Kennedy: The Classic Biography (119 page)

Kennedy’s basic objective in Vietnam, however, was essentially the same as in Laos and the rest of Southeast Asia. He sought neither a cold war pawn nor a hot war battleground. He did not insist that South Vietnam maintain Western bases or membership in a Western alliance. As in Laos, his desire was to halt a Communist-sponsored guerrilla war and to permit the local population peacefully to choose its own future. But South Vietnam was too weak to stand alone; and any attempt to neutralize that nation in 1961 like Laos, at a time when the Communists had the upper hand in the fighting and were the most forceful element in the South as well as the North, would have left the South Vietnamese defenseless against externally supported Communist domination. The neutralization of
both
North and South Vietnam had been envisioned by the 1954 Geneva Accords. But when a return to that solution was proposed by Rusk to Gromyko, the latter not surprisingly replied that the North was irrevocably a part of the “socialist camp.”

We would not stay in Southeast Asia against the wishes of any local government, the President often said. But apart from that local government’s interest, free world security also had a stake in our staying there. A major goal of Red China’s policy was to drive from Southeast Asia—indeed, from all Asia—the last vestiges of Western power and influence, the only effective counter to her own hegemony. Southeast Asia, with its vast population, resources and strategic location,
¹
would be a rich prize for the hungry Chinese. Kennedy, as shown by his reversal of our policy in Laos, saw no need to maintain American outposts in the area. The Kennedy Southeast Asia policy respected the neutrality of all who wished to be neutral. But it also insisted that other nations similarly respect that neutrality, withdraw their troops and abide by negotiated settlements and boundaries, thus leaving each neutral free to choose and fulfill its own future within the framework of its own culture and traditions. To the extent that this required a temporary U.S. military presence, American and Communist objectives conflicted. The cockpit in which that conflict was principally tested was hapless South Vietnam, but neither Kennedy nor the Communists believed that the consequences of success or failure in that country would be confined to Vietnam alone.

This nation’s pledge to assist and defend the integrity of South Vietnam was first made in 1954. In that year the Geneva Accords divided the country at the 17th Parallel into Communist and non-Communist territories, both sides promising (but neither expecting) an election to reunify the country. The new Republic of South Vietnam, attempting to build a nation on the ruins of nearly a hundred years of colonial rule, Japanese occupation and war with France, faced seemingly insurmountable difficulties. With the majority of the population and industry in the North, with no core of trained or well-known administrators, with four-fifths of its population in a virtually inaccessible and ungovernable countryside, with one million hungry refugees fleeing south from Communist repression, its early collapse was expected. Communists moving north after the Geneva Conference secretly left cadres and arms caches behind to prepare for that eventuality. But American aid, Vietnamese energy and the vigorous administrative talents of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem prevented that collapse and in fact produced more economic and educational gains than the North.

Unfortunately, Diem also purged his political opposition, causing many dissidents to go underground, into exile or to the Communists, and causing the local Communists to turn for support to Vietnam’s traditional enemies, the Chinese. During the first few years following the Geneva Conference, North Vietnam’s leader Ho Chi Minh was content to consolidate his position. But as his own economy faltered in comparison with Diem’s, as the latter’s political repressions warmed the water in which guerrilla fish could swim, as the militancy of Red China gained ascendancy in his own camp, the “struggle for national reunification,” as Ho called it—“to liberate the South from the atrocious rule of the U.S. imperialists and their henchmen“—began in earnest: assassinations in 1957, the training and increased reinfiltration of South Vietnamese insurgents in 1958, the announcement of a planned campaign of “liberation” in 1959 and the formation in December, 1960, of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

In 1961 all the evidence was not yet in on the extent to which the antigovernment forces in the South were the creatures of the Communist North. But it was reasonably clear that many of them were trained in the North, armed and supplied by the North, and infiltrated from the North through the Laotian corridors, across the densely wooded frontier and by sea. The North supplied them with backing, brains and a considerable degree of coordination and control. Their food and shelter were largely provided at night by South Vietnamese villagers, who were sometimes wooed—with promises of land, unification and an end to political corruption, repression and foreign troops—and sometimes terrorized, with demonstrations of kidnaping, murder and plunder, before the guerrillas vanished back into the jungle at daybreak. A considerable portion of the insurgents’ arms, American-made, were captured from the South Vietnamese forces.

By early 1961 these “Vietcong” guerrillas, as they were labeled by the government in Saigon, were gradually bleeding South Vietnam to death, destroying its will to resist, eroding its faith in the future, and paralyzing its progress through systematic terror against the already limited number of local officials, teachers, health workers, agricultural agents, rural police, priests, village elders and even ordinary villagers who refused to cooperate. Favorite targets for destruction included schools, hospitals, agricultural research stations and malaria control centers.

The Eisenhower administration—in the creation of SEATO, in statements to President Diem and in commenting on the 1954 Geneva Accords—had pledged in 1954 and again in 1957 to help resist any “aggression or subversion threatening the political independence of the Republic of Vietnam.” Military as well as economic assistance had begun in 1954. This country in that year drew the line against Communist expansion at the border of South Vietnam. Whether or not it would have been wiser to draw it in a more stable and defensible area in the first place, this nation’s commitment in January, 1961—although it had assumed far larger proportions than when it was made nearly seven years earlier—was not one that President Kennedy felt he could abandon without undesirable consequences throughout Asia and the world.

Unfortunately he inherited in Vietnam more than a commitment and a growing conflict. He also inherited a foreign policy which had identified America in the eyes of Asia with dictators, CIA intrigue and a largely military response to revolution. He inherited a military policy which had left us wholly unprepared to fight—or even to train others to fight—a war against local guerrillas. Our military mission had prepared South Vietnam’s very sizable army for a Korean-type invasion, training it to move in division or battalion strength by highways instead of jungle trails. Nor had the United States encouraged a build-up in the local Civil Guard and Self-defense Corps which bore the brunt of the guerrilla attacks.

Under Kennedy the earlier commitment to South Vietnam was not only carried out but, as noted below, reinforced by a vast expansion of effort. The principal responsibility for that expansion belongs not with Kennedy but with the Communists, who, beginning in the late 1950’s, vastly expanded their efforts to take over the country. The dimensions of our effort also had to be increased, unfortunately, to compensate for the political weaknesses of the Diem regime.

In that sense, Eisenhower, Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem all helped to shape John Kennedy’s choices in Vietnam. His essential contribution—which is reviewed here as the situation then appeared, not to pass judgment on subsequent developments—was both to raise our commitment and to keep it limited. He neither permitted the war’s escalation into a general war nor bargained away Vietnam’s security at the conference table, despite being pressed along both lines by those impatient to win or withdraw. His strategy essentially was to avoid escalation, retreat or a choice limited to those two, while seeking to buy time—time to make the policies and programs of both the American and Vietnamese governments more appealing to the villagers—time to build an antiguerrilla capability sufficient to convince the Communists that they could not seize the country militarily—and time to put the Vietnamese themselves in a position to achieve the settlement only they could achieve by bringing terrorism under control.

That it would be a long, bitter and frustrating interval he had no doubt. Ultimately a negotiated settlement would be required. But the whole fight was essentially over a return to the basic principles (if not the letter) of an earlier negotiated settlement, the Geneva Accords of 1954. The North Vietnamese and Chinese showed no interest in any fair and enforceable settlement they did not dictate; and they would show no interest, the President was convinced, until they were persuaded that continued aggression would be frustrated and unprofitable. Any other settlement would merely serve as a confirmation of the benefits of aggression and as a cover for American withdrawal. It would cause the world to wonder about the reliability of this nation’s pledges, expose to vengeance all South Vietnamese (and particularly those the U.S. had persuaded to stand by their country) and encourage the Communists to repeat the same tactics against the “paper tiger” Americans in Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia—until finally Kennedy or some successor would be unalterably faced with the choice he hoped to avoid: withdrawal or all-out war.

Almost immediately upon his assumption of office, Kennedy created a State-Defense-CIA-USIA-White House task force to prepare detailed recommendations on Vietnam. Those recommendations were considered in late April and early May of 1961 simultaneously with the Joint Chiefs’ recommendations for intervening in Laos. The two reports, in fact, resembled and were related to each other. Both called for a commitment of American combat troops to Vietnam.

The President—his skepticism deepened by the Bay of Pigs experience and the holes in the Laos report—once again wanted more questions answered and more alternatives presented. The military proposals for Vietnam, he said, were based on assumptions and predictions that could not be verified—on help from Laos and Cambodia to halt infiltration from the North, on agreement by Diem to reorganizations in his army and government, on more popular support for Diem in the countryside and on sealing off Communist supply routes. Estimates of both time and cost were either absent or wholly unrealistic.

Finally, a more limited program was approved. The small contingent of American military advisers was tripled, with officers assigned at the battalion level as well as to regiments, to advise in combat as well as training and to aid in unconventional as well as conventional warfare. American logistic support was increased, and money and instructors were made available to augment the size of South Vietnam’s Civil Guard and Self-defense Forces as well as her army. To demonstrate his support, to obtain an independent firsthand report and to make clear to Diem his insistence that Diem’s own efforts be improved, the President dispatched Vice President Johnson on a tour of Southeast Asia, including a lengthy stopover at Saigon.

But throughout 1961 the situation in Vietnam continued to deteriorate. The area ruled by guerrilla tactics and terror continued to grow. American instructors—accompanying Vietnamese forces in battle and instructed to fire if fired upon—were being killed in small but increasing numbers. The Vice President’s report urged that the battle against Communism be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination. The key to what is done by Asians, he said, is confidence in the United States, in our power, our will and our understanding. In late October a new high-level mission to Vietnam, headed by Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, visited Vietnam preparatory to a major Presidential review.

A new set of recommendations proposed a series of actions by the American and Vietnamese governments. Once again, the most difficult was the commitment of American combat troops. South Vietnam’s forces already outnumbered the enemy by ten to one, it was estimated, and far more could be mobilized. But many believed that American troops were needed less for their numerical strength than for the morale and will they could provide to Diem’s forces and for the warning they would provide to the Communists. The President was not satisfied on either point. He was unwilling to commit American troops to fighting Asians on the Asian mainland for speculative psychological reasons.

Nevertheless, at this moment more than any other, the pressures upon the President to make that commitment were at a peak. All his principal advisers on Vietnam favored it, calling it the “touchstone” of our good faith, a symbol of our determination. But the President in effect voted “no”—and only his vote counted.

The key to his “vote” could be found in his speech on the Senate floor on the French-Indochinese War on the sixth of April, 1954:

… unilateral action by our own country…without participation by the armed forces of the other nations of Asia, without the support of the great masses of the peoples [of Vietnam]…and, I might add, with hordes of Chinese Communist troops poised just across the border in anticipation of our unilateral entry into their kind of battleground—such intervention, Mr. President, would be virtually impossible in the type of military situation which prevails in Indochina…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.

That year he had watched the French, with a courageous, well-equipped army numbering hundreds of thousands, suffer a humiliating defeat and more than ninety thousand casualties. Now the choice was his. If the United States took over the conduct of the war on the ground, he asked, would that not make it easier for the Communists to say we were the neo-colonialist successors of the French? Would we be better able to win support of the villagers and farmers—so essential to guerrilla warfare—than Vietnamese troops of the same color and culture? No one knew whether the South Vietnamese officers would be encouraged or resentful, or whether massive troop landings would provoke a massive Communist invasion—an invasion inevitably leading either to nuclear war, Western retreat or an endless and exhausting battle on the worst battleground he could choose.