In September, Kennedy sent Taylor to Vietnam for four days to get a clearer picture of what was happening, and more important, to counsel the president on how to turn the war more quickly in a positive direction. Taylor’s trip was essentially an acknowledgment by Kennedy that he had turned Vietnam policy over to McNamara and the military.
For the moment, Kennedy had another priority: a clash with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett over James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran trying to end segregation at the University of Mississippi. “I won’t let that boy get to Ole Miss,” Barnett defiantly told Bobby Kennedy, who, as attorney general, was the administration’s point man in the conflict. “I would rather spend the rest of my life in the penitentiary,” Barnett declared, than enforce Meredith’s court-ordered enrollment. After private conversations with Barnett, in which the governor tacitly agreed to let Meredith enter the university, Kennedy gave a national speech from the Oval Office noting Barnett’s acceptance of the rule of law and assuring Americans that the conflict was about to be peacefully resolved. But as detached as ever from domestic crosscurrents, Kennedy misread Barnett’s willingness to accept federal direction. Barnett saw political advantage in disregarding the president’s public declaration of an agreement and withdrew state troopers from the campus, leaving five hundred federal marshals at the mercy of a segregationist mob trying to bar Meredith from going on campus. It forced Kennedy to send in regular U.S. Army troops, who arrived too late to prevent two deaths and hundreds of injuries, including twenty-seven U.S. marshals wounded by gunfire. New doubts surfaced about the president’s competence, with some journalists saying that Barnett had played Kennedy for a fool. “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” Kennedy moaned. Bobby told his brother, “We are going to have a hell of a problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better.” Their response to the conflict looked to him like “one of the big botches.”
Aside from conversations with Bobby, who had been conferring with associates at the Justice Department, Kennedy had made no effort to convene a group of administration troubleshooters, an executive committee counseling him on how to resolve this crisis with the least destructive consequences for the country and the White House. But unlike the Bay of Pigs, where consultations with experts had been a constant in the run-up to the invasion, Kennedy had refused to see Mississippi or any other domestic problem as worthy of similar crisis management.
While Kennedy temporarily fixed his attention on a domestic crisis, Taylor filled the vacuum on Vietnam. He used his trip to Saigon to confirm administration hopes that the United States could help Diem defeat the communists. Everything he heard from Nhu, Diem, embassy officials, and the military advisers on the ground boosted his confidence in what they were doing. Nhu enthusiastically recounted the accomplishments of the Strategic Hamlets program and predicted more gains in the future. Taylor responded that “this situation resembled that which exists during any war. There is a period during which an impasse exists, and then, suddenly, a sudden surge to victory.” Taylor congratulated Nhu on Vietnam’s rapid progress. It allowed Nhu to describe South Vietnam’s success in the war as a model for other Third World countries threatened by communists and eager for democratic development.
Diem was equally upbeat. He disputed skeptical press accounts, saying that with U.S. help the Vietnamese would achieve the ultimate victory. William Trueheart, the U.S. minister in Saigon, echoed the Nhu-Diem predictions: He described Saigon’s military progress as “little short of sensational. . . . The Strategic Hamlet program had transformed the countryside.” Nhu’s and Diem’s hopefulness was meant to keep the U.S. aid flowing, while Trueheart’s enthusiasm issued from an advocate’s optimism rather than the observations of a detached analyst assessing the facts.
On his return from Asia, Taylor told the president that although he had had only a short stay in Vietnam, he had seen many people during travels around the country. His conversation with eight junior U.S. officers advising South Vietnamese units was most encouraging. He wished the president could have heard from them directly. He advised Kennedy not to read press reports from Saigon as accurate measures of what was happening. “You have to be on the ground to sense a lift in the national morale,” he said. And yet, he acknowledged, they needed more information to be confident that things were going as well as Diem and Nhu said. And although there could be doubts about significant progress in the war, Taylor encouraged Kennedy to believe that they were winning. Like some true believer, Taylor, the tough-minded soldier, thought that they could will their way to victory. It was a testimony to how little advocates, even military men mindful of battlefield uncertainties, could be trusted to make objective assessments of policies they favored. And it raised questions with Kennedy about Taylor’s reliability as an adviser.
No one close to Kennedy cared to hear dissenting opinions about progress in the war in the press or from embassy officials or military advisers observing the combat. If they had accepted the possibility, even the likelihood, that the communists were winning, they would have had a different picture from the one Nhu, Diem, and Taylor painted. And with so much politically and emotionally already invested in Vietnam, administration policymakers didn’t want to accept that they were on the wrong track.
Journalists reported that friction between U.S. advisers and South Vietnamese military commanders was imperiling the war effort and that assertions about the impact of South Vietnamese offensives on the Viet Cong were questionable. Communist losses and their diminished willingness to fight were exaggerated. David Halberstam, who had become the New York Times correspondent in Saigon in June, described “a frustrating hunt for elusive foes.”
Joe Mendenhall, the political counselor in the embassy in Saigon, had a very different take on conditions than what Taylor heard and reported. Mendenhall saw the Viet Cong as strong and resourceful, despite recent government attacks. They controlled much of the countryside, with government authority largely confined to the cities and towns. He saw a future of “gradual deterioration.” So “why are we losing?” he asked. The fundamental cause was Diem’s ineffective governance and his unpopularity with the masses. Mendenhall doubted that the South Vietnamese could win the war with the existing government in power. The only solution he saw was a U.S.-backed coup. But Mendenhall’s doubts did not reach Kennedy’s ears. He was not high enough in the chain of authority to have his reports land on Kennedy’s desk.
Instead, it was the good news or the hopeful assessments that filtered through. Mike Forrestal told Kennedy on September 18 that the Saigon embassy’s bullish review of political and military developments gave hope that they had found the means to succeed in combating the insurgency. Forrestal was the son of James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, and a Harvard law graduate who had served as Harriman’s naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and later practiced international law. His association with Harriman and ties to Bundy had brought him into Kennedy’s National Security Council, where he focused on Asian and Vietnamese affairs in particular. He was a leading voice for finding the right answers to the challenges in Vietnam.
His principal worry was not the weakness of the Diem government or the administration’s inability to work its will in the conflict, but rather the bad publicity generated by the journalists in Saigon. The problem seemed to be that “the newspapers and news magazines have not sent top drawer people to the area.” The attitude of Diem’s government toward the press was part of the difficulty. (On September 4, Diem had expelled Newsweek reporter François Sully from Vietnam for criticizing him as corrupt and alienated from his people.) Forrestal urged Kennedy to use discussions with U.S. editors and publishers to discourage negative reports about Vietnam.
Taylor echoed Forrestal’s complaints. In a September 20 memo to the president, he described the Saigon press corps as “uninformed and often belligerently adverse to the programs of the U.S. and SVN Governments.” They needed “the support of publishers in obtai
ning responsible reporting.” Kennedy, who had his own tensions with the Washington press, especially the New York Herald Tribune, a Republican paper that had consistently attacked him, sympathized with their complaints. When he met with a high South Vietnamese government official on September 25, Kennedy urged him “not to be too concerned by press reports. . . . Inaccurate press reporting . . . occurs every day in Washington.”
Whatever the remaining challenges in South Vietnam, reining in the messengers’ bad news was not going to save the country from a communist takeover. But everyone at the White House from Kennedy down believed that a pliable press more sympathetic to Diem could make a difference in helping him win his war. It was only one part of the growing illusions about Washington’s ability to save Vietnam.
At the center of the administration’s increasing investment in Vietnam was the rationalization that it mattered to America’s security. At the start of October, Kennedy asked the State Department to draft a paper updating progress in the war and explaining U.S. involvement in the conflict. The department summarized the recent gains in the fighting and described the war as important in convincing all our allies that we stood by our commitments. In addition, “a victory for us would prove that . . . underdeveloped nations can defeat ‘wars of liberation’ with our help [and] strike a telling blow to the mystique of the ‘wave of the future.’” If such a victory could be won without the involvement of American ground troops or, so to speak, on the cheap with advisers and material support, Kennedy was an enthusiastic supporter. No one at the State Department considered the likelihood that America’s prime European allies might view a growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a distraction from more important commitments. Moreover, no one seemed to think that winning in Vietnam was tied to saving Southeast Asia from communism—or at least they said nothing about this.
While the administration struggled to solve problems in Vietnam, Cuba remained a minefield of uncertainty and bad advice. With information flooding in by late August 1962 about a Soviet military buildup on the island, Bobby Kennedy urged Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs to consider what new “aggressive steps” could be taken, including “provoking an attack against Guantánamo which would permit us to retaliate.” McNamara favored heightened sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and the Chiefs urged Castro’s elimination, which could be done “without precipitating general war.” They suggested that “manufactured . . . acts of sabotage at Guantánamo . . . faked assassination attempts against Cuban exiles and terrorist bombings in Florida and Washington, D.C.” could trigger U.S. intervention. But Bundy, speaking for the president, cautioned against action that could provoke a Berlin blockade or a Soviet strike against U.S. missile sites in Turkey and Italy.
John McCone, the acting CIA director, was as eager as the Chiefs to identify ways to overthrow Castro. With Allen Dulles about to retire in November 1961, the fifty-nine-year-old McCone had become effective head of the agency. His selection by Kennedy bothered liberals, who saw him as a conservative hawk. His background only reinforced this view. The silver-haired, bespectacled McCone was the offspring of a wealthy California family: Educated at Berkeley in mechanical engineering, he had worked in the family iron foundry business, Bechtel-McCone. During World War II, the corporation had made $44 million in shipbuilding, which a General Accounting Office official described as wartime profiteering. “At no time in the history of American business,” he said, “had so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of taxpayers.”
An outspoken Republican with ties to the Eisenhower administration, McCone became head of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1958. He had been an early and forceful proponent of nuclear weapons. In 1956, after Adlai Stevenson pledged support for a nuclear test ban as a presidential candidate, and scientists at the California Institute of Technology endorsed his proposal, McCone, a trustee of the institute, attacked them as taken in by the Russians. McCone’s principal advocate for the CIA directorship was Bobby Kennedy, who saw him not only as an ally in urging all-out action against Castro, but also as a firewall against Republican criticism of the administration’s failed Cuban policy.
The minute McCone saw evidence of the Soviet buildup in Cuba he was convinced that they intended to turn the island into a missile base. At an August 21 meeting with other national security officials, he described the Russian shipments to Cuba as equipment either to guard against a future air assault or for missile sites. After the meeting, McCone privately told Bobby Kennedy that “[i]f Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.” Although the president considered McCone’s prediction hyperbolic, he accepted his advice urging an analysis of “the probable military, political and psychological impact of the establishment in Cuba of either surface-to-air missiles or surface-to-surface missiles which could reach the U.S.”
No other top administration official besides McCone voiced similar concerns. Schlesinger disputed the conclusion that the Soviet decision to make a major investment in Cuba signaled a readiness to challenge the United States head-on. “Any military construction will probably be defensive in function; a launching pad directed against the U.S. would be too blatant a provocation,” Schlesinger told Bundy.
Roger Hilsman, a West Point graduate who had served in the OSS during World War II, behind the lines in Burma and China, and became the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, shared Schlesinger’s view of the Soviet buildup. As someone who had passed the Kennedy test of physical courage and knowledge of counterinsurgency through personal experience, Hilsman enjoyed standing with the president as tough-minded. Kennedy especially enjoyed Hilsman’s nerve at a briefing when he spent ten minutes correcting General Lemnitzer about Laos. Kennedy sat smiling as Hilsman spoke and Lemnitzer did a slow boil. And so Hilsman’s view that the Russian matériel and military personnel arriving in Cuba were meant to help Castro defend himself against another U.S.-sponsored invasion carried weight at the White House. Hilsman did not discount Moscow’s direct military involvement in Cuba but rejected suggestions that it grew out of a risky plan to turn Cuba into an offensive base like those the United States had encircling Russia.
Having been so badly burned by the CIA’s miscalculations about the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was inclined to agree with Schlesinger and Hilsman and see McCone’s warnings as unconvincing and likely to stimulate pressure to invade Cuba, which step he resisted as certain to undermine the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy wished simply to shelve Cuba as an issue in the developing fall congressional campaign. At the end of August, when the CIA showed him photos of surface-to-air missile sites on the island, Kennedy saw them as defensive installations and acted to repress press leaks that could stimulate Republican demands for an attack. He instructed Marshall Carter, who was temporarily standing in as CIA director while McCone was away, to “limit access to the information. . . . ‘The President said to put it back in the box and nail it tight.’”
In trying to mute speculation about Soviet steps to make Cuba a nuclear launching pad, Kennedy had advice from Rusk and Bundy that Moscow had never risked deploying nuclear missiles outside of the Soviet Union. The intelligence bureaus of the State and Defense departments as well as their Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Security Agency counterparts agreed. The U.S. Intelligence Board, the coordinating agency or clearinghouse for all intelligence estimates, concurred. “There is no evidence that the Soviet government has ever provided nuclear warheads to any other state,” Bundy advised.
When news of the Soviet buildup in Cuba, leaked by Senate Republicans, made headlines in the United States, Bundy urged Kennedy to hold a press conference drawing a “sharp distinction between what is now going on and what we would not tolerate.” In short, the Soviet shipments did not add up to offensive weapons and posed no direct threat to the United States or any Latin American country, which is what Kennedy unequivocally told a press conference on September 13.
As with CIA and military miscalcula
tions about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the various national security agencies were misinformed about past Soviet behavior and current Soviet intentions. Between January and May 1959, Moscow had set up nuclear missile launchers in East Germany and deployed warheads under Soviet control. In August, however, apparently eager to make sure that their capacity to strike all of Western Europe with the missiles in East Germany did not undermine prospects for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev Paris summit in the spring, Moscow dismantled the sites. Although the deployment had registered on Western intelligence services, none of them had a full report on the Soviet action until the beginning of 1961, and by then the missiles were long gone. Since none of the intelligence services could offer a satisfactory explanation for the missiles’ initial deployment and subsequent removal, they concluded that the temporary deployment was an aberration not worth serious consideration.
Neither Kennedy nor anyone in his White House knew about the deployment, nor did anyone in the intelligence services come forward in September 1962 to report it or suggest that the Soviets might be replicating their action. U.S. intelligence officials knew that shipping missiles to Cuba would be much harder to disguise than the deployments to East Germany; it was another reason to discount the 1959 episode as of no significance in assessing current events. Since Moscow had no indication that the West knew about the 1959 deployment, the Soviets could hope that similar shipments to Cuba would also go undetected. The failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to tell the White House about the East German deployment was a blunder on par with earlier misjudgments on Cuba. The failure to report the seemingly inconsequential 1959 episode may have resulted from the belief that it was of no real importance, but it can also be assumed that it grew out of a desire to defend an agency for which the new administration already had questionable regard.