An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
On December 18, Kennedy received two conflicting reports on Vietnamese conditions and prospects. Theodore Heaver, the State Department’s Vietnam specialist, who had spent March and April in the country and then another forty days visiting seventeen provinces in the fall of 1962, acknowledged that “fact is not always easy to come by in Viet-Nam.” He had concluded nevertheless that a standoff in the war was now more likely than Saigon’s defeat. “But the tide has not turned. The VC are still very strong, and our key programs are still in many respects experimental.” If they worked, he foresaw a GVN standing on its own “with greatly reduced US military assistance.”
Mike Mansfield had been less confident. He said, “[It distresses me] to hear the situation described in much the same terms as on my last visit, although it is seven years and billions of dollars later. In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.” He certainly had heard “extremely optimistic” evaluations of the strategic hamlet program, which Vietnamese and Americans in Saigon predicted would solve the insurgency problem in a year or two. But having heard optimistic talk like this from the French in the early 1950s, he doubted the wisdom of uncritically accepting such current hopes. The “real tests [of strategic hamlets] are yet to come.” They involved “an immense job of social engineering, dependent on great outlays of aid on our part for many years and a most responsive, alert and enlightened leadership in the government of Vietnam.” If current remedies failed, Mansfield foresaw “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. That is an alternative which I most emphatically do not recommend,” he had told Kennedy. “Our role is and must remain secondary. . . . It is their country, their future which is most at stake, not ours.” The alternative to being trapped in unwanted commitments in Vietnam was to press for negotiations that could neutralize all of Southeast Asia.
At a December 1962 news conference, Kennedy took a wait-and-see attitude. “As you know, we have about 10 or 11 times as many men there as we had a year ago. We’ve had a number of casualties. We put in an awful lot of equipment. We are going ahead with the strategic hamlet proposal.” But he acknowledged “the great difficulty . . . in fighting a guerrilla war . . . especially in terrain as difficult as South Viet-Nam. So we don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say I don’t think it is darker than it was a year ago, and in some ways lighter.” Privately, Kennedy was less sanguine. He had angrily told Mansfield during a meeting in Palm Beach that his advisers were giving him more optimistic assessments of what to expect in Vietnam. “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” Kennedy later told O’Donnell, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Kennedy’s public conformity with optimistic estimates, however, served a useful political purpose: If he was going to get out of Vietnam, it was essential to encourage the idea that there was progress in the war and that the United States could soon reduce its role in the fighting. As Defense Department public affairs officer Arthur Sylvester famously said, “It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself.”
On February 1, Kennedy met with army Chief of Staff General Wheeler, who had assessed conditions in Vietnam during a January visit. Wheeler frustrated and irritated Kennedy with a report Forrestal described as “rosy euphoria” and “a complete waste of . . . time.” Wheeler also was no help in suggesting how to bring the GVN more closely into line with “U.S. views on fighting the war and on foreign policy,” or how to “develop gradually a more independent posture for the U.S. in South Vietnam and very carefully dissociate ourselves from those policies and practices of the GVN of which we disapprove.”
Troubled by the different assessments of South Vietnamese effectiveness, Kennedy sent Roger Hilsman, still the head of the State Department’s intelligence division, and Forrestal to Vietnam to give him their appraisal of the war. Although they believed that things were “going much better than they were a year ago,” they did not see them “going nearly so well as the people here in Saigon both military and civilian think they are.” The Viet Cong were “being hurt,” but “the negative side of the ledger” was “still awesome.” Their overall judgment was that the United States was “probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped,” and they expected the war to “last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated, and prolong the period in which a sudden and dramatic event would upset the gains already made.” The CIA, which weighed in with a report now as well, said “the war remains a slowly escalating stalemate.”
While Kennedy announced in the opening paragraphs of his January 1963 State of the Union Message that “the spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in Viet-Nam,” he also publicly conceded that Vietnam, along with Berlin, the Congo, Cuba, Laos, and the Middle East, remained “points of uncertainty.” He could not see how South Vietnam would survive without substantial U.S. economic and military aid. “I think that unless you want to withdraw from the field and decide that it is in the national interest to permit that area to collapse,” he told a news conference on March 6, the United States had to continue providing support. In an April 2 special message to Congress on economic and military aid to nations battling communist subversion, Kennedy said that assistance to beleaguered countries like Vietnam should not be reduced, however strong the desire to help balance the U.S. budget by cutting foreign aid. Of course he was eager to protect Vietnam from a communist takeover. But by 1963 he was more skeptical than ever about putting in ground forces, which would suffer losses and increase pressure on him to commit additional men to the fighting. He wished to mute America’s role in the conflict and leave himself free to withdraw sixteen thousand U.S. military “advisers” now on the ground (about twenty times the number that had been there at the start of 1961), some of whom, he publicly acknowledged, were being killed in combat. At the end of January, Kennedy instructed Harriman to clear all visits to Vietnam. According to Hilsman, the president called him to complain about “press reports of unscheduled visits by senior U.S. officials to Vietnam.” The stories appeared to increase the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. “That is exactly what I don’t want to do,” he told Hilsman.
A Washington Post interview published on May 12 with Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother and director of the strategic hamlet program, increased Kennedy’s interest in withdrawal. Nhu complained that there were too many U.S. military advisers in Vietnam and that at least half could be safely withdrawn. At a news conference on the twenty-second, when asked to comment on Nhu’s remarks, Kennedy testily declared the United States ready to withdraw “any number of troops, any time the Government of South Vietnam would suggest it. The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on their way home.”
That month, Kennedy began planning the withdrawal of U.S. military advisers. But a plan was not a commitment. O’Donnell remembered a conversation between the president and Mansfield that month in which Kennedy said that he “now agreed with the Senator’s thinking on the need for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. ‘But I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected.’” A withdrawal in 1963 or 1964, Kennedy feared, would jeopardize his chances for a second term. After Mansfield left, according to O’Donnell, Kennedy told him, “If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.” In the 1970s, Mansfield confirmed that Kennedy had told him of his interest in withdrawing military advisers. He “felt that even then with 16,000 troops we were in too deep.”
However calculating Kennedy was about politics—and he and Bobby did not hesitate to cut lots of corners—it is hard to credit his willingness to let boys die in Vietnam for the sake of his reelection. What seems mor
Diem undermined Kennedy’s political strategy by provoking a crisis with his country’s Buddhist majority. Between May and July, Buddhist demonstrations, including self-immolations by monks, against repressive government policies embarrassed Washington. The abuse of a religious majority by Diem’s Catholic minority regime particularly discomfited Kennedy. On July 17, a reporter asked the president whether the conflict between Diem’s government and the Buddhists, which had stirred “a good deal of public concern” in the United States, had become “an impediment to the effectiveness of American aid in the war against the Viet Cong?” Kennedy thought it had and regretted the conflict at a time when the military effort had begun to show progress.
During the summer of 1963, Kennedy largely left management of U.S.-Vietnamese relations to subordinates. The civil rights crisis, his trip to Europe, the tax cut, negotiation of the test ban treaty, and the campaign to ensure its Senate approval claimed most of his attention. Experience had taught him that appearing indecisive was better than rushing into a policy that ended up failing and having ongoing negative consequences, like the Bay of Pigs. In the six months between May 22 and November 22, for example, none of the 115 telephone conversations he chose to record was about Vietnam. Of the 107 taped meetings the Kennedy Library has for this period, only 14 include discussions about Vietnam, and all but one of these were in the three months between August and November, when problems with Diem reached a breaking point. In June, after the State Department warned Diem that unless he worked out an accommodation with the Buddhists, the United States would “have to re-examine our entire relationship with his regime,” Kennedy temporarily reclaimed control of Vietnam policy by embargoing any further warnings or ultimatums to Diem without his clearance. On July 3, Max Frankel of the New York Times described Kennedy’s concern to keep uncertainties about Vietnam as quiet as possible. “Once in a while,” he wrote, “Washington remembers that there is a war on in Vietnam. . . . But for long stretches, the war against communist-led guerrillas in Vietnam fades from memory here, not because no one cares, but because the men who care most decided long ago to discuss it as little as possible.”
Kennedy’s hesitancy over what to do about Vietnam registered strongly with his advisers in conversations between June and October. Or, more to the point, his uncertainty about how to lead Vietnam toward greater stability and freedom from communist control without a significant increase in U.S. aid, especially American combat troops, was evident to aides battling to push him in one direction or another. His indecisiveness was partly the result of an argument among his advisers about what would work. A few even thought there was nothing that could be done. Like Kennedy, Paul Kattenburg, a State Department Asian expert and chairman of an interdepartmental working group on Vietnam, listened to the debate with mounting doubts that anyone in Washington or Saigon had a solution to the Vietnam problem. Neither supporters of Diem and strategic hamlets nor advocates of a new government led by a military chief who would follow a more aggressive counterinsurgency plan convinced him that they knew how to save South Vietnam from communism. He urged withdrawal.
Kennedy decided to make Henry Cabot Lodge ambassador to Saigon. He saw the appointment as good politics and a boost for effective policy. Possibly remembering FDR’s selection of Herbert Hoover’s secretary of war Patrick J. Hurley as ambassador to China in 1944 to negotiate a coalition between the nationalists and the communists, Kennedy understood that sending a prominent Republican to Saigon would give him some political cover should Vietnam collapse. A fresh ambassador would also allow the U.S. embassy to renew efforts to bend Diem to Washington’s will and control American correspondents in Saigon, whose front-page reports on the Buddhist crisis were undermining Kennedy’s efforts to mute Vietnam as a compelling issue in the United States. Diem certainly saw Lodge’s selection as evidence that Kennedy intended to control or unseat him. “They can send ten Lodges,” Diem said defiantly, “but I will not permit myself or my country to be humiliated.”
At a July 4 meeting with Bundy, Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Forrestal, Kennedy had heard mostly bad news. Diem’s uncompromising antagonism to the Buddhists might force the United States “publicly to disassociate itself from the GVN’s Buddhist policy.” Forcing Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the Nhus, out of the government seemed like a good but undoable proposal. Coup attempts over the next several months with unpredictable results seemed likely. In keeping with his reluctance to decide anything about Vietnam or to wait on events before acting, Kennedy’s only response was to get Lodge to Saigon as soon as possible, though he told Hilsman to work out the actual timing. Moreover, on July 8, when Kennedy met with outgoing ambassador Fred Nolting, he decided against sending Diem a personal message pressing him to initiate reforms (despite a New York Times report to the contrary). He also ignored the urging of State Department officials during the next month to pressure journalists to accept the “official” view of “the Vietnamese situation” and to encourage greater aggressiveness by U.S. officials pushing Diem to accept a policy of conciliation with the Buddhists.
His unresponsiveness reflected not indifference but a continuing sense of limitations. With Diem’s government apparently self-destructing, Kennedy wanted to keep his distance from any direct involvement in the growing crisis. Compared to the many lengthy meetings he had on Cuba and other foreign and domestic matters, a thirty-five-minute discussion with an ambassador heading into a firestorm without any but the most general presidential directive speaks loudly about Kennedy’s intentions. He remained uncertain about what to do and worried about being trapped in an unwinnable war.
A New York Times David Halberstam story saying things were going badly in the fighting heightened Kennedy’s concern about the war effort, as demonstrated by a request on August 15 to McNamara and Rusk for an update on the effectiveness of “military operations in Vietnam.” The following day marine corps general Victor Krulak told McNamara that Halberstam’s article not only suffered from “factual and statistical weaknesses” but also exhibited “a lack of understanding of our entire Vietnam strategy.” Halberstam, Krulak said, missed the fact that we were “driving the Viet Cong southward—away from their sources of strength and compressing them in the southernmost area of the peninsula.” The hope was to trap and let them “rot there. If Halberstam understood clearly this strategy, he might not have undertaken to write his disingenuous article.” Krulak repeated his optimistic assessment of conditions in Vietnam in a meeting with the president on August 21.
At the same time, Mansfield weighed in with renewed warnings to Kennedy that regardless of whether “[we dealt] with the present government or with a replacement—we are in for a very long haul to develop even a modicum of stability in Viet Nam. And, in the end, the costs in men and money could go at least as high as those in Korea.” Mansfield urged Kennedy to ask himself “the fundamental question: Is South Viet Nam as important to us as the premise on which we are now apparently operating indicates?” Mansfield advised the president to begin stressing “the relatively limited importance of the area in terms of specific U.S. interests” and consider withdrawing 10 percent of our advisers from Vietnam as a “symbolic gesture” and indication that under certain circumstances we would end our commitment to Vietnam.
No direct record exists of what Kennedy thought about Krulak’s assessment or Mansfield’s recommendations. But a White House memo on August 20 from Max Taylor to McNamara reflected both contradictory a
When Lodge arrived in Saigon on August 22, the prospect of a South Vietnamese collapse seemed more likely than a victory. On the twenty-first, despite promises to Nolting that he would be conciliatory toward the Buddhists and would expel Madame Nhu (who had applauded Buddhist immolations and openly advocated uncompromising repression of dissident monks), Diem had unleashed a nationwide attack on pagodas to crush Buddhist opposition. Kennedy now felt compelled to instruct Lodge to inform Diem that he must rid himself of the Nhus’ influence; should he refuse, Lodge was to tell Vietnamese military chiefs that we could no longer support Diem. Lodge was to “examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary.” Kennedy directed that Lodge and General Paul Harkins, the head of MACV, have the freedom to implement the department’s instructions by whatever means they believed wise. When Lodge responded that chances of persuading Diem to act against the Nhus were nil and asked permission to go directly to the generals, Kennedy agreed.