and offices in the South into unwanted social actions. To assure southerners that the federal government would not compel them to act against their accepted norms, Johnson declared “this is not a persecuting committee or prosecuting committee.” He hoped that “volunteerism,” which was called “Plans for Progress” and relied on business establishments to initiate nonmandated reforms, would bring some results.

  Robert Troutman, an Atlanta attorney and friend of the president, who was put in charge of implementing “Plans,” echoed Johnson’s determination not to threaten or bully anyone. Troutman announced that the CEEO would not be “a policeman with a nightstick chasing down alleged malefactors.” It was a formula for no progress: By the summer of 1961 the New York Times saw little evidence of increased black employment. It incensed Bobby Kennedy, who served not only as his brother’s principal adviser but also as his enforcer—the man everyone had to answer to if they fell short of the president’s expectations. And Johnson, whom Bobby already disliked, became the object of Bobby’s anger over public criticism of the CEEO’s lackluster performance. Johnson’s defense of his efforts provoked Bobby to attack him at a committee meeting as insincere and incompetent. Privately, Bobby said that Johnson “lies all the time. . . . In every conversation I have with him, he lies.”

  The White House came in for additional criticism when it failed to back up a promise to desegregate interstate travel. In May, when an integrated group of CORE members tested the administration’s commitment by traveling on interst
ate buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, the Freedom Riders, as they called themselves, were physically attacked in Alabama. Kennedy pressed Harris Wofford to get his “goddamned friends off those buses.” Although the CORE riders gave up the trip, student activists from Nashville, Tennessee, took up the challenge. When the Birmingham, Alabama, police arrested them, Bobby Kennedy stepped in to arrange their release and facilitate their trip to New Orleans. His actions angered southerners but won the administration little credit with rights activists who saw the Kennedy initiative as a belated and token attempt to fulfill the administration’s promise. After the riders reached Montgomery, Alabama, a mob attacked them and Bobby had to send federal marshals to save them and King, who had come to speak at a black church in support of the riders.

  When riots erupted, Bobby publicly asked rights activists for a “cooling off” period. It provoked ridicule from them. They complained that “Negroes have been cooling off for a hundred years,” and would be “in a deep freeze if they cooled any further.” The conflict now petered out, but it enraged southern segregationists against the administration and deepened suspicions of civil rights backers that the administration had little resolve to overcome historic wrongs.

  To refute civil rights critics and disarm segregationist obstructionism, Bobby Kennedy went to Athens, Georgia, in May to give a speech at the University of Georgia. He felt as if he were entering the lion’s den and his hands trembled as he turned pages of his speech. Clearly speaking for the White House, he emphasized the administration’s determination to back equal rights for all Americans. To counter segregationist resistance, he explained that they were essential in the struggle against international communism, which continually scored points with people of color by pointing to America’s enduring tradition of racism. He warned that acts of violence by segregationists “hurt our country in the eyes of the world.” His display of courage by speaking so forthrightly moved the sixteen hundred people in his audience to warmly applaud him. King sent him a telegram of praise, but the good effects were dissipated four days later when the White House announced that it would not press Congress for a major civil rights bill. Roy Wilkins, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), compared the administration’s behavior to giving blacks “a cactus bouquet.”