Kennedy: The Classic Biography (118 page)

No deadline was set for a cease-fire, though he indicated that “every day is important.” In the weeks that followed, the prospects for a ceasefire rose and fell as sporadic fighting continued. The President, in the key strategy meeting of March 9, had agreed to preparations for a military build-up. But he had not agreed, he had emphasized at the time to all present, to giving the final “go” signal. Throughout March and April he calmly withstood pressures to launch the new military effort, believing that Khrushchev might still agree to a cease-fire. The Pathet Lao, shrewdly avoiding any all-out assault, continued to expand and consolidate their position. “With a few more weeks of fighting,” the President would admit privately later, “the Communists had every military prospect of picking up the entire country.”

A new round of White House talks on Laos took place around the first of May. But these talks had a different ring, due to two intervening factors or events. One was the growing evidence that this nation would be largely alone if we intervened in Laos. The Pentagon talked of landing a SEATO force in which U.S. troops would play only their part. But upon pressing the other SEATO nations hard about the actual extent of their help, the President found the French strongly opposed, the British dragging their feet and most of the others willing to give only token forces, if any. The Laotian people themselves were wholly unenthusiastic, and the Phoumi forces were unwilling to fight very hard for their homeland. Phoumi himself still talked tough, but he and his men seemed both unable and unwilling to engage in many actual exchanges of gunfire.

Second, the Bay of Pigs fiasco had its influence. That operation had been recommended principally by the same set of advisers who favored intervention in Laos. But now the President was far more skeptical of the experts, their reputations, their recommendations, their promises, premises and facts. He relied more on his White House staff and his own common sense; and he asked the Attorney General and me to attend all NSC meetings. He began asking questions he had not asked before about military operations in Laos. He requested each member of the Chiefs of Staff to give him in writing his detailed views on where our intervention would lead, who would join us, how we would react to a massive Red Chinese response and where it would all end. Their answers, considered in an NSC meeting on May I, looked very different from the operation originally envisioned; and the closer he looked, the less justifiable and definable those answers became. “Thank God the Bay of Pigs happened when it did,” he would say to me in September, as we chatted about foreign policy in his New York hotel room on the eve of his UN address. “Otherwise we’d be in Laos by now—and that would be a hundred times worse.”

In general, the Joint Chiefs (and most other advisers) accepted without reservation the “falling domino” theory—the premise that an absence of American military intervention would lose Laos, which would move Thailand toward the Communist orbit, which would jeopardize SEATO, which in five or six years would lose all Southeast Asia, and so on down a trail of disaster. But their individual written views revealed all kinds of splits not previously made known to the President. Those whose troops would have to do the fighting were dubious, pointing out the difficulties the Army would encounter in supplying its troops and clearing guerrillas out of the rugged mountains, and warning (somewhat inaccurately, the President later learned) of the crippling effects of dysenteric and other diseases native to the area. The President was also warned that the Communists had the manpower to open another front against us elsewhere in Asia. The majority, however, appeared to favor the landing of American troops in Thailand, South Vietnam and the government-held portions of the Laotian panhandle. If that did not produce a cease-fire, they recommended an air attack on Pathet Lao positions and tactical nuclear weapons on the ground. If North Vietnamese or Chinese then moved in, their homelands would be bombed. If massive Red troops were then mobilized, nuclear bombings would be threatened and, if necessary, carried out. If the Soviets then intervened, we should “be prepared to accept the possibility of general war.” But the Soviet Union, they assured the President, “can hardly wish to see an uncontrollable situation develop.” At least that was their judgment—and the President had relied on their judgment at the Bay of Pigs.

Earlier the Chiefs had talked of landing and supplying American combat forces through Laotian airports (inasmuch as the kingdom is landlocked). Questioning now disclosed that there were only two usable airstrips even in good weather, that Pathet Lao control of the nearby countryside could make initial landings difficult, and that a Communist bombing of these airstrips would leave us with no alternative but to bomb Communist territory.

If we used nuclear bombs, the President asked, where would it stop, how many other Communist movements would we have to attack, what kind of world would it be? No one knew. If we didn’t use nuclear weapons, he asked, would we have to retreat or surrender in the face of an all-out Chinese intervention? That answer was affirmative. If we put more forces in Laos, he asked the Chiefs, would that weaken our reserves for action in Berlin or elsewhere? The answer was again in the affirmative. If neither the royal nor the administrative capital cities fell, and the cease-fire squabble was merely over where the truce was to be signed, would these risks be worthwhile? No one was sure.

Once in, how and when do we get out? he asked. Why cannot air and Naval power suffice? Do we want an indefinite occupation of an unenthusiastic, dark-skinned population, tying up our forces and not those of the Communists? Is this our best bet for a confrontation with Red China—in the mountains and jungles of its landlocked neighbor? Would forces landing in Vietnam and Thailand end up defending those regimes also? Above all, he asked, why were the Laotian forces unwilling to fight for their own freedom? “Experience has taught us,” the President said later that May in his second State of the Union,

that no one nation has the power or the wisdom to solve all the problems of the world or manage its revolutionary tides; that extending our commitments does not always increase our security—…that nuclear weapons cannot prevent subversion; and that no free peoples can be kept free without will and energy of their own….

He spoke of the world in general but he was thinking of Laos in particular.

Nevertheless he did not alter his posture (which combined bluff with real determination in proportions he made known to
no one)
that the United States would have to intervene in Laos if it could not otherwise be saved. That posture, as communicated by his March 23 news conference, by an order for American military advisers in Laos to don their uniforms and by further preparations to send a contingent to Thailand, helped persuade Khrushchev not to overplay his hand. A military solution—risking a big-power confrontation and the danger of “escalation”—was not in the Soviets’ interest either. Moreover, the monsoon season had halted most major military movements. In the late spring of 1961 the crisis eased. A military cease-fire was effected, and a new Geneva Conference began, with the West once again united on the goal of a “neutral and independent” Laos.

East-West agreement on the meaning of that phrase was advanced by the Kennedy-Khrushchev talks at Vienna in early June. Kennedy was very frank. American policy in that region has not always been wise, he said, and he wanted to change it in Laos because that country is of no strategic importance. The Pathet Lao had the advantage of being for change, he admitted, and he could not make a final judgment as to the desires of the people. But the United States nevertheless had treaty obligations under a SEATO protocol. A solution had to be found which could avoid committing the prestige of the great powers, secure and verify the cease-fire (which each side was accusing the other of violating), obtain a government acceptable to both sides and thus draw the fire out of the situation in a way that would be mutually satisfactory. He suggested the use of Burma and Cambodia as examples of “neutral and independent” countries.

At first Khrushchev seemed to brush aside Laos as an unimportant detail, preferring to talk more generally about “wars of liberation” in the old colonial areas, and ranging into a variety of other issues about China, Africa and guerrilla warfare. But patiently and persistently Kennedy brought him back to the specific question of Laos. On the second day of talks he pressed the Soviet Chairman again on both sides’ reducing their commitments. Laos, he said, is not so important as to get us as involved as we are. Khrushchev agreed, asserting that his nation had neither obligations nor vested interests in this little country far from Soviet borders. He acknowledged that the cease-fire should be verified, and promised to encourage both sides in the kingdom to get together. Rusk and Gromyko, he said, should be locked in a room and told to find a solution (at which the usually dour Gromyko interjected the point that the Palace of Nations in Geneva is a big place with a lot of rooms).

But the negotiations at Geneva dragged on. The princely leaders of the three factions of Laotians were slow to agree on specifics and quick to walk out in protest. They bogged down trying to list personnel in Souvanna Phouma’s new coalition Cabinet in which the rightists and Pathet Lao were to have appropriate representation and the neutralists were to predominate. Arguments broke out over which way various neutralists leaned. From time to time fighting broke out in violation of the cease-fire, and the Pathet Lao nibbled away at more territory. The Red Chinese and North Vietnamese delegates were not only less open to reason than the Russians but more prone to rudeness. Nevertheless, “We will stay at the Conference,” said the President patiently, “for as long as we feel there is some hope of success.”

Finally on May 15, 1962, after a major Pathet Lao attack across the Mekong Valley on the town of Nam Tha had threatened both the Conference and the Thai border, Kennedy moved once again. He had to show that his March, 1961, talk was no bluff—that he would not permit Laos to be taken into the Communist orbit through military action. On the basis of a decision quickly made and quickly executed, barely going through the formality of asking the Thais to “request” our help under the SEATO Treaty, U.S. Naval forces and two air squadrons were moved to the area. More than five thousand marines and Army combat personnel were put ashore in Thailand and moved up to the Laos border. Australia, New Zealand and Britain sent units as well. At the same time concentrated diplomatic pressure was put on the Soviets, making clear that we still favored a negotiated neutral settlement but wondered if they still controlled events on their side.

The Pathet Lao stopped, convinced that the United States meant business. General Phoumi also stopped, in doubt perhaps after his defeat at Nam Tha that he could ever win the country with his anti-Communist (and apparently antibloodshed) army. The negotiating atmosphere quickly improved. In June a shaky coalition “government of national union” was glued together with its tripartite Cabinet. And in July, after fifteen months of persistence by America’s chief negotiator, Averell Harriman, a new Geneva Accord on Laos was signed by fourteen governments—including those of Red China and North Vietnam, whom this country did not officially recognize but who were indispensable to any agreement. Kennedy shortly thereafter recalled the American troops in Thailand, leaving behind the logistic facilities needed for their rapid reintroduction, and resumed economic aid to Souvanna.

The new Accord reflected the preference of all the major powers that Laos should be left to work out its own destiny geographically undivided, politically unaligned, militarily unoffensive and generally unimportant except as a buffer state. It was a precarious agreement, never entirely fulfilled by the Communists. Western military advisers were withdrawn and the Soviet airlift stopped; but North Vietnam continued to provide military support to the Pathet Lao and to use Laotian corridors into South Vietnam. The Pathet Lao, unwilling to meet in a capital patrolled by Phoumi’s troops, finally withdrew from Souvanna’s government, attacked their former ally, Kong Le, and prevented the International Control Commission from inspecting possible Geneva violations in the areas they controlled. The rightists, resisting Kennedy’s suggestions to reduce their troop strength, constantly agitated against Souvanna’s inclusion of Communists; Souvanna constantly threatened to quit the government; and Kennedy was constantly calling upon the International Control Commission or the Soviet Union directly to carry out the Geneva mandate. Harriman, talking to Khrushchev twice in 1963, found him less interested in Southeast Asia than previously, possibly reflecting the rise of Red Chinese influence in the area. In the spring of that year it was once again necessary for Kennedy to alert the Seventh Fleet and to stage “war games” in Thailand as a warning against a Communist takeover. Nevertheless, none of the parties involved in Laos, including Red China, seemed willing to push the fighting to a decisive point or to seek control of the country through a violent coup, apparently for fear that such an attempt might bring in the other side.

The Geneva agreement was imperfect and untidy, but it was better than no agreement at all, better than a major military confrontation and better than a Communist conquest. It was more consistent, in short, with this nation’s capabilities and interests than the untenable position in which Kennedy found himself wedged in January, 1961. Contrary to the public predictions of many “experts,” Souvanna Phouma did not turn out to be a Communist in disguise and his country did not slip quickly behind the Iron Curtain. “We have never suggested that there was a final easy answer in Laos,” said the President. “It is a situation which is uncertain and full of hazard…. [But so] is life in much of the world.”

VIETNAM

Life was certainly uncertain and full of hazard next door to Laos in South Vietnam. There the prospects of a final, easy answer were even more remote. Unlike Laos, Vietnam was a highly populated and productive country ruled by a central government determined to oppose all Communist aggression and subversion. Unlike the often farcical battles in Laos, the war in Vietnam was brutal on both sides, and the government forces—despite a lack of imaginative and energetic leadership—were sizable, engaged in actual combat and dying in large numbers for their country. Unlike their situation in Laos, the great powers were more firmly committed on both sides in Vietnam, and the struggle was over not merely control of the government but the survival of the nation.