An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
The decisions on troop withdrawals were given official expression in a National Security Action Memorandum on October 11 with the proviso that “no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” News of Defense Department steps to bring U.S. troops out of Vietnam was to be done by a “leak to the press.” But on October 31, during a news conference, Kennedy himself acknowledged the plan to remove one thousand troops from Vietnam before the end of the year. “If we are able to do that,” he said, “that would be our schedule.”
Kennedy’s announcement was a public confirmation of a private conclusion. It had become crystal clear to him after hearing from McNamara and Taylor on October 2, if not before, that Diem’s regime was incapable of winning the war. Major General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”) told Taylor, “[My country is] in chains with no way to shake them off.” On October 5, Minh asked Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein, a CIA contact in Saigon, to see him at his headquarters. After getting Lodge’s approval, Conein and Minh met alone for over an hour. During their conversation, Minh declared the need for a prompt statement of Washington’s attitude toward a change of government in the “very near future.” Minh predicted that without action soon, the war would be lost to the Viet Cong. He wanted assurances “that the USG will not attempt to thwart this plan.” Conein promised nothing, but agreed to report back on his government’s attitude. Lodge urged conformity with Minh’s request for assurances and a promise to Minh of continued U.S. military support for a new government devoted to defeating the communists. After discussion with Kennedy, McCone advised Lodge that they did not wish “to stimulate [a] coup,” but they would not thwart one or deny support to a new, more effective regime. “We certainly would not favor assassination of Diem,” McCone added, but “we are in no way responsible for stopping every such threat of which we might receive even partial knowledge.” As always, Kennedy saw “deniability” of direct U.S. involvement as of utmost importance should a coup occur.
As more information came in during the next two weeks, the White House became concerned that a coup, for which the United States would be held responsible, might fail and embarrass the administration. “We are particularly concerned about hazard that an unsuccessful coup . . . will be laid at our door by public opinion almost everywhere,” Bundy cabled Lodge on October 25. “Therefore, while sharing your view that we should not be in position of thwarting coup, we would like to have option of judging and warning on any plan with poor prospects of success. We recognize that this is a large order, but President wants you to know of our concern.”
Lodge believed that the White House was asking for something beyond the embassy’s control. He cabled Rusk on October 29, “It would appear that a coup attempt by the Generals’ group is imminent; that whether this coup fails or succeeds, the USG must be prepared to accept the fact that we will be blamed, however unjustifiably; and finally, that no positive action by the USG can prevent a coup attempt.” Since the plotters promised to give Lodge only four hours notice, he saw no way that the United States could “significantly influence [the] course of events.”
Still, Kennedy wanted him to try. If the coup failed, Bobby predicted, “Diem will throw us out.” Rusk countered that if the United States opposed the uprising, “the coup-minded military leaders will turn against us and the war effort will drop off rapidly.” Taylor and McCone thought that a failed revolt would be “a disaster and a successful coup would have a harmful effect on the war effort.” Harriman disagreed, arguing that Diem could not win the war. With pro- and anti-Diem forces in Vietnam so equally divided, Kennedy thought a coup “silly,” and wanted Lodge to discourage an uprising. “If we miscalculated,” Kennedy said, “we could lose our entire position in Southeast Asia overnight.” But it was too late. Despite additional appeals to Lodge over the next forty-eight hours to restrain the generals, the coup was launched at 1:45 P.M. on November 1. And once it began, as Bundy had cabled Lodge on the thirtieth, it was “in the interest of the U.S. Government that it should succeed.” At a meeting following news of the coup, Kennedy emphasized “the importance of making clear publicly that this was not a U.S. coup.” Contrary reports about who at any given moment held the upper hand in Saigon made this even more complicated. When Diem called Lodge at 4:30 P.M. to ask, “What is the attitude of the United States?” he replied evasively, “I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you. . . . It is 4:30 A.M. in Washington and U.S. Government cannot possibly have a view.” Lodge added, “I am worried about your physical safety,” and offered to help get him out of the country if Diem asked. Rusk at once counseled Lodge against premature recognition lest the coup be described as “American-inspired and manipulated.”
On the morning of November 2, Diem and Nhu, who had taken refuge in a private residence in suburban Saigon, offered to surrender to the generals if they guaranteed them safe conduct out of the country. When the generals made no firm promise of safe passage and troops tried to seize them, Diem and Nhu took refuge in a Catholic church, where they were arrested and placed in an armored personnel carrier. Early on the morning of the second, Conein received a call from Minh asking him to provide a plane for Diem’s exile. Still reluctant to give any indications of U.S. involvement, CIA operatives falsely answered that no aircraft with sufficient range to fly Diem to an asylum country was available for at least twenty-four hours. Before any plane became accessible, Diem and Nhu were assassinated in the personnel carrier. Even had a plane been available, it is doubtful that the generals would have allowed Diem or the Nhus to leave the country and set up a government in exile.
The news of their deaths reached Kennedy during a morning meeting with the National Security Council. According to Taylor, the president at once “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face,” which Taylor had never seen before. Taylor attributed Kennedy’s reaction to his having been led to believe or having persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed. Schlesinger, who saw the president shortly after, found him “somber and shaken.” He had “not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.” Kennedy refused to believe that Diem and Nhu, devout Catholics, would have killed themselves, as the Vietnamese generals were claiming. “He said that Diem had fought for his country for twenty years and that it should not have ended like this.” The fact that Diem had a million dollars in large denominations in a briefcase when he died added to Kennedy’s skepticism about the generals’ suicide account. So large a sum of money suggested that Diem intended to make himself comfortable in exile. Indeed, it was possible that the CIA had given him the money as an inducement to leave the country.
Kennedy tried to assuage his guilt about the assassinations by taping a statement in the Oval Office that future historians could consult. “Monday, November 4, 1963,” he began. “Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversations about a coup, conversations that divided the government here and in Saigon.” He listed Washington opponents as Taylor, his brother, McNamara (“to a somewhat lesser degree”), and McCone—“partly because of an old hostility to Lodge,” whose judgment he distrusted. The advocates were at state, “led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, supported by Mike Forrestal at the White House.”
Kennedy did not spare himself from blame: “I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. Harkins continued to oppose the coup on the ground that the military effort was doing well. . . . Politically the situation was deteriorating,
Kennedy then turned to the assassinations: “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether Saigon will begin—whether public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.” Kennedy then matter-of-factly turned away from Vietnam to discuss other current events.
His truncated discussion was a sign that he had made up his mind. The lesson Kennedy seemed to take from all this was that U.S. involvement in so unstable a country was a poor idea. He was immediately dismissive of the new government and its prospects for survival. And having been so concerned, as he had told McNamara on November 5, not to get “bogged down” in Cuba as the British, the Russians, and the Americans had in South Africa, Finland, and North Korea, respectively, it was hardly conceivable that Kennedy would have sent tens of thousands more Americans to fight in so inhospitable a place as Vietnam. Reduced commitments, especially of military personnel, during a second Kennedy term were a more likely development. The failed coup had—just as the Bay of Pigs had in Cuba—pushed Kennedy further away from direct engagement.
Kennedy’s official and public statements about Vietnam were predictably upbeat. On November 6, he cabled Lodge, “Now that there is a new Government, which we are about to recognize, we must all intensify our efforts to help it deal with its many hard problems.” The fact that the administration had encouraged a change of government created a responsibility for it “to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can.” The goal was to concentrate on “effectiveness rather than upon external appearances.” The new regime needed to “limit confusion and intrigue among its members, and concentrate its energies upon the real problems of winning the contest against the Communists.” If it could do this, “it would have met and passed a severe test.”
At a press conference on November 14, two days after the State Department announced a Honolulu conference of U.S. officials on Vietnam, Kennedy offered an “appraisal of the situation in South Viet-Nam” and the goals of the Hawaii meeting scheduled for November 20. The Honolulu conference would be an “attempt to assess the situation: what American policy should be, and what our aid policy should be, how we can intensify the struggle, how we can bring Americans out of there. Now, that is our objective,” he emphasized, “to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate.”
Bundy returned from Honolulu with the impression that “the course the US country team will chart in Vietnam is by no means decided upon. . . . Briefings of McNamara tend[ed] to be sessions where people [tried] to fool him, and he tried to convince them they cannot.” As for the new regime, Bundy said, “it was too early to see what course it might follow, but it was clear that the coalition of generals might not last.” Were it not for the fact that influential defense, state, national security, and military officials remained determined to continue the fight, newspaper editorials advocating negotiations with North Vietnam aimed at neutralization might have convinced Kennedy. But the likely internal and congressional hullabaloo over such a strategy, the hope that the new government might fight the war more effectively, and the indifference of most Americans to our involvement made such a policy difficult to embrace just yet.
Nevertheless, somebody in the administration took seriously Kennedy’s apparent interest in eliminating U.S. military commitments in South Vietnam. In an undated, unsigned memo in the president’s office files from the late summer or fall of 1963, possibly even after November 1, the writer provided “Observations on Vietnam and Cuba.” Since the Soviets seemed to feel trapped in Cuba and the United States in Vietnam, might it not make sense to invite de Gaulle to propose a swap with the Soviets of neutralization for both countries? Whether Kennedy ever saw this memo or what reaction he might have had to it is unknown. Nonetheless, it is clear that by late November 1963, Kennedy welcomed suggestions for easing difficulties with Cuba and Vietnam as alternatives to the policies that, to date, had had such limited success. On November 21, the day he was leaving for Texas, Kennedy told Mike Forrestal that at the start of 1964 he wanted him “to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top,” Kennedy said.
THE PROBLEMS WITH VIETNAM, as with Cuba and domestic affairs, did not seem to undermine Kennedy’s reelection chances in 1964. Most soundings on national politics encouraged optimism about the president’s prospects in the next campaign. At the end of 1962, Americans listed Kennedy as the world public figure they most admired, ahead of Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, and the Reverend Billy Graham. No other officeholder or active politician, including Nixon, made the top ten. Although Kennedy’s approval ratings fell between January and November 1963 from 76 percent to 59 percent and his disapproval numbers went up from 13 percent to 28 percent, he took comfort in the consistently high public affirmation of his presidential performance. In March 1963, 74 percent of Americans thought that he would be reelected. Moreover, when Gallup ran trial heats pitting him against Goldwater, Rockefeller, Michigan governor George Romney, or Nixon, Kennedy consistently had double-digit leads over all of them.
In-depth state surveys of North Dakota and Pennsylvania added to the optimism. North Dakota had been a reliable Republican state, with Kennedy winning less than 45 percent of the popular vote in 1960. But the election of a Democrat to a U.S. Senate seat in 1960 and the reelection of the senior senator, another Democrat, in 1962—albeit by the narrowest of margins in both contests—encouraged some hope that the president might win the state in 1964. In an April 1963 survey of North Dakota voters, Kennedy had an astonishing 77 percent approval rating. In statewide straw polls against four potential Republican nominees, Kennedy beat all of them except for Romney, who had only a slight 51 percent to 49 percent lead. Pollsters concluded that “from the loss of the State with a bare 44.5% of the total vote, the President has soared to a situation in which he might beat any Republican presidential candidate.”
The news from Pennsylvania was even better. In 1960, Kennedy had won the state by 117,000 votes, or 51.2 percent, to Nixon’s 48.8 percent. By the spring of 1963, his popularity had “increased significantly.” Rockefeller was Kennedy’s strongest opponent in straw polls, but he was “not running anywhere near as strong as Nixon did against Kennedy” in 1960, while other potential Republican nominees “might have difficulty defeating Kennedy among Republicans, let alone Democrats.”
Journalists echoed the polling results. Charlie Bartlett quoted a current jingle: “Never wait for an uptown car on the downtown side of the street.” Top administration officials “feel strongly now that they are waiting on the right side of the street for events that are moving in a favorable direction.” In May, a Chattanooga Times reporter predicted a Kennedy victory in Tennessee, where Negroes, who “hold the balance,” would back him “110%. . . . About the worst thing that could happen to Kennedy,” the reporter said, “. . . would be the death of John XXIII and the election of an austere, reactionary Pope. John is very popular with many Protestants and this, combined with Kennedy’s own careful handling of the religious problem, has done much to water down the church issue in the South.” A Rochester, New York, newsman saw Kennedy “holding fast” to 1960 voters and winning over about one in ten Nixon supporters. “‘I voted for Nixon, but Kennedy seems to be doing a good job’” w
Yet like any savvy American politician, Kennedy knew better than to take voters for granted. So much could happen in 1964 that might weaken his hold on the electorate and force him into a close election. “I suppose . . . we’re going to get a very tough fight,” he told a British visitor in October 1963. The chairman of the Westchester County, New York, Democratic Committee predicted in November that “if civil rights and tax cut legislation [are] on the books and off television by January, we will do better than ’60. If not, we will just have to work harder.” Kennedy saw little reason to think that either bill would gain passage by then and assumed that they would indeed have to “work harder.” Whenever he spoke to O’Donnell and Powers about ’64, he “[made] a point of saying it is going to be another tough campaign.” He would remind people that the Democrats had won only 52.8 percent of the congressional vote in 1962, and that since 1884, except for FDR, the Democrats had never won a majority of the popular vote for president. When he assessed recent voting patterns of “swing groups” likely to tip the election one way or another, the numbers confirmed his expectations of a very close contest. His gains in the East and the West and among women were “soft,” while Republicans had a “slight gain among men” and a “solid gain” in the South, where Kennedy did not think enough blacks would switch to him and the Democrats in 1964 to make a significant difference.