The Best and the Brightest (18 page)

Even at this low point, Harriman had been thinking ahead, projecting a future role for himself. Sensing that there was a good chance of a Democratic President’s being elected in the fall, and wanting to specialize in Soviet affairs, exploiting the most personal kind of expertise that went back to his boyhood, he had written to Khrushchev suggesting that the Premier invite him to Moscow (which would be a marvelous piece of wampum to barter with a new President). Khrushchev, who understood the game, of course, and who knew what Americans did not know, that a Harriman was just as much a Harriman out of office as in office, indeed that the office was marginal, more of a lark than anything else, immediately responded, and invited him. They spent two days together, twelve good long hours, and at the beginning Khrushchev, as was his wont, bullied Harriman, threatened, stomped, the voice rising: if the Americans did not move out of Berlin the rockets would fly, the tanks would roll, and he, Citizen N. Khrushchev, could not be responsible for all the terrible things which would happen. Harriman listened and then quietly rejoined that rocketry was a two-way avenue, that there were now few shelters left on either side, that the Soviet industrial might was just as vulnerable as American might and had been built up at just as high a national price. That done with, they had subsided into long and profitable talks about other subjects, the possibility of coexistence, the aims of the Chinese, a very pleasant exchange which had lasted the two days.

Harriman came back from that trip believing that there was a possibility of a deal with the Soviets, that history had finally converged to a point where both nations were ready, that the Soviet fear of the Chinese radically changed their national security problems. He felt in this winter of a long career that this was the special contribution he could make, particularly to a young President. He told friends that every man wants to contribute what he knows best, and since Soviet-American relations were his specialty, he had a special belief that he could give a new President the legacy of this special knowledge of the Soviets. Harriman had come over to the Kennedy side rather belatedly, the reason of course being doubts about Joe Kennedy,
that man.
He had not been a great aid during the campaign, and to the Kennedys he was someone who had once been Democratic governor of New York, someone they ought to do something for. He had a serious hearing problem, which would not have been a problem except that he also had a serious vanity problem, which precluded a hearing aid. At the first meeting with Kennedy after November 1960, he had been at his worst; asked what he thought about a complicated question of Soviet intentions, he had answered “Yes.” Later Kennedy had taken Michael Forrestal, Harriman’s protégé, aside and asked if there was someplace they might talk privately. Forrestal suggested the bathroom, and they went in there, locking the door, Forrestal delighted, sure that his own big job was coming, at State. Or perhaps, like his father, at Defense. At least an Assistant Secretaryship. “Do you think,” asked Kennedy, “that you can get Averell to wear a hearing aid?”

But Harriman’s friends continued to push his case to the Kennedys, trying to overcome their doubts. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, pressed his case very hard, saying that they should try Harriman at State, even in a lower capacity; they would be surprised by his ability. “You’re sure you’re not just being sentimental?” Bobby Kennedy asked him.

In February 1961 Harriman was made roving ambassador, a particularly low level in the governmental hierarchy when one considers the many distinguished posts he had held in the past. But he accepted with good grace; asked how it was going, in the early months of the Administration, he answered, “Oh, you know, all these Presidents are the same. You start at the bottom and work your way up.” His stock rose steadily in the Administration. His style was more than adequate; he gave the best dinner parties in town; and in tough sessions with other Kremlinologists, he more than held his own. But he was furious at the time of the Vienna meeting because he had not been consulted on the planning. That had been left to people like Charles Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson and George Kennan, kids really, boys that he had trained, but nonetheless men very much his junior. So with the intrusive, audacious style which makes him unique in government (“What makes Averell different from other men?” a reporter once asked one of his very young aides in 1969. “Well, he’s the only
ambitious
seventy-seven-year-old I’ve ever met,” the aide answered), Harriman just happened to show up in Paris as Kennedy was visiting De Gaulle, and just happened to see the President’s sister Eunice Shriver to let her know that he desperately had to talk to the President. He just happened to get himself invited to a state dinner, just happened to sit one sister and one person away from the President, and just happened to hear the sister say to the President, “Look, Averell is here and I think he has something to say about Khrushchev and Vienna,” and Kennedy, well primed, said, “Yes, I hear there is something you want to say to me.” Harriman, of course, had practiced what he wanted to say. He had taught all his protégés always to be brief when talking to a President; they have so little time, everyone is always telling them things, keep it short and simple, and brevity above all. One idea, a few brief sentences. Having determined to put the lessons of his long sessions with Khrushchev and forty years together in a few sentences, the gist of what he said was: Go to Vienna. Don’t be too serious, have some fun, get to know him a little, don’t let him rattle you, he’ll try to rattle you and frighten you, but don’t pay any attention to that. Turn him aside, gently. And don’t try for too much. Remember that he’s just as scared as you are, his previous excursion to the Western world in Europe did not go too well, he is very aware of his peasant origins, of the contrast between Mrs. Khrushchev and Jackie, and there will be tension. His style will be to attack and then see if he can get away with it. Laugh about it, don’t get into a fight. Rise above it. Have some fun.

That was the sum of the Harriman advice, though the contrary advice had been just as explicit. Stand up to him, show him that you’re not young, that you’re just as tough as he is, that the Bay of Pigs was an accident and not a reflection of your will. Indeed there were those who felt that a confrontation was needed, that we had to test our will, and the sooner the better. So Kennedy had gone to Vienna, and the meeting was a disaster, harsh and tense; the tensions of the world, centering over Berlin, had seemed to intensify rather than ebb with the meeting; Khrushchev had attacked, and Kennedy, surprised, had finally rejoined. Vienna, like the Bay of Pigs, had increased the tensions in the world.

The Vienna meeting made a powerful impact on Kennedy. James Reston, the
New York Times
columnist and Washington bureau chief, and the most powerful and influential journalist in the capital, had asked for a private meeting with the President after the final encounter. Because of his unique position, it had been granted. Knowing that such a session would enrage his colleagues, Reston spent the day in Vienna hiding from fellow journalists and was smuggled into a special room at the embassy. The blinds were drawn lest anyone see him, he waited there for several hours in the darkness. When Kennedy finally arrived, he could not see Reston at first because of the dark. Finally he spotted Reston and as the journalist began to rise the President waved him down, came over and sat down on a couch next to him. He was wearing a hat; Reston remembered that because it was only the second time he had seen Kennedy with a hat on; the first time was at the inaugural. Kennedy sank into the couch, pushed the hat over his eyes like a beaten man, and breathed a great sigh.

“Pretty rough?” Reston asked.

“Roughest thing in my life,” the President answered. He was, Reston thought, genuinely shaken.

Kennedy told Reston that he had studied Khrushchev carefully beforehand, and he knew that the Russian had great contempt for Eisenhower; whenever they had met and a serious question was asked, Ike would turn to Dulles for the answer. So Kennedy had decided to go it alone, to show his equality with Khrushchev, to show that he had done his homework. Just the two of them would meet, and the interpreters. He had gone in and, he felt, held out his hand, saying that the two of them had very special responsibilities for peace in the world. “I propose to tell you what I can do, and what I can’t do, what my problems and possibilities are and then you can do the same.” The reaction was astonishing, a violent attack on the United States, on its international imperialism, but particularly on its presence in Berlin. As he had threatened Harriman before, he now threatened Kennedy on Berlin: the missiles would fly, the tanks would roll, they must not doubt his word. He had kept the pressure on all week, and Kennedy had finally answered in kind. So Kennedy had told Reston, “I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it. I think the first part is pretty easy to explain. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” Then he told Reston that he would increase the military budget (which he did) and send another division to Germany (which he also did). He turned to Reston and said that the only place in the world where there was a real challenge was in Vietnam, and “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” (Ironically, a year later, after the Americans had begun their limited commitment to Vietnam, Khrushchev would tell Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson that the Americans were making a major mistake in Vietnam. “In South Vietnam,” he said, according to Thompson’s cable back to Washington, “the U.S. has stumbled into a bog. It will be mired there for a long time.”)

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year. Reston in particular would see these events as a study in irony, believing that by October 1962, after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had made good his need to show Khrushchev his fiber, but by that time it was too late as far as Southeast Asia was concerned; there were already more than 15,000 Americans in South Vietnam. For the Cold War was still quite real in 1961, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the men who had come to power in Washington were very much a part of it. They had been fashioned out of it, and now in their first year they were getting regular reminders that it had not yet crested, and their own very eagerness to be tested would in fact accelerate it.

Berlin, of course, had dominated their thoughts for some time. They believed that the hopes for war and peace somehow centered around that divided city, and its access routes. Could we maintain our access? Would the Soviets block it? They were the men in power, preoccupied with the tiniest details; it was as if the President were the desk officer, and the Secretary of State his assistant. There was no event too small for their concern, as if one little misplay would somehow start a chain of events which they might not be able to control. When someone questioned the President about spending too much time on Berlin, he answered, better too much than too little, and he did not mind checking too closely on military convoys; he did not, after all, want the world to be blown up because some young captain had a hangover on a given morning. If Berlin had seemed central in early 1961, Vietnam had loomed somehow very distant. Around that time a knowledgeable Far Eastern correspondent named Stanley Karnow had dropped by the Justice Department to talk with the President’s brother. In the course of the conversation Karnow began to single out Vietnam as probably the most serious problem there, the one which bore the greatest long-range potential for danger. “Vietnam,” said Robert Kennedy, “Vietnam . . . We have thirty Vietnams a day here.”

Thirty Vietnams. From the beginning it had been that way, a tiny issue overclouded by the great issues. It had risen to pre-eminence partly because of neglect and omission, a policy which had evolved not because a group of Westerners had sat down years before and determined what the future should be, but precisely because they had not. Vietnam had begun as the most peripheral of problems to the United States, a new Western power sprung suddenly to superpower proportions and facing a prolonged confrontation with the Communists. There had been time only for the great decisions, and Vietnam had been part of the price, something small which grew into something large. Who, in 1945, when decisions were being made, had time for Indochina? Nineteen forty-five was a time when the problems of Europe were pre-eminent, when the question of the atomic weapon and the atomic balance with the Soviet Union was next, when even China was on the periphery; Vietnam was on the periphery of the periphery.

But it began to go sour for this country as early as July 1945, when the new and uncertain President of the United States, Harry Truman, made his first major trip abroad, to Potsdam, to come to terms with the enormous problems that seemed to come hurtling at him, great decisions which would decide the immediate wartime and postwar future. He was not particularly concerned with Indochina, as it was then called; but because some of the issues arising at Potsdam might touch on China, Truman had brought along, as part of his State Department team, a China and Asian expert, John Carter Vincent, chief of the China division of the State Department.