JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (40 page)

In Khrushchev’s November 10, 1961, letter to Kennedy, he dismissed the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops through Laos and emphasized the weakest link in U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, namely Ngo Dinh Diem: “I think that looking at facts soberly you cannot but agree that the present struggle of the population of South Vietnam against Ngo Dinh Diem cannot be explained by some kind of interference or incitement from outside. The events that are taking place there are of internal nature and are connected with the general indignation of the population at the bankrupt policy of Ngo Dinh Diem and those who surround him. This and only this is the core of the matter.”
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Kennedy, in his November 16 reply, shrewdly bypassed Khrushchev’s critique of Diem to reemphasize the “external interference” of North Vietnam: “I do not wish to argue with you concerning the government structure and policies of President Ngo Dinh Diem, but I would like to cite for your consideration the evidence of external interference or incitement which you dismiss in a phrase.”
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After drawing on a South Vietnamese government letter to the ICC, Kennedy concluded that “Southern Vietnam is now undergoing a determined attempt from without to overthrow the existing government using for this purpose infiltration, supply of arms, propaganda, terrorization, and all the customary instrumentalities of communist activities in such circumstances, all mounted and developed from North Vietnam.”
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Kennedy and Khrushchev each had a piece of the truth. North Vietnam was in fact sending its troops and arms through “a neutral and independent” Laos into South Vietnam. But this infiltration was part of a nationalist Communist movement that would have been ruling all of Vietnam had not Diem, backed by the Eisenhower administration, blocked an election called for by the Geneva settlement. As Kennedy argued, North Vietnam was indeed violating the neutrality of Laotian territory. But as Khrushchev insisted, Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, illegitimate from the start, was suppressing its own people. The overarching truth plaguing Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s agreement on a neutral and independent Laos was that peace in Laos and Vietnam was interdependent.

John Kennedy contradicted his commitment to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe (known by the Americans as the “Meos”). On August 29, 1961, following the recommendations of his CIA, military, and State Department advisers, Kennedy agreed to raise the total of U.S. advisers in Laos to five hundred and to go ahead with the equipping of two thousand more “Meos.” That brought to eleven thousand the number of mountain men of Laos recruited into the CIA’s covert army.
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From Kennedy’s standpoint, he was supporting an indigenous group of people who were profoundly opposed to their land’s occupation by the Pathet Lao army. He was also trying to hold on to enough ground, through some effective resistance to the Pathet Lao’s advance, to leave something for Averell Harriman to negotiate with in Geneva toward a neutralist government. But he was working within Cold War assumptions and playing into the hands of his own worst enemy, the CIA. The Agency was eager to manipulate his policy to benefit their favorite Laotian strongman, General Phoumi Nosavan. Aware of this danger, Kennedy went ahead in strengthening the CIA-“Meo” army, so as to stem a Communist takeover in Laos, while at the same time trying by other means to rein in the CIA.

Following the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had tried to reassert control over the CIA by firing the primary architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and General Charles Cabell; by launching a critical inquiry into the Bay of Pigs under the watchful eye of Robert Kennedy; and by cutting the CIA’s budget.
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A further measure by which JFK tried to keep the CIA from making foreign policy on the ground was his May 29, 1961, letter to each American ambassador abroad. The president wrote: “You are in charge of the entire U.S. Diplomatic Mission, and I expect you to supervise all its operations. The Mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also representatives of all other United States agencies.”
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That included, of course, the CIA, which Schlesinger notes was the particular target of JFK’s letter.
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The Agency didn’t like it. Its people were therefore pleased whenever Kennedy made a concession to their covert agenda, as he did in Laos to counter the Pathet Lao. That particular concession gave them the opportunity not only to strengthen General Phoumi’s hand but also to encourage Phoumi to undercut the president’s neutralist policy. Phoumi was happy to oblige.

In early 1962 General Phoumi built up the garrison of Nam Tha, only fifteen miles from the Chinese border. Phoumi used his reinforced base to launch provocative probes into nearby Pathet Lao territory. For a time the Pathet Lao ignored Phoumi, aware that he was trying to create an international incident. Eventually they did engage in a series of firefights with Phoumi forces, but refrained from attacking Nam Tha. However, Phoumi’s troops abandoned Nam Tha anyhow, claiming they were under attack, and fled across the Mekong River into Thailand.
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Then they waited for the United States to intervene in the conflict they had choreographed.

As the
Times
of London reported, “CIA agents had deliberately opposed the official American objective of trying to establish a neutral government, had encouraged Phoumi in his reinforcement of Nam Tha, and had negatived the heavy financial pressure brought by the Kennedy administration upon Phoumi by subventions from its own budget.”
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Emboldened by his knowledge of his CIA backing, Phoumi was brazen in his defiance of President Kennedy’s policy. The
Times
correspondent stated: “The General apparently was quite outspoken, and made it known that he could disregard the American embassy and the military advisory group because he was in communication with other American agencies.”
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The CIA’s Phoumi ploy failed, however, to create a crisis that would push Kennedy to intervene and kill the developing coalition in Laos.
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Instead the president did nothing more than make a show of force, first to the Communists by deploying troops to neighboring Thailand, and second to his advisers by having contingency plans drawn up for a Laotian intervention that would never happen. But JFK also authorized Averell Harriman to transfer Jack Hazey, the CIA officer closest to Phoumi.
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Hazey had been the Agency’s counterpart in Laos of David Atlee Phillips in the Caribbean, who would deploy anti-Castro Cubans in raids designed to draw JFK into a war with Cuba. In neither case did the president bite.

At the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman was trying to carry out the president’s order to negotiate a settlement for a neutral Laos. JFK had been explicit to him that the alternative was unacceptable: “I don’t want to put troops in.”
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Harriman brought to the conference the asset of a mutual respect with the Russians. He had done business in the Soviet Union. The Russians regarded Harriman as a friendly capitalist. He and Nikita Khrushchev had visited each other for informal diplomatic exchanges, first at the Kremlin, then at Harriman’s Manhattan home, during the year before Kennedy became president. JFK had recognized Khrushchev’s confidence in Harriman and would use that relationship later to great effect when Harriman represented JFK in negotiating the test ban treaty with Khrushchev in Moscow. In Geneva, Harriman and his counterpart, Soviet negotiator Georgi M. Pushkin, were developing a wary friendship as they tried to find a way together through Laotian battlegrounds and Cold War intrigues. While representing opposite, contentious sides of the Cold War, Harriman and Pushkin respected each other and were inclined to conspire together for peace.

A turning point at Geneva came in October 1961, when leaders of the three Laotian factions agreed to neutralist Souvanna Phouma’s becoming prime minister of a provisional coalition government. Then, as Rudy Abramson, Harriman’s biographer, put it, the Soviets “agreed to take responsibility for all the Communist states’ compliance with the neutrality declaration and accepted language declaring that Laotian territory would not be used in the affairs of neighboring states—meaning the North Vietnamese could not use the trails through Laos to support the insurgency in South Vietnam.”
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This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the “Pushkin agreement.”

A major obstacle arose, however, when the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao insisted on the right of all three Laotian factions to approve any movements of the International Control Commission. The Pathet Lao would thereby be given a veto power over inspections to monitor violations of the accord.
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The communists wouldn’t budge on the issue. With the Pathet Lao controlling the battlefield, Harriman became convinced that the Geneva Conference would collapse unless the United States was willing to compromise. Although the State Department was adamantly opposed, Kennedy reluctantly decided with Harriman that the critical compromise with the Communists was necessary. The negotiations moved on. But from then on, a “neutral Laos” would take the form of a partitioned country under the guise of a coalition government. Georgi Pushkin would soon die. The agreement named after him would never be honored by Soviet leaders, who lacked the power to tell the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese what to do. The corridor running down the eastern border of Laos would become known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” for its infiltrating North Vietnamese soldiers on their way to South Vietnam—or as State Department critics would call the same route, the “Averell Harriman Highway.”
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Kennedy, struggling to avoid both war and Communist domination of Laos in the midst of the larger East–West conflicts over Cuba, Berlin, and the Congo, was happy to get the compromise Harriman had worked out with Pushkin.

The president’s most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi’s provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Averell Harriman told Arthur Schlesinger in May 1962 that JFK’s Laos policy was being “systematically sabotaged” from within the government by the military and the CIA. “They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible,” Harriman said, “and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”
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On April 4, 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith, the ambassador to India, raised a ruckus among JFK’s advisers by proposing in a memorandum to the president that the United States explore with North Vietnam a disengagement and mutual withdrawal from the growing war in South Vietnam. Galbraith suggested that either Soviet or Indian diplomats “should be asked to ascertain whether Hanoi can or will call off the Viet Cong activity in return for phased American withdrawal, liberalization in the trade relations between the two parts of the country and general and non-specific agreement to talk about reunification after some period of tranquillity.”
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If the United States instead increased its military support of Diem, Galbraith wrote Kennedy, “there is consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.”
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Galbraith’s warning echoed what John Kennedy remembered hearing as a congressman from his friend Edmund Gullion in Saigon in 1951.

Predictably, the Joint Chiefs were furious at Galbraith’s proposal. To McNamara they argued that “any reversal of U.S. policy could have disastrous effects, not only on our relationship with South Vietnam, but with the rest of our Asian and other allies as well.”
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A Defense Department memorandum to the president dismissed Galbraith saying, “His proposal contains the essential elements sought by the Communists for their takeover . . .”
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But the State Department also opposed Galbraith. Even Averell Harriman, JFK’s advocate for a neutral Laos, was against a neutral solution in Vietnam, as he told the president.
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Kennedy, however, considered Galbraith’s proposal feasible. He tried unsuccessfully to explore it. In a conversation with Harriman in the Oval Office on April 6, he asked his newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State to follow up Galbraith’s memorandum. He told Harriman to send Galbraith instructions to pursue an Indian diplomatic approach to the North Vietnamese about exploring a mutual disengagement with the United States. Harriman resisted, saying they should wait a few days until they received an International Control Commission report on Vietnam. Kennedy agreed but insisted, according to a record of their conversation, “that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith, and that he would like to see such instructions.”
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Harriman said he would send the instructions the following week.
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In fact Averell Harriman sabotaged Kennedy’s proposal for a mutual de-escalation with North Vietnam. In response to the president’s order to wire such instructions to Galbraith, Harriman “struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line,” as scholar Gareth Porter discovered by examining Harriman’s papers. Harriman dictated instructions to his colleague Edward Rice for a telegram to Galbraith that instead “changed the mutual de-escalation approach into a threat of U.S. escalation of the war if the North Vietnamese refused to accept U.S. terms,” thereby subverting Kennedy’s purpose.
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