JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (51 page)

On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death in Saigon in protest to Diem’s repressive policies. Reporter Malcolm Browne’s wire service photo of the bonze’s self-immolation shocked the world. When John Kennedy opened his June 12 newspaper and saw the picture of the burning monk, he exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” to his brother Robert on the phone.
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Secretary of State Dean Rusk had already cabled the U.S. Embassy in Saigon: “In our judgment the Buddhist situation is dangerously near the breaking point. Accordingly, you are authorized to tell Diem that in the United States view it is essential for the GVN [Government of Vietnam] promptly to take dramatic action to regain confidence of Buddhists and that the GVN must fully and unequivocally meet Buddhist demands . . .

“If Diem does not take prompt and effective steps to reestablish Buddhist confidence in him we will have to reexamine our entire relationship with his regime.”
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Kennedy’s advisers were running ahead of him. Rusk’s instructions to the Saigon Embassy led Acting Ambassador William Trueheart to convey an ultimatum to Diem on June 12 that the president had not authorized. JFK found out by reading a CIA Intelligence Checklist on June 14. A White House memorandum that day emphasized: “The President noticed that Diem has been threatened with a formal statement of disassociation. He wants to be absolutely sure that no further threats are made and no formal statement is made without his own personal authorization.”
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Vietnam was spiraling out of Kennedy’s control. So was a crisis in Alabama. On June 11, Governor George Wallace placed himself in the doorway of the University of Alabama to keep two black students from registering. Working closely with his brother in the Attorney General’s office, the president federalized the Alabama National Guard in the same hour to move Wallace aside and register the students. He decided to address the nation that night on the moral and civic crisis it was facing at home, as dramatized by Wallace.

At the same time, Kennedy had just turned a corner in his East–West struggle with Nikita Khrushchev. The day before, JFK had delivered his American University address, calling for an end to the Cold War, inspiring Khrushchev to hail his words as “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”
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The Soviet leader agreed quickly with Kennedy to a test ban treaty, to the dismay of the military-industrial complex.
U.S. News and World Report
would ask in a major article, “Is U.S. Giving Up in the Arms Race?,” citing military authorities’ fears that Kennedy’s new strategy added up to “a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament.”

On the night of June 11, as Kennedy continued to ponder Vietnam and to absorb in particular the flaming image of Thich Quang Duc, he gave his televised speech to the American people on civil rights, saying it was “a moral issue,” “as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
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Four hours later, as if in response to his speech, a hidden assassin shot NAACP leader Medgar Evers in the back as he approached his home in Jackson, Mississippi, causing Evers to bleed to death in front of his wife and children.
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In two critical days, John Kennedy’s words had inspired millions of people on opposite sides of the globe, some to act profoundly for peace and justice, others to hate and to kill. By those words and his decisions implementing them, he had become simultaneously a catalyst of hope and a target of hate.

JFK’s friend John Kenneth Galbraith, his ambassador to India, said in a reflection published the day of the president’s funeral that none of Kennedy’s advisers could keep up with the man’s own understanding:

“What Mr. Kennedy had come to know about the art and substance of American Government was prodigious . . . My Harvard colleague Professor Carl Kaysen, who has worked in the White House these last years, has said that when asked who is the most knowledgeable of the President’s advisers he always felt obliged to remind his questioner that none was half so well-informed as the President himself.

“Departments and individuals, in approaching the President, invariably emphasized the matters which impress them most. Mr. Kennedy knew how to make the appropriate discounts without anyone quite realizing they were being made. He had a natural sense for all of the variables in a problem; he would not be carried away by anyone.”
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Galbraith said, “No one knew the President well.”
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That was especially true of his advisers. Their thinking on Vietnam ran counter to his own widening strategy for peace, as stated in his American University address. It was a relative outsider, Senator Mike Mansfield, who convinced him to withdraw from Vietnam, a decision consistent with JFK’s unfolding vision of peace. Yet Kennedy was perplexed at how to manage a military withdrawal that was against the direction of his Cold War government. A prospective withdrawal now lay also in the context of the Buddhist crisis, which had prompted an international revulsion at the repressive rule of South Vietnamese President Diem.

It was at this point that Kennedy made a crucial mistake on Vietnam.

His ambassador to the Saigon government, Frederick Nolting, had asked to be relieved. Kennedy’s first choice to become the new ambassador was his friend, Edmund Gullion,
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who as a consul in Saigon in 1951 had told him it would be a disaster for the U.S. to follow the French example in Vietnam. Gullion had already served the president as his ambassador to the Congo, which for a while was the hottest spot in the Cold War.

In his book
JFK: Ordeal in Africa
, Richard Mahoney noted that Kennedy considered Gullion his most trusted third world ambassador. He sent Gullion into the Congo in 1961 because that African nation had become “a testing ground of the views shared by Kennedy and Gullion on the purpose of American power in the Third World. As Kennedy remarked over the phone one day, if the U.S. could support the process of change—‘allow each country to find its own way’—it could prevent the spread of the Cold War and improve its own security.”
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In the Congo, Gullion also represented Kennedy’s support of a UN policy forged by the late Dag Hammarskjold. Kennedy and Gullion promoted Hammarskjold’s vision of a united, independent Congo, to the dismay of multinational corporations working ceaselessly to carve up the country and control its rich resources.
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After Kennedy’s death, the corporations would succeed in controlling the Congo with the complicity of local kingpins. While JFK was alive, a Kennedy-Hammarskjold-UN vision kept the Congo together and independent.

Seventeen years after JFK’s death, Gullion said, “Kennedy, I think, risked a great deal in backing this operation [of UN forces in the Congo], backing this whole thing.”
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The risk came from within his own government. Kennedy rejected his State Department’s and Joint Chiefs’ proposals for “direct U.S. military intervention in the Congo in September 1961 and December 1962.”
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Kennedy had again feared he was being entrapped by his advisers, as in the Bay of Pigs, Laos, and Vietnam, in an ever-deepening U.S. military involvement. His Congo policy was also being subverted by the CIA, which had been arming the Congo’s secessionist regime in Katanga in order to promote Belgian mining interests. “This [CIA] practice,” wrote Richard Mahoney, “was expressly contrary to U.S. policy and in direct violation of the UN Security Council resolutions.”
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Kennedy’s policy, carried out by Gullion, was to support the UN peacekeeping operation. The president often quoted the statement his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson made to the Security Council, that the only way to keep the Cold War
out
of the Congo was to keep the UN
in
the Congo.
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But the CIA
wanted
the Cold War in the Congo.

In the summer of 1963, Edmund Gullion’s anticolonial diplomacy, as practiced already in the Congo, held the promise—or threat to some—of opening new doors to Kennedy in Vietnam. However, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the president he was opposed to Gullion as the new Saigon ambassador.
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In a decision JFK would live to regret, he then went along with Rusk’s veto of Gullion and chose instead as ambassador his old Republican rival from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy wound up agreeing with Rusk’s view that to choose a distinguished Republican as his ambassador would take the air out of the Republican right’s demands for an escalated war.
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But in forgoing Gullion, whose views were in harmony with his own, for the Republican Lodge, the president was not only giving up the appointment of a trusted colleague but also surrendering power to a political enemy.

In 1952 Kennedy had been elected to the Senate over the heavily favored incumbent senator, Henry Cabot Lodge. From 1953 to 1960, Lodge served the Eisenhower administration as UN ambassador, squashing UN opposition to CIA coups carried out in Iran and Guatemala under the direction of Allen Dulles. When JFK defeated Nixon for the presidency in 1960, Lodge as Nixon’s vice-presidential candidate lost to Kennedy again. Lodge had then been hired by anti-Kennedy media magnate Henry Luce as his consultant on international affairs.
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The struggle for power between the two dueling Massachusetts dynasties, the Fitzgerald Kennedys and the Cabot Lodges, continued. In 1962 Ted Kennedy, like JFK, began his Senate career by beating a Cabot Lodge. In that mid-term election of the Kennedy presidency, JFK’s youngest brother defeated George Cabot Lodge, Henry Cabot Lodge’s thirty-five-year-old son.
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For a decade, Henry Cabot Lodge (and his son) had been trying unsuccessfully to beat John Kennedy (and his brother) in an election. Lodge was no Kennedy man. Yet he had taken the curious step in 1963 of letting it be known in Washington that he would like to become the president’s Saigon ambassador. Why did Lodge offer to become the ambassador of a man he so often opposed?

Henry Cabot Lodge was a major general in the U.S. Army Reserves. He had spent a month at the Pentagon in January 1963 being briefed on Vietnam and counterinsurgency. Author Anne Blair, who was given access to Lodge’s private papers for her book
Lodge in Vietnam
, determined that it was probably during his Pentagon tour of duty “that Lodge began to float his name as a possibility for Vietnam.”
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Blair concluded from her reading of Lodge’s confidential journal that he wanted to use a Vietnam appointment as the basis for a late run for the presidency in 1964.
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Several of Lodge’s close associates in South Vietnam, including his special assistant, John Michael Dunn, confirmed to Blair that Lodge “had accepted the South Vietnam post to increase his chances of gaining the Republican nomination.” Henry Cabot Lodge wanted to represent his longtime opponent, John Kennedy, in Vietnam in such a way that he would be able to replace him in the White House.

Robert Kennedy warned his brother that he was making a mistake in appointing Lodge. He said Lodge would cause the president “a lot of difficulty in six months.”
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Even RFK was being too optimistic about Lodge. JFK’s difficulties with his new ambassador would begin almost as soon as Lodge arrived in Vietnam.

With a sense of having just added one more shark to those already swimming around him, Kennedy joked to his aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers about his own motives for the appointment: “The idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible.”
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Kennedy had in fact taken a magnanimous risk in appointing his political adversary to an influential post. Lodge would not return the favor by obeying the president’s orders. Kennedy had made a mistake that would dog him that fall in Vietnam. By appointing Henry Cabot Lodge as his ambassador rather than holding out against Rusk for Edmund Gullion, Kennedy had lost a critical degree of power over Vietnam. Once Lodge took up residence in Saigon in August, it would not be Kennedy but his old political enemy, Lodge, who would be in control of the situation on the ground.

We saw earlier how Lee Harvey Oswald was continually impersonated in Mexico City in September 1963. Oswald disappeared down a black hole. His CIA-alleged visits and phone calls to the Cuban and Soviet consulates ended up revealing more about the CIA than they ever did about Oswald. In preparation for his patsy role in Dallas, Oswald was being given a false identity in Mexico City as a communist conspirator by an unknown impersonator. CIA transcripts of fraudulent Oswald phone calls to the Soviet Consulate “documented” the future scapegoat’s supposed communications with a Soviet assassination expert. As William Harvey had written in his notes for the ZR/RIFLE assassination program, “planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs . . .”
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The Mexico City scenario highlighted the CIA’s plan to blame the Soviets and the Cubans for the president’s murder.