JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (63 page)

Averell Harriman, for example, who had been the president’s trusted test-ban negotiator in Moscow, was now doing everything he could with Hilsman and Forrestal (and the CIA’s Helms behind the scenes) to push through with Lodge the Saigon coup they had manipulated Kennedy into supporting in the first place. They were soon joined by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, who on September 11 supported a cable from Lodge calling for the overthrow of Diem.
[33]
At this point they all thought, with mutual affirmation, that they knew better than their chief what had to be done to win the war, beginning with a coup to remove Diem as soon as possible. They hoped the president, with their help, would come to his senses. None of Kennedy’s advisers was considering the unthinkable option of a U.S. withdrawal, except McNamara behind closed doors with the president, and Robert Kennedy in questions he began to raise in key meetings. But the president not only thought the unthinkable. He chose it. He was now trying to bring his advisers around to it.

When Kennedy managed to escape the suffocating thinking of the circles around him in Washington, he confided bluntly in people he thought he could trust his decision to withdraw from Vietnam.

The previous May on a visit to Canada, he had asked Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson for his advice on Vietnam. Pearson said the United States should “get out.” Pearson was struck by Kennedy’s undiplomatic reply.

“That’s a stupid answer. Everybody knows that,” said JFK, ignoring all the anti-withdrawal sentiment in Washington. “The question is: How do we get out?”
[34]

As we saw, he had already developed a withdrawal scenario with McNamara to begin gradually taking out troops that fall, finishing the process in 1965. How he would justify such a move politically, he didn’t know yet. Pearson had been no help on a political strategy, saying only what Kennedy thought obvious.

After the president told Mike Mansfield his plan to pull out completely after the 1964 election, he made the same point with brutal honesty to his old friend, Washington correspondent and columnist Charles Bartlett. Kennedy said to Bartlett:

“We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”
[35]

Pearson, Mansfield, and Bartlett were not the last to hear Kennedy’s statements on withdrawing from a war he was convinced couldn’t be won. Democratic House Leader Tip O’Neill was another.

After JFK’s death, O’Neill liked to tell friends again and again the story of how the president had summoned him to the Oval Office “on an autumn day in 1963.” There the two men “had talked about the situation in Congress, and the upcoming trip to Dallas, and how Kennedy had vowed that he was pulling the American troops out of Vietnam once the 1964 election was over.”
[36]

The president also aired his decision to withdraw from Vietnam with an old friend in Hyannis Port. On October 20, 1963, during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy said to his next-door neighbor, Larry Newman:

“This war in Vietnam—it’s never off my mind, it haunts me day and night.

“The first thing I do when I’m re-elected, I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam.”

He again acknowledged his puzzlement at a political strategy for what he had already decided to do: “Exactly how I’m going to do it, right now, I don’t know, but that is my number one priority—get out of Southeast Asia. I should have listened to MacArthur. I should have listened to De Gaulle.

“We are not going to have men ground up in this fashion, this far away from home. I’m going to get those guys out because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war it’s impossible to win.”
[37]

He said the same thing to General David M. Shoup, commander of the Marines and the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Kennedy most trusted. Shoup strengthened Kennedy’s conviction that Vietnam was a total trap. JFK had asked his Marine commandant “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup did so and advised the president that “unless we were prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expanded beyond control.”
[38]

On the morning of November 11, the president and General Shoup met at the White House and walked over together to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for a wreath-laying ceremony. Moved by their remembrance of the American war dead and further convinced by Shoup’s dramatic one-million men assessment, Kennedy told the general that he was withdrawing U.S. forces from Vietnam. As General David Shoup’s widow, Zola D. Shoup, told me in an interview, “Dave came home saying, ‘I know Kennedy’s getting out of Vietnam.’ Then two weeks later, Dave was walking behind the body in Arlington.”
[39]

The day after Kennedy told Shoup of his withdrawal plans, Senator Wayne Morse came to the White House to see the president about his education bills. Kennedy wanted to talk instead about Vietnam—to his most vehement war critic. Morse had been making two to five speeches a week in the Senate against Kennedy on Vietnam. JFK took Morse out into the White House Rose Garden to avoid being overheard or bugged by the CIA.
[40]

The president then startled Morse by saying: “Wayne, I want you to know you’re absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. Keep this in mind. I’m in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam. When I’m finished, I want you to give me half a day and come over and analyze it point by point.”

Taken aback, Morse asked the president if he understood his objections.

Kennedy said, “If I don’t understand your objections by now, I never will.”
[41]

JFK made sure Morse understood what he was saying. He added: “Wayne, I’ve decided to get out. Definitely!”
[42]

Yet a mind needs hands to carry out its intentions. A president’s hands are his staff and extended government bureaucracy. As Kennedy knew, when it came down to the nitty-gritty of carrying out his decision to end the Vietnam War, his administrative hands were resistant to doing what he wanted them to do, especially his Pentagon hands. He also knew that to withdraw from Vietnam “after I win the election” in the fall of 1964, he now had to inspire his aides to continue moving the machinery for withdrawal that he activated on October 11 with National Security Action Memorandum 263.

That was why, on the day before he left for Dallas, he took aside one of his reluctant aides on Vietnam, Michael Forrestal. Kennedy first gave Forrestal “odds of a hundred-to-one that the U.S. could not win” in Vietnam.
[43]
He then told Forrestal to prepare to do what Kennedy had said more frankly, in his conversation with Wayne Morse, he himself was already doing as a basis for his decision to withdraw from Vietnam:

“I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, what we thought we were doing, and what we now think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.”
[44]

Kennedy was trying to bring aboard not only Michael Forrestal but his entire reluctant government by a “complete and very profound review” designed for a Vietnam withdrawal. The president’s mind had to coax his government hands gently and circumspectly to get them to function as he wished, in response to his new thinking on not only the U.S.S.R. and Cuba, but most urgently in his own mind, Vietnam.

Not the least of Kennedy’s obstacles on Vietnam from September on continued to be the noncooperation of his coup-pushing ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. After Kennedy’s and Rusk’s persistent appeals, Lodge had finally met with Diem on September 9 to appeal to him to send his brother Nhu away and thereby lift the worst government repression. The meeting had gone poorly, and Lodge’s patrician attitude toward Diem had not helped. The ambassador’s report back to the State Department dismissed Diem for “his medieval view of life.”
[45]
Following the failed meeting, Lodge reverted to his strategy of “chicken” with Washington’s client ruler, refusing to communicate with Diem. Thus, the South Vietnamese ruler had to surrender to U.S. demands or he would be run over by the coup Lodge wanted and thought inevitable.

Kennedy urged a different course. On September 17, the president sent a personal telegram to his ambassador that, first of all, put a brake on the coup that Lodge and his Washington collaborators were trying to accelerate:

“We see no good opportunity for action to remove present government in immediate future. Therefore, as your most recent messages suggest, we must for the present apply such pressures as are available to secure whatever modest improvements on the scene may be possible. We think it likely that such improvements can make a difference, at least in the short run.”
[46]

Kennedy then appealed once again to his ambassador to act more like a diplomat than a coup leader, asking that Lodge engage in a serious dialogue with Diem:

“We note your reluctance to continue dialogue with Diem until you have more to say but we continue to believe that discussions with him are at a minimum an important source of intelligence and may conceivably be a means of exerting some persuasive effect even in his present state of mind . . . We ourselves can see much virtue in effort to reason even with an unreasonable man when he is on a collision course.”

The president added on this critical matter that he was nevertheless not issuing a command: “We repeat, however, that this is a matter for your judgment.”
[47]

Kennedy was, in essence, appealing to Lodge’s resistant mind in the same way he hoped Lodge would appeal to Diem’s resistant mind. Without knowing Lodge’s “chicken” game paradigm for his refusal to talk with Diem, Kennedy had discerned the problem and its solution: “We ourselves can see much virtue in effort to reason even with an unreasonable man when he is on a collision course”—an insight that applied just as much to Lodge as it did to Diem. Both were on a collision course, just as Lodge wished. But a strategy of dialogue (no matter what) that had worked well for Kennedy with his enemy Khrushchev got him nowhere with his own Saigon ambassador, nor as a consequence, with Diem.

In a personal reply to the president, Lodge immediately rejected his appeal for a dialogue with Diem, insisting instead on his own “policy of silence”: “I have been observing a policy of silence which we have reason to believe is causing a certain amount of apprehension and may just be getting the family into the mood to make a few concessions.”
[48]

What most upset Lodge, however, in the president’s telegram was that Kennedy had announced that he was about to send Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Vietnam. The ambassador protested that Kennedy would thereby nullify Lodge’s ploy of distancing himself from Diem.

“The effect of this [policy of silence toward Diem],” Lodge rebuked the president, “will obviously be lost if we make such a dramatic demonstration as that of having the Secretary of Defense and General Taylor come out here,” given the diplomatic necessity of their then meeting with Diem.
[49]

Kennedy’s main State Department advisers on Vietnam, Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman, and his White House aide, Michael Forrestal, were all just as dismayed as Lodge was by the president’s decision to send McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam. When Harriman learned about it, he phoned Forrestal to say he and Hilsman thought the president’s proposal was “a disaster” because it meant “sending two men opposed to our policy” of promoting a coup. Forrestal glumly agreed.
[50]

But Kennedy had made his decision. The coup that his closest State Department advisers on Vietnam and his Saigon ambassador regarded as
their
policy, and that they had manipulated the president into endorsing, was not in fact
his
policy. Nor for that matter was
his
policy the troop escalation to full-scale U.S. intervention that his Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor had pushed from the beginning, and that his Defense Secretary, McNamara, had backed until Kennedy made clear his resistance to it. As would eventually become clear, in sending McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam under a mandate for withdrawal, Kennedy was steering a course that went between and beyond both the coup-makers on his left and the warmakers on his right, with the CIA’s Richard Helms in both camps. They all had their own policies on Vietnam and regarded the president’s as a disaster.

Kennedy responded by return cable to Lodge’s objections to the McNamara-Taylor visit. He said McNamara and Taylor would definitely be coming, in order to carry out a critical mission he had given them. “My need for this visit is very great indeed,” he said firmly.
[51]

The McNamara-Taylor mission was designed by Kennedy to meet his “very great need indeed” of not only forestalling the coup that Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Helms, and even the president’s more liberal State Department advisers sought. It was also meant to lay the foundation for the beginning withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam that fall, which only John Kennedy sought.