An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (76 page)

Kennedy agreed, dismissing such involvement as out of the question. “To my surprise,” Ball remembered, “the President seemed quite unwilling to discuss the matter, responding with an overtone of asperity: ‘George, you’re crazier than hell. It isn’t going to happen.’” Ball later wondered whether Kennedy meant that events would so evolve as not to require escalation or that “he was determined not to permit such escalation to occur.” Judging from his conversations and actions, Kennedy doubted the wisdom of sending combat troops to fight openly in Vietnam and seemed determined to fend off such a commitment. Avoiding a large conflict on the Asian mainland was a firmly held conviction from which he never departed. Yet at the same time, his compulsion to send in advisers complicated the escalation question.

In preparation for a White House meeting on November 11, Kennedy armed himself with eight questions for his advisers. The first five addressed the central issues under consideration: “Will this [Taylor’s] program be effective without including the introduction of a U.S. troop task force? What reasons shall we give Diem for not acceding to his request for U.S. troops? Under what circumstances would we reconsider our decision on troops? . . . Is the U.S. commitment to prevent the fall of South Vietnam to Communism to be a public act or an internal policy decision of the U.S. Government? [And] to what extent is our offer of help to Diem contingent upon his prior implementation of the reform measures which we are proposing to him?”

After the meeting with Taylor, Rostow, Rusk, McNamara, Lemnitzer, Bobby, and others on the eleventh, Lemnitzer summarized Kennedy’s remarks: “Troops are a last resort. Should be SEATO forces. Will create a tough domestic problem. Would like to avoid statements like Laos & Berlin” that could provoke a confrontation with Moscow. To underscore the president’s wishes, Bobby said that a presidential statement on Taylor’s report should say, “We are not sending combat troops. [We are] not committing ourselves to combat troops. Make it [any statement about sending troops] [as] much SEATO as possible.” The coalition aspect to any military intervention was crucial: Kennedy felt the exclusive use of American troops would arouse a public outcry in the United States.

William Bundy, Mac’s older brother, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and was at the meeting, believed “the thrust of the President’s thinking was clear—sending organized forces was a step so grave that it should be avoided if this was humanly possible.” Kennedy also resisted making a categorical commitment to saving South Vietnam. The president saw an outright pledge to keep Vietnam out of the communist orbit as unrealistic without a collateral promise to use American military power. So the best course of action seemed to be to make noise about using U.S. military might and even send advisers, but to hold back from assuming principal responsibility for South Vietnam’s national security.

Consequently, Kennedy now approved a recommendation that the military prepare contingency plans for the use of U.S. forces “to signify United States determination to defend South Viet-Nam,” to assist in fighting the Viet Cong and Hanoi without direct participation in combat, and to join the fighting “if there is organized Communist military intervention.” Kennedy, however, remained reluctant to actually initiate any of these plans. In a memo to Rusk and McNamara in preparation for a meeting on November 15, he asked that Taylor’s nonmilitary proposals be made more precise and that Harriman’s suggestion of negotiations with Moscow on Vietnam be further explored.

At the NSC meeting on the fifteenth, Kennedy “expressed the fear of becoming involved simultaneously on two fronts on opposite sides of the world. He questioned the wisdom of involvement in Viet Nam since the basis thereof is not completely clear.” Comparing the war in Korea with the conflict in Vietnam, he saw the first as a case of clear aggression and the latter as “more obscure and less flagrant.” He believed that any unilateral commitment on the part of the United States would produce “sharp domestic partisan criticism as well as strong objections from other nations.” By contrast with Berlin, Vietnam seemed like an obscure cause that “could even make leading Democrats wary of proposed activities in the Far East.”

When Lemnitzer warned that a communist victory in Vietnam “would deal a severe blow to freedom and extend Communism to a great portion of the world,” Kennedy “asked how he could justify the proposed courses of action in Viet Nam while at the same time ignoring Cuba.” Lemnitzer urged simultaneous steps against Cuba. Kennedy restated doubts about having congressional or public support for U.S. combat troops in Vietnam and concluded the meeting by postponing action until he had spoken with Vice President Johnson and received “directed studies” from the State Department.

FOR ALL KENNEDY’S RELUCTANCE,
international and domestic pressures persuaded him to commit new U.S. resources to Vietnam. Everything he said about Vietnam during the first ten months in office made clear that he doubted the wisdom of expanded involvements in the fighting. But after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev’s uncompromising rhetoric in Vienna, the refusal to fight in Laos, construction of the Berlin Wall, and Soviet resumption of nuclear tests, Kennedy believed that allowing Vietnam to collapse was too politically injurious to America’s international standing and too likely to provoke destructive domestic opposition like that over China after Chiang’s defeat in 1949.

Taylor’s report had emphasized that the United States could not act too soon to prevent a Vietnamese collapse. He described his recommendations as an “emergency program which we feel our Government should implement without delay.” Walt Rostow also warned that any delay in helping Saigon would produce “a major crisis of nerve in Viet-Nam and throughout Southeast Asia. The image of U.S. unwillingness to confront Communism . . . will be regarded as definitively confirmed. [Without it,] there will be real panic and disarray.” When Ambassador Frederick Nolting asked permission on November 12 to come home for consultations, Rusk replied, “We cannot afford inevitable delay” in implementing Taylor’s program, which Nolting’s absence from Saigon would bring. In the existing circumstances time was a “crucial factor.” The sense of urgency about saving Vietnam with a demonstration of greater U.S. support became a pattern by which Washington, with too little thought to what lay ahead, incrementally increased its commitments until the conflict had become a major American war.

Although Kennedy would not yet agree to send combat troops to fight Saigon’s war, he sent Diem a message on November 15 declaring U.S. readiness “to join . . . in a sharply increased joint effort to avoid a further deterioration in the situation.” He intended to provide additional military equipment and to more than double the twelve hundred American military personnel assisting the Vietnamese in training and using their armed forces. To rationalize not committing U.S. troops to combat, Kennedy told Diem that “the mission[s] being undertaken by our forces . . . are more suitable for white foreign troops than garrison duty or missions involving the seeking out of Viet Cong personnel submerged in the Viet-Nam population.” It was Kennedy’s way of saying, We don’t want to fight an Asian land war or to be accused of reestablishing colonial control over Vietnam.

But even without a direct part in the fighting, the stepped-up U.S. program meant acting as much more than an adviser. “We would expect to share in the decision-making process in the political, economic and military fields as they affected the military situation,” Kennedy wrote Diem. Specifically, Kennedy proposed to “provide individual administrators and advisers for the Governmental machinery of South Viet-Nam,” as well as “personnel for a joint survey with the GVN of conditions in each of the provinces to assess the social, political, intelligence and military factors bearing on the prosecution of the counter-insurgency program.”

As a condition of American help, Kennedy insisted that Diem put his “nation on a wartime footing to mobilize its entire resources” and “overhaul” his military command “to create an effective military organization for the prosecution of the war.” Simultaneous with Kennedy’s marching orders to Diem, the White House drafted a letter to Kennedy to be published under Diem’s name. It was a demonstration of how little the White House trusted Diem to meet American demands and how eager Kennedy was to convince people at home and abroad of the justification for this deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam’s civil war. Diem’s ghosted letter, which the White House published in December, said the North Vietnamese were relying on “terror . . . to subvert our people, destroy our government, and impose a communist regime upon us.” The nation, it said, faced the “gravest crisis” in its history. Diem’s letter promised a full mobilization of national resources but asked for further assistance to ensure a victory over the communist aggressors. His subsequent actions would give the lie to what Kennedy had committed him to in the letter.

AFTER HIS NOVEMBER 15 DECISIONS
on Vietnam, Kennedy braced himself for protests from the domestic left and right. In speeches shortly afterward, he focused on their unrealistic views of foreign affairs. Though he never mentioned Vietnam, he had it in mind when he criticized liberals “who cannot bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” They were impatient for “some quick and easy and final and cheap solution [to the communist threat]—now.” Nor, he said, were they correct in seeing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia as neocolonialism or a defense of the international status quo. Kennedy saw the right’s criticism of Vietnam policy as even more skewed. Their depiction of limited intervention as “appeasement,” or a failure to use America’s military muscle to decisively defeat communism, was part of a campaign of suspicion and fear that undermined rational responses to foreign problems.

During the winter of 1961-62, as the U.S. government implemented Kennedy’s directives on Vietnam, further obstacles were thrown up by Saigon. Diem, who accurately saw the U.S. program turning his government and country into a protectorate of Washington, resisted ceding too much control. His opposition partly took the form of Vietnamese press criticism of U.S. diplomats and military officers. The Vietnamese complained that Americans lacked a proper understanding of an underdeveloped country’s problems in becoming a Western-style democracy.

But democracy and democratization seemed far from Diem’s mind, and from India, Galbraith recommended that the U.S. rid itself of him. “He has run his course,” Galbraith told Kennedy. “He cannot be rehabilitated.” Since he did not think that Diem could or would “implement in any real way the reforms Washington has requested, we should make it quietly clear that we are withdrawing our support from him as an individual. His day would then I believe be over.” Galbraith thought it a cliché that there was no alternative to Diem. A better rule was that “nothing succeeds like successors.”

Kennedy’s problems with implementing Taylor’s limited program matched his difficulties with Diem. Kennedy did not trust either the State or the Defense Department to carry out his wishes. “I’ve told the Secretary frankly,” Bundy advised Kennedy of a conversation with Rusk, “that you feel [the] need to have someone on this job that is wholly responsive to your [Vietnam] policy, and that you really do not get that sense from most of us.” Similarly, Kennedy worried about the reliability of both the embassy and the MAAG in Saigon. At Kennedy’s request, Taylor entered into “considerable discussion . . . over the kind of organization required in South Vietnam to administer the accelerated U.S. program.” Taylor’s advice was to stick with the organization already in place in Saigon until it proved inadequate. But Kennedy thought this was already the case.

Whatever the pace and whatever the organization, despite Kennedy’s refusal to have Americans become full combatants, “advisers” were inevitably drawn into firefights with the Viet Cong. Instructing Saigon’s forces on antiguerrilla tactics meant accompanying them on field missions and involvement in the fighting. In addition, because the South Vietnamese lacked the training to fly some of the newest airplanes and helicopters, the MAAG assigned U.S. pilots to fly them and pretended they were under Vietnamese command by assigning one Vietnamese airman to every attack mission. To give the president “plausible deniability” on air combat, the State Department euphemistically described “combined crew operations” in aircraft bearing SVN markings. It was “an agreed approach” sanctioned by the White House and State “to avoid pinning down the President.”

KENNEDY KNEW THAT PUBLICITY
about America’s combat role would result in unwanted international and domestic repercussions. American involvement in the fighting was a clear violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords and made U.S. complaints about North Vietnamese and Chinese support of the Viet Cong appear hypocritical. More important, an avowal of American military operations would increase tensions with Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow, and difficulties with the USSR in reaching agreements on Southeast Asia, Germany, and arms control. It would be especially embarrassing to Moscow, which had promised to support wars of national liberation in Asia and Africa against former colonial masters and neo-imperialists in Washington. On November 28, before expanded operations began, Rusk cabled the Saigon embassy, “Do not give other than routine cooperation to correspondents on coverage current military activities in Vietnam. No comment at all on classified activities.”

Kennedy also saw public disclosure of American involvement as touching off domestic demands for military commitments that could guarantee victory, even at the risk of nuclear war. If the struggle against the Viet Cong and Hanoi now became a losing cause, full knowledge of the South Vietnamese-American failure would stimulate an outcry for the United States to do more. Kennedy hoped that the current U.S. effort could be enough to shore up Saigon and force the communists into negotiations that would preserve an independent South Vietnam tied to the West. At the very least, he hoped that U.S. support would keep South Vietnam free of communist control for the foreseeable future. Ideally, U.S. help would give the Vietnamese the wherewithal to stand on their own and free American troops to go home. But if Vietnam was about to fall, he did not want to identify the United States too closely with its defeat.