JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (37 page)

In light of the Bay of Pigs and the chiefs’ push for war in Laos, Kennedy told columnist Arthur Krock he had simply “lost confidence” in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[42]

A military authority who reinforced Kennedy’s resistance to the Joint Chiefs was retired general Douglas MacArthur, who visited him in late April. MacArthur told the president, “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.”
[43]
Kennedy cited MacArthur’s judgment to his own generals for the duration of his presidency. To put U.S. combat troops into Laos or Vietnam was a line he adamantly refused to cross for the rest of his life. General Maxwell Taylor said MacArthur’s statement made “a hell of an impression on the President . . . so that whenever he’d get this military advice from the Joint Chiefs or from me or anyone else, he’d say, ‘Well, now, you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.’”
[44]

MacArthur made another statement, about the political situation Kennedy had inherited in Indochina, that struck the president so much that he dictated it in an oral memorandum of their conversation: “He said that ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’ from Eisenhower’s years and I live in the chicken coop.”
[45]
Malcolm X would become notorious for the same barnyard saying after JFK was killed in the chicken coop.

As John Kennedy began to take a stand against sending troops to Southeast Asia that would become one more reason for his assassination, he met a man who would take equally strong stands on his behalf, Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.

In the Cold War years when JFK had been a congressman and a senator, Abe Bolden was a black kid growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois. By determination and discipline, Bolden survived the inner-city war zone of East St. Louis. He then worked his way through Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. From the beginning to the end of his college days, Bolden walked to the beat of his own drummer. While other freshmen obeyed the hazing commands of upperclassmen, Bolden defied them, saying he would do nothing that was not included in the school manual.
[46]
He outraged campus opinion by writing a letter to the school paper challenging the granting of scholarships to star athletes who were poor students. Bolden graduated
cum laude
from Lincoln. A classmate said Abraham Bolden could be described “as foolish or as a man of courage, depending upon one’s views,”
[47]
a characterization that would be borne out by his journey into the life and death of John F. Kennedy.

After serving as an Illinois state trooper for four years with an outstanding record, Bolden joined the U.S. Secret Service in 1960. He became an agent in its Chicago office. Thus it was that on the night of April 28, 1961, when President Kennedy came to speak at Chicago’s McCormick Exposition Center, Abraham Bolden was standing outside a men’s restroom to which he’d been assigned as security. Just as he was thinking that he’d probably never see Kennedy, he suddenly saw the president coming down the steps toward him, together with Mayor Richard Daley and other dignitaries.

Kennedy stopped in front of Bolden. He said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Abraham Bolden, Mr. President.”

“Are you a member of the Secret Service?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Bolden, has there ever been a Negro member of the White House Detail of the Secret Service?”

“No, sir, there has not.”

“Would you like to be the first?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll see you in Washington.”
[48]

Abraham Bolden joined the White House Secret Service detail in June 1961. He experienced personally John Kennedy’s concern for people. Kennedy never passed Bolden without speaking to him. He asked about him and his family, in such a way that Bolden knew he meant it. He engaged him in small talk about Chicago and its baseball teams. The president often introduced Bolden to his White House visitors. Bolden could also see in Kennedy’s eyes a worry, a feeling that something was wrong around him.
[49]

Abraham Bolden saw increasing evidence of the president’s isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they’d get out of the way. The agents’ drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president. Bolden refused to drink or play cards with them. The other agents made remarks about “niggers” in his presence.
[50]

As he had before in his life, Abraham Bolden spoke up. He complained to his superiors about the president’s poor security. They did nothing. After forty days as a member of the White House detail, Bolden refused to take part any longer in a charade. He returned voluntarily to the Chicago office. He had demoted himself on principle from the highest position an African American had ever held in the Secret Service. However, in a deeper scheme of things, the White House detail had been one more apprenticeship for Bolden. He had grown in love and respect for the president, while speaking up for his life. From East St. Louis to the White House, Abraham Bolden was being primed to be a witness to the unspeakable.

At the June 3-4, 1961, summit meeting in Vienna, John Kennedy succeeded in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for their mutual support of a neutral and independent Laos under a government to be chosen by the Laotians themselves.
[51]
It was the only issue they could agree upon. Khrushchev’s apparent indifference toward the deepening Cold War threat of nuclear war had shocked Kennedy. It inspired his midnight reflection echoing Lincoln written on the flight back to Washington:

“I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming;

If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
[52]

Kennedy had had to push Khrushchev at Vienna to get him to agree on Laos. At first Khrushchev taunted his American counterpart with Cold War history, saying Kennedy “knew very well that it had been the US government [under Eisenhower] which had overthrown Souvanna Phouma.”
[53]
JFK conceded the point. He said, “Speaking frankly, US policy in that region has not always been wise.”
[54]
Nevertheless, he went on, the United States now wanted a Laos that would be as neutral and independent as Cambodia and Burma were. Khrushchev said that was his view as well.
[55]

He then became as amused by the U.S. policy about-face on Laos as Kennedy’s military and CIA advisers were upset by it. He said wryly to Kennedy, “You seem to have stated the Soviet policy and called it your own.”
[56]
Kennedy’s Cold War critics grimly agreed. For his part, JFK was relieved to have found at least one place in the world, Indochina, where he and Khrushchev seemed ready to pursue peace together.

Kennedy immediately ordered his representative at the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman, to seize the time and resolve the Laos crisis peacefully. He phoned Harriman in Geneva and said bluntly, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”
[57]

Nevertheless, putting troops in continued to be the Joint Chiefs’ demand to the president, for not only Laos but also for the former French colony on its eastern border, Vietnam. What now gave Vietnam added significance in the Kennedy administration was the stand that the president had taken on Laos. Before Kennedy reached his first half-year in office, in Cold War terms he was already thought to have “lost Laos” by joining the Soviet Union in supporting a coalition government that would include Communists. He therefore came under increasing pressure to “save South Vietnam” by introducing there the U.S. combat troops he refused to send to Laos. However, the anti-communist South Vietnamese government Kennedy was being asked to save was itself highly problematic.

On November 11, 1960, three days after JFK was elected U.S. president, South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem was almost turned out of office by a military coup with a populist base of support. The November 1960 attempted coup foreshadowed the November 1963 successful coup that would kill Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Holed up in both cases with a handful of presidential guards, the wily, despotic ruler negotiated just long enough in November 1960 with the rebel forces surrounding his palace to enable a loyalist armored battalion to reach him in the nick of time. The tank commanders then turned their guns on the rebels, routing them.
[58]
When he would try to follow a similar delaying strategy in 1963, Diem would be dealing with more seasoned coup leaders who were resolved not to repeat the mistakes of three years ago. But in 1960 Diem survived the coup and reasserted his control over South Vietnam. Claiming initially that he had reformed his ways, he continued his autocratic rule, relying on U.S. support to defeat both democratic opponents and a Communist-led guerrilla movement.

The
Pentagon Papers
have described the special American commitment to Vietnam that existed when Kennedy became president. Unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was “essentially the creation of the United States,”
[59]
as was the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem:

“Without U.S. support Diem almost certainly could not have consolidated his hold on the South during 1955 and 1956. [Senator John F. Kennedy, because of his Cold War politics and his first impression of Diem as a sincere Vietnamese nationalist, had been among the U.S. supporters of Diem’s government.]

“Without the threat of U.S. intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Viet Minh armies.

“Without U.S. aid in the years following, the Diem regime certainly, and an independent South Vietnam almost as certainly, could not have survived.”
[60]

In the context of the U.S. creation of South Vietnam as a bulwark against Communism (with John F. Kennedy’s participation), President Kennedy’s decision in the spring of 1961 to neutralize neighboring Laos was a shock to Diem. He regarded Kennedy’s new policy in Laos as a threat to the survival of his own government. JFK tried to reassure Diem by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson in May 1961 to visit him along with other anti-Communist Asian allies who were dismayed by Kennedy’s turn toward neutralism. Johnson’s written report back to the president was a rebuke of his policy. Johnson described what he thought was the disastrous impact of the decision to neutralize Laos:

“Country to country, the degree differs but Laos has created doubt and concern about intentions of the United States throughout Southeast Asia. No amount of success at Geneva can, of itself, erase this. The independent Asians do not wish to have their own status resolved in like manner in Geneva.

“Leaders such as Diem, Chiang [Kai-Shek of Taiwan], Sarit [of Thailand], and Ayub [Khan of Pakistan] more or less accept that we are making ‘the best of a bad bargain’ at Geneva. Their charity extends no farther . . .

“Our [Johnson’s] mission arrested the decline of confidence in the United States. It did not—in my judgment—restore any confidence already lost. The leaders were as explicit, as courteous and courtly as men could be in making it clear that deeds must follow words—soon.

“We didn’t buy time—we were given it.

“If these men I saw at your request were bankers, I would know—without bothering to ask—that there would be no further extensions on my note.”
[61]

Johnson then summed up for Kennedy a belligerent Cold War challenge to his policy that came not only from the anti-Communist allies whom LBJ had just visited but also from the Pentagon and from the vice president himself:

“The fundamental decision required of the United States—and time is of the greatest importance—is whether we are to attempt to meet the challenge of Communist expansion now in Southeast Asia by a major effort in support of the forces of freedom in the area or throw in the towel.”
[62]

Kennedy’s response to this reproach from his vice president was not “to throw in the towel” to Communist expansion in Southeast Asia, but neither was it to approve the combat troops that the Joint Chiefs now wanted for Vietnam. Kennedy drew the same line in South Vietnam that he had drawn in Laos and Cuba. He would not authorize the sending of U.S. combat troops.

On May 10, and again on May 18, the Joint Chiefs had recommended that combat troops be sent to Vietnam.
[63]
Diem then sent Kennedy a June 9 letter with a more modest request, for “selected elements of the American Armed Forces to establish training centers for the Vietnamese Armed Forces.”
[64]
As the
Pentagon Papers
point out in this connection, “the crucial issue, of course, was whether Americans would be sent to Vietnam in the form of organized combat units, capable of, if not explicitly intended for conducting combat operations.”
[65]
Kennedy would agree to send military support to Diem, such as U.S. advisers and helicopters. However, no matter what pressures were put upon him, he would always refuse to send “American units capable of independent combat against the guerrillas.”
[66]