An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Optimism—or wishful thinking—was so strong now that Kennedy ordered McNamara to begin planning a U.S. military exit from Vietnam. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Gilpatric, the president “made clear to McNamara and me that he wanted to not only hold the level of U.S. military presence in Vietnam down, but he wanted to reverse the flow.” To that end, McNamara drew up a three-year plan for the reduction of U.S. forces in Vietnam. U.S. military planners told him that “advisers” could leave by 1965, but McNamara extended the date to 1968. By then, he hoped to withdraw the last fifteen hundred U.S. troops and reduce military assistance payments to $40.8 million, less than a quarter of 1962 layouts. McNamara rationalized the plan by saying that “it might be difficult to retain public support for U.S. operations in Vietnam indefinitely. Political pressures would build up as losses continued. Therefore . . . planning must be undertaken now and a program devised to phase out U.S. military involvement.”
There is no direct record of Kennedy’s agreement with McNamara’s plan, but it is difficult to believe that McNamara did not have the president’s approval. They were close, very close, or as close as anyone in the administration was to the president, aside from Bobby. McNamara was Kennedy’s idea of a first-rate deputy. The president “thought very highly of Bob McNamara,” Bobby recalled, “very highly of him. . . . He was head and shoulders above everybody else. . . . In the area of foreign policy or defense,” Bobby added, “obviously, it was Bob McNamara, not Dean Rusk.” With his affinity for numbers, for unsentimental calculation, McNamara “symbolized the idea that [the administration] could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. . . . He was so impressive and loyal,” David Halberstam wrote later, “that it was hard to believe, in the halcyon days of 1963 when his reputation was at its height, that anything he took command of could go wrong.” Kennedy himself said, McNamara would “come in with his twenty options and then say, ‘Mr. President, I think we should do this.’ I like that. Makes the job easier.”
McNamara was one of only two members of the cabinet—the other being Douglas Dillon—who enjoyed a consistent social relationship with the Kennedys. Charming, gay, gregarious, a sort of modern Renaissance man with a capacity to discuss the arts and literature, he became a favorite of Jacqueline Kennedy’s. “Men can’t understand his sex appeal,” Jackie said. “Why is it,” Bobby wondered, “that they call him ‘the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?”
In proposing to get out of Vietnam before it turned into a political liability in the United States, McNamara reflected the president’s thinking. Kennedy wanted the lowest possible profile for U.S. involvement in the conflict. In May, he instructed that there be no “unnecessary trips to Vietnam, especially by high ranking officers,” who might draw more attention to America’s role in the fighting. In a meeting with congressional leaders, Kennedy made it clear that he did not want to announce increases in U.S. troops. The objective for JFK, Fulbright said, was to keep the United States from becoming “formally involved.” The increase in advisers was less important than keeping things “on an informal basis, because . . . we couldn’t withdraw if it gets too formal.” In October, Kennedy reluctantly agreed to let the military destroy crops in Viet Cong-controlled areas. It was a small concession to the Joint Chiefs, who were pressing him to use more muscle in Vietnam. “His main train of thinking,” an NSC member told Bundy, “was that you cannot say no to your military advisers all the time.” But he wanted to be sure that crop destruction did not become an embarrassment to the administration. “What can we do about keeping it from becoming an American enterprise which would be surfaced with [or described as] poisoning food?” Kennedy asked his advisers.
Knowing nothing of the Kennedy-McNamara plan to reduce military commitments to Vietnam, American correspondents in Saigon remained highly critical of administration policy. Seeing U.S. officials as misled by the Vietnamese and their own illusions, reporters disputed Diem-embassy assertions of steady progress in the conflict. In October 1962, Halberstam, speaking for many of his colleagues, said, “The closer one gets to the actual contact level of the war, the further one gets from official optimism.” By protecting Diem from criticism, Halberstam added, the U.S. embassy was turning into “the adjunct of a dictatorship,” and if reporters accepted the official line on Diem and the war, they would “become the adjuncts of a tyranny.”
The press, an embassy official reported in September, “believes that the situation in Viet Nam is going to pieces and that we have been unable to convince them otherwise.” Taylor said that American journalists in Saigon “remained uninformed and often belligerently adverse to the programs of the U.S. and SVN Governments.” His observations and discussions in Vietnam told him that press reports of difficulties between U.S. military advisers and South Vietnamese officers were false. The administration needed to push publishers into “responsible reporting,” he said. In his conversation with Thuan, Kennedy urged “the GVN not to be too concerned by press reports. He assured Mr. Thuan that the U.S. government did not accept everything the correspondents wrote even if it appeared in the New York Times. He emphasized that if the Vietnamese government was successful, the public image would take care of itself.” The president added that “inaccurate press reporting . . . occurred every day in Washington.”
This last statement was said with real conviction. Kennedy was not as tolerant of the press as he seemed. He believed that its affinity for the sensational and its instinctive impulse to be critical of the White House had repeatedly produced unfair attacks on his administration. Time magazine’s coverage of his presidency particularly irritated him. He viewed it as inconsistent and much more friendly to his predecessor. Complaints to Time publisher Henry Luce evoked a strong defense of the magazine’s performance but left Kennedy unconvinced.
Kennedy sympathized with the belief in Saigon that American reporters were opportunists trying to build reputations with controversial stories belittling Diem and progress in the war. This allowed him to rationalize new October directives to the State and Defense departments about press interviews. In response to national security leaks, including those involving Vietnam, Kennedy ordered officials not to hold one-on-one meetings with reporters, and if they did, “to report promptly and in writing on any conversation with ‘news media’ representatives.” A leak to New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, which seemed to compromise U.S. satellite intelligence on Soviet ICBM installations, especially upset the president. He saw the press and the New York Times in particular as “the most privileged group,” who regarded any attempt to rein them in “as a limitation on their civil rights. And they are not very used to it.” Joe Alsop called the restrictions on interviews “news-control devices” that threatened healthy democratic debate about vital issues. But Kennedy refused to back down. The restrictions were “aimed at the protection of genuinely sensitive information,” he told Alsop through Bundy. Nor would the directives prevent “responsible reporters from doing their job.” The president’s order “was so rarely and humorously observed,” Sorensen remembered, “that it soon fell into disuse.” Nevertheless, the directives undermined Kennedy’s generally good relations with the press and made reporters more distrustful of White House pronouncements on everything.
Kennedy believed that newspaper stories from Saigon, whatever their accuracy, made it difficult for him to follow a cautious policy of limited involvement. If people believed that we were losing the conflict, it would create additional pressure to expand U.S. commitments. His political strategy was to keep the war off the front pages of America’s newspapers. Press accounts arousing controversy drew more attention to Vietnam than he wanted, and an inflamed public debate would make it difficult to hold down commitments and maintain his freedom to withdraw when he saw fit. As with Laos, and, again, unlike with Latin America, Kennedy maintained a good sense of proportion about the limits of Vietnam’s importance in the overall scheme of U.S. natio
AS KENNEDY BEGAN to pay more attention to Vietnam, he could not neglect larger threats. After announcing plans to resume atmospheric tests at the end of April, he made last-ditch efforts to halt the slide into an escalating arms race. On March 5, he thanked Khrushchev for agreeing to have their foreign ministers open a new round of disarmament talks in Geneva on March 14. He also urged against additional “sterile exchanges of propaganda.” He proposed, “Let us, instead, join in giving our close personal support and direction to the work of our representatives, and let us join in working for their success.”
But Kennedy could not persuade the Soviets that international verification was essential to a comprehensive test ban treaty. The sticking point in Soviet-American discussions was on-site investigation of seismic shocks. The Americans insisted that only direct observation could establish the difference between an earthquake and a nuclear explosion, “a natural and an artificial seismic event.” The Soviets rejected the distinction as an American espionage ploy. Gromyko privately told Rusk that “even one foreigner loose in the Soviet Union could find things out that could be most damaging to the USSR.” Although it was possible to ascribe Soviet suspicion to paranoid fears of foreigners, Macmillan saw more rational calculation at work. Convinced that on-site investigations would reveal nuclear inferiority to the West and eager to use American tests as an excuse for additional tests of their own, the Soviets were resigned to pushing the United States into atmospheric explosions. (Much later, Khrushchev admitted as much.)
The administration suffered a public relations setback after the Defense Department released preliminary results of a seismic research study concluding that international detection stations in the Soviet Union might not be essential to monitor underground nuclear explosions. When Arthur Dean, U.S. ambassador to the disarmament talks, publicly acknowledged this as a possibility, it gave the Soviets a propaganda bonanza. In fact, although the seismic study weakened the case for on-site inspection stations, the Pentagon maintained that they were still essential to prevent Soviet cheating. But that now seemed like a secondary detail, and because Moscow continued to reject inspections, prospects for a comprehensive test ban largely disappeared. At a July 27 White House meeting on arms control, Kennedy vented his irritation at the premature release of the report. “We had messed up the handling of the new data,” he said. “Information about it was all over town before we had decided what effect it would have on our policy.”
Kennedy’s frustration with professional diplomats and military officers who, in addition to Dean, had undermined America’s position in the test ban talks was part of a larger concern. On July 30, three days after complaining about the Pentagon’s misstep, he expressed his low opinion of America’s professional diplomats and military chiefs. In a taped conversation with Rusk, Bundy, and Ball, Kennedy described U.S. career envoys as weak or spineless: “I just see an awful lot of fellows who . . . don’t seem to have cojones.” By contrast, “the Defense Department looks as if that’s all they’ve got. They haven’t any brains. . . . You get all this sort of virility . . . at the Pentagon and you get a lot of Arleigh Burkes: admirable nice figure without any brains.”
In fact, the Pentagon’s premature release of a report undermining a White House policy was partly the consequence of bureaucratic chaos. The New York Times, in particular, had frequently complained about the hit-or-miss procedures of a government poorly coordinated by the White House. Kennedy was not unsympathetic to the Times’ argument. He had already expended more energy than he cared to on trying to bring greater order to his foreign policy agencies—defense, state, and the CIA. Predictably, domestic red tape bothered him less than poorly functioning foreign policy machinery; he was fond of saying, “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.” But there seemed only so much that could be done. Certainly, Kennedy was temperamentally uncomfortable with managing everything from the White House. Why had he surrounded himself with so many talented people if he were going to oversee every agency? And perhaps some disorder was even a good thing. “Creative governments will always be ‘out of channels,’” Schlesinger told Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos. “[They] will always present aspects of ‘confusion’ and ‘meddling’; [they] will always discomfit officials whose routine is being disturbed or whose security is being threatened. But all this is inseparable from the process by which new ideas and new institutions enable government to meet new challenges. Orderly governments are very rarely creative; and creative governments are almost never orderly.” The balance between constructive chaos and bureaucratic mess seemed hard to maintain, however.
In September, the Soviets rejected U.S. proposals for both comprehensive and limited test bans, proposing instead a nonbinding ban on atmospheric explosions and a moratorium on underground detonations, both to begin on January 1, 1963. Kennedy accepted the cutoff date, but insisted at an August 29 press conference that it should rest on “workable international agreements; gentlemen’s agreements and moratoria do not provide the types of guarantees that are necessary. . . . This is the lesson of the Soviet government’s tragic decision to renew testing just a year ago.” On September 7, when the Geneva talks recessed to make way for the U.N. General Assembly session in New York, a reliable test ban agreement of any kind remained an uncertain hope.
INTO 1962 KENNEDY STRUGGLED to find some formula for accommodation with Moscow over Germany and Berlin. In November 1961, the president suggested the creation of an International Access Authority made up of NATO, Warsaw Pact, and neutral representatives to eliminate the possibility of confrontations over Allied movements in and out of Berlin. Although the East Germans promptly rejected this plan as colonialist, Kennedy expanded the idea to include flights, over which East Germany had no control. Seeing the suggestion as a way to block productive talks, the Soviets began harassing civil aircraft flying in the Berlin air corridors.
Despite mutual recognition of the importance of Berlin to improved Soviet-American relations, both sides doggedly stuck to their positions: The United States would not give up access to Berlin or concede to a permanent division of Germany, both changes Moscow believed essential to its future national security. Although Kennedy persuaded Khrushchev to end the buzzing of air traffic, they could not break the impasse. By June, Kennedy saw no point in continuing the exchange of private messages on Germany. “Matters relating to Berlin are currently being discussed in careful detail by Secretary Rusk and Ambassador Dobrynin,” he wrote Khrushchev, “and I think it may be best to leave the discussion in their capable hands at this time.” In July, when Khrushchev answered with a stale proposal for the replacement of western occupation forces with U.N. troops, Kennedy dismissed the suggestion as an extension of Moscow’s “consistent failure . . . to take any real account of what we have made clear are the vital interests of the United States and its Allies.”
An incident at the Berlin Wall, in which East German security guards killed a defector, together with Khrushchev’s fears of a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union, heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington in the summer. In March, Adenauer had told Bobby that Khrushchev told him that he genuinely believed that “the United States wants to destroy the Soviet Union.” In an interview with journalist Stewart Alsop, Kennedy said that, “in some circumstances we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may—a clear attack on Western Europe, for example.” Khrushchev told Salinger that this “new doctrine” was “a very bad mistake for which [the President] will have to pay!” Although Kennedy’s full statement left little doubt that his concern was with avoiding nuclear war, Khrushchev ordered a special military alert in response to the article.
In June, Bolshakov reported a conversation with Bobby Kennedy that renewed Khrushchev’s worries about a U.S. nuclear attack. Do war hawks enjoy special influence in the United States? Bolshakov had asked Bobby. “In the government, no,” he h
Although Bobby Kennedy assured Bolshakov that the president “had decisively rejected any attempt by zealous advocates of a clash between the United States and the Soviet Union . . . to [get him to] accept their point of view,” the conversation upset Khrushchev. If Bobby’s “candor” was aimed at encouraging Khrushchev to reach agreements on Berlin and test bans, it backfired. Khrushchev sent back a message through Bolshakov restating his determination to sign a peace treaty with East Germany that would liquidate “war remnants . . . and on this basis the situation in West Berlin—a free demilitarized city—would be normalized.” To underscore Soviet determination not to be intimidated by U.S. military might, Khrushchev told Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during a September visit to Russia that if “any lunatics in your country want war, Western Europe will hold them back. War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour. It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.”
Nevertheless, because Khrushchev was eager to help the president in the congressional elections, he sent a message asking if Kennedy preferred that he wait on a Berlin treaty until after November 6. After Sorensen told Dobrynin that the president “could not possibly lay himself open to Republican charges of appeasement in his response to any buildup in Berlin pressures between now and November 6,” Khrushchev promised not to “hurt [his] chances in the November elections.” Khrushchev said that he intended to give Kennedy a choice after the elections: “go to war, or sign a peace treaty. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin. We will permit access to West Berlin for economic or commercial purposes, but not for military purposes. Everybody is saying nowadays that there will be a war. I don’t agree. Sensible people won’t start a war. What is Berlin to the United States? . . . Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it. Nor do we need it.”