Robert G. K. Thompson, a highly decorated British officer who had been a central figure in defeating guerrilla insurgents in Malaysia and had become the head of a British Advisory Group on Vietnam, encouraged American illusions about progress defeating the Viet Cong. At an April 1 meeting with Harriman, Thompson reported that when McNamara had asked about reducing U.S. forces in Vietnam, Thompson had said that continuing gains in the fighting during 1963 would allow the withdrawal of some one thousand men.
Thompson’s credentials in defeating communist insurgents in Malaysia convinced his American audience that he was an authority worth hearing. His conviction that Strategic Hamlets would make a difference in Vietnam won him an interview with Kennedy on April 4. Eager for good news that would chart out a relatively short timeline for U.S. victory, Kennedy embraced Thompson’s vision of success. The French had lost in Vietnam, Thompson replied to a Kennedy question about their failure, because they did not have the Strategic Hamlets, which were bringing the peasants to the government’s side. Morale was on the upswing, Thompson reported, and continued progress by the summer would give Kennedy the option of withdrawing a thousand advisers by the end of the year. He also told Kennedy, who had asked about the quality of the political opposition, that it was “very poor,” and that Diem was the only one who could win the war. By the close of the meeting, Kennedy was delighted to have such an upbeat assessment.
A three-and-a-half-hour meeting that night at the palace in Saigon between Nolting, who had agreed to resign at the close of his two-year tour in Saigon, and Diem gave the lie to all the optimism. Diem adamantly refused to accept American advice on funding for counterinsurgency programs that the embassy and U.S. military advisers believed were essential to winning the war. Diem’s resistance perplexed Nolting. But Diem insisted that following the U.S. lead would undermine his authority by giving the appearance of Vietnam as a U.S. protectorate. Diem was indifferent to Nolting’s warning that his resistance to U.S. advice would curtail American aid and reverse the gains made over the last eighteen months.
Still, Diem and the Nhus did not seem to care. On April 12, when Ngo Dinh Nhu spoke with an embassy official, he said that “it would be useful to reduce the numbers of Americans by anywhere from 500 to 3,000 or 4,000.” He did not think that U.S. advisers in the provinces understood the difficulties of the local officials who were complaining about unwanted pressure from the Americans. They were creating a “sense of inadequacy and inferiority” among the Vietnamese. Mrs. Nhu publicly declared that the Americans were trying to make “‘lackeys of the Vietnamese.’”
An April 17 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded that it was impossible “to project the future course of the war with any confidence. . . . Despite South Vietnamese progress, the situation remains fragile.” The analysts doubted that Diem had the will or capacity to lead his country to victory. Nonetheless, the State Department’s working group on Vietnam was willing to bet on the likelihood of gains in the fighting and proposed a substantial reduction of the more than sixteen thousand U.S. advisers in Vietnam by the end of 1963. The CIA expected the Saigon government to endorse the idea of a significant reduction of U.S. personnel; the agency said “the force is too large and unmanageable.”
By the spring of 1963, Vietnam seemed to be primarily a burden with no clear solution. An evaluation of the Strategic Hamlets program described it as an “excellent” concept that was “seriously handicapped by a lack of understanding” and insufficient “will to put it into effect.” To make it work would require “a psychological revolution in the way the Vietnamese Government and its officials operate.” As for Diem, he remained resistant to reforms the embassy had been pressing on him since 1960. The State Department’s Vietnam working group proposed a fresh discussion of what economic and fiscal pressures might force him to respond. They also wanted renewed consideration of contingency plans should Diem be ousted. Despite, or perhaps because of, these uncertainties, McNamara directed Pentagon planners to discuss a more rapid withdrawal of U.S. personnel from Vietnam than the numbers projected over the next three years. In a May 7 meeting, he told the president that he hoped they could pull out one thousand troops by the end of the current year and avoid the sort of commitment the United States had faced in Korea, which he saw as excessive and feared would occur from an unchecked growth of involvement in South Vietnam.
In May, if Kennedy needed any additional incentives to withdraw from Vietnam, he found them in the disturbing behavior and comments of Diem and Nhu. In Hue, in the central highlands, government repression of Buddhists, who were peacefully protesting a ban on displaying their flags on Buddha’s birthday, embarrassed Washington as a demonstration of Diem’s religious intolerance: a Catholic president repressing his country’s Buddhist majority. A Washington Post story on May 12 reporting an interview with Nhu outraged congressmen and senators and raised new questions about why the United States was expending lives and money in Vietnam. Nhu said that he would like to see half of the U.S. troops in his country withdrawn; they were unnecessary and gave the communists propaganda. He said that many of the Americans who died were “cases of soldiers who exposed themselves too readily,” suggesting that they were reckless. The State Department complained that Nhu’s comments would “likely generate new and reinforce already existing US domestic pressures for complete withdrawal from SVN.” In addition, “statement that some American casualties incurred because our advisors are daredevils and expose themselves needlessly likely to have very bad effect on morale US forces.”
Managing Diem and Nhu had become a war within the war. Harkins was convinced that if Diem agreed to an all-out offensive in 1963, it would end the war. “The equipment is on hand, the units are trained, morale is high, and from all I can ascertain, the determination and will are present,” Harkins told Diem. But doubtful that his government could survive a campaign with significant losses, which he feared would occur, Diem wouldn’t budge. The State Department’s working group discussed punitive cuts in aid to force Diem’s hand on reforms and military cooperation. But they thought the result would be more private and public conflict with him. The outcome might then be a push for “a change in government. We don’t want to blunder into that,” they concluded.
Kennedy was caught between an eagerness to end U.S. involvement in what could be a long, draining war and the political liability from accusations that he had cut and run. On May 22, when a reporter asked his response to Nhu’s call for a drawdown of U.S. troops, he replied: “We would withdraw troops, any number of troops, any time the Government of South Vietnam would suggest it. The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on their way home. . . . We are hopeful that the situation in South Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can’t possibly make that judgment at the present time.” That decision would depend on “the course of the struggle the next few months.”
With a New York Times headline announcing “Failure to Gain Clear-Cut Victories and Political Frustrations Hamper U.S. Involvement,” Kennedy invited Mike Mansfield in for another conversation. According to Kenny O’Donnell, who sat in on part of the meeting, Kennedy told the senator that he agreed with his “thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.” But he couldn’t do it until after the 1964 election—otherwise “there would be a wild conservative outcry” against returning him to the presidency for a second term. After Mansfield left, Kennedy told O’Donnell, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. . . . If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare . . . but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better be damned sure that I am reelected.”
Because Kennedy had lost whatever confidence he had that Diem could be pressured into following America’s lead in winning the war, he wanted contingency plans for a change of government. The plan, which won White House approval on Jun
e 6, was to be held in the greatest confidence lest it stir a firestorm of controversy from both Saigon and the communists accusing the United States of neocolonialism.
Pressure to dump Diem mounted with a failure to end Buddhist protests. On June 8, when Madame Nhu denounced the Buddhists as “reds’ dupes,” the tensions between the government and Buddhist leaders provoked a crisis in U.S.-Vietnamese relations. Rusk cabled the embassy: “Madame Nhu’s intolerant statement has seriously weakened GVN’s position as defender of freedom against Communist tyranny and has greatly increased difficulty of U.S. role as supporter of GVN.” An embassy protest to Diem reflecting Rusk’s complaint brought no retreat. And on June 11, when a photograph of a Buddhist bonze (priest) burning himself to death reached around the world, the New York Times reported that Diem’s government and the war against the Viet Cong were in serious jeopardy. The embassy received word that Vietnam’s air force chief of staff, a Buddhist, wondered why the United States did not seize this opportunity to overthrow Diem.
Rusk instructed the embassy to inform Diem that he needed to do whatever it takes to meet Buddhist demands. Relations between Washington and Saigon were nearing a breaking point; the United States was considering reexamining “our entire relationship with his regime.”
Rusk’s warning to Diem went forward without Kennedy’s knowledge or approval. It was unusual for Rusk to act so independently. But he believed that he was expressing the president’s wish to keep his distance from the whole Vietnam mess. Besides, he saw Kennedy as preoccupied with a crisis in Alabama, where Governor George Wallace was resisting the integration of the state’s university, and racial tensions across the South seemed poised to erupt in widespread violence. After great reluctance to face down the segregationists, Kennedy had decided to put a comprehensive rights bill before Congress that would end segregation in all places of public accommodation.
Kennedy had tried to avoid a showdown over civil rights, viewing it as likely to refocus too much national attention on a fiercely divisive domestic issue that could jeopardize his reelection. But the repression of peaceful marchers in Montgomery by club-wielding police prodding snarling dogs to bite demonstrators, including children, joined by firemen assaulting marchers with high-pressure hoses that tore off their clothes, provoked outrage across the nation. A front-page New York Times image of a dog lunging to bite a teenager sickened Kennedy and convinced him to act. He now saw the segregationists as “hopeless, they’ll never reform.” They “haven’t done anything about integration for a hundred years,” he added, “and when an outsider interferes, they tell him to get out; they’ll take care of it themselves, which they won’t.”
But Kennedy still held back on making civil rights reform a top priority. His resistance to investing too much of his energy and political capital in this domestic battle reflected itself in the slapdash manner in which he asked Congress to act on civil rights and prepared on June 10 for an Oval Office speech to the nation. There was little discussion about the bill with anyone except Bobby Kennedy, who, as in the Mississippi crisis, managed the administration’s response. Lyndon Johnson, in fact, was the member of the administration best able to help design and pass a landmark civil rights law. In 1957, as Senate majority leader, he had engineered the passage of the first major civil rights law since 1875, during Reconstruction. But neither Kennedy consulted him about the current crisis. LBJ learned about the president’s plans from a New York Times article. He complained to Ted Sorensen that he never saw the bill, didn’t know what was in it, nor had discussions with anyone on how to pass it. Johnson’s concerns persuaded Kennedy to hold off sending the bill to Capitol Hill for a week. But he still failed to confer with Johnson about a concerted strategy for getting the bill approved.
The national address was also something of an afterthought. All Kennedy’s speeches on big foreign policy matters had been the product of careful preparation. But his civil rights address was not ready until five minutes before he went before the cameras, and even then part of it had to be delivered extemporaneously. To his credit, Kennedy made a heartfelt appeal for what he described as a great cause: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. . . . One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. . . . And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. . . . I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Although given with clear emotion and sincerity, the speech was a last-minute pronouncement on a subject at the fringe of Kennedy’s priorities, or more to the point, given with the understanding that it would alienate southern voters and jeopardize his reelection.
Kennedy was in fact frustrated at having to divert attention to civil rights, which led to his irritation at Rusk for implying that the United States might back a coup in Saigon. When he learned about Rusk’s threat from a CIA Intelligence Checklist on June 14, he instructed his military aide to tell the State Department to stop making such pronouncements. “The President noticed that Diem has been threatened with a formal statement of disassociation,” a White House memo recorded. “He wants to be absolutely sure that no further threats are made and no formal statement is made without his personal approval.”
Kennedy had no special regard for Diem and his government. He saw the South Vietnamese leader’s clash with the Buddhists as unacceptable and destructive to his regime. But he was reluctant secretly or overtly to back military opponents ready to overthrow him. As with the Bay of Pigs invasion, any coup would be laid at America’s doorstep. A front-page New York Times story on June 14 saying, “U.S. Warns South Vietnam on Demands of Buddhists,” had raised speculation that Washington was laying plans to get rid of Diem. In fact, Rusk sent word to South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Ngoc Tho that the United States would be prepared to back him as Diem’s replacement should it become necessary, but only if it were clear that the war could not be won with Diem in power. Kennedy believed that dumping Diem would mean greatly increased U.S. responsibility for Vietnam and diminished likelihood of a U.S. withdrawal in a timely fashion. He was not categorically opposed to a U.S.-sponsored coup, but he wanted to be sure that Diem’s replacement would be a major improvement and would facilitate rather than reduce America’s chances of escaping from an unwanted war.
Despite Kennedy’s injunction against further threats, Rusk, Hilsman, and the State Department’s working group continued warning Diem that loss of U.S. support could follow unless he resolved his Buddhist problem. They saw no choice if the United States were to find a timely exit from Vietnam, as Kennedy wanted. They cited growing congressional resistance to aid, declaring that “a profound sense of irritation” was damaging prospects for long-term cooperation.
The department’s Intelligence Bureau warned that a coup would force Kennedy and the United States to confront a grave dilemma. An uprising would create difficult choices: If Washington responded with silence or a refusal to take sides, Diem would conclude that it was a U.S.-sponsored coup and become entirely unmanageable if he held on to power. If the coup succeeded without American help, the United States would face considerable hostility from the new administration. In brief, regardless of who prevailed, a coup in which Washington held its hand could be a disaster for American policy.
American demands on Diem to settle the Buddhist crisis enraged him. He was angry at being told how to run his affairs and was “suspicious that we were trying to undermine him.” Diem saw a request for approval of former Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., as Nolting’s replacement as signaling a new American policy. He saw Nolting as someone he could bend to his purposes, but Lodge? “They can sen
d ten Lodges,” he said, “but I will not permit myself or my country to be humiliated, not if they train their artillery on this Palace.” The State Department tried to assure Diem that there was no change in policy: The embassy was instructed to tell him that the United States was trying to save him from a disaster and to advise him that Lodge was a conservative Republican eager to defeat the communists and intent on expanding U.S. cooperation with Saigon.
Kennedy’s eagerness to find some way out of Vietnam partly rested on his wish to keep the situation from adding to his difficulties with the Soviets. Above all, after the missile crisis, he thought that Khrushchev might be more receptive to a test ban. He was right. Having gone to the brink of a nuclear conflict, Khrushchev had a heightened sense of urgency about reining in the dangers of an apocalyptic war. On November 12, Khrushchev sent the president a letter saying that if they were to “draw the necessary conclusions from what has happened up till now,” they could agree “that conditions are emerging . . . for reaching an agreement on the . . . cessation of all types of nuclear weapons tests.” As a prelude to further negotiations, Kennedy asked that a committee of national security experts, including White House science adviser Jerry Wiesner, evaluate the results of the recent U.S. and Soviet atmospheric tests. In December, when the committee told Kennedy that little of importance had been learned from the recent tests and that they wouldn’t affect the strategic balance, Kennedy was eager to make a new push for a ban.
On December 19, Khrushchev gave substance to his suggested cessation with a letter saying that the time had come to end all nuclear tests. Because they had not found an acceptable way to monitor underground tests, Khrushchev proposed that they focus on controlling explosions in outer space, the atmosphere, and underwater. He was willing, however, to consider a few on-site inspection stations with two to three inspections a year. Kennedy promptly replied that he hoped they were now starting down the road to an agreement.