JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (9 page)

Jack and Bobby also visited Hanoi and the Mekong Delta. A colonel at a frontier post told them France would win, but it might not happen in his lifetime. General de Lattre rolled out maps and declared that if France lost the rich delta, the Communists would seize all of Southeast Asia—the domino theory. Jack spent several hours with the
New York Times
correspondent Seymour Topping at his apartment in Saigon.
Topping told him
the French were doomed as long as the Chinese could supply the Viet Minh through mountain passes, and that many Vietnamese detested Americans because they were assisting the French. By the time Kennedy left his apartment, Topping believed that he had been persuaded “that only a truly independent Vietnamese government had any prospect of attracting popular support.”

Bobby wrote in his diary
that Vietnam had made “a very, very major impression” on his brother, and had taught them “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments.” Jack added his own entry to the diary, writing, “We must do what we can as our contribution gets bigger to force the French to liberalize political conditions,” “We are not here to help French maintain colonies,” and “Reason for spread of communism is failure of those who believe in democracy to explain this theory in terms intelligible to the ordinary man and to make its ameliorating effect in life apparent.”

After returning to Washington he went on
Meet the Press,
accused the Eisenhower administration of supporting “
the desperate attempt
of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire,” and warned that attempting to defeat the Communist insurgency without recognizing the nationalism of the Vietnamese people “spells foredoomed failure.” While running for the Senate against Lodge the following year he stood in front of a map of Vietnam with a pointer and criticized the conflict as “
a white man’s war
against the natives.”

During a fifty-seven-day siege in 1954 that would end in the humiliating surrender of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Kennedy rose in the Senate to oppose a French request for additional military assistance. Change the dates, substitute the United States for France, and his speech could have been delivered by an antiwar politician in 1968. He said, “To pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive.” After recalling Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s 1952 statement that “the tide is now moving in our favor,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s insistence that American aid would “reduce this Communist pressure to manageable proportions,” he concluded, “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people,’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”

The French surrendered two weeks later, and negotiations at Geneva led to an agreement to divide Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. The Communists under Ho Chi Minh ruled the North, and Emperor Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem head of state in the South. The division was meant to be temporary, and the Geneva Accords called for elections in 1956 to unify the country under a single government. Diem refused to participate, arguing that the Communists would never permit free elections in the North. After the Viet Minh attacked government offices and assassinated officials in the South, Eisenhower increased U.S. economic and military assistance to the Diem government.

Kennedy’s reputation as a zealous cold warrior rests partly on his 1960 campaign speeches, in which he charged the Eisenhower-Nixon administration with allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union militarily, and on the famous passage in his inaugural address in which he pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” His cold war rhetoric was not an act. He subscribed to the domino theory and believed that the charge that his party had “lost” China meant that no Democratic politician could become president without being tough on communism. After taking office, he continued ornamenting his speeches with cold war rhetoric, even after it became apparent to his advisers that if he
was
a cold warrior, he was a fairly nonviolent one, ready to talk tough, call up reserves, impose blockades, deploy aircraft carriers off coasts, and order convoys up autobahns, but unwilling to “pay any price” if the price was nuclear war, or “bear any burden” if the burden included sending combat troops to Vietnam.

He had hinted at this in his inaugural address. After his “pay any price”
passage
he had warned, “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish . . . all forms of human life,” and spoke of “that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.” He followed this with a call for negotiations, saying, “Let both sides begin anew the quest for peace,” “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” and “Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms—and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.” The newspapers got it right. Headlines in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington proclaimed, “Kennedy Is Sworn In—Asks Grand Alliance for Peace,” “Kennedy Takes Oath as President, Proclaims a ‘New Quest for Peace,’” “Kennedy Asks World Peace Quest,” and “Kennedy Sworn In, Bids for Peace.”

At a White House meeting a day before Kennedy’s inauguration, Eisenhower warned that the most immediate and important foreign challenge would be the small, landlocked Southeast Asian nation of Laos, where an insurgency by the Communist Pathet Lao was threatening a pro-Western regime. “
If we permit Laos to fall
, then we will have to write off the whole area,” Eisenhower said, adding that the only solution might be a unilateral military intervention. After leaving the meeting, Kennedy remarked caustically, “
There he sat, telling me
to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years.”

Laos monopolized his attention that winter. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense McNamara recommended sending in U.S. ground forces and bombing North Vietnam.
The chiefs warned that if the Chinese
Communists intervened, the United States might have to retaliate with nuclear weapons. In March, the chiefs recommended an expeditionary force of 60,000 troops, with an additional 140,000 readied and armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Their chairman, Lyman Lemnitzer, promised victory if Kennedy approved the use of nuclear weapons.

The president was appalled, telling an aide after the meeting, “
Since he couldn’t think
of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory.” Instead, he ordered a show of force in Thailand and in waters off Vietnam, and asked the veteran diplomat W. Averell Harriman to negotiate the neutralization of Laos. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy both opposed a neutral Laos, arguing that it could hand South Vietnam to the Communists. He ignored them and told Harriman during an overseas phone call, “
Do you understand
? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.” General Maxwell Taylor, who succeeded Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs a year later, believed Kennedy had resisted escalation in Laos because of “
his knowledge of the French problem
in Vietnam.” His refusal to intervene in Laos to prevent it falling to the Communists also indicated that, his rhetoric notwithstanding, he did not believe that its loss would imperil neighboring Southeast Asian nations, and represented a de facto rejection of the domino theory.

He also refused the Joint Chiefs’ request to provide air cover and marines to save the Cuban exiles pinned down at the Bay of Pigs, a decision leading to a strained relationship between himself and the chiefs. He was furious at himself for approving the invasion, and furious at the CIA, the military, and his advisers for endorsing it. While dining with family and friends at Hyannis Port that summer, he could still work himself up into a fury over it. “
When I sat there and looked
at that fat ass [Admiral] Arleigh Burke and fat ass [General] George Decker,” he said, “I looked at their four stars and that wide gold braid, and . . . I figured the selection process that they had to go through in order to achieve that pinnacle in the military—having been in the military myself—I just figured these fellows have got to know what they’re doing.” Later that evening, he resumed his rant while playing dominoes with Fay. “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interest of the country,” he said. “I will never compromise the principles on which this country is built, but we’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason. Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw here this evening? Do you think I’m going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn’t think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he’s crazy.” He picked up his crutches, announced he was going to bed, then swiveled around and added, “I’ll tell you I don’t care who it is, nobody is going to force me to do anything irrational just because they feel that it is going to save the image or the name of the country.”

When Khrushchev threatened to cut off access to Berlin in August 1961, and the East Germans erected a wall separating East from West Berlin, the Pentagon recommended that Kennedy consider using nuclear tactical weapons to maintain Western rights in the divided city. Instead, he increased military spending on conventional forces, called up reserves, doubled draft calls, and put American forces on alert. During the crisis he arrived two hours late for a small White House dinner party. His hands shook as he said, “
God, I hope you’ve been enjoying
yourselves over here because I’ve been over there in that office, not knowing whether the decisions I made were going to start a war and send the missiles flying.”

In the fall of 1962, he learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba. His civilian and military advisers urged him to bomb the missile sites and invade the island, measures that would have probably precipitated a nuclear exchange. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay recommended surrounding Cuba with warships and sending Strategic Air Command bombers to bomb it with nuclear weapons.
Kennedy told John Kenneth Galbraith
, the Harvard economist who was serving as his ambassador to India, that he never had the slightest intention of doing this, and that the worst advice always seemed to come “from those who feared that to be sensible made them seem soft and unheroic.” Instead of bombing Cuba he imposed a naval blockade, demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missiles, and during secret exchanges with Khrushchev agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union doing the same in Cuba.
He told Rusk
that if the blockade and Turkish deal failed to persuade the Soviets to remove the missiles, he would bring the dispute to the United Nations Security Council instead of attacking Cuba.

He had prefaced his 1954 Senate speech on Vietnam by declaring that American citizens had a right “to inquire in detail into the nature of the struggle in which we may become engaged,” before traveling “the long and torturous road to war—particularly a war which we now realize would threaten the survival of civilization.” After making his own inquiry, he concluded that the United States should not send combat units to save the French. This conclusion guided his own Vietnam policy throughout his presidency, repeatedly putting him at odds with the Joint Chiefs and his civilian advisers.

In the spring of 1961, the chiefs urged him to send 3,600 combat troops to assist Diem’s beleaguered forces. He sent 500 military advisers.

During a visit to South Vietnam in May 1961, Vice President Johnson hailed President Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia” and recommended increasing U.S. economic and military assistance. Kennedy listened instead to General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded American forces in Asia during World War II and the Korean conflict. The two men got along so famously when they dined in New York in the spring of 1961 that Kennedy invited him to the White House for lunch. Before he arrived he read aloud to Bobby and Powers the citation for the decoration that he had won in the First World War. He prefaced it by asking Powers, “
Dave, how would you like this to be said
about you”—by which he meant that he wished it had been said about him—and read, “On a field where Courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant feature.” In a quiet voice, Bobby, who had never been in combat, said shyly, “I would love to have that said about me.” With this as an introduction, he naturally hit it off with MacArthur again.

MacArthur told him
, “What has happened after eight years of Eisenhower is that the chickens have come home to roost. And you live in the chicken house.” He said that anyone who advocated putting American ground troops in Asia should have his head examined. He dismissed the domino theory, saying it would be a mistake to fight the Communists in Vietnam, and recommended drawing a defensive line around Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines. He further endeared himself to Kennedy by saying, “If I was in combat and I commanded an army, I would hope that someone like General Eisenhower was commanding the opposing army.” General Taylor believed that MacArthur’s advice made “
a hell of an impression
” on Kennedy. Whenever Taylor or others urged him to increase the U.S. military commitment to Vietnam, he would tell them, “
Well, now, you gentlemen
, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.”

After returning from a fact-finding mission
to Vietnam in the fall of 1961, Taylor and Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow recommended sending 8,000 combat engineers to South Vietnam and making preparations to dispatch an additional 205,000 combat troops if North Vietnamese forces launched an invasion. They concluded their report by urging that the United States commit itself to preventing the fall of South Vietnam “by the necessary military actions.” Taylor and McNamara followed this with a memorandum warning, “The chances are against preventing [the fall of South Vietnam] by any measures short of the introduction of U.S. forces on a substantial scale.”