An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (59 page)

Although, as events made clear in the coming months, Khrushchev was more interested in scoring propaganda points with Africans than in risking a Soviet-American confrontation, Kennedy, taking Khrushchev at his word, sent Johnson to Africa to counter Soviet initiatives. Johnson left a strong impression on everyone he met in Senegal, an East-West battleground. He insisted that a seven-foot bed, a special showerhead that emitted a needlepoint spray, cases of Cutty Sark, and boxes of ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with L.B.J. inscribed on them accompany him to Dakar. Against the advice of the ambassador, who urged him to shun contact with villagers he described as dirty and diseased, Johnson visited a fishing village, where he handed out pens and lighters, shook hands with everyone, including some fingerless lepers, and urged the uncomprehending natives to be like Texans, who had increased their annual income tenfold in forty years. The contrast with what Johnson called “Cadillac diplomacy,” the failure of U.S. representatives to get out of their limos and meet the people, was, however much professional foreign service officers saw it as cornball diplomacy, just what Kennedy wanted from his vice president.

Kennedy had seen the Khrushchev speech in January promising to support “wars of liberation or popular uprisings” of “colonial peoples against their oppressors” as a direct challenge to Western influence in developing areas. Kennedy, who took the speech “as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions,” read it “time and again—in his office, at Cabinet meetings, at dinners with friends, alone. At times he read it aloud and urged his colleagues to comment.” Perhaps with the speech in mind, he ordered the Defense Department to place “more emphasis on the development of counter-guerrilla forces.” Because this was not a high priority with the army and because he believed it would encourage views of his administration as receptive to fresh thinking about military threats, he suggested that a paper by General Edward Lansdale on special forces be converted into a popular magazine article. Lansdale’s reputation for successful counterinsurgency in the Philippines against communist subversion seemed likely to excite public interest in antiguerrilla warfare. But Kennedy saw more at work here than good public relations. He believed that training and deploying such forces would prove to be a valuable tool in “the subterranean” or “twilight” war with communism. He instructed the National Security Council to distribute Lansdale’s study to the CIA and to U.S. ambassadors in Africa and Asia. He also endorsed a $19 million allocation to support a three-thousand-man special forces group, which promised to give the United States “a counter-guerrilla capability” in meeting insurgencies in future limited wars. The Green Berets, a name and appearance that set these special forces apart from regular army troops, would become a receptacle for fantasies and illusions about America’s ability to overcome threats in physically and politically inhospitable places around the world. Although Kennedy assumed that the effectiveness of these units would largely depend on joining their military actions to backing for indigenous progressive reforms, he could not entirely rein in wishful thinking about how much counterinsurgency units or “freedom fighters” alone could achieve at relatively small cost in blood and treasure.

The first test in the contest for the “periphery,” as Kennedy had feared, came in Laos. He was not happy about it. No foreign policy issue commanded as much attention during the first two months of his presidency as this tiny, impoverished, landlocked country’s civil war. “It is, I think, important for all Americans to understand this difficult and potentially dangerous problem,” he declared at a March 23 news conference. He explained that during his conversation with Eisenhower on January 19, “we spent more time on this hard matter than on any other thing.” A constant stream of questions about Laos had come up at press conferences, and numerous private discussions with American military and diplomatic officials paralleled exchanges with British and French leaders about how to prevent a communist takeover, which could make the country a staging ground for assaults on South Vietnam and Thailand. On March 21, the
New York Times
carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration’s determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell, “I don’t think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I’m embarked on a military venture” would jeopardize the future of the administration.

Winthrop Brown, the U.S. ambassador to Laos, told Kennedy during a meeting at the White House on February 3 that it was unrealistic to expect that “any satisfactory solution of the problem in the country could be found by purely military means.” Brown believed that “Laos was hopeless . . . a classic example of a political and economic vacuum. It had no national identity. It was just a series of lines drawn on a map.” The people were “charming, indolent, enchanting . . . but they’re just not very vigorous, nor are they very numerous, nor are they very well organized.” Galbraith, who had become JFK’s ambassador to India and was helping to bring the Indians into a diplomatic solution to the Laos conflict, wrote from New Delhi, “These jungle regimes, where the writ of government runs only as far as the airport, are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead. . . . The rulers do not control or particularly influence their own people. . . . As a military ally the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.” Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman told Brown, “We must never face the President with the choice of abandoning Laos or sending in troops.”

Publicly Kennedy made loud noises about preserving Laos’s independence. He stated at the March 23 news conference, “Laos is far away from America, but the world is small. . . . The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all.” Shortly after, he privately told Chalmers Roberts of the
Washington Post
that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He “said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner.” At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard ships in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that “the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means.”

It was all a bluff. At the same time Kennedy was talking a hard line, he asked Harold Macmillan to convince Eisenhower that military intervention in Laos was a poor idea. Eisenhower’s opinion would be influential in how the public gauged Kennedy’s Laos policy, and Macmillan was happy to help. We all feel strongly about keeping Laos out of communist hands, Macmillan wrote Ike. “But I need not tell you what a bad country this is for military operations. . . . President Kennedy is under considerable pressure about ‘appeasement’ in Laos.” Macmillan said that he understood the impulse not to forget the lessons of history, but he believed it a poor idea to “become involved in an open-ended commitment on this dangerous and unprofitable terrain. So I would hope that in anything which you felt it necessary to say about Laos you would not encourage those who think that a military solution in Laos is the only way of stopping the Communists in that area.”

Happily for Kennedy, neither Eisenhower nor the Russians saw fighting in Laos as a good idea. Despite urging Kennedy in their second transition meeting not to let Laos fall under communist control, Ike told journalist Earl Mazo after JFK’s March press conference, “That boy doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He doesn’t even know where Laos is. You mean have Americans fight in that goddamned place?” The Soviets, likewise, had no appetite for a punishing conflict in so remote a place, especially since it might provoke Chinese intervention and a wider conflict between the United States and China.

But the Russians had little control over events, as renewed fighting at the end of April in a civil war demonstrated. On April 26, Ambassador Brown reported the likelihood that communist forces would gain control in Laos unless the president authorized the use of U.S. air and land forces. At a National Security Council meeting the next day, members of the Joint Chiefs urged just that. Kennedy wanted to know what they intended if such an operation failed. They answered, “You start using atomic weapons!” Lemnitzer promised that “if we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” Someone suggested that the president might want to ask the general “what he means by victory.” Kennedy, who had been “glumly rubbing his upper molar, only grunted and ended the meeting.” He saw Lemnitzer’s guarantee as absurd: “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy, his principal advisers, and congressional leaders vetoed the military’s recommendations. Although he left open the possibility that he might later use force in Laos, Kennedy accepted the “general agreement among his advisers that such a conflict would be unjustified, even if the loss of Laos must be accepted.” Democratic and Republican congressional leaders unanimously confirmed the feeling that despite concern about the rest of Southeast Asia, it would be unwise to become a party to the Laotian civil war. When Kennedy visited Douglas MacArthur at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York the weekend of this crisis, the general told him, “It would be a mistake to fight in Laos. It would suit the Chinese Communists.”

The Laotian crisis extended into the fall of 1961, when the exhausted opponents agreed to establish a neutral coalition government. Although critics complained about Kennedy’s irresolute response to a communist threat, more compelling concerns pushed Laos aside and the issue temporarily “dribbled to a conclusion.” One of these more urgent concerns was South Vietnam. In the early fifties, Kennedy had seen the area as a testing ground for innovative U.S. policies toward a colony struggling to establish autonomy without communist control. By the late fifties, however, he had shifted his attention to Algeria as the latest Soviet-American battleground for Third World influence. But South Vietnam, where an insurgency supported by North Vietnam’s communist regime threatened Diem’s pro-Western government, reclaimed Kennedy’s attention after he became president.

In January, Lansdale, who had made a fact-finding mission to Vietnam for the Pentagon, described the country as in “critical condition and . . . a combat area of the cold war . . . needing emergency treatment.” In a meeting with Lansdale and other national security advisers, Kennedy told the general that his report “for the first time, gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem.” It is “the worst one we’ve got,” Kennedy told Rostow about Vietnam. Commitments by Eisenhower of military supplies, financial aid, and some six hundred military advisers had made the United States an interested party in Vietnam’s six-year-old civil war. To deal with the mounting danger, Kennedy authorized funding for an increase of twenty thousand additional South Vietnamese troops and the creation of a task force to help avert a South Vietnamese collapse.

The Laotian crisis added to worries about Vietnam. A possible communist victory in Laos threatened cross-border attacks on “the entire western flank of South Vietnam.” To bolster the South Vietnamese, Kennedy decided to send Johnson on “a special fact-finding mission to Asia.” When asked whether he was “prepared to send American forces into South Viet-Nam if that became necessary to prevent Communist domination,” Kennedy evaded the question. Sending troops, he said, “is a matter still under consideration.” Although he had great doubts about making such a commitment, it made sense to keep the communists guessing as to what the United States might do if Vietnam seemed about to collapse. In the meantime, as he had done in Africa, Johnson could show the flag and quiet fears that Kennedy’s refusal to send troops into Laos implied that he was abandoning Southeast Asia.

Johnson’s trip was an exercise in high-visibility diplomacy. (After his Asian swing, one U.S. diplomat said, “Saigon, Manila, Taipei, and Bangkok will never be the same.”) The six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch Texan, who had made a reputation as a larger-than-life figure in the Senate, was perfectly suited to the job. On his way into Saigon from the airport, he stopped the motorcade several times to shake hands with people in the crowds lining the roads. As in Africa, he handed out pens, cigarette lighters, and gold-and-white passes to the U.S. Senate gallery. “Get your mamma and daddy to bring you to the Senate and Congress to see how the government works,” he told bewildered children. Trying to draw connections to British resistance to Nazi tyranny in World War II, Johnson made an arm-waving speech in downtown Saigon comparing South Vietnamese president Diem to Winston Churchill. The campaign continued the next day, when Johnson staged a photo op by chasing a bunch of Texas steer around a ranch. He then carried American informality to something of a new high—or low—by changing clothes before a group of foreign correspondents invited to a press conference in his hotel room.

Part of Johnson’s mission was to get out and meet the people and sell them on the virtues of American democracy and free enterprise. But there was also the more important business of bolstering a shaky South Vietnamese government. A letter Johnson carried from Kennedy to Diem promised funds for an additional twenty thousand troops the South Vietnamese army wanted and proposed collaboration in “a series of joint, mutually supporting actions in the military, political, economic and other fields” to counter communist aggression. Johnson’s visit reassured him, Diem wrote Kennedy, that America would continue to support Vietnam, and he expressed particular pleasure at being asked by the vice president for ideas on how to meet the crisis. “We have not become accustomed to being asked for our own views as to our needs,” Diem wrote.