Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (50 page)

Hilsman and Harriman saw no choice but to go ahead. Without a coup, the United States would lose in Vietnam and would have to withdraw. Besides, they said, “We can’t stop the generals now and they must go forward or die.” Kennedy again demurred: He suggested that they go back to Lodge and Harkins and explain that Diem seemed to hold the balance of power and ask their advice on what to do. Nolting said that the president was right: “only Diem can hold this fragmented country together.” Harriman now exploded in anger at Nolting, saying he had disagreed with Nolting from the beginning and that he was “profoundly wrong,” adding that the stakes in this debate compelled him to be so blunt. Gilpatric later recalled that this was the worst “tongue lashing” he had seen in Kennedy’s presence and doubted that anyone other than Harriman, with his seniority, could have gotten away with it. Bobby Kennedy saw the division in the room as a very disturbing fundamental break in his brother’s government. Kennedy now adjourned the meeting to let tempers cool and provide time for some reflection before they reconvened at six.

At the evening meeting, Kennedy put any decision on hold by directing that cables be sent to Lodge and Harkins in Saigon saying that nothing had been decided in Washington. Instead, he wanted their judgment on whether the generals were ready to act, and if not, he recommended a temporary stand-down from a coup, or no coup at all. As Taylor now emphasized to Harkins, “We do not want to become involved in any coup which will not succeed.” Harriman saw the cables for what they were—an expression of Kennedy’s doubts about promoting a coup that would inevitably draw the United States more deeply into Vietnam.

As the meeting ended, Harriman said to Kennedy, “I hope we are not giving any idea of wobbling on our course.” Kennedy replied: “We have to make sense; we must not let the field feel that we are in any way heavy-handed, or obliging them to take actions which are not, in their good judgment, sound.” A memo describing the exchange noted: “The President had some difficulty containing himself until everyone had left the room, whereupon he burst into laughter and said, ‘Averell Harriman is one sharp cookie.’” Harriman, who was the strongest advocate of promoting and ensuring the success of a coup, understood that Kennedy wasn’t eager or even willing to do it.

During all this debate over Vietnam, Kennedy struggled to keep black demands for equal rights under control. On June 22, as he was about to go to Europe, he had met with civil rights leaders at the White House. His agenda was to encourage them to contain demonstrations that might jeopardize the civil rights bill before Congress. He warned against a planned march on Washington that could turn some members of Congress against the bill, saying, “I’m damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.” But the civil rights leaders believed that a peaceful demonstration would do more to energize and promote a law than undermine it. As the meeting ended, Roy Wilkins conveyed to Schlesinger “his sympathy for the President in view of the pressures playing on him, the choices he had to make, the demands on his time and energy.” On August 28, the march of some 250,000 people was an affirmation of peaceful democratic expression of which, Kennedy told the march’s leaders at a White House meeting that evening, “[t]his nation can be properly proud.” While the march worked no miracles on the Hill, where Kennedy’s legislative initiative stalled in the Senate, it momentarily quieted this most volatile domestic issue and allowed Kennedy to return to the crisis in Vietnam.

The pressure on Kennedy to give the go-ahead for a coup was unrelenting. On the twenty-ninth, in response to his request for an independent judgment, Lodge declared, “Any course is risky, and no action at all is perhaps the riskiest. . . . We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back.” It was already an open secret that the United States favored a coup. More to the point, Lodge warned that Diem could not win the war. Because Harkins believed that a coup might be unnecessary if Diem ousted Nhu and because McNamara saw no alternative to Diem, Kennedy instructed the embassy in Saigon to make a final effort to pressure Diem into dismissing Nhu. But doubtful that Diem would accept the advice, Kennedy confirmed the earlier decision to inform the Vietnamese generals of U.S. backing for a change of government. Nonetheless, if he had last-minute doubts that an uprising would be successful, he insisted on the freedom to change course. “I know from experience,” he told Lodge, “that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision.” Lodge, however, cautioned him that a coup could take on a momentum of its own, and “you may not be able to control it.”

The problem, however, was not a runaway operation, but, as Lodge reported by cable on August 30, “inertia. The days come and go and nothing happens.” At a State Department meeting that afternoon, Rusk and McNamara said that “the Generals were either backing off or wallowing.” McNamara thought that they had never even had a plan. That night, Rusk cabled Lodge that prospects for a coup now seemed “very thin” but assured him “that highest levels in Washington are giving this problem almost full-time attention.” At 2:39
A.M.
on August 31, the CIA station chief reported that “this particular coup is finished. . . . Generals did not feel ready and did not have sufficient balance of forces.” Lodge followed up with the contemptuous conclusion “that there is neither the will nor the organization among the Generals to accomplish anything.” Kennedy’s advisers saw no choice but to reopen discussions with Diem about how to win the war.

Later that morning, at another State Department meeting, which Lyndon Johnson attended with all the administration’s top national security officials, Paul Kattenburg, an expert on Southeast Asia who had just returned from Vietnam, urged the group to understand that Diem could not win the war, and that if the United States continued on the same track it would be forced to leave the country in six months to a year. “He had known Diem for ten years,” he said, “and did not think that Diem would ever take the steps necessary to correct the situation. . . . He suggested that it would be better for the U.S. to withdraw honorably.” Secretary of State Rusk dismissed Kattenburg’s remarks as “speculative”: A pullout made no sense. Johnson agreed, and in the sort of colorful language that all who knew him well found familiar, declared, “We must . . . stop playing cops and robbers” and talking about a coup. “There were bad situations in South Vietnam. However, there were bad situations in the U.S. It was difficult to live with [Louisiana congressman] Otto Passman, but we couldn’t pull a coup on him.”

Recalling the meeting and discussion sixteen years later, Kattenburg thought the “whole group of them . . . absolutely hopeless. . . . There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about. . . . They didn’t know Vietnam. They didn’t know the past. They had forgotten the history. . . . The more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and I thought, ‘God, we are walking into a major disaster.’”

After more than fifty-eight thousand American troops had died in Vietnam and the North had seized the South despite the sacrifices in American blood and treasure, Kattenburg was proven right. And even then only McNamara and Bundy publicly acknowledged how wrong they had been. Walt Rostow, a principal proponent of the war as Johnson’s national security adviser, never conceded the war was a failure, arguing that aside from Vietnam, the United States had saved the rest of Southeast Asia from communism. McNamara and Bundy tried to understand their misjudgments in the belief that it might head off similar future disasters. Bundy not only was self-critical, but he also passed judgment on other advocates of America’s increased involvement in Vietnam. In an interview, Bundy said later that Lodge was the stupidest man he had ever dealt with in public life.

Lodge was now instructed to renew pressure on Diem to push the Nhus aside and reform his government in hopes of increasing his popular support. At the same time, Kennedy used TV interviews with CBS and NBC to put Diem on notice that he stood squarely behind the demand for changes in Saigon. Could Diem’s government regain the support of his people? CBS’s Walter Cronkite asked. Kennedy replied: “With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can.” Kennedy left no doubt about his determination to win in Vietnam. He called the suggestions of withdrawal a “great mistake”; the people who advocated it were “wholly wrong.” The United States had no choice but to defend Asia and understand that we were locked in a “desperate struggle against Communism.” Leaving Vietnam would open the way to Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia and trigger greater threats to other Asian nations.

Nonetheless, Kennedy emphasized that it was up to the Vietnamese to do the fighting, and unless the Diem government generated popular support for itself, it was likely to lose the war. “In the final analysis,” he said, “it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” Anyone who thought about his comments had to be puzzled. If success in Vietnam was so crucial to U.S. national security and Diem was in jeopardy of losing the war, could the United States ultimately avoid full-scale involvement? Or was Kennedy signaling that if Diem didn’t reform he would back a coup that brought to power a government that would fight more effectively? It was an unacknowledged contradiction that Americans and Vietnamese were left to consider. Whether Kennedy purposely created this uncertainty or simply was expressing his own inner struggle about what he might do was unclear.

In suggesting that it was Vietnam’s responsibility to fight the war, Kennedy had considerable hope that it might yet rise to the challenge with limited American help. Taylor told him that military operations in Vietnam for August were encouraging, despite Saigon’s political disputes. Progress was also continuing with the Strategic Hamlets program, with 76 percent of the rural population under its protection, which said nothing about whether it was effective in defeating the Viet Cong.

As the summer ended, Kennedy’s strategy was to keep up the pressure on Diem to end or at least greatly reduce the Nhus’ power and limit the press stories about tensions between Saigon and Washington and pessimistic reports about the outcome of the war. Kennedy saw negative news accounts forcing him toward a choice between using U.S. forces and abandoning Vietnam, or encouraging a coup that might lead to victory or who knows what. He instructed government press officers to stay off TV and turn down calls from journalists requesting interviews. At the same time, he directed the embassy in Saigon not to initiate further contacts with the Vietnamese generals, but to be responsive to any initiative from them. He did not want the generals to think “that the U.S. had backed off” or excluded a coup from its plans for defeating the communists.

Nonetheless, Vietnam remained a muddle without a solution. On the morning of September 10, General Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall, a State Department Asian expert, reported to Kennedy on a four-day visit they had just made to Vietnam. Krulak described a war that was moving in the absolutely right direction and was going to be won. The impact on the war effort from the current tensions between the government and the Buddhists were at most “small”: The ARVN units under American direction were “worrying about the Viet Cong and not about politics or religion,” he said. Mendenhall saw a different universe: “a virtual breakdown of the civil government in Saigon as well as a pervasive atmosphere of fear and hate arising from the police reign of terror and the arrests of students. The war against the Viet Cong has become secondary to the ‘war’ against the regime.” He concluded “that the war against the Viet Cong could not be won if Nhu remains in Vietnam.” Krulak countered, “The battle was not being lost in a purely military sense.”

An astonished and frustrated Kennedy asked: “The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you? . . . How is it that you get such different—this is not a new thing, this is what we have been dealing with for three weeks. . . . I’d like to have an explanation what the reason is for the difference.” Kennedy didn’t know what to believe or, more important, what to do. He had pressed the case in public for Diem to introduce political reforms and to convince U.S. congressional and public opinion that this was a conflict we must not lose. But “this had ignited nothing.”

Because no one had a surefire solution to the Vietnam dilemma, advisers felt empowered to make the case for their viewpoint. It was as if the discussion about Vietnam had turned into a faith-based dispute with clashing egos. Each side was invested in its advice and uncertain about what would be effective; advisers felt free to urge their policy but perhaps more because they were mindful of the weakness in their opponents’ arguments than from being confident of their prescription.

The inability of his advisers to reach a consensus discouraged Kennedy’s hopes of finding an effective response to the Vietnam morass. The debate continued at a late afternoon meeting on September 10. McNamara, Taylor, and McCone argued for working with Diem to sideline Nhu and unite the country against the Viet Cong. They saw no alternative to Diem and feared chaos and defeat if he were removed from power. Harriman and Hilsman sharply disputed their conclusion. Diem could not win, and the only alternative for the United States was to find another leader who could defeat the communists. Hilsman acknowledged that this might require the use of American combat troops. Taylor opposed the introduction of combat forces either to oust Diem or fight the Viet Cong. Lodge, writing from Saigon, insisted that the time had come for the United States “to bring about the fall of the existing government.”

Bobby Kennedy, who had been preoccupied with domestic struggles over civil rights, now joined or rejoined the conversation about Vietnam. At the September 10 meeting, the ongoing debate among the national advisers about how to win the war angered him. Mindful of his brother’s frustration with a debate that seemed unending and unproductive, he pressed for a consensus: “All agreed that the war would go better without Nhu and Diem,” he said. He insisted that they not burden the president with their differences. He wanted them to reach a consensus on Vietnam policy. But agreement remained beyond reach, and President Kennedy, hoping that they might yet find common ground, asked Forrestal to write a paper “recommending a delay in any decision for a sufficient time for the situation to ripen.”