An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (74 page)

The CIA had been plotting Castro’s assassination during the closing months of Eisenhower’s administration, so it was not unprepared for this not-so-new assignment. Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee investigating alleged assassination plots in 1975 turned up eight schemes to kill Castro hatched between 1960 and 1965, including a contract with mobsters eager to reestablish lost business interests in Cuba. Kennedy himself discussed assassinating Castro. In March 1961, he had asked George Smathers whether “people would be gratified” if Castro were killed. In 1988, Smathers recalled Kennedy telling him that the CIA had encouraged him to believe that Castro would be “knocked off” at the start of the Bay of Pigs attack. There are additional indications that the president and Bobby talked in the fall of 1961 about killing the Cuban leader. Bobby Kennedy’s biographer Evan Thomas pointed out that “on the very same day that the Attorney General—for the first time in four months—asked about a case that risked exposing CIA plotting against Castro, the administration requested a study on the likely effect of removing Castro—and further ordered that the President’s interest in this subject be kept quiet. . . . There can be little doubt,” Thomas concluded, “that they discussed assassination as at least an option, however sordid.” “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” McNamara said later. In a conversation on November 9 with
New York Times
reporter Tad Szulc, Kennedy asked, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” When Szulc denounced it as immoral and impractical, Kennedy entirely agreed with him. Szulc also recalled the president saying that he had raised the question because “he was under terrific pressure from his advisers.” (Szulc thought Kennedy was talking about Bobby, whom CIA officials remember pressing them at this time to use any means to “get rid” of Castro.)

Bobby was not advancing an assassination plot against his brother’s wishes. No secrets on foreign policy existed between them. Assassination was undoubtedly a topic of discussion and something the emotional, messianic Bobby may have seen as a necessary evil. But his more dispassionate brother seems to have resisted the suggestion, not necessarily as immoral, but as impractical and counterproductive. Kennedy realized that Castro’s death seemed likely to strengthen rather than eliminate communist control in Cuba, where the leader’s brother Raul and Che Guevara could convert his death into an emotional plea vindicating his life and beliefs. Poor planning at the Bay of Pigs had ended in disaster. By contrast, careful, modulated responses to Khrushchev’s pressure over Germany and Berlin had produced at least a temporary stand-down. The two episodes had strengthened Kennedy’s instinctual caution about any response to international dangers that could lead to war. Although the CIA continued to see assassination as a possible response to pressure to remove Castro, there is no evidence that the White House, perhaps after briefly entertaining it, saw it as anything more than a bad idea. Nevertheless, as with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was the accountable party for his administration’s actions. Hidden acts of aggression against Third World countries by overzealous agencies were the president’s responsibility.

Kennedy’s caution in the fall regarding the advancement of American interests in the hemisphere also revealed itself in his dealings with British Guiana. There can be no question that he saw a communist takeover in the British colony as impermissible. Like Castro, Cheddi Jagan claimed to be an anticommunist social democrat, but the experience with Castro had made Washington wary. British reassurances that Jagan could be kept in the Anglo-American camp gave Kennedy only minor reason to hope that Guiana would not turn into another Cuba. In addition to his own worries about a second communist enclave in the hemisphere, which would jeopardize U.S. security and deal his administration another serious blow, he was under pressure from Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, who was denouncing Jagan as a communist agent.

Jagan’s selection as prime minister in September, after his party won majority control of a legislative council, gave Kennedy little choice but to try to work with him. In late October, he agreed to receive Jagan at the White House during a trip to America to ask economic assistance. Though Jagan struck a number of responsive chords with Kennedy, he came across as an unreliable romantic who Kennedy believed would eventually suspend constitutional democracy and “cut his opposition off at the knees.” Kennedy refused to give him a relatively large aid package but did agree to some help in the belief that support would reduce the chances of his going communist from 90 percent to 50 percent. To guard against that eventuality, Kennedy approved a covert program aimed at destroying communist influence in the country. But the watchword was caution: The covert program was to “be handled with the utmost discretion and probably confined at the start to intelligence collection.” A wait-and-see attitude would parallel efforts to work “against pro-Communist developments by building up anti-Communist clandestine capabilities.” It was, considering the pressure Kennedy was under, a restrained effort, and would remain so. That would not be the case—tragically—in the next place to which Kennedy turned his attention. That place had only a limited hold on the public’s imagination in 1961, but before long millions of Americans would know about South Vietnam.

CHAPTER 13

Reluctant Warrior

Let us pray . . . that there will be no veterans of any further war—not because all shall have perished but because all shall have learned to live together in peace.

— John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Arlington National Cemetery, November 11, 1961

IN 1961,
it was unimaginable to Kennedy that within a decade and a half Vietnam would become the locale where more American troops died than in any other foreign conflict except World War II. Nor could he have dreamed that U.S. air forces would drop more than twice the tonnage of bombs used between 1941 and 1945 against Germany, Italy, and Japan in the struggle to contain communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

If South Vietnam, with its apparently cooperative government, seemed to offer an opportunity to defeat communism in developing nations, it also, as Ros Gilpatric recalled, was a blank slate on which America could write anything it liked. In the many hours of discussion about Vietnam, there would be ample emphasis on South Vietnamese failings, limited U.S. resources in a world crying out for American commitments, and U.S. public reluctance to sacrifice blood and treasure in a place of questionable value to the national security. Some asked: Were not worries about Europe, Latin America, and Africa enough without making Southeast Asia a high priority? But the principal planners assigned to consider the problem of Laos and Vietnam—General Maxwell Taylor, Walt W. Rostow, Robert Komer, and U. Alexis Johnson—were “tasked,” in the language of the day, to come up with a workable design to save Southeast Asia from communism. Confessions of inadequacy, declarations of incapacity to meet the challenge, were simply not acceptable responses. Public servants of the most powerful country in history, men speaking for a nation with almost unimaginable resources, were never going to conclude that this was too complicated or too demanding a job to get done.

It was as if Vietnam had no past to provide a cautionary tale for any nation trying to shape its destiny. But of course there was a history, a story of unrelenting struggle against centuries of Chinese control, followed by a hundred years of French rule dating from the 1860s and a period of Japanese occupation during World War II. A fight for independence led by Ho Chi Minh beginning in 1946 had culminated in the 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu over the French and the north-south division. American assumptions that the United States would do better than the French in defeating Vietnamese aspirations for a unified independent country rested on the arrogance of a modern superpower battling a so-called backward people. Henry Kissinger had it right, but late, when in 1979 he puzzled over the succession of outsiders (including himself) who had mistakenly entered “that distant monochromatic land” in the name of some principle or other “only to recede in disillusion.”

Despite Kennedy’s publicly expressed doubts in the 1950s about Western efforts to thwart Vietnamese self-determination, Cold War imperatives, including an Eisenhower domino theory predicting communist control of all Southeast Asia following a South Vietnamese collapse, moved him to continue Eisenhower’s policy of trying to defeat a North Vietnamese takeover of the South. Kennedy had instructed Gilpatric to draft a plan for Saigon’s survival and sent Johnson to bolster South Vietnamese president Diem’s morale and promise more aid. Although there was some discussion of sending U.S. troops to prevent a communist victory, no one, including Johnson, Rusk, and the National Security Council officials responsible for Vietnam planning, recommended it in 1961. Ted Sorensen came closest to Kennedy’s thinking in an April 28 memo declaring, “There is no clearer example of a country that cannot be saved unless it saves itself—through increased popular support; governmental, economic and military reforms and reorganizations; and the encouragement of new political leaders.”

It was also crystal clear that Kennedy had no immediate intention to allow the country or the region to become an acknowledged battleground for American forces.
Acknowledged
was key: In March 1961, U.S. war planes were ordered to destroy “hostile aircraft” over South Vietnam, but any such action was to be held as a closely guarded secret. (In the event of U.S. aircraft losses, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group [MAAG] in Saigon planned to describe them as the result of an accident during a “routine operational flight.”) Kennedy wanted to keep such U.S. military actions secret to avoid complaints both that Washington was violating international agreements and that it was provoking expanded communist aid to the Viet Cong. But at the end of May, Rostow, speaking for the State Department’s policy planning council, warned Kennedy that conditions in Vietnam were endangering world peace and that the administration needed to publicly deflate the crisis. “If it comes to an open battle,” Rostow predicted, “the inhibitions on our going in will be less than in Laos; but the challenge to Russia and China will be even greater.”

Rostow had hoped that the president would speak with Khrushchev in Vienna about Vietnam as another of the trouble spots that could trigger a Soviet-American confrontation. But Kennedy had scarcely mentioned Vietnam to Khrushchev in Vienna. It was not that he was indifferent to America’s stake in Vietnam: Indeed, he was eager to honor promises of increased aid, and before going to Europe he had assured Saigon’s foreign minister that he intended to increase the size of MAAG, even though this meant violating the 1954 Geneva Accords. However, limited appropriations for foreign military aid and Diem’s resistance to pressure for economic and political reforms had sidetracked these commitments.

Nevertheless, throughout the summer of 1961, while the Berlin crisis commanded most of the president’s attention, planning for increased aid to Vietnam went forward. Kennedy authorized a Special Financial Group under the direction of Eugene A. Staley, a Stanford economist, to work with Saigon in developing means to fund South Vietnamese military, social, and economic programs.

Kennedy was reluctant to go beyond economic aid. In a White House meeting on Southeast Asia at the end of July, he responded skeptically to proposals for U.S. military intervention in southern Laos. He “emphasized the reluctance of the American people and of many distinguished military leaders to see any direct involvement of U.S. troops in that part of the world.” Some of Kennedy’s advisers “urged that with a proper plan, with outside support, and above all with a clear and open American commitment, the results would be very different from anything that had happened before. But the President remarked that General de Gaulle, out of painful French experience, had spoken with feeling of the difficulty of fighting in that part of the world.”

After the meeting, Rostow sent Kennedy a memo summarizing his and General Taylor’s understanding that “you would wish to see every avenue of diplomacy exhausted before we accept the necessity for either positioning U.S. forces on the Southeast Asian mainland or fighting there; you would wish to see the possibilities of economic assistance fully exploited to strengthen the Southeast Asian position; you would wish to see indigenous forces used to the maximum if fighting should occur; and that, should we have to fight, we should use air and sea power to the maximum and engage minimum U.S. forces on the Southeast Asian mainland.” As a prelude to any direct involvement in Vietnam, Kennedy wanted to focus world attention on North Vietnamese aggression against Laos and Saigon. Still smarting over the embarrassment to Washington from the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy believed it essential to prepare public opinion to accept possible U.S. intervention—“otherwise any military action we might take against Northern Vietnam will seem like aggression on our part.” Kennedy’s basic message to his advisers was that U.S. military involvement was to be a last resort.

In early August, Kennedy sent Diem a letter largely agreeing to the program of support worked out between Staley and the South Vietnamese. He promised to finance the expansion of Diem’s army from 170,000 to 200,000 men, but only on the condition that Saigon had an effective plan for fighting Viet Cong subversion. Kennedy emphasized that U.S. aid was “specifically conditioned upon Vietnamese performance with respect to particular needed reforms.” Indeed, most of Kennedy’s letter focused not on U.S. military aid but on Vietnamese financial and social reforms that “will be most effective to strengthen the vital ties of loyalty between the people of Free Viet-Nam and their government.” In this, he was returning to the argument he had made to the French in the fifties: Stable Vietnamese ties to the West depended on popular self-government. But Diem was proving as resistant to the argument as Paris had been. The South Vietnamese ruler felt that repression of dissenting opinion would save his political future better than democratization. In sticking with Diem, the administration was implicitly admitting that it saw no viable alternative.