Read Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Online
Authors: Robert Dallek
Kennedy and his civilian advisers breathed a huge sigh of relief. They had faced the possibility of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets as the ultimate failure. Jackie Kennedy reflected the depths of their fears when she told her husband that she and the children wanted to die with him, if it came to that. Despite her reluctance to leave, he sent her and the children away to the safety of a bomb shelter. He then invited Mimi Beardsley to spend the night of October 27 with him at the White House. She witnessed Kennedy’s “grave” expression and “funereal tone” that evening, when he told her that “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” He never could have said that publicly; it would have been seen as defeatist, a readiness to surrender to Moscow rather than fight them. But it revealed his conviction that almost anything was better than a nuclear war.
With the immediate crisis at an end, Kennedy cautioned everyone not to gloat, and Jackie Kennedy remembered at the end of the crisis “thinking of the Inaugural Address—‘Let’s never negotiate out of fear’—because I thought how humiliating really for Khrushchev to have to back down. And yet, somehow Jack let him do it with grace and didn’t rub his nose in it.” On the contrary, Kennedy, as he said to some dinner guests after the crisis, “wondered how he would now get on with Khrushchev; he wondered if this humiliation cost Khrushchev too much; he wondered if something ought to be done to save his face and what, if so, he could do.”
Kennedy also counseled against thinking that everything was settled. The United States still had to verify that the missiles were being dismantled and shipped back to Russia. Moreover, the Joint Chiefs remained convinced that the Soviet threat would not disappear without an attack on Cuba that could neutralize the island. They sent the president a memo describing Khrushchev’s response as a delaying tactic “while preparing the ground for diplomatic blackmail.” Unless there was “irrefutable evidence” that the Soviets were removing the missiles, the Chiefs recommended the full-scale air strike and invasion that had been planned for Sunday or Monday. Taylor, who had faithfully reflected the Chiefs’ views throughout the crisis, now separated himself from their advice.
Kennedy ignored the Chiefs’ recommendation, but a few days after the crisis ended, he met with them as a gesture of regard for their help. They were openly contemptuous: A talking paper they had prepared for the meeting, according to Taylor, was “condescending and full of platitudes: ‘we were saying, Now see here, young man, here is what we think you ought to do.’” Although they put the paper aside, Anderson and LeMay made their contempt for Kennedy’s leadership clear: “We have been had!” Anderson said. LeMay called the settlement “the greatest defeat in our history,” one that could only be remedied by a prompt invasion. Kennedy was “absolutely shocked” by their remarks and “stuttering in reply.” Soon after,
Washington Post
editor Benjamin Bradlee heard from him “an explosion . . . about his forceful, positive lack of admiration for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Kennedy would later tell John Kenneth Galbraith, “Ken, you have no idea how much bad advice I received in those days.”
But he could not simply disregard their advice: “We must operate on the presumption that the Russians may try again,” he told McNamara. And when Castro refused to allow a U.N. inspection of Cuba and posed a continuing threat of subversion in other hemisphere countries, Kennedy maintained plans to bring him down. An invasion, however, was off the table. As Kennedy told McNamara on November 5 about an invasion, “Consider the size of the problem, the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists’ fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Not to mention the broken pledge about an invasion, which would have brought condemnation not just from Moscow but also around the world.
What lessons did Kennedy take away from the crisis about the Soviets, his military, and his closest advisers? Khrushchev had made a mistake in putting the missiles in Cuba, and he knew it and had backed down. More to the point, he understood that Soviet national security interests were not clearly at stake and that world opinion would not have been on his side in a war. And so he relented and pulled the missiles out of Cuba. But, as Kennedy told Schlesinger, if Soviet interests were directly at stake, the outcome would have been different.
As for the U.S. military, Kennedy justifiably considered them irresponsible: They wanted an invasion and that “would have been a mistake—a wrong use of our power. But the military are mad,” he told Schlesinger. It is impossible to say whether an invasion would have provoked a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. But it is clear that they had tactical nuclear weapons ready to fire if U.S. forces had invaded the island. Whether they would have fired them is unknowable, but the risk was there and certainly great enough for firings to occur in response to an invasion. As Bundy said later, “recognition that the level of nuclear danger reached in October was unacceptably high for all mankind may be the most important single legacy of the Cuban missile crisis.”
Kennedy also told Schlesinger that the military wanted to invade. “It’s lucky for us that we have McNamara over there,” who had initiated the idea of a blockade or quarantine as an alternative to quick military strikes. Kennedy could have described McNamara as a counterbalance to Acheson and Taylor, who had consistently backed the Chiefs’ pressure for action, until their startling call for implementing plans for the air assault and invasion after Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles. Their insistence on action before diplomacy was given a chance was distressing enough. But after Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles? It is no wonder that Kennedy kept the Chiefs at arm’s length during the crisis, never giving them a regular presence in the ExCOM discussions, which Kennedy could justify with Acheson briefly and Taylor consistently at the table.
Kennedy said nothing about Bundy, who had run an erratic course during the crisis, careening from suggestions for passivity to calls for military action. He “did some strange flip flops,” Bobby Kennedy recorded. “First he was for a strike, then a blockade, then for doing nothing because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of a strike.” Schlesinger said that at “one time he was a hawk and another time he was a dove.” Jackie Kennedy recalled that “Bundy in the missile crisis, when you think of that great mind, in the beginning he wanted to go in and bomb Cuba. And at the end, he wanted to do nothing. So, if you’d been relying on that great intelligence, look where we’d be?” As the missile crisis ended, Bundy himself, speaking of the advice offered at the ExCOM meetings, said “some had been hawks and some had been doves, but today was the day of the doves.”
Rusk had been a cautious but steady presence throughout the discussion. He described his function as trying “to keep the group from moving too far or too fast.” Bobby Kennedy privately described him as “playing the role of the ‘dumb dodo’ for this reason.” From the perspective of 1965, when Bobby was already critical of Rusk for his ties to Lyndon Johnson and escalation of the Vietnam War, Bobby ungenerously described Rusk during the missile crisis as having “a virtually complete breakdown mentally and physically.” Although Kennedy never held Rusk in the same high regard as McNamara, Rusk was, in fact, a voice of reason in the crisis that helped Kennedy resist the rash urgings of the military Chiefs. Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson was especially valuable in helping Kennedy take Khrushchev’s measure. Bobby Kennedy remembered him as “tremendously helpful. . . . He made a major difference. The most valuable people during the Cuban crisis were Bob McNamara and Tommy Thompson,” Bobby said.
Bobby should have included himself. He was the president’s closest confidant during the crisis. Dobrynin recalls that he and Bobby had almost daily conversations, usually lasting about two hours, between one and three in the morning, with no one else present. Although he thought that Bobby sometimes overdramatized the tensions between the president and his military chiefs, Dobrynin believed that “in general he rather correctly reflected the tense mood inside the White House”; it gave Khrushchev a realistic sense of the crisis they were facing. At their decisive meeting on the night of October 27, Bobby made clear that “a lot of unreasonable people among American generals—and not only generals—were ‘spoiling for a fight.’” Dobrynin had “no doubt that my report of this conversation turned the tide in Moscow.”
Most important, Bobby was less a thoughtful commentator during the ExCOM’s deliberations than an instrument of his brother’s ideas and intentions. Where Kennedy needed to stay somewhat above the debate over finding a way through the crisis, Bobby could freely state his brother’s views and at times openly announce that he was declaring what the president wanted done. It was an essential role that allowed Kennedy to provide the sort of effective leadership that carried the country and the world to a peaceful resolution of the most dangerous Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“Mankind Must Put an End to War”
I
n December 1962, Kennedy was much happier about his presidential performance than he had been at the end of 1961. A national approval rating of 74 percent and a Gallup poll describing him as the most admired man in the world were causes for considerable satisfaction. The second-best showing in the November midterm elections by a party in a hundred years, and the conviction of three-quarters of U.S. voters that Kennedy would win reelection, were additional reasons for an upbeat mood at the White House.
Kennedy relished the prospect of running in 1964 against Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the darling of ultraconservatives. This group had won 109 of the 176 Republican House seats in the recent elections and had become a dominant force in the Republican Party. They were enthusiastically promoting Goldwater’s presidential nomination, but Kennedy saw him as a relatively easy mark. Goldwater’s antagonism to Social Security and seeming readiness to consider fighting the Soviet Union—“We should think about lobbing one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” he jested—frightened people. Why, even Dave Powers could beat him, Kennedy joked. They would all get to bed much earlier on election night than they had in 1960 if Goldwater were his opponent, Kennedy quipped.
A big reelection victory would allow Kennedy to overcome his disappointing legislative record. All of his major initiatives—a tax cut, federal aid to education, and Medicare—were stalled in Congress, while southern resistance ruled out even asking for a civil rights law. But a second term, supported by a large national majority for him and congressional Democrats, seemed likely to produce a domestic legacy rivaling Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Moreover, with almost two-thirds of the country optimistic about the economy and a like number hopeful after the resolution of the missile crisis that the United States could achieve a peaceful settlement of differences with Russia in the future, Kennedy could imagine a truly distinguished presidency.
And after that, he could picture Bobby succeeding him—the first two-brother presidential dynasty in American history. On January 4, when Bobby gave a compelling speech at the National Archives commemorating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, liberal activist Joe Rauh passed a note to Schlesinger saying, “Poor Lyndon.” What do you mean? Schlesinger asked him. “Lyndon must know he is through,” Rauh replied. “Bobby is going to be the next President.”
Only Vietnam cast a shadow over the administration’s prospects. True, a test ban treaty and the 1964 elections remained unfinished projects, but favorable outcomes seemed within reach. By contrast, Kennedy received several reports about Vietnam in December 1962 that troubled him. Yes, Diem and Nhu were optimistic about the eventual success of Strategic Hamlets in defeating the Viet Cong, but they could not imagine a successful end to the fighting for at least three years, if even then. Roger Hilsman warned that although Diem and Nhu saw “the tide turning against insurgency and subversion . . . this optimism was premature.” A State Department working group on Vietnam thought that bringing U.S. journalists in Saigon on board was the biggest remaining problem in ensuring sustained U.S. support for a successful war effort. Even then, South Vietnam’s survival was less than certain: Averell Harriman, Deputy Undersecretary U. Alexis Johnson, Hilsman, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and Michael Forrestal, the National Security Council’s point man on Vietnam, thought that the war could be won, but only through increased use of U.S. air support and a sustained effort for an uncertain period of time. Whether the Congress and the public would remain steadfast if the required sacrifices became too great or lasted too long was open to question.
After visiting Vietnam with other senators in November, where he had been seven years before, Mike Mansfield gave the president a more discouraging report. Nolting and Harkins acknowledged the challenges in battling the communists, but they told Mansfield that they had every hope of winning. Diem, with whom Mansfield had a cordial relationship dating from the 1950s, and the Nhus, whose influence and control over Diem did not escape Mansfield, also saw better days ahead.
But Mansfield did not trust either the embassy’s or the palace’s optimism. Eager to escape the Potemkin village atmosphere of officials in Saigon, Mansfield arranged to have a four-hour lunch with more critical American correspondents. The move greatly irritated American officials, who saw the journalists as a major part of their problem. Their reporting angered Diem and the Nhus and made them harder to deal with. Diem and the Nhus also thought that the journalists were undermining morale among the diplomats and troops serving in Saigon as well as threatening to turn key Washington policymakers against substantial long-term support for the war. Some in the U.S. military and embassy tried to strong-arm the reporters into getting “on the team.” Nolting told them, “Stop looking for the hole in the doughnut.” He told Washington that his assignment was being “badly hampered by irresponsible, astigmatic and sensationalized reporting.” The Marine general in Saigon belittled the journalists as weak-kneed liberals who cried at the sight of dead bodies. Although the four reporters—Halberstam of the
New York Times
, Neil Sheehan of UPI, and Peter Arnett and Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press—did not describe a hopeless conflict, they astutely warned of disaster from the Diem government, which they believed incapable of beating the Viet Cong.
Mansfield saw little that had changed since his last visit, despite billions of American dollars and the increased presence of U.S. military advisers. He heard lots of hopeful talk about Strategic Hamlets, but the French had also been full of unwarranted optimism about new concepts. As far as he could tell, the Viet Cong still controlled the countryside. He thought that defeat of the communists would take “an immense job of social engineering, dependent on great outlays of aid on our part for many years” and a much more effective government in Saigon.
He believed it was worth giving the Hamlets program a chance to work, but warned that if they failed, the United States would face the possibility of “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam. That is an alternative I most emphatically do not recommend. . . . We are not, of course, at that point at this time. But the great increase in American military commitment this year has tended to point us in that direction.” Mansfield warned against a rapid slide into a quagmire. He urged a reassessment of U.S. interests in Southeast Asia, which might discourage any expansion of U.S. commitments to Vietnam’s civil war. He shared the English view that “[e]very people have a right to their own Wars of the Roses.” The failure of the present effort should persuade the administration to seek neutralization of the region.
A front-page
New York Times
story by Halberstam on December 3 describing Mansfield as “Cool on Vietnam War” angered Kennedy. In a discussion with Mansfield at his Palm Beach retreat in December, he told the senator that his assessment did not tally with what he was hearing from administration subordinates. Afterward, Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell that “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” He was more irritated with his military and national security advisers for once again urging him to take on what might prove to be an impossible challenge. This could be worse than the Bay of Pigs. The failure there was a quick disaster, but this could be a slow, drawn-out fiasco that could cost American lives and significant amounts of money and undermine him politically at home and abroad.
In public, he tried to maintain a measured posture on America’s part in the conflict. At a December 12 press conference, a journalist described “a good deal of discouragement about the progress” in Vietnam despite a year of stepped-up aid, and asked Kennedy’s assessment. The president acknowledged that “we are putting in a major effort” with about ten or eleven times the number of men there than a year ago and a lot of equipment. He also described “a number of casualties and great difficulty . . . in fighting a guerrilla war. . . . We don’t see the end of the tunnel,” he said, but he didn’t think conditions were worse than a year before.
Events in January of the new year deepened Kennedy’s private skepticism about rescuing South Vietnam from a communist takeover. On January 3, 1963, in a pitched battle at Ap Bac, a village thirty-five miles from Saigon in the rich Mekong Delta, which the government saw as vital to its survival, a Viet Cong battalion—a force of some two hundred men—inflicted a stunning defeat on Diem’s forces. Despite a four-to-one advantage in troops backed by artillery, armor, and helicopters, the South Vietnamese performed miserably. According to a U.S. adviser’s after-action report, they showed “a reluctance to incur casualties, an inability to take advantage of air superiority, and a lack of discipline.” In short, the government’s men could not match the enemies’ willingness to take losses and fight for something they believed in. The battle also cost the lives of three American advisers, including an Army captain “out front pleading with them [the South Vietnamese] to attack.” Five U.S. helicopters ferrying troops into battle were shot down. When the defeat became headline news in the United States, the Joint Chiefs, instead of acknowledging that military advisers had had little success in turning South Vietnamese troops and their commanders into an effective army, criticized the reports as distorting “both the importance of the action and the damage suffered by the US/GVN forces.”
To refute the press accounts, which stirred complaints that the Kennedy administration had been hiding the truth about Vietnam from the public, General Harkins and Admiral Felt attacked the newsmen as irresponsible for saying that the South Vietnamese forces didn’t and won’t fight and for ignoring victories that they asserted were occurring more frequently. To bolster the view that the war was going much better than journalists said, the Chiefs sent Army Chief of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler to lead a team of Pentagon officers on an inspection trip to Saigon to report on future prospects for the war. A career Army officer, the fifty-four-year-old Wheeler had served in a variety of senior staff positions, but had limited experience as a field commander and deferred to those who did. He seemed unlikely to take issue with what Harkins thought, which is what the Chiefs wanted. If the United States wasn’t winning on the battlefield, at least it could encourage perceptions that it was until the tide turned against the Viet Cong.
Because Mansfield’s report had so troubled him, Kennedy earlier had directed Hilsman and Forrestal to make a fact-finding trip to Vietnam to see if anything could be done to improve chances of a successful outcome. On the ground for ten days beginning December 31, the two kept extensive notes on what they found, which was the basis for a lengthy report they sent Kennedy on January 25. They saw clear evidence of improvement in the war from the previous year and substantial optimism at the U.S. Embassy and among the military about long-term results in the fighting. Harkins and Nolting were decidedly optimistic.
But the “negative side of the ledger,” Hilsman and Forrestal reported, “is still awesome.” They were hard-pressed to understand the excessively positive official outlook: “Things are not going nearly so well as the people here in Saigon, both military and civilian, think they are.” They agreed “that we are probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped. At the rate it is now going the war will last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated, and prolong the period in which a sudden and dramatic event would upset the gains already made.” They suggested the need for a plan better coordinating civilian and military actions; providing some long-range thinking about future conditions in South Vietnam; better understanding of how to conduct a counter-guerrilla war; and means of persuading Diem to win greater popularity among his countrymen. It was hardly a prescription for how to win the war—just another call to find the means to do so.
Kennedy at once read the battle at Ap Bac and the Hilsman-Forrestal report as evidence that Galbraith, Ball, and Mansfield were right about the nearly impossible task of defending an unpopular regime in Saigon against a highly motivated insurgency. When he read press reports of visits to Vietnam by senior U.S. military and civilian officials that increased impressions of American involvement in the war, he complained to Forrestal on January 25: “that is exactly what I don’t want to do.”
On February 1, Forrestal reminded Kennedy that he would meet that afternoon with General Wheeler as well as Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Harriman, and McCone to hear Wheeler’s report on Vietnam. Forrestal listed seven questions Kennedy might want to ask the group, including whether a new ambassador should replace Nolting, whether the administration was being firm enough with Diem, and whether the United States should reconsider the way it was conducting military and political operations.
After the meeting, Forrestal apologized to Kennedy for the “complete waste of your time.” The meeting was supposed “to provide you an opportunity to initiate action on some of the problems in South Vietnam” listed in his earlier memo. “The rosy euphoria generated by General Wheeler’s report made this device unworkable.” Speaking for the Joint Chiefs, but especially Taylor, who even more than McNamara saw the conflict as his war, Wheeler tried to counter the negative impressions of Hilsman and Forrestal and the journalists. He described a situation in South Vietnam that had changed from near desperation to likely victory. The United States was winning and only needed to stay the course. Because he and the Chiefs did not want to attack Kennedy’s civilian advisers directly, Wheeler said the greatest problem was the reporting of U.S. journalists in Saigon, who had done “great harm” by encouraging public and congressional concern the United States was locked into a losing effort. It was transparent to Forrestal and Kennedy that the military was spinning its wheels. No doubt they believed their own rhetoric, but Wheeler’s performance only deepened Kennedy’s conviction that they weren’t to be trusted.