Read Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Online
Authors: Robert Dallek
On May 1, Kennedy had already put aside consideration of neutralizing Vietnam and indicated as much to advisers who doubted the wisdom of trying to negotiate a settlement with Hanoi. During a White House discussion with his national security officials about the merits of Galbraith’s suggestion for negotiating a neutralized coalition government for South Vietnam, Harriman and Roger Hilsman “vigorously opposed this recommendation and the President decided against it.” After the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949 and Truman’s failure to oust Kim Il Sung’s communist regime in North Korea, the domestic political consequences, more than the national security perils, made “losing” South Vietnam through a political arrangement too risky for Kennedy to accept or openly favor in the first half of 1962.
At the same time, however, he remained quietly receptive to hearing about any possible interest by Hanoi in discussing a settlement. On May 16, Rusk told Galbraith that Kennedy was interested in a conversation Galbraith had had in New Delhi with the Indian representative to the international control commission on Vietnam. The Indian thought that there might be a chance for negotiations in the future and Kennedy wanted Galbraith to continue informal discussions about the likelihood of talks on ending the conflict in Vietnam and ending U.S. participation in an unwanted war.
Administration resistance to a negotiated settlement partly rested on the conviction that, despite relying on the unpopular Diem, U.S. sponsored anticommunist military and political actions were showing positive signs—or at least that’s what American officials in Saigon were telling McNamara. At a March hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, which was considering the annual foreign aid budget, McNamara voiced unqualified optimism about U.S. policy in Vietnam. In fact, he saw a definite endpoint without the need for U.S. ground forces. Vietnam’s troops, aided by U.S. advisers, were “terminating subversion, covert aggression and combat operations.”
When Secretary of the Army Elvis Stahr returned from a visit to Vietnam in April, he reported that the Vietnamese were “greatly encouraged by our policy toward them and by our strong support. Slowly but surely they are working out the techniques of counter-insurgency and of civic action.” The South Vietnamese army was becoming an effective fighting force. Harkins and Nolting were working well together, and since Stahr had served for two years in Asia during World War II and recently spent much time focused on the problems of the Far East, he was able to make authoritative judgments on conditions in Vietnam, or so he and others were ready to believe. At the same time, a U.S. Embassy official who visited four South Vietnamese provinces, where he spoke with various officials and local residents, saw the great likelihood of a substantial improvement of security in a year or two. Things were “not too rosy” at the moment, but “we are moving in the right direction.” Sterling Cottrell, the director of a Defense Department task force on Vietnam, returned from meetings in Saigon convinced that “we have found the right formula.”
A four-day visit to South Vietnam by McNamara from May 8 to 11 gave added support to rising hopes. But McNamara’s inspection tour was not an excursion by a commonly tough-minded skeptic; rather, it was a ceremonial glimpse at the war front as portrayed to him by General Harkins, who was intent on persuading him that they could defeat the Viet Cong. When Harkins looked at a briefing map showing more areas under communist control than he wished McNamara to see, he directed a junior officer to doctor the map, which then gave the secretary a much brighter picture of the fighting. As eager for a victory as Harkins, McNamara uncritically accepted what he was shown and signed off on a Defense Department report describing an atmosphere of restrained optimism in every area he visited. In Pentagon-speak, McNamara declared that “victory is clearly attainable through the mechanisms that are now in motion.” The whole operation from McNamara down was at best an exercise in auto-intoxication and at worst a use of unmitigated deception. If the facts did not support a rosy war scenario, Harkins was determined to make it appear that way and McNamara was all too ready to embrace good news.
Journalists who trailed McNamara on his tour were puzzled by his seeming acceptance of all that the military was telling him. When he echoed the feel-good reports of his briefers to reporters during an informal session in Nolting’s home, one asked McNamara if he might have a different view if he extended his stay. “Absolutely not,” he said. He thought his optimism would be strengthened. Neil Sheehan, a young United Press International reporter who had only been in Saigon for two weeks, had heard enough from his more seasoned colleagues to confront McNamara privately about his conclusions. As he was about to get in his car, Sheehan pressed him to say how he could be so optimistic after so brief a visit to the front lines. McNamara abruptly replied: “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning this war.”
Did he believe it? Probably. It was an expression of his unbounded confidence in social science engineering. And so whatever the current realities, he was confident that they could find the means to defeat a smaller, less well equipped enemy. Moreover, after sixteen months in which he had been repeatedly at cross-purposes with his military subordinates, the defense secretary was keen to support their plans for winning a conflict that might become a model for fighting other guerrilla wars. Besides, he and Kennedy didn’t want to “lose” Vietnam, and there seemed to be no current alternative to what the military proposed to do.
McNamara’s snub of Sheehan reflected the White House and Pentagon view that the journalists were an impediment to winning in Vietnam. The reporters, however, had no desire to undermine the Kennedy administration’s reach for victory in Vietnam. But they had a different take on what they saw in Saigon and the provinces and believed that they were not only doing their job by reporting what they learned but also serving U.S. and Vietnamese interests.
Consequently, they could not accept McNamara’s upbeat view of the conflict. They remained critical of Diem and continued to publish accounts questioning prospects for success in the war. July 25 and July 29 stories in the
New York Times
reported that some American embassy staff and military advisers thought that the war was not going well and that McNamara’s optimism was unwarranted. Administration spokesmen responded with fresh pronouncements on the importance of saving Vietnam from the communists and the likelihood that it could be done without U.S. combat forces—only advisers and matériel.
Homer Bigart, the
New York Times
correspondent in Saigon, who in 1962 had a reputation as a tough-minded seeker of truth, thought that U.S. actions in Vietnam were ineffective and began saying so in his dispatches. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting during World War II and in Korea, the fifty-four-year-old Bigart angered Diem, Nolting, and American military chiefs, who considered him a subversive force. In the middle of May, after Bigart published a critical story about the South Vietnamese government’s shaky hold on the provinces, Lemnitzer told a meeting of a Special Counterinsurgency Group that Bigart’s report ignored the fact that the defense of various provinces was going well. Always alert to any published story that might embarrass the administration, Bobby Kennedy urged Lemnitzer to send the president a note “pointing out Bigart’s inaccuracy.”
Despite his reservations about the administration’s growing involvement in Vietnam, George Ball also defended its policy. In speeches in Chicago and Detroit, he announced that U.S. national security demanded a proactive policy in Southeast Asia, where the communists were aggressively trying to seize control of South Vietnam and dominate the region. Although conceding that it would take years, he asserted that we would definitely win by relying on the South Vietnamese. “We are not running the war,” he asserted. Harriman as well weighed in with a
New York Times Magazine
article explaining “What We Are Doing in Southeast Asia.” Bundy and Kennedy, who remained keen to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam, worried that the Ball speeches might reduce chances of persuading Hanoi to talk peace.
Because serious negotiations seemed like a distant reality, Kennedy and his advisers focused on hopes of aiding South Vietnam to find the wherewithal to defeat the Viet Cong. No one discounted the difficulties, but wishful thinking blotted out harsh truths. U.S. military and embassy officials put a positive face on any glimmer of hope. At the end of May, the embassy reported that a Strategic Hamlets program, which aimed to defend some sixteen hundred villages across the provinces from the Viet Cong, who compelled villagers to join their forces and supply foodstuffs, showed “considerable momentum behind [a] promising idea.” Despite troubling “weaknesses in the GVN administration, . . . US counsel and advice are becoming increasingly acceptable and should produce further dividends,” the embassy told Washington.
The positive reports became a spur to calls for more action and encouraged additional expressions of optimism. Rostow once again urged a more robust military campaign against Hanoi, including bombing raids against North Vietnam’s transportation and power grids and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. In June, Nolting reported that, in spite of some setbacks, he saw considerable improvement. On June 18, picking up on the hopeful signs coming from Vietnam, Hilsman told Harriman that deterioration in political and military conditions in Vietnam had been arrested, with “heartening progress” in the effectiveness of South Vietnam’s fighting forces. Chances of success in the war were “good” if Saigon made continuing progress in its current strategy. In the cliché of the day, there was growing light at the end of the tunnel.
“If We Listen to Them, None of Us Will Be Alive”
A
fter eighteen months of interactions with his counselors, Kennedy had diminished confidence in most of the men advising him on policy. With the exception of Bobby, who was principally a sounding board and instrument for testing out ideas on others, he thought it best to rely less on his associates and more on himself for the hard decisions he seemed to be confronting all the time.
Neither Rusk nor McNamara nor Bundy nor Rostow nor Taylor had impressed him as all that masterful about any of the big issues they had faced on Cuba, Berlin, or Vietnam. As for Sorensen and Schlesinger, they had been impressively helpful in composing speeches and preparing him for press conferences, but they were as much at sea as everyone else about how to solve his foreign policy dilemmas.
And Schlesinger in particular had become something of a liability. The conservative press was describing him as promoting socialist ideas. In June 1962, Schlesinger confided to his journal: “I have a feeling that JFK is a little edgy about all this and may even be beginning to wonder whether I am not more of a liability than a working asset.” At the end of the month, when some high jinks at a Bobby Kennedy party, with Arthur shoving Ethel Kennedy into a pool, and accusations that he was unpatriotic and antireligious and had violated government policy by accepting payments for magazine articles became front-page news, Schlesinger was mortified and justifiably convinced that “whatever limited effectiveness I may have had will be diminished.” Kennedy advised him not to “worry about it. . . . All they are doing is shooting at me through you. Their whole line is to pin everything on the professors—you, Heller, Rostow.” Nonetheless, it rightly persuaded Schlesinger that Kennedy would need to hold him at arm’s length.
In the summer of 1962, no group of advisers was less helpful than a Vietnam task force describing great progress in the conflict. They saw slow but clear forward movement. On a visit to the United States, South Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Vu Van Mau echoed their optimism. But Lansdale and McNamara wanted a sharper picture of what was happening on the ground. When Lansdale designed a questionnaire that U.S. officers could use to gather data, McNamara told Lansdale: “An excellent set of questions Ed—it is this kind of info I need & am not receiving.”
Kennedy was reluctant to take the happy talk at face value. In July, during negotiations in Geneva about concluding a neutrality agreement on Laos, an intermediary asked Harriman if he was willing to meet privately with North Vietnamese foreign minister Ung Van Kiem. When Kennedy gave Harriman the go-ahead, James Barrington, the British undersecretary for Burmese affairs, arranged a meeting in his hotel room. Harriman and Ung talked past each other, exchanging accusations of blame for the fighting. “We got absolutely nowhere,” Harriman’s deputy recalled. “We hit a stone wall.” It was enough to encourage feelings that the only route out of Vietnam was through more U.S. aid and counsel that gave Saigon the wherewithal to beat back the insurgents.
At the end of July, McNamara returned to Hawaii for another meeting with Harkins, Nolting, and other embassy and military officials stationed in Saigon. Given the dead end in possible negotiations with Hanoi, the impulse to see a military solution to the Vietnam problem was greater than ever. Moreover, Harkins and Nolting could not have been more upbeat about prospects for a successful outcome. Harkins told McNamara that Diem was winning the war. McNamara wanted to know “how long a period before the VC could be eliminated as a disturbing force.” Harkins was unprepared for the question and clueless as to an answer, but McNamara’s aide recalls him “jumping up in his chair,” collecting himself, and answering: a year after South Vietnamese forces were “fully operational and really pressing the VC in all areas.”
McNamara, however, believed it best to take a conservative view and assume that it would be three years before they could declare victory. It was all guesswork, resting more on hope than anything concrete—an astonishing bit of flimflam from someone who so prided himself on statistical analysis. Their problem during this time, McNamara believed, would be maintaining public support. U.S. losses in the fighting would raise questions about the wisdom of being in Vietnam. McNamara wanted plans for reducing U.S. involvement in the conflict that he could make public at the same time that the United States expanded its operations.
To delay public discomfort with the fighting, he directed his public affairs officer to begin getting “good material in the press.” Nothing was as perceptive on McNamara’s part about the growing U.S. role in Vietnam as his understanding that public dissent would become a major problem in fighting the war. But none of the national security advisers wanted to ask why, if the communists are actually losing, weren’t they willing to salvage something by talking? Instead, the objective was to issue upbeat reports and hope that the good news would eventually reflect reality.
In August, the State Department told Nolting that the White House and the whole government were committed to winning in Vietnam. But the president wanted hard data on why the embassy in Saigon thought the war was going so well. Michael Forrestal, the National Security Council’s expert on Vietnam, told Bundy that they wouldn’t really know if the war was progressing until the end of November, when the rainy season ended and military activity increased. He expected to know then whether sending more advisers and facilitating Strategic Hamlets were showing any results. He thought that American casualties would increase and “we will be in for real trouble” unless the public believed that they were winning the war.
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 obtaining 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.”