JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (38 page)

The author of this section of the
Pentagon Papers
, Daniel Ellsberg, puzzled over why Kennedy took such a stand. Why wouldn’t John F. Kennedy send combat units to Vietnam? The focus of Ellsberg’s question in his
Pentagon Papers
analysis was the fall of 1961, when Kennedy had advisers on all sides urging him to send U.S. troops before it was too late to stop a Viet Cong victory.

The pressure on the president began to build in late summer. “The situation [in South Vietnam] gets worse almost week by week,” journalist Theodore White reported to the White House in August. “The guerrillas now control almost all the southern delta—so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.”
[67]

In September the number of guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam almost tripled from the previous months’ totals. Saigon was shocked when Phuoc Thanh, a provincial capital nearby, was seized and Diem’s province chief was beheaded before the insurgents retreated.
[68]

As the pressures increased for U.S. troops, Kennedy stalled by sending a fact-finding mission to Saigon in October. General Maxwell Taylor was its head. He was no help. Taylor wired Kennedy from Saigon that the United States should take quick advantage of a severe flood in South Vietnam by introducing six thousand to eight thousand U.S. troops under the guise of “flood relief,” including combat units that would then “give a much needed shot in the arm to national morale.”
[69]
In a follow-up wire from the Philippines, Taylor acknowledged that those first eight thousand troops could well be just the beginning: “If the ultimate result sought is the closing of the frontiers and the clean-up of the insurgents within SVN, there is no limit to our possible commitment (unless we attack the source in Hanoi).”
[70]
On the other hand, regardless of the number of troops needed, Taylor thought “there can be no action so convincing of U.S. seriousness of purpose and hence so reassuring to the people and Government of SVN and to our other friends and allies in [Southeast Asia] as the introduction of U.S. forces into SVN.”
[71]
Taylor’s enthusiasm for troops was seconded in a cable by Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who cited “conversations over past ten days with Vietnamese in various walks of life” showing a “virtually unanimous desire for introduction of U.S. forces into Viet-Nam.”

The case for troops was becoming formidable. On November 8, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all recommended to Kennedy in a memorandum that “we do commit the U.S. to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism and that we support this commitment by the necessary military actions,” including Taylor’s proposed “U.S. force of the magnitude of an initial 8,000 men in a flood relief context” and expanding to as many as six divisions of ground forces, “or about 205,000 men.”
[72]

Kennedy rejected the virtually unanimous recommendation of his advisers in the fall of 1961 to send combat troops to Vietnam. Taylor reflected later on the uniqueness of JFK’s position: “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against [sending ground troops], except one man and that was the President. The President just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do . . . It was really the President’s personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn’t go in.”
[73]

Kennedy was so resistant to the military’s demand for troops that he took a step he knew would further alienate them. He subverted his military leaders’ recommendations by planting a story that they were against sending combat units.

In mid-October the
New York Times
reported erroneously: “Military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat units into Southeast Asia.”
[74]
The opposite was the truth. As we have seen, the Pentagon leaders and General Taylor were in fact beating their war drums as loudly as they could in the president’s ears. They wanted combat troops. Kennedy fought back with a public lie. As the
Pentagon Papers
noted, “It is just about inconceivable that this story could have been given out except at the direction of the president, or by him personally.”
[75]
The president was undermining his military leaders by dispensing the false information that they were against the very step they most wanted him to take. The ploy worked. As the
Pentagon Papers
observed, “The
Times
story had the apparently desired effect. Speculation about combat troops almost disappeared from news stories . . .” However, besides misleading the public, Kennedy was playing a dangerous game with the Pentagon’s leaders. His misrepresentation of their push for combat troops would prove to be one more piece of evidence in their mounting case against the president.

But Kennedy would do anything he could to keep from sending combat troops to Vietnam. He told Arthur Schlesinger, “They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. 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 in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”
[76]

Nevertheless, although he refused to send combat troops, Kennedy did agree in November 1961 to increase the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. What he chose to send instead of combat troops were advisers and support units. According to the advice he was being given, Kennedy’s military support program for South Vietnam would almost certainly fall far short of anything that could stop the Viet Cong. This was what puzzled Daniel Ellsberg so deeply when he analyzed JFK’s decision in the
Pentagon Papers
, as he has written more recently in his memoir,
Secrets
:

“Kennedy had chosen to increase U.S. involvement and investment of prestige in Vietnam and to reaffirm our rhetorical commitment—not as much as his subordinates asked him to, but significantly while rejecting an element, ground forces, that nearly all his own officials described as essential to success. In fact, at the same time he had rejected another element that all his advisers, including [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk, had likewise described as essential: an explicit full commitment to defeating the Communists in South Vietnam. Why?”
[77]

While Ellsberg was trying to figure out JFK’s odd stand, he had the opportunity to raise the question in a conversation with Robert Kennedy. As a U.S. senator in 1967, Kennedy had invited Ellsberg, a Pentagon analyst, to talk with him in his office about a mutual concern, the escalating war in Vietnam. Ellsberg had boldly seized the chance to question RFK about JFK’s decision making in 1961. Why, Ellsberg asked him, had President Kennedy rejected both ground troops and a formal commitment to victory in Vietnam, thereby “rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials”?
[78]

Robert Kennedy answered that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the U.S. would be in the same spot as the French—whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination.

Ellsberg pressed the question: Was JFK willing to accept defeat rather than send troops?

RFK said that if the president reached the point where the only alternatives to defeat were sending ground troops or withdrawing, he intended to withdraw. “We would have handled it like Laos,” his brother said.
[79]

Ellsberg was even more intrigued. It was obvious to him that none of President Kennedy’s senior advisers had any such conviction about Indochina. Ellsberg kept pushing for more of an explanation for Kennedy’s stand.

“What made him so smart?” he asked John Kennedy’s brother.

Writing more than thirty years after this conversation, Ellsberg could still feel the shock he had experienced from RFK’s response:

“
Whap!
His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. ‘Because
we were there!
’ He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. ‘We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French.
We saw it.
My brother was determined, determined never to let that happen to us.’”
[80]

John Kennedy had been there. He had seen it with Robert, when the French troops were doing it. A friend on the spot, Edmund Gullion, had underlined the futility of American combat troops replacing the French. Ellsberg wrote that he believed what Robert Kennedy said, “that his brother was strongly convinced that he should never send ground troops to Indochina and that he was prepared to accept a ‘Laotian solution’ if necessary to avoid that.”
[81]

JFK was not primarily concerned with Vietnam, or even Laos, in the middle of 1961. The focus of the president’s attention was on Germany. In the summer and fall following the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy’s struggle with Nikita Khrushchev over the divided city of Berlin was the context in which Kennedy was also discerning what to do in Laos—and in relation to Laos, Vietnam.

His military advisers continued to ride hard toward the apocalypse. Kennedy was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer’s and LeMay’s insistence at two summer meetings that they wanted his authorization to use nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. His response was to walk out of the meetings.
[82]

After one such walkout, he threw his hands in the air, glanced back at the generals and admirals left in the Cabinet Room, and said, “These people are crazy.”
[83]
The Joint Chiefs wondered in turn why their commander-in-chief was reluctant to authorize their use of the means they considered essential to victory. Was he crazy?

In October 1961, the president’s newly appointed personal representative in West Berlin, retired general Lucius Clay, tried to escalate the Berlin crisis to a point where the president would be forced to choose victory. In August, Khrushchev had ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, thereby ending a mass exodus of East Germans to the capitalist side of the city. In September, General Clay began secret preparations to tear down the wall. He ordered Major General Albert Watson, the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin, to have army engineers build a duplicate section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks with bulldozer attachments then experimented with assaults on the substitute wall. General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay’s exercise and put a stop to it.
[84]
When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay’s red telephone to the White House and said, “If you don’t like that, call the President and see what he says.”
[85]
Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest.

While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay’s provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counterscenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall.
[86]
However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined.
[87]

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, in his memoir,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborated at key points by Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

At their Vienna meeting in June, Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that they establish “a private and unofficial channel of communications that would bypass all formalities.”
[88]
Khrushchev agreed. In September the Soviet premier made a first use of the back channel.

After a summer of increasing tensions over Berlin, JFK was about to give his first speech at the United Nations. On the weekend before his UN appearance, as the Berlin crisis was continuing, the president and Pierre Salinger were staying overnight at a Manhattan hotel. Salinger agreed to an urgent phone request from Georgi Bolshakov, Soviet embassy press attaché, that he meet in private with Soviet press chief Mikhail Kharlamov.

When Salinger opened his hotel room door to his Russian visitor, Kharlamov was smiling. “The storm in Berlin is over,” he said.
[89]
A puzzled Salinger replied, on the contrary, the situation couldn’t have been much worse.