Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (22 page)

It was a mistake. The fifty-year-old Diem, a Catholic who had lived in France and the United States from 1950 to 1954, was unreceptive to Washington’s advice, or more to the point, he was an authoritarian and perhaps paranoid personality who resisted American pressure as an extension of Western colonialism. But he was also a shrewd manipulator of Americans who naïvely took his promises at face value.

After Vietnam was partitioned into northern and southern states following the collapse of French rule in 1954, Diem, with the support of leading American Catholics, including New York’s Cardinal Spellman, and the Eisenhower White House, had become prime minister in Saigon. In rigged elections the following year, in which he won 98 percent of the vote, Diem assumed the presidency of the Republic of South Vietnam. A stubborn mandarin who hoped to command U.S. aid with no strings attached, Diem took Lansdale’s and Nolting’s show of regard as license to do as he pleased. The Kennedy administration’s replacement of Durbrow with Nolting encouraged Diem’s conviction that he could maintain U.S. support strictly on his terms. From the first, he saw Nolting’s eagerness to accommodate him as a godsend.

Yet Nolting’s embassy staff did not share his conviction that Diem knew his own best interests. They said of Diem: “He was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown. His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought.” Despite “mounting terrible pressure,” he listened only to “trusted family and sycophants. It was the sign of a dying order.”

A National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Diem’s control would become increasingly precarious as a consequence of growing communist guerrilla strength and widening discontent with Diem’s abuse of power and indifference to public opposition. The intelligence analysts anticipated a repetition of a failed November 1960 coup by noncommunist elements in the coming year. They also saw U.S. prestige as deeply engaged in South Vietnam, and warned that losing the country to the communists would be a severe blow to U.S. security. The White House was less certain that Vietnam’s collapse would jeopardize the national safety, but defeat there seemed certain to be a major political setback for Kennedy’s fledgling government. No one could forget how politically destructive the loss of China to communism had been for Truman and the Democrats.

Among Kennedy’s White House advisers, none pushed harder to beat back the communists in South Vietnam than Walt Rostow. As deputy special assistant to the president for national security affairs and the author of his famous 1960 book on how developing societies could achieve economic growth in a free enterprise system, he was in a position to press Kennedy for action on the conflict in Vietnam. An MIT professor of economic history with unlimited faith in social science engineering, Rostow won Kennedy’s support as someone who had identified ways to foster economic and political advance without excessive reliance on military force. His evident intelligence and enthusiasm for rational planning joined with endearing qualities of personal warmth to encourage Kennedy to think that Rostow had a formula for defending Vietnam from a disastrous outcome. But he was leery of Rostow’s affinity for excessive enthusiasm about his own ideas. On hearing that Walt was giving a seminar on underdeveloped countries, Kennedy exclaimed: “Jesus Christ! . . . Walt Rostow’s got all those people trapped in there, listening to him?” “He really thought Walt Rostow went on and on, and was hard to listen to. . . . But he liked him,” Jackie recalled. “He never said anything mean about him.”

On April 12, 1961, after Diem had won a second five-year presidential term with 90 percent of the vote, Rostow urged Kennedy to gear up the whole Vietnam operation. He suggested sending Vice President Johnson to Saigon, where he was to underscore U.S. determination to help and would hand-deliver a letter to Diem emphasizing “the urgency you attach to a more effective political and morale setting for his military operations” and the need for a broader base of his government. Rostow also advised Kennedy to expand the number of U.S. Special Forces in the country, but as only a temporary measure that would diminish as Diem introduced the necessary social reforms.

Although Kennedy agreed to increase Special Forces from the 685 Eisenhower had sent to just over a thousand and to write the proposed letter, Kennedy refrained from advising Diem on how to defend his country. A CIA report that the elections were rigged, an NSC warning that it might be impossible to convince Diem that his current behavior could prove fatal, and a Ted Sorensen memo raising doubts about America’s ability to save Vietnam unless it moved to save itself, together gave Kennedy pause about becoming too involved in a country possibly beyond rescue. A letter from Galbraith in India gave Kennedy fair warning about the Vietnam problem: Recent developments in South Vietnam suggested “a disintegrating economy which is the cause and consequence of a disintegrating government. . . . American aid, though considerable, is insufficient—perhaps partially as a result of egregious misuse. Maladministration and corruption are general. Underneath is a nauseous social situation in which the landlords and politicians rape the poor with an energy, which they apply to no other purpose.” The response always seemed to be to “send a high level mission. This is done partly because no one can think of anything else to do.”

For all these doubts, it was clear to Kennedy that he could not abandon Vietnam or effectively refute assertions about its importance to the United States. It might be that no one knew what to do about South Vietnam, but letting the communists in Hanoi seize it did not seem like an acceptable option. On May 3, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric sent Kennedy an interdepartmental task force proposal urging consideration of a defensive alliance, including stationing U.S. forces in Vietnam. Speaking for the Joint Chiefs and a larger body of American opinion, which after other communist gains in Europe and Asia saw Vietnam as a line in the sand, Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer asked: “Does the U.S. intend to take the necessary military action now to defeat the Viet Cong threat or do we intend to quibble for weeks and months over details of general policy, finances, Vietnamese Govt organization, etc., while Vietnam slowly but surely goes down the drain of Communism?”

For all Kennedy’s skepticism about involvement in a jungle war that could provoke cries of U.S. imperialism, he also saw Vietnam as a testing ground the United States could not ignore: It fit Khrushchev’s description in a January 1961 speech of a war of national liberation, which, if successful, could become a model for other Third World communist insurgencies. Kennedy wanted to discourage the belief that the United States could not defeat these guerrilla movements or that the will and means was lacking to promote democratic freedoms and prosperity, if necessary by military might, but principally by cooperative initiatives of the kind proposed in the Alliance for Progress.

A Johnson trip to Asia from May 9 to May 24 was meant to signal Kennedy’s determination to hold the line in the region against communist advance. There is no record of a conversation between Kennedy and Johnson preceding the trip, but based on Johnson’s behavior in the seven countries he visited—Laos, South Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and Pakistan—it is hard to believe that Kennedy did not give him marching orders to draw all possible attention to his presence in these East-West contested nations or at least did not counsel him against typical high-visibility Johnson pronouncements and actions.

It is clear that Kennedy wanted to give a rudderless, energetic vice president something to fill his time and get him out of Washington, where his frustration at being a fifth wheel was evident to White House observers. As Kennedy told Florida senator George Smathers, an old friend with whom he could speak openly, Johnson was something of an eyesore: He came to cabinet meetings, said nothing, and sat looking forlorn and rejected—a sad child excluded from the circle of most popular teenage boys and girls. When Smathers urged Kennedy to send Johnson abroad to visit countries where he could become the center of attention and “all of the smoke-blowing will be directed at him,” Kennedy called it “a damn good idea.”

Kennedy didn’t need to urge Johnson to draw attention to himself. LBJ had a lifelong affinity for center stage, including outlandish actions that were familiar Washington gossip and a source of much amusement. During his time in the House, visitors to his office described how he would keep a conversation going while he urinated in a sink screened off behind his desk. Or when he was Senate majority leader, how he would engage in recreational sex in what he called his nookie room.

In Vietnam, where a motorcade from the airport turned into a campaign-style event, Johnson repeatedly stopped his limo to shake hands with obedient onlookers directed by the government to give the American a warm reception. Handing out pens, cigarette lighters, and visitors’ passes for the U.S. Senate gallery, Johnson told bewildered Vietnamese recipients to come see American democracy at work. In a passionate, arm-waving speech in the center of Saigon, before many who knew no English, he praised Diem as the Winston Churchill of Asia, suggesting that the South Vietnamese president was filling the role of a savior against totalitarian communism just as Churchill had saved Europe from Nazism. A photo op in a pasture with a herd of Texas-bred cattle followed by a press conference in his hotel room, where he un-self-consciously changed clothes in front of reporters, were meant to demonstrate that Americans were not haughty imperialists but plain good folks who wanted nothing more for their Vietnamese cousins than the chance to enjoy traditional American freedoms.

Clearly, more was at work here than just a feel-good trip for Johnson. Kenneth Young, the American ambassador in Bangkok, Thailand, saw Johnson’s tour as a “timely and gallant enterprise of purpose [that] accomplished the missions originally conceived in Washington. He reached the politicos, the administrators, and the people. Saigon, Manila, Taipei, and Bangkok will never be quite the same again, for a new chapter has opened in US relations with Southeast Asia. The friendship and sincerity of the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson were felt and returned. They came, saw, and won over.”

Yet as Johnson told Kennedy in a written report that was promptly leaked to both American and Vietnamese journalists, this was an administration that understood the dangers in Southeast Asia and how to combat them. Johnson warned that “the battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination . . . or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores.” Unless America exercised an “inhibitory influence . . . the vast Pacific becomes a Red Sea.” If so stark a description wasn’t enough to scare anyone who read it, Johnson added, “The decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept.” No one reading Johnson’s report could doubt that the Kennedy administration was determined to save Vietnam. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was declaring that he could not be accused of appeasing the communists.

Yet alongside so stark a description of the red menace, Johnson’s recommendations—reflecting Kennedy’s caution about unwanted and unproductive commitments—were distinctly restrained. Johnson saw “an obsessive concern with security on the part of many of our mission people.” He discounted it by saying that “occasional murders in Rock Creek Park . . . do not mean that the United States is about to fall apart.” He stressed that “a mere increase in the level of military aid on our part to Vietnam will not necessarily solve the difficulty. . . . There must be a simultaneous, vigorous and integrated attack on the economic, social and other ills of the Vietnamese peoples. The leadership and initiative in this attack must rest with the Vietnamese leaders.” Above all, Johnson saw a need for stronger “democratic institutions in Vietnam.” America’s “mission people” in Saigon “must by . . . subtle persuasion encourage the Saigon Government from the President down to get close to the people, to mingle with them, to listen for their grievances and to act upon them.”

Under prodding from the White House, Johnson offered unqualified advice against a substantial U.S. military effort in South Vietnam’s conflict: “Barring an unmistakable and massive invasion of South Vietnam from without,” he declared, “we have no intention of employing combat U.S. forces in Viet Nam or using even naval or air-support which is but the first step in that direction. If the Vietnamese government backed by a three-year liberal aid program cannot do this job, then we had better remember the experience of the French who wound up with several hundred thousand men in Vietnam and were still unable to do it. . . . Before we take any such plunge we had better be sure we are prepared to become bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength.”

Would that Johnson had listened to his own counsel beginning in 1965. But when some in the American press criticized him for his flamboyance and public overstatements about Diem during his 1961 trip, Johnson complained that he was only acting “under orders.” He told aides, “Hell, they don’t even know I took a marked deck out there with me.” He prided himself on being a team player, never publicly taking issue with Kennedy and always showing the flag for the administration. In the long run, the lasting effect of the trip would be much more on Johnson than Diem. Whatever his words about recalling French failure and avoiding military involvement, Johnson returned home with a sense of commitment to Vietnam that would only reveal itself in years to come.

Walt Rostow didn’t wait until 1965 to ignore Johnson’s warnings about overcommitting ourselves to the fight in Vietnam. At the end of May 1961, after Johnson reported his findings, Rostow told Kennedy that Vietnam was endangering world peace and that the United States needed to deflate that crisis. He wasn’t ready to recommend direct U.S. military involvement, or he at least understood that Kennedy wasn’t yet receptive to any such recommendation. So instead he urged Kennedy to build Diem’s strength and encourage the international community to recognize Hanoi’s assault on the South. Rostow also advised Kennedy to press Khrushchev to rein in his surrogates in Vietnam, as he seemed agreeable to doing in Laos. Rostow’s advice resonated with Kennedy as a way to defuse a volatile situation that could generate demands for U.S. military action. In the meantime, Kennedy told Rusk that he was very anxious to implement the promises that Johnson had made during his recent trip to Vietnam.