JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (47 page)

[
162
]. Hilsman Letter, ibid.
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 63.

[
163
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 16.

[
164
].
FRUS, 1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 268.

[
165
].
Pentagon Papers,
vol. 2, p. 180.

[
166
]. Ibid.

[
167
]. April 3, 1963, Memorandum by Assistant Secretary of State-designate Roger Hilsman to Frederick G. Dutton, Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Affairs.
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 124.

[
168
]. Ibid., p. 153.

[
169
]. Ibid.

[
170
]. Ibid., pp. 208, 211.

[
171
]. Ibid. Also Francis X. Winters,
The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963-February 15, 1964
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 26.

[
172
]. Ibid., p. 208.

[
173
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 224; Winters,
Year of the Hare,
p. 27.

[
174
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 223.

[
175
].
Pentagon Papers,
vol. 2, p. 724.

[
176
]. William Colby,
Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 178.

[
177
]. Cited by Do Tho, Diem’s aide-de-camp, in
Hoa Binh
(July 5, 1970); Ellen J. Hammer,
A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987), p. 121.

[
178
]. Marguerite Higgins,
Our Vietnam Nightmare
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 91.

[
179
]. Hammer,
Death in November,
p. 112; Higgins,
Our Vietnam Nightmare,
p. 93.

[
180
].
Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission to South Viet-Nam
(United Nations Document A/5630, December 7, 1963).

[
181
]. Cited by Higgins,
Our Vietnam Nightmare,
pp. 90-91.

[
182
].
UN Report
, p. 74.

[
183
]. Hammer,
Death in November,
p. 114.

[
184
]. “A Bomb Makes a Shambles of a Sunny Saigon Square,”
Life
(January 28, 1952), p. 19.

[
185
]. Tillman Durdin, “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center,”
New York Times
(January 10, 1952), p. 2.

[
186
]. Graham Greene,
Ways of Escape
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 171.

[
187
]. H. Bruce Franklin explained the historical events underlying
The Quiet American
in his article “Our Man in Saigon,”
The Nation
(February 3, 2003), pp. 43-44.

[
188
]. In the 2002 Penguin paperback edition of
The Quiet American
, Greene’s references to the CIA’s plastic explosive appear on pages 72, 74, 96, 129, 133, 143 (twice), 154, 160, and 183. At the time of the Saigon bombing in 1952, the CIA was only five years old and virtually unknown. Thus, the novel’s narrator, Fowler, at one point asks a well-informed Saigon contact what U.S. agency the quiet American, Pyle, is really working for:

“What is he? O.S.S.?” [Office of Strategic Services, U.S. predecessor to the CIA]

The man responds:

“The initial letters are not very important. I think now they are different” (Penguin edition, p. 173).

When Greene discussed
The Quiet American
in 1979 in his conversations with French writer Marie-Francoise Allain (published later in English as
The Other Man
), he named the CIA as the source of the Saigon bomb: “One could put a finger on a number of operations set in hand by the CIA (the CIA was behind the bomb attack in the Saigon square which I mentioned in the novel, for example).” Marie-Francoise Allain,
The Other Man:
Conversations with Graham Greene
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 96.

[
189
]. Lemnitzer, March 13, 1962, Memorandum to McNamara; p. 9. See note 11 in this chapter for “Operation Northwoods.”

[
190
]. Hammer on the Catholic newspaper
Hoa Binh
’s reconstruction of the May 8, 1963, events;
Death in November,
p. 116.

[
191
]. Ibid. Hammer wrote that she had “been unable to prove or disprove the truth of this account.”

[
192
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, pp. 311-12; Hammer,
Death in November,
pp. 117-18.

[
193
]. Warren Unna, “Viet-Nam Wants 50% of GIs Out,”
Washington Post
(May 12, 1963), p. A1.

[
194
]. Ibid.

[
195
]. Ibid.

[
196
]. Ibid., p. A14.

[
197
]. Ibid., p. A1.

[
198
]. Ibid., p. A14.

[
199
]. Ibid., pp. A1, A14.

[
200
]. Editorial, “U.S. and South Viet-Nam,”
Washington Post
(May 14, 1963), p. A18.

[
201
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 295.

[
202
]. Ibid.

[
203
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, p. 421.

[
204
]. Ibid. (emphasis added).

[
205
]. David Halberstam,
The Making of a Quagmire
(New York: Random House, 1965), p. 202 (emphasis in original).

[
206
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, pp. 310-12.

[
207
]. Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff,
Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 84.

[
208
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 18.

CHAPTER FOUR

Marked Out for Assassination

John Kennedy was not afraid to die. Nor was he lacking in the practice of living while dying. By the time he reached the White House, he had gone through a series of near-death experiences from repeated illness. The physical pain Kennedy endured from childhood to death was excruciating. “At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth,” Robert Kennedy said, “were days of intense physical pain.”
[1]
He masked his pain by a deceptively sunny detachment. In a rare comment on the pain he felt regularly in his back, JFK told his wife and a couple of friends that “he thought he could stand any kind and any amount of pain, provided he knew that it would end.”
[2]

He knew the threat of death as pain’s companion. He nearly died of scarlet fever as a child, of a blood condition as a teenager, from the ramming of his
PT 109
by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands, and from recurrences of malaria during and after the war. In the Solomons, he risked his life to the point of total exhaustion in efforts to save the lives of his crewmembers. In one such attempt, he lost consciousness in the middle of Ferguson Passage and drifted through a night of delirium to the edge of an open sea. Then the current moved him through a huge circle back to the start of his odyssey and new life. Kennedy knew death intimately. When he met death again in the gaze of his generals, he was not afraid.