JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (42 page)

Mansfield cautioned Kennedy against trying to win a war in support of an unpopular government by “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam.”
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To continue the president’s policy, Mansfield warned, may “draw us inexorably into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French.”
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Kennedy was stunned by his friend’s critique. He was again confronted by his own first understanding of Vietnam, shared first by Edmund Gullion, repeated by John Kenneth Galbraith, and now punched back into his consciousness by Mike Mansfield. The Senate Majority Leader’s comparison between the French rule and JFK’s policy stung the president. But the more Kennedy thought about Mansfield’s challenging words, the more they struck him as the truth—a truth he didn’t want to accept but had to. He summed up his reaction to the Mansfield report by a razor-sharp comment on himself, made to aide Kenny O’Donnell: “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”
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By accepting the truth of Mansfield’s critique of an increasingly disastrous policy, JFK turned a corner on Vietnam. Just as Ambassador Winthrop Brown’s honest analysis had helped turn Kennedy toward a new policy in Laos, so did Mike Mansfield’s critical report return him to an old truth on Vietnam. A little noted characteristic of John Kennedy, perhaps remarkable in a U.S. president, was his ability to listen and learn.

Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher, once observed of Kennedy: “I’ve never known a man who listened to every single word that one uttered more attentively. And he replied always very relevantly. He didn’t obviously have ideas in his own mind which he wanted to expound, or for which he simply used one’s own talk as an occasion, as a sort of launching pad. He really listened to what one said and answered
that
.”
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The way John Kenneth Galbraith put it was: “The President faced a speaker with his wide gray-blue eyes and total concentration. So also a paper or an article. And, so far as one could tell, once it was his it was his forever.”
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Mike Mansfield said of Kennedy’s response to his critique: “President Kennedy didn’t waste words. He was pretty sparse with his language. But it was not unusual for him to shift position. There is no doubt that he had shifted definitely and unequivocally on Vietnam but he never had the chance to put the plan into effect.”
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Kennedy was now on the alert to remove any obstacles from the way to a future withdrawal from Vietnam. On January 25, 1963, he phoned Roger Hilsman, the head of State Department intelligence, at his home to complain about a front-page box in the
New York Times
on a U.S. general visiting Vietnam. In what Hilsman remembered as “decidedly purple language,”
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Kennedy took him to task. He ordered Hilsman to stop military visits that seemed to increase the U.S. commitment in Vietnam.

Kennedy said, “That is exactly what I don’t want to do. Remember Laos,” he emphasized. “The United States must keep a low profile in Vietnam so we can negotiate its neutralization like we did in Laos.”
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After listening to the angry president, Hilsman pointed out that he had no authority as a State Department officer to deny a Pentagon general permission to visit Vietnam.

“Oh,” said Kennedy and slammed down the phone. That afternoon the president issued National Security Action Memorandum Number 217, forbidding “high ranking military and civilian personnel” from going to South Vietnam without being cleared by the State Department office where Hilsman worked.
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This action by JFK, reining in the military’s travel to Vietnam, for the sake of a neutralization policy, did not please the Pentagon.

Even as Kennedy turned toward a withdrawal from Vietnam, he continued to say publicly that he was opposed to just such a change in policy. At his March 6, 1963, press conference, a reporter asked him to comment on Mansfield’s recommendation for a reduction in aid to the Far East.

The president responded: “I don’t see how we are going to be able, unless we are going to pull out of Southeast Asia and turn it over to the Communists, how we are going to be able to reduce very much our economic programs and military programs in South Viet-Nam, in Cambodia, in Thailand . . . ”

As Mansfield knew, Kennedy was in fact changing his mind in favor of a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam. However, JFK thought such a policy would never be carried out by any of his possible opponents in the 1964 election, and that its announcement now would block his own reelection. Neither of the two most likely Republican presidential candidates, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller or Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, had any tolerance whatsoever for a possible withdrawal from Vietnam. In the context of 1963 presidential Cold War politics, a Vietnam withdrawal was the unthinkable. President John F. Kennedy was not only thinking the unthinkable. He was on the verge of doing it. But he wanted to be able to do it—by being reelected president. So he lied to the public about what he was thinking.

Kennedy made all this explicit in a conversation with Mike Mansfield. It happened in the spring of 1963 after Mansfield again criticized the president on Vietnam, this time at a White House breakfast attended by the leading members of Congress. Kennedy was annoyed by the criticism before colleagues, but invited Mansfield into his office to talk about Vietnam. Kenny O’Donnell, who sat in on part of their meeting, has described it:

“The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield’s argument and that he now agreed with the Senator’s thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

“‘But I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected,’ Kennedy told Mansfield.

“President Kennedy explained, and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.

“After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, ‘In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I
am
reelected.’”
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Nevertheless, to government insiders, Kennedy began to tip his hand. In preparation for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam by 1965, the president wanted to initiate the decision-making process in 1963. Yet he still didn’t even have the plan for withdrawal he had asked his military leaders, through McNamara, to draw up a year ago.

Finally, at the May 6, 1963, SECDEF Conference in Honolulu, the Pacific Command presented the president’s long-sought plan. However, McNamara immediately had to reject its extended time line, which was so slow that U.S. numbers would not even reach a minimum level until fiscal year 1966.
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The Defense Secretary said he wanted the pace revised “to speed up replacement of U.S. units by GVN units as fast as possible.”
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The May 1963 meeting in Honolulu took place one month before Kennedy would give his American University address. It is in the context of that dawning light of peace in the spring of 1963, when Kennedy and Khrushchev were about to begin their rapprochement, that McNamara again shocked his military hierarchy on Vietnam. He ordered them to begin an actual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam that fall. As the
Pentagon Papers
described this change of tide, McNamara “decided that 1,000 U.S. military personnel should be withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of Calendar Year 63 and directed that concrete plans be so drawn up.”
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McNamara’s startling order would be met with more resistance by the Joint Chiefs. They saw where Kennedy was going, on Vietnam as on the Cold War in general. They were not going to go there with him.

The Diem government in South Vietnam was alarmed by the Mansfield report, as the U.S. government knew. Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, whom Mansfield had singled out for criticism, understood precisely what the report meant. As a State Department memorandum noted, “The reaction [to the Mansfield report] within the GVN [Government of Vietnam], particularly at the higher levels, has been sharp. We are informed by Saigon that the GVN, and in particular Counselor Ngo Dinh Nhu, sees the report as a possible prelude to American withdrawal.”
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Ngo Dinh Nhu told U.S. embassy official John Mecklin in Saigon on March 5, 1963, that the Mansfield report was “treachery.”
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Nhu added that “it changes everything.” When Mecklin objected that the report was not U.S. government policy, Nhu, he thought, doubted the explanation “on the assumption that [the report] could not have been released without the President’s approval.”
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President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother-adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were both deeply aware that Mike Mansfield had for years been Diem’s greatest supporter in the U.S. Senate. For Mansfield, now as Senate Majority Leader, to give such a stinging report to his close friend, President John F. Kennedy, was for the Ngo brothers more than a hint of a change in U.S. policy. They surmised correctly that the president was deciding to withdraw from Vietnam. Diem and Nhu therefore began to make their own adjustments to a U.S. withdrawal.

On April 4, 1963, President Diem told U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting that the U.S. government had too many Americans stationed in South Vietnam. Nolting reported to the State Department in a telegram the next day that Diem had become convinced that Americans, by their very number and zeal, were advising his government in too much detail on too many matters.
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The Vietnamese people were thereby being given the impression that South Vietnam was “a U.S. protectorate.” The remedy, Diem said, was to gradually cut back the number of U.S. advisers, thus restoring his government’s control over the situation. To Nolting’s dismay, Diem also said that he would no longer allow the United States to control any of the counterinsurgency funds that came from the South Vietnamese government.
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Nolting said in his State Department telegram that he was “gravely concerned and perplexed” by Diem’s abrupt declaration of independence from the United States. The South Vietnamese president even seemed to have a sense of peace about taking a stand that could prove threatening to himself. Diem “gave the impression,” Nolting wired, “of one who would rather be right, according to his lights, than President.”
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Diem’s brother, Nhu, sounded the same theme of independence when he met on April 12 with CIA station chief John Richardson. Nhu said the Americans should recall that Diem “had spent a great part of his life in reaction against and resistance to French domination.”
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Nhu was reminding the U.S. government of that trait in his brother’s character and beliefs that had so impressed Senators John Kennedy and Mike Mansfield a decade earlier—Diem’s stubborn nationalism, which had once kept him independent of both the French and the Viet Minh. It was therefore not surprising, Nhu pointed out, that Diem was now deciding to resist U.S. controls that implied a protectorate status.

Nhu, like Diem, wanted fewer Americans in Vietnam. He told the Saigon CIA chief “that it would be useful to reduce the numbers of Americans by anywhere from 500 to 3,000 or 4,000.”
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Nhu was delivering this unwelcome message directly to a key representative of the institution most involved in trying to control the South Vietnamese government: the CIA. It was the CIA that, operating under its front organization, the Agency for International Development (AID), had already managed to put advisers in at least twenty of the government’s forty-one provinces.
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William Colby, Richardson’s predecessor at the CIA’s Saigon station, said that even by early 1962, “the station had contacts and influence throughout Vietnam, from the front and rear doors of the Palace, to the rural communities, among the civilian opponents of the regime and the commanders of all the key military units.”
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In April 1963, when the Ngo brothers declared their intent to reassert control over their own government, the CIA was pushing hard to have a controlling agent working alongside every province chief in South Vietnam. Just as the U.S. military wanted total control over the South Vietnamese army, so did the CIA want total control at every level of the civilian hierarchy. That was why Diem and Nhu used the all-inclusive term “Americans” for what they wanted many fewer of—fewer American advisers of every kind: CIA, military, whatever. Our Vietnamese were getting tired of being told by Americans what decisions they had to make to keep themselves free from domination by other Vietnamese.