JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (10 page)

Kennedy told Taylor that he was “
instinctively against the introduction
of U.S. forces.” Bundy tried to change his mind, reminding him that his advisers had unanimously recommended sending combat units, and suggesting cabling Ambassador Frederick Nolting, Jr., that combat troops would be sent “
when and if the U.S. military recommend it
on persuasive military grounds.” Kennedy refused. He did, however, approve Taylor and Rostow’s recommendation that the United States increase economic aid and the number of military advisers. He may have done this to placate the Joint Chiefs, who were becoming increasingly mutinous after his responses to Cuba, Berlin, and Laos, and in the hope that the advisers might stabilize the situation sufficiently for Diem to survive until the 1964 U.S. election, or succeed in training enough South Vietnamese forces to wage the kind of successful anti-insurgency operations that the British had mounted against Communist guerrillas in Malaya. What
is
certain is that he repeatedly and categorically refused to send U.S. combat units to Vietnam, a position leading Taylor to conclude, “
I don’t recall anyone who was strongly
against [sending combat troops], except one man and that was the President.” Kennedy may have had this in mind when he told reporters at a 1962 press conference, “Well, you know that old story about Abraham Lincoln and the Cabinet. He says, ‘All in favor say “aye,”’ and the whole Cabinet voted ‘aye,’ and then, ‘All opposed no,’ and Lincoln voted ‘no,’ and he said, ‘the vote is no.’”

He realized that sending armed American advisers on patrol with South Vietnamese forces risked drawing the United States deeper into the conflict. To minimize this happening, he insisted that they participate only in combat-training missions. In the summer of 1962, he was cruising off Newport
with Fay when he received a call from the Pentagon reporting that a contingent of U.S. Marine advisers was requesting permission to assist a unit of South Vietnamese troops who were preparing to ambush a Viet Cong detachment. He had the call transferred to the forward cabin, where he and Fay could be alone. “
I want you to hear this
,” he told Fay. “We’ve got twenty advisors out there who want to attack the Viet Cong. They think they can kill at least over 100 or 150.” While Fay listened, he forbade the marines to engage in combat, adding, “For every one of those advisors that gets involved in it, I’m going to pull them out and an equal number to that.” After hanging up he turned to Fay and said, “We’re going to settle this thing diplomatically.”

Throughout 1962 Kennedy received cables from Ambassador Nolting and General Paul Harkins, commander of the U.S. advisory mission, stating that the counterinsurgency strategy of gathering South Vietnamese peasants in “strategic hamlets” was succeeding. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the Senate’s leading expert on Asia, was the first major dissenter. He had been among Diem’s earliest supporters, praising him in a 1959 speech as a man of “vision, strength, and selflessness,” but while visiting Saigon in November 1962, he was dismayed to find that he was becoming a recluse and had fallen under the influence of his sinister brother, Vice President Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu’s wife. Nhu was an unsavory paranoid who commanded a private army of shock troops trained by U.S. advisers. Because Diem was a celibate bachelor, Madame Nhu had become South Vietnam’s de facto first lady. She was a tangle of contradictions: a dragon lady with long fingernails and tight dresses split from ankle to waist, and a militant Catholic and sexually voracious puritan who had sponsored legislation outlawing contraceptives, abortion, prostitution, and taxi dancing.

Ambassador Nolting told Mansfield, “
We can see the light
at the end of the tunnel,” a comment unlikely to impress him since he had first heard it from the lips of the commander of the French forces in 1953. He wrote in a private memorandum that he had left Vietnam “
with a feeling of depression
and with the belief that our chances may be little better than 50-50.” After returning to Washington he sent Kennedy a confidential report that ranks among the most prescient and depressing documents ever written about that conflict. “
Seven years and billions
of dollars later . . . it would be well to face the fact that we are at the beginning of the beginning,” he wrote. Success was theoretically possible, but only if both the Vietnamese and Americans pursued the current strategy with “great vigor and self-dedication,” a possibility he considered unlikely. The only alternative was “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 sort of neo-colonial rule in South Vietnam.” He concluded that Kennedy must stress that the primary responsibility for the war rested with the South Vietnamese. Failure to do this could “not only be immensely costly in terms of American lives and resources but it may also draw us into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French.”

Kennedy invited Mansfield to Palm Beach over the Christmas holidays to discuss Vietnam. As they cruised on the
Honey Fitz
he became furious as he reread his memorandum, and exclaimed, “
This is not what my advisors
are telling me!” Mansfield said he was courting disaster unless he stopped increasing the advisers and began withdrawing the ones already there. “
I got angry at Mike
for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” he told O’Donnell afterward, “and I got angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”

At the end of December he sent Michael V. Forrestal of his National Security Council and the State Department’s director of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, to Vietnam to assess the state of the war. Forrestal was close to Averell Harriman, who had become his mentor after the suicide of his father, former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Hilsman was a West Point graduate whose experience fighting behind Japanese lines with Merrill’s Marauders during the Second World War had made him an early expert in counterinsurgency warfare.
In a special “eyes only” annex
to their report for President Kennedy, they described the situation as “fragile,” and pointed out serious problems in the conduct of the counterinsurgency efforts of the South Vietnam army. As Kennedy was digesting this, the Joint Chiefs made another pitch for combat units, writing in a memorandum to McNamara that if the Diem government could not bring the Vietcong under control, there was “no alternative to the introduction of U.S. military combat forces.”

Kennedy made Hilsman assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summoned him to the White House to discuss Vietnam, and told him that he had received
an assessment from Edmund Gullion
that had shaken his confidence in Diem. He had decided to continue supporting Diem for the moment, but would not send U.S. troops into battle or bomb North Vietnam. He wanted Hilsman to do everything possible to help the South Vietnamese win without getting the United States dragged into the fighting. Hilsman summarized his position as “
Keep it down
, no more advisors, we’re going downhill. We’ve reached the peak. From now on we’re going to cut the advisors back. If the Vietnamese win it, okay, great. But if they don’t, we’re going to go to Geneva and do what we did with Laos.”

•   •   •

O
N
M
AY
8, South Vietnamese police fired into a procession of Buddhists who had gathered in the formal imperial capital of Hue to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday and were flying religious banners in defiance of a law banning them. Although Buddhists constituted almost 90 percent of the population, Diem had given his fellow Catholics easier access to education and government jobs, and demonstrations against the Hue massacre turned into nationwide protests against religious discrimination. On June 12, an elderly monk sat down in a Saigon intersection, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself alive. Kennedy saw a wire service photograph of the man engulfed in flames, shouted “Jesus Christ!” and bolted from the room. He waved the photograph at Lodge when he asked him to go to Saigon.

That spring he complained to his friend Charlie Bartlett, a newspaper reporter and columnist, “
We don’t have a prayer
of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”

He asked Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Averell Harriman to be ready “
to seize upon any favorable
moment to reduce our involvement, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.”

He had told Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric at the end of 1962 that he believed the United States had been “
sucked into Vietnam little by little
,” and by the fall of 1963, Gilpatric came to believe that he had become “sick” of Vietnam, and noticed him frequently asking how to extricate America from the conflict.

In the spring of 1963, he told Mansfield
that he had made a mistake in increasing the number of advisers, agreed with Mansfield’s recommendation for a complete withdrawal, and said he would begin bringing troops home at the beginning of 1964 but would not remove them all until he was reelected. If he made his intentions known earlier, conservatives would pillory him and he might lose the election. After Mansfield left, he turned to O’Donnell and said, “
In 1965, I’ll become
one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we better make damn sure I
am
reelected.”
*

Kennedy could point to the Pentagon’s optimistic reports
about the progress of the war as an argument for reducing the U.S. commitment. A prime example was a MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) memorandum in the spring of 1963 reporting, “
Barring greatly increased resupply
and reinforcements of the Viet Cong by infiltration, the military phase of the war can be virtually won by 1963.” The military’s assessments became more cautious after the Buddhist revolt, and on the morning of August 15, the
New York Times
carried a front-page article by David Halberstam that Lodge and Kennedy had probably read before they met. Headlined “Vietnamese Reds Gain in Key Areas,” it began, “South Vietnam’s military situation in the vital Mekong Delta has deteriorated in the last year and informed officials are warning of ominous signs.”

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
ACTIVATED
the hidden Oval Office microphone
as Lodge was in midsentence. He may have waited until he was distracted, or made a spur-of-the-moment decision to record his former rival. Lodge was describing his dinner with Madame Nhu’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tran Van Chuong. Although Mr. Chuong owed his position as South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States to nepotism, as did his wife, who represented South Vietnam at the United Nations, they had become estranged from Diem, Nhu, and their increasingly erratic and terrifying daughter. Lodge told Kennedy that Madame Chuong believed that the Diem regime was responsible for mass executions, that a coup was inevitable, and that unless her daughter and husband fled, they would be assassinated. She also thought that her daughter’s bizarre and inflammatory comments—she had celebrated the Buddhist immolations as “barbecues,” and had said, “Let them burn, and we shall all clap our hands”—reflected the thinking of her husband and Diem.

As Lodge delivered his dinner-party aperçus about the dysfunctional Chuong family (in 1984 Madame Nhu’s brother would strangle his parents in their bed), Kennedy said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah.” Like his tooth-tapping, finger-drumming, and doodle-drawing, it was a sign that he was bored. Those who knew Kennedy well knew that boring him was a cardinal sin. His former girlfriend Nancy Dickerson, who would become NBC’s first female correspondent, noticed that “
when he was bored
, a hood would come down over his eyes and his nervous system would start churning. You could do anything to him—steal his wallet, insult him, argue with him—but to bore him was unpardonable.”

During his thirty-five-minute meeting with Lodge
he filled a page with doodles
, writing in a column down one side, “Saigon / Lodge / No press comment / Cabot Lodge / Henry Cabot Lodge / Ambassador Lodge / Governor / Senator,” and on the other, “No press comment / USOM [United States Operations Mission],” with an arrow pointing downward. “No press comment” was a reminder to ask Lodge not to comment to the press after the meeting, an instruction that, presaging things to come, Lodge would immediately ignore. To be fair, it was not only Lodge’s insights into the Chuong family that Kennedy found tiresome, it was the whole Vietnam mess, a sideshow compared with civil rights, the test ban treaty, and U.S.-Soviet relations.

When he and Lodge met on June 12 he had held up the photograph of the Buddhist monk engulfed in flames. After saying, “
I suppose these are the worst press relations
to be found in the world today,” he had told Lodge that he expected him to take charge of relations with U.S. journalists in Saigon. Mindful of that exchange, Lodge now offered him a preview of how he planned to handle his first Saigon press conference, saying, “Suppose I am asked, ‘Do you think we can win with Diem?’”

Kennedy, who persisted in viewing Vietnam as primarily a public relations problem needing better management, suddenly showed more interest in the conversation. “You have to think of a rough one for that,” he suggested. Referring to the American press corps, he added, “You’re going to have a difficult time having a satisfactory relationship with them.”

“The very first day I’m going to invite them to lunch with me and my wife and ask their advice. I’ll be too fresh for them to get anything out of me . . . and at least [I can] try to get them into a human frame of mind.”