An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (88 page)

Eisenhower thus under wraps, Kennedy now encouraged press and public uncertainty about U.S. intentions toward Laos. He wanted “to maintain vis-a-vis the Communist bloc an attitude of ‘veiled ambiguity,’” he told his advisers. He also wanted Phoumi to understand that the administration had no confidence in him and would not intervene in Laos on his behalf. “All United States moves,” Kennedy said, “should be designed (a) to bring Phoumi to the conference table, and (b) to have the desired effect on the Soviets and on the Chinese.” But he wanted no irreversible commitments that might drag the country into an unwanted war. He “wished to retain the element of reversibility in all military actions. He wanted no public announcement of landings until after he had ordered such landings. Furthermore, he wanted it again made clear to the Lao that we were undertaking no new commitments toward them.” Compared to Latin America, where fears of Cuban subversion throughout the hemisphere had agitated Kennedy into anticommunist excesses, policy toward Laos was a model of sensible restraint.

U.S. military threats produced a quick response. Since Moscow and Peking had no intention of risking a wider war for control of Laos, the Pathet Lao responded to American troop movements by immediately resuming negotiations. On June 12, after the Laotian factions agreed to form a coalition government under Souvanna Phouma, Khrushchev wired Kennedy: “Good news has come from Laos.” The political accommodation seemed likely to serve both the Laotian people and peace in Southeast Asia. The result also strengthened the conviction that other unresolved international problems might yield to reasonable exchange. Kennedy answered Khrushchev: The Laotian solution “will surely have a significant and positive effect far beyond the borders of Laos.”

Khrushchev reiterated his enthusiasm for the settlement in a message through Georgi Bolshakov, the ostensible Soviet embassy press officer in Washington. To take advantage of JFK’s wish to bypass his own national security bureaucracy, Khrushchev used Bolshakov, really a high-ranking military intelligence agent, to speak to the president through Bobby Kennedy, with whom Bolshakov met every couple of weeks. A report in the
Times
of London that the CIA was “actively opposing US policy in Laos and working against a neutral government” may have moved Khrushchev to tell Kennedy that “the settlement in Laos was an extremely important step forward in the relationship of the Soviet Union and the United States.” JFK valued Khrushchev’s message, which he hoped signaled an interest in other agreements. The
Times
account of CIA opposition worried him. When Pierre Salinger told him of his intention to deny the
Times
story as “preposterous and untrue,” Kennedy replied, “The story I assume is untrue—Do they offer evidence?” Kennedy had learned the hard way that the CIA could not always be trusted, and he now wondered if the
Times
might be onto something.

AFTER THE LAOTIANS SIGNED
a neutrality declaration in July, Kennedy instructed Harriman to explore the possibility of negotiations with the North Vietnamese. He hoped that Hanoi and Moscow, especially after Khrushchev’s comments, might be willing to neutralize all of Indochina as a way to limit Chinese control in the region. But at a secret meeting with North Vietnam’s foreign minister in a Geneva hotel suite, Harriman and William Sullivan, his deputy, hit a stone wall. “We got absolutely nowhere,” Sullivan said.

The alternative was to continue helping Saigon. Reports from American military and civilian officials there in the spring of 1962 that U.S. aid was turning the tide in South Vietnam made this acceptable, and even appealing. McNamara told a House committee that the administration was hoping to clean up the conflict in Vietnam by “terminating subversion, covert aggression, and combat operations.” He saw no need for U.S. combat troops. In May, at the end of a two-day trip to Vietnam, his first, McNamara, unshaven and dressed in rumpled khaki shirt and trousers and hiking boots dusty from his travels in the countryside, carried data-filled notebooks into a press conference at the ambassador’s residence. “I’ve seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress,” he declared. Pressed by reporters to move beyond declarations of good news boosting Saigon’s morale, McNamara, UPI’s Neil Sheehan recorded, was “a Gibraltar of optimism.” Following him out to his car, Sheehan asked the secretary to speak the truth off the record. Fixing Sheehan with a cold stare, McNamara replied, “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.” By July, reinforced by a military briefing in Honolulu that predicted a U.S. military exit one year after South Vietnamese forces had become “fully operational” in 1964, McNamara could see “tremendous progress to date.”

In September 1962, after his first visit to Vietnam since the fall of 1961, Max Taylor also reported that “much progress has been accomplished. . . . The most notable perhaps is the snowballing of the strategic hamlet program which has resulted in some 5,000 hamlets being fortified or in process of fortification.” Dating from February 1962, the hamlets were supposedly winning the support of Vietnamese farmers by creating allegedly safe havens against the Viet Cong with South Vietnamese forces. Conversations with junior U.S. officers attached to South Vietnamese units led Taylor to tell Kennedy, “You have to be on the ground to sense a lift in the national morale. . . . I’m sure you would get a great deal of encouragement out of hearing these young officers.” U.S. embassy officials in Saigon confirmed Taylor’s impressions, reporting in September that they were “tremendously encouraged. . . . The military progress had been little short of sensational. . . . The strategic hamlet program had transformed the countryside and . . . the Viet Cong could not now destroy the program.” After receiving these reports, Kennedy told Nguyen Dinh Thuan, Diem’s cabinet secretary, who was visiting Washington, that recent reports from Saigon were encouraging. The president expressed “admiration for the progress being made in Viet-Nam against the Communists.”

Optimism—or wishful thinking—was so strong now that Kennedy ordered McNamara to begin planning a U.S. military exit from Vietnam. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Gilpatric, the president “made clear to McNamara and me that he wanted to not only hold the level of U.S. military presence in Vietnam down, but he wanted to reverse the flow.” To that end, McNamara drew up a three-year plan for the reduction of U.S. forces in Vietnam. U.S. military planners told him that “advisers” could leave by 1965, but McNamara extended the date to 1968. By then, he hoped to withdraw the last fifteen hundred U.S. troops and reduce military assistance payments to $40.8 million, less than a quarter of 1962 layouts. McNamara rationalized the plan by saying that “it might be difficult to retain public support for U.S. operations in Vietnam indefinitely. Political pressures would build up as losses continued. Therefore . . . planning must be undertaken now and a program devised to phase out U.S. military involvement.”

There is no direct record of Kennedy’s agreement with McNamara’s plan, but it is difficult to believe that McNamara did not have the president’s approval. They were close, very close, or as close as anyone in the administration was to the president, aside from Bobby. McNamara was Kennedy’s idea of a first-rate deputy. The president “thought very highly of Bob McNamara,” Bobby recalled, “very highly of him. . . . He was head and shoulders above everybody else. . . . In the area of foreign policy or defense,” Bobby added, “obviously, it was Bob McNamara, not Dean Rusk.” With his affinity for numbers, for unsentimental calculation, McNamara “symbolized the idea that [the administration] could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. . . . He was so impressive and loyal,” David Halberstam wrote later, “that it was hard to believe, in the halcyon days of 1963 when his reputation was at its height, that anything he took command of could go wrong.” Kennedy himself said, McNamara would “come in with his twenty options and then say, ‘Mr. President, I think we should do this.’ I like that. Makes the job easier.”

McNamara was one of only two members of the cabinet—the other being Douglas Dillon—who enjoyed a consistent social relationship with the Kennedys. Charming, gay, gregarious, a sort of modern Renaissance man with a capacity to discuss the arts and literature, he became a favorite of Jacqueline Kennedy’s. “Men can’t understand his sex appeal,” Jackie said. “Why is it,” Bobby wondered, “that they call him ‘the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?”

In proposing to get out of Vietnam before it turned into a political liability in the United States, McNamara reflected the president’s thinking. Kennedy wanted the lowest possible profile for U.S. involvement in the conflict. In May, he instructed that there be no “unnecessary trips to Vietnam, especially by high ranking officers,” who might draw more attention to America’s role in the fighting. In a meeting with congressional leaders, Kennedy made it clear that he did not want to announce increases in U.S. troops. The objective for JFK, Fulbright said, was to keep the United States from becoming “formally involved.” The increase in advisers was less important than keeping things “on an informal basis, because . . . we couldn’t withdraw if it gets too formal.” In October, Kennedy reluctantly agreed to let the military destroy crops in Viet Cong-controlled areas. It was a small concession to the Joint Chiefs, who were pressing him to use more muscle in Vietnam. “His main train of thinking,” an NSC member told Bundy, “was that you cannot say no to your military advisers all the time.” But he wanted to be sure that crop destruction did not become an embarrassment to the administration. “What can we do about keeping it from becoming an American enterprise which would be surfaced with [or described as] poisoning food?” Kennedy asked his advisers.

Knowing nothing of the Kennedy-McNamara plan to reduce military commitments to Vietnam, American correspondents in Saigon remained highly critical of administration policy. Seeing U.S. officials as misled by the Vietnamese and their own illusions, reporters disputed Diem-embassy assertions of steady progress in the conflict. In October 1962, Halberstam, speaking for many of his colleagues, said, “The closer one gets to the actual contact level of the war, the further one gets from official optimism.” By protecting Diem from criticism, Halberstam added, the U.S. embassy was turning into “the adjunct of a dictatorship,” and if reporters accepted the official line on Diem and the war, they would “become the adjuncts of a tyranny.”

The press, an embassy official reported in September, “believes that the situation in Viet Nam is going to pieces and that we have been unable to convince them otherwise.” Taylor said that American journalists in Saigon “remained uninformed and often belligerently adverse to the programs of the U.S. and SVN Governments.” His observations and discussions in Vietnam told him that press reports of difficulties between U.S. military advisers and South Vietnamese officers were false. The administration needed to push publishers into “responsible reporting,” he said. In his conversation with Thuan, Kennedy urged “the GVN not to be too concerned by press reports. He assured Mr. Thuan that the U.S. government did not accept everything the correspondents wrote even if it appeared in the
New York Times
. He emphasized that if the Vietnamese government was successful, the public image would take care of itself.” The president added that “inaccurate press reporting . . . occurred every day in Washington.”

This last statement was said with real conviction. Kennedy was not as tolerant of the press as he seemed. He believed that its affinity for the sensational and its instinctive impulse to be critical of the White House had repeatedly produced unfair attacks on his administration.
Time
magazine’s coverage of his presidency particularly irritated him. He viewed it as inconsistent and much more friendly to his predecessor. Complaints to
Time
publisher Henry Luce evoked a strong defense of the magazine’s performance but left Kennedy unconvinced.

Kennedy sympathized with the belief in Saigon that American reporters were opportunists trying to build reputations with controversial stories belittling Diem and progress in the war. This allowed him to rationalize new October directives to the State and Defense departments about press interviews. In response to national security leaks, including those involving Vietnam, Kennedy ordered officials not to hold one-on-one meetings with reporters, and if they did, “to report promptly and in writing on any conversation with ‘news media’ representatives.” A leak to
New York Times
military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, which seemed to compromise U.S. satellite intelligence on Soviet ICBM installations, especially upset the president. He saw the press and the
New York Times
in particular as “the most privileged group,” who regarded any attempt to rein them in “as a limitation on their civil rights. And they are not very used to it.” Joe Alsop called the restrictions on interviews “news-control devices” that threatened healthy democratic debate about vital issues. But Kennedy refused to back down. The restrictions were “aimed at the protection of genuinely sensitive information,” he told Alsop through Bundy. Nor would the directives prevent “responsible reporters from doing their job.” The president’s order “was so rarely and humorously observed,” Sorensen remembered, “that it soon fell into disuse.” Nevertheless, the directives undermined Kennedy’s generally good relations with the press and made reporters more distrustful of White House pronouncements on everything.

Kennedy believed that newspaper stories from Saigon, whatever their accuracy, made it difficult for him to follow a cautious policy of limited involvement. If people believed that we were losing the conflict, it would create additional pressure to expand U.S. commitments. His political strategy was to keep the war off the front pages of America’s newspapers. Press accounts arousing controversy drew more attention to Vietnam than he wanted, and an inflamed public debate would make it difficult to hold down commitments and maintain his freedom to withdraw when he saw fit. As with Laos, and, again, unlike with Latin America, Kennedy maintained a good sense of proportion about the limits of Vietnam’s importance in the overall scheme of U.S. national security. But his good sense of proportion could not withstand other pressures.