Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (74 page)

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OMPARED TO THE DRAMATIC CONFRONTATIONS
over Cuba, developments in Vietnam during much of Kennedy's tenure received little public attention. Yet they were profoundly significant. When Kennedy entered the White House, there were some 1,000 American military advisers in Vietnam. In October 1963 there were 16,732. They had been authorized to go with combat missions against the forces of the National Liberation Front and to use napalm and Agent Orange, a powerful and toxic defoliant, so as to flush out opposition. On November 1, 1963, the South Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, were killed in a coup. Although Kennedy had not expected them to be killed, he had in effect encouraged the effort. The assassinations left the government of South Vietnam even more disorganized and demoralized than it had been under Diem. This was the situation at the end of the Kennedy administration three weeks later.
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Kennedy's expansion of American commitment to Vietnam was consistent with his overall view of foreign and defense policy, a test of his inaugural promise to "pay any price" and "bear any burden" to "assure the survival . . . of liberty." Like most American political leaders at the time, he was convinced that the Soviets and the Chinese were behind the efforts of Ho Chi Minh's war of liberation. He further believed that Diem, a vehement anti-Communist, held the key to stopping enemy victory in South Vietnam. Special Forces such as the Green Berets, he thought, afforded the flexible response necessary to assist Diem against enemy guerrillas. Kennedy's chief military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, considered Vietnam a "laboratory" for American military development. Walt Rostow, who played a major role in policy-making, was equally blunt. The United States, he said, should make aggressive use of its Special Forces. "In Knute Rockne's old phrase, we are not saving them for the junior prom."
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Beliefs such as these did not plunge Kennedy pell-mell into escalated involvement. On the contrary, Kennedy resisted the idea of sending American soldiers into combat. After the Bay of Pigs he became more leery of potentially costly military adventures, opting in neighboring Laos for negotiations and covert operations. In Vietnam he contented himself with the dispatch of 400 Special Forces.
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Kennedy continued to resist hawkish advice later in 1961. Taylor and Rostow led a mission to Vietnam in October and returned to call for the dispatch thereto of 8,000 American soldiers—a "logistic task force" composed of engineers, medical people, and small numbers of combat infantry to support them. Taylor explained that the men would serve as a "visible symbol of the seriousness of American intentions" and as a reserve force in case the military situation suddenly deteriorated.
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Other advisers, however, criticized aspects of the Rostow-Taylor report. Undersecretary of State Bowles warned that the commitment of such a force would rush the United States "full-blast up a dead-end street." Kennedy was torn. On the one hand he remained very nervous about the unpredictable Khrushchev. "That son of a bitch," he said, "won't pay any attention to words. He has to see you move." As always, he worried about maintaining America's credibility in the world. On the other hand Kennedy gave only cursory attention to Southeast Asia, and he remained fearful of heavy American involvement. He noted: "The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another."
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Opposing the commitment of combat troops, he agreed in November 1961 to the sending of more military advisers. By the end of the year there were 3,205 in South Vietnam.
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In so doing, however, Kennedy was hardly giving up on Diem. In addition to increasing the number of advisers, JFK made other key decisions in November that set a course for the remainder of his administration. He rejected, first of all, the recommendations of Bowles and Averell Harriman, a special adviser, that the United States work for a cease-fire in Vietnam, to be followed in time by a negotiated agreement leading to elections that would reunite the nation. This was a course similar to the one that Harriman was then working out for Laos. Given the extent of American support for Diem since the mid-1950s, such a policy would have been difficult to sell to the American public. Moreover, Diem and Ho Chi Minh were on a collision course and would have hotly opposed it. In any event, Kennedy scarcely considered such an option. He stuck instead with the effort to promote Diem as the non-Communist leader of a sovereign South Vietnam, even though he recognized—it was impossible not to—that Diem had become increasingly despotic and corrupt over the years. "Diem is Diem," Kennedy mused, "and the best we've got."
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Kennedy rejected other options suggested to him in November 1961. One, pressed by Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, was to insist that Diem use American aid and know-how to promote social reform, especially in villages where the battle against the NLF was being lost. If Diem refused to do so, he should be cut off. Rusk, one of the strongest advocates of curbing Communism in Asia, seemed sympathetic with versions of this option from time to time. Diem, he complained, was "an oriental despot." The United States needed to take a hard line with him, else its support would be wasted.
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Advice such as this made sense to Kennedy—and to many others who struggled to develop a coherent policy concerning Vietnam over the years. But it was extraordinarily hard to put into practice. For one thing, Diem continued to enjoy significant political support in the United States, especially from conservative Catholics and determined Cold Warriors. Throughout his presidency Kennedy worried a good deal about the political consequences of appearing "soft" in Vietnam. Remembering that Cold Warriors (himself included) had accused Truman of "losing" China, he determined that he would not go down in history as the President who had "lost" Vietnam. For another, thanks in large part to decisions made by the Eisenhower administration, Diem
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the government in South Vietnam. If he refused to back major reforms, what was the United States to do? The answer was that it could not do very much, except—perhaps—to look for a more pliant but equally anti-Communist successor. Indeed, JFK faced a tougher situation than the one that had confronted Eisenhower: in the late 1950s Diem had retained some plausibility as a leader, but he was losing it rapidly in the early 1960s. This created major dilemmas for Kennedy. He could and did threaten to cut Diem off, but that managed mostly to sour relations without much changing Diem's own headstrong course.

Kennedy advisers focused instead on two efforts after late 1961, "counter-insurgency" and a "strategic hamlet" program. Counter-insurgency involved using American military advisers to help Diem's armed forces engage the enemy. South Vietnamese military leaders, however, showed little interest in fighting. Many of them were instead engaged in extortion and other forms of corruption. The United States sent in more and more military advisers: there were 9,000—as well as 300-odd military aircraft, 120 helicopters, and other heavy weapons—by December 1962. But Kennedy was busy with other concerns and did not give the effort much attention. Nor did his political advisers, who left matters mainly to General Paul Harkins, the American commander in Vietnam. Harkins tried (some 100 Americans lost their lives in the effort by December 1963) but failed to turn the tide. "Search and destroy" missions killed many villagers. Use of napalm devastated parts of the countryside. Counter-insurgency grew increasingly unpopular with South Vietnamese people in rural areas, where the NLF made rapid inroads in late 1962.
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The strategic hamlet program aimed to develop pockets of strength in these rural areas. American and South Vietnamese authorities were supposed to cooperate in developing civic programs, fortifications, and radio contacts in and between key villages. Moats and bamboo would protect villages from the enemy. But the program required the uprooting and moving about of people from their villages so that they would be safe in the hamlets. It also proved impossible, even when villagers were told to carry identification, to prevent subversive forces from infiltrating the hamlets. Most important, the strategic hamlet program did not promote either land reform or democratic practices. While many villagers distrusted the NLF, which was frequently brutal, they had little reason to support the corrupt and dictatorial government of Diem in Saigon. Most of them probably wanted above all to be left alone.
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The political situation in South Vietnam began seriously to deteriorate in 1963. Diem came to rely increasingly on Nhu, described by one leading scholar as a "frail and sinister man who tended toward paranoia and delusions of grandeur," and on Nhu's wife, "beautiful, ambitious, and acid-tongued."
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Diem and the Nhus, who were Catholic, especially antagonized southern Buddhists, one of whom, Quang Due, took the extraordinary step on June 11 of publicly immolating himself in protest in Saigon. Photographs of Quang Due burning to death shocked the world, Kennedy included.
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Other Buddhists followed suit during the summer, with Madame Nhu cavalierly dismissing the actions as "barbecues." She offered to supply matches and gasoline for Buddhists who wanted to burn. Diem and Nhu jailed hundreds of protestors and raided Buddhist pagodas. In August they staged a major sweep of opponents and arrested 1,400 people.

The day after these arrests Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., arrived in Saigon as the new American ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge was a Republican, Kennedy's opponent for the Senate in 1952 and Nixon's running mate in 1960. His appointment symbolized JFK's quest for a bipartisan political consensus in order to shore up his precarious policies in Southeast Asia. Perceiving the mood of demoralization in Saigon, Lodge had little faith in Diem's ability to rule the country. Washington, moreover, signaled to him that a coup, if likely to succeed, would be acceptable. The Kennedy administration further indicated its displeasure with Diem—and its willingness to see him removed—by cutting back aid in October. CIA officials developed close contacts with anti-Diem generals.
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A large and frequently bewildering increase in diplomatic cable traffic took place between Lodge's arrival in August and the coup on November 1. For the first time, Kennedy involved himself steadily in what was happening in Vietnam. Still, his top advisers, such as McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy, were not sure what to do. Harkins appeared to oppose the removal of Diem, Lodge to favor it. Offered no clear instructions, Lodge had considerable latitude and gave anti-Diem plotters—some of them in contact with the CIA—every reason to assume that the United States would not thwart a coup. When it broke out on November 1, Kennedy and other Washington officials eagerly monitored events. Neither they nor Lodge had insisted that Diem and his brother be spared, but when Kennedy heard that they had been killed, he leapt to his feet and rushed from the room in dismay. Schlesinger recalled, "I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs. No doubt he realized that Vietnam was his great failure in foreign policy, and that he had never really given it his full attention."
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OT MANY SERIOUS SCHOLARS
would disagree with this assessment of "failure," which was in part one of inattention to a serious problem that demanded careful presidential engagement. From the beginning many of his military and intelligence advisers, including those in the CIA, warned repeatedly that the United States would have to make a major military commitment, at the least of 200,000 American men, if it hoped to have a good chance of victory in Vietnam. But JFK did not listen. Brushing aside such advice (the CIA, after all, had been wrong before), he persisted in hoping that the South Vietnamese, assisted by American Special Forces and "advisers," could prevail. This notion was highly questionable by 1963, but aside from dumping Diem, Kennedy never reassessed the situation, and he had no well-considered long-range plans.

Kennedy's failure stemmed also from faulty assumptions about the Cold War as it affected Southeast Asia. Like Rusk and other top advisers, Kennedy believed fervently in the domino theory. Indeed, he perceived the emerging post-colonial nations of the world as a new and vital battleground in the Cold War. If the United States acted indecisively in Southeast Asia, he thought, it would send a message of weakness to Moscow on how it would respond to insurgency elsewhere in the world. Rusk, moreover, was convinced that what was happening in Vietnam was part of a larger Communist plot. In clinging to such beliefs Kennedy did not act on what in fact he knew: the Soviets and the Chinese were bitterly opposed to each other by 1961. He also neglected to heed what some advisers (a minority, to be sure) were saying: the battle in Vietnam was a civil war, not a blueprint from the design of world Communism.

Although it is hard to find committed defenders of Kennedy's policies in Vietnam, some writers have tried to explain them in context. They reiterate that earlier decisions by Eisenhower had already committed the United States to Diem, that anti-Communist pressure at home in the United States constrained the President's freedom of action, and that Kennedy managed, despite these pressures, to forbid the direct use of American combat troops. They highlight Kennedy's increasingly well informed appraisal of the situation in the last months of his administration. "Unless a greater effort is made by the government [of South Vietnam]," Kennedy told CBS in September, "I don't think that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who will have to win it or lose it." Acting on this appraisal, it is argued, Kennedy in October ordered the return to the United States of 1,000 advisers by the end of the year. This decision, it is further claimed, was to pave the way for recall of all the advisers at some point, probably after the 1964 presidential election.
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