Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  Three weeks into October, with conditions growing more uncertain in Saigon, Kennedy used a lunch meeting with Arthur Sulzberger, who had recently become the publisher of the New York Times, to ask that Halberstam be withdrawn from Saigon. Sulzberger refused Kennedy’s assault on press freedom. The fact that the president didn’t like Halberstam’s reports was insufficient to compel his recall. Halberstam’s reporting was a model of truth telling. The Times had no desire to make policy with its lead stories, however much Kennedy may have seen it that way. Halberstam was providing an accurate portrait of an unpopular government and a faltering civil war. It was up to Kennedy to face these realities and not try to alter them by repressing the news out of Saigon.

  But Kennedy could no more control press accounts than he could his own advisers and events in Saigon. On October 9, after renewed indications of coup planning reached Kennedy, he told Lodge not to help “stimulate” a coup, but also not to discourage one if it appeared likely to succeed and increase the effectiveness of the military effort. While Lodge remained entirely supportive of the generals now promising to oust Diem within a week after October 26, Harkins continued to advise the generals against toppling the government and risking recent gains in the war. When Lodge and Harkins conferred on the afternoon of October 23, they argued about what the White House wanted them to do and the different signals they were giving the generals. Speaking for the president, Bundy instructed Lodge and Harkins to “stand back from any non-essential involvement in these matters”—meaning that if there were a coup, the White House wanted plausible deniability. When Lodge responded that anything the United States did to thwart a coup would be a mistake, Kennedy reiterated his concern that a coup not “be laid at our door.”

  On the twenty-seventh, the divide among the advisers in Washington and Saigon grew more pronounced. Harriman and Hilsman convinced Ball, who was acting secretary of state while Rusk was out of the country, to sign a “green light” cable to Lodge telling the generals that Washington approved a coup. U. Alexis Johnson, who was excluded from their three-way exchange, believed that he was purposely kept out of the conversation because he opposed any such instruction. In telling Lodge to facilitate the coup, Harriman and Hilsman were taking advantage of Kennedy’s ambivalence. He had neither approved nor opposed a coup, but simply said he didn’t want it blamed on the United States. Kennedy’s uncertainty about what to do about Vietnam allowed advisers to fill the policy vacuum.

  On October 29, in an apparent reaction to the “green light” cable, Bundy told Kennedy that “all important separate instructions and reports made on any channel—State, CIA, DOD, USIA, and JCS—be sent over here during this next period for your personal information. . . . There is just no doubt at all that a good deal of our trouble in the last three months has come from difference of emphasis, at least in what we have said to the field.” The instruction would allow him and Forrestal “to call to your attention any serious divergences. . . . I do not underestimate the sensitivity of this order.” The Joint Chiefs, Defense Department, and CIA might object, “but your interest is not served by the uncritical acceptance” of their right to send unmonitored cables. It reflected Kennedy’s feeling that he had lost control of policy.

  The directive might have given Kennedy greater influence over future embassy actions in Saigon, but having encouraged the generals to act, Lodge believed that it was too late for the White House to pull back from a coup. He reported that a rebellion was “imminent” and that the United States was likely to be blamed, regardless of whether it succeeded or failed. Moreover, he saw no way to deter the generals from acting “short of informing Diem and Nhu with all the opprobrium that such an action would entail.”

  The limits of White House control became all too apparent on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when Kennedy met with all his principal advisers. Was the pending coup likely to succeed? he asked. Kennedy thought that the odds were against success, but his calculations were little more than guesswork. Bobby Kennedy, undoubtedly reflecting his brother’s concerns, asserted that a coup would put America’s position in Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia at risk. Rusk worried that if we opposed a coup, the generals would “turn against us and the war effort will drop off rapidly.” Taylor sided with Bobby, warning that even “a successful coup would have a harmful effect on the war effort.” McCone shared Taylor’s view, but Rusk warned that if Diem remained in power, it would continue to jeopardize success against the Viet Cong. Harriman agreed. Kennedy now came out against the coup, saying that the opposing forces in Saigon were about equal, which made a coup “silly. If Lodge agrees with this point of view, then we should instruct him to discourage a coup.” Caught between concerns that a failed coup would destroy U.S. ability to shape events in Vietnam and staying with a government that some believed was destined to lose the war, Kennedy abdicated control to Lodge, who had made his eagerness for a change of government clear.

  At a subsequent meeting later that afternoon, Kennedy reiterated his eagerness to discourage the generals unless they were absolutely certain they could succeed. “We could lose our entire position in Southeast Asia overnight,” he said. A cable to Lodge reiterated Kennedy’s insistence on only supporting a coup that promised victory: The “burden of proof must be on coup group to show a substantial possibility of quick success. . . . A miscalculation could result in jeopardizing U.S. position in Southeast Asia.”

  But Lodge, who remained convinced that a coup was essential, dismissed Kennedy’s demands for guaranteed success as beyond U.S. freedom to arrange. “Do not think we have the power to delay or discourage a coup,” he responded. “We have very little influence on what is essentially a Vietnamese affair.” He agreed “that a miscalculation could jeopardize position in Southeast Asia. We also run tremendous risks by doing nothing.” Speaking for the president, Bundy replied, “We do not accept as a basis for U.S. policy that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup.” He instructed him “to persuade” the generals “to desist at least until chances are better” if “there is not clearly a high prospect of success.” In sum, the United States and Lodge specifically should only back a coup if they were sure it would succeed.

  But the exchanges between the embassy and Washington had become irrelevant. On November 1, convinced by embassy indications that the United States would ensure their success, the generals overturned Diem’s government and assassinated him and Nhu. Lodge was full of enthusiasm at the turn of events. He counseled prompt support and recognition of the new government: “We should, of course, give unmistakable signs of our satisfaction to the new leadership.” He stressed “the very great popularity of this coup. . . . Every Vietnamese has a grin on his face today. Am told that the jubilation in the streets exceeds that which comes every New Year.”

  On learning that the coup was succeeding, Kennedy met with ten of his advisers to decide on whether to promptly recognize the new government. A few minutes into the meeting Forrestal brought in a cable reporting that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Kennedy was horrified. Taylor recorded: He “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.” Shortly after, Schlesinger saw the president and remembered him as “somber and shaken.” He could not believe that Diem and Nhu, good Catholics, had killed themselves, as the generals were alleging. He thought that they deserved a better fate. Moreover, the political repercussions of their deaths were not lost on him. As Bundy told Lodge, “there is danger that standing and reputation of incoming government may be significantly damaged if conviction spreads of their assassination.”

  In a recording on November 4, Kennedy ruminated about the coup, his part in encouraging it, and the prospects for the new government and the war. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with o
ur cable in 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” against a coup.

  Kennedy then described himself as “shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu.” He recalled his contacts with Diem dating back many years and lamented his demise: “He’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.” And so “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.”

  Regardless of what happened next, Kennedy was determined to separate the United States from Vietnam’s future struggles. But having failed to bring Cuba, a much smaller island country in America’s closest sphere of control, into line with administration goals, he doubted his capacity to dictate Vietnam’s fate. His public posture was to do everything possible to ensure the autonomy of that country. “We must all intensify our efforts to help it [the new government] deal with its many hard problems,” he told Lodge. Having encouraged the change in Saigon, “we thus have a responsibility to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can.” He endorsed holding a conference in Honolulu on how to intensify the struggle against the Viet Cong. He also wanted the participants to discuss “how we can bring Americans out of there.” Asked at a November 14 press conference if he still intended to bring home a thousand troops before the end of the year, he said it would be several hundred, but that he would wait to determine exact numbers until after the Honolulu meeting.

  His eagerness to find a way out of Vietnam registered forcefully in a memo to Forrestal on November 21. As he was about to leave for a political fence-mending trip in Texas, where a division between Democratic Party conservatives and liberals threatened Kennedy’s reelection prospects in 1964, he instructed Forrestal “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 the whole thing from the bottom to the top.” In 1971, Forrestal told CBS that in an Oval Office conversation on November 21, Kennedy told him: “I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, and what we thought we were doing, and what we think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.” It is impossible to say just what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam in a second term, if he had had one. But given the hesitation he showed about Vietnam during his thousand-day administration, it is entirely plausible that he would have found a way out of the conflict or at least not to expand the war to the extent Lyndon Johnson did.

  EPILOGUE

  “What He Is Slated to Become Depends on Us”

  Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, was a national trauma that continues to haunt Americans. Although solid evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman, some 70 percent of the country holds to the belief that a conspiracy cannot be ruled out. It is difficult for most people to accept that someone as inconsequential as Oswald—a dysfunctional, erratic character, who had an undistinguished period of service in the Marines and lived for two years in the Soviet Union before coming to Dallas, and working a menial job in the Texas Book Depository—could have killed someone as closely guarded as the president of the United States. Yet Kennedy himself—who had a keen sense of irony, the unpredictability of events, and the tragic nature of human affairs—would have been more accepting of the single gunman narrative. He would not have been surprised that the back brace he wore to help him get through the day without agonizing discomfort made a difference in ending his life: Had he not been wearing it, Oswald’s first shot, which passed through his neck, would have toppled him and prevented a second fatal bullet from striking him in the back of the head.

  Kennedy’s interactions with his ministry of talent throw new light on his presidential performance as well as the agony of decision-making agitated by the uncertainties every adviser faced in trying to shape a better future. The retrospective judgments of some of Kennedy’s associates on his leadership and what they believed he intended give us additional insights into his presidency. But they also expand our understanding of the advisers, whose reflections on the past tell us as much about them as the history they recount.

  For those who saw themselves as best able to describe and defend Kennedy’s presidency—his wife, brother, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorensen—the public’s elevated opinion of him was justified by his actions. Devastated and anguished by Kennedy’s assassination, they launched a campaign to promote a romanticized picture of a heroic leader selflessly serving the nation’s best interests. Quoting the poet W. H. Auden, Sorensen said, “What he was he was; what he is slated to become depends on us.”

  On November 29, 1963, only a week after the president was slain, Jackie Kennedy led the way, sitting down with the journalist Theodore White to recount her husband’s accomplishments. The interview, which appeared a week later in Life magazine, famously compared Kennedy’s White House to King Arthur’s Court, “the one brief shining moment” known as Camelot. She preserved the president’s memory by lighting an eternal flame at his grave and renaming Florida’s Cape Canaveral as Cape Kennedy; the manned spacecraft to the moon would be launched from that site in 1969. In December 1963, grieving New Yorkers renamed Queens’s Idlewild Airport as John F. Kennedy International Airport.

  In March 1964, Jackie Kennedy expanded on her campaign to memorialize her husband in a series of interviews with Arthur Schlesinger. Concerned that part of her remarks would offend some of the president’s associates, and principally aiming to shape historical judgments, she instructed that they be closed until fifty years after her death. In 2011, however, her daughter, Caroline, published the interviews in a three-hundred-page book to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy presidency. Despite some interesting revelations about Kennedy and the men around him, the book is mostly a continuation of the Camelot romance. Caroline Kennedy was not unmindful of the interviews’ exaggerated, but understandable, regard for her father. In a foreword, she described the book as the product of “a young widow in the extreme stages of grief” and asserted that were her mother alive, she would have revised some of what she said in 1964.

  Although she never retracted anything she told Schlesinger, during the thirty years after 1964 Jackie Kennedy became much more than John Kennedy’s widow. In 1968, she married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and spent considerable time abroad until Onassis died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1975. She then took up a career as a book editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday. In 1980 she began a relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, a wealthy businessman, with whom she shared an interest in the arts and architecture. In 1994, she passed away from cancer at the age of sixty-four.

  Jackie’s recollections could be seen as a stand-in for what Kennedy himself would have done in a volume of memoirs: defend his historical record. In 1964, since she had no intention of publishing her memories in her lifetime and feared that Kennedy’s standing would wane with the passage of time, she urged Schlesinger to write a book describing Kennedy’s hopes of being a great president. She believed that Schlesinger’s recollections and history would not only preserve Kennedy’s memory but also advance the causes he believed in.

  Schlesinger was more than happy to oblige. Although he was never a principal adviser and was mostly on the fringe of Kennedy’s administration, mainly helping with speeches, as a professional historian he, along with Sorensen, was the White House official most capable of writing about JFK’s presidency.

  Within days of Lyndon Johnson’s succession, Schlesinger concluded that Johnson saw him as a Kennedy devotee and was not keen to have him at the White House. As 1963 ca
me to an end, Schlesinger recorded in a diary, “I have not had a single communication from the President or his staff for the last month—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion. . . . It seems clear that they are prepared to have me fade away, which is OK by me.” On January 27, 1964, Schlesinger submitted his resignation, which was accepted with “alacrity.”

  Johnson was eager to separate himself as much as possible from the Kennedys. Although he saw initial political advantages from a close association with the martyred president, at least until he could win and hold the office in his own right, Johnson was determined to establish his administration as distinct from and superior to John Kennedy’s. In January 1964, he began charting his own legacy by announcing a War on Poverty, and in May he described his administration not as continuing the New Frontier but as building a Great Society.

  As soon as Schlesinger left the White House, he began working on a book about Kennedy’s presidency. While he had been in the habit of keeping a diary, his part in the 1960 campaign and appointment as special assistant to the president had persuaded him to become a more fastidious recorder of daily events. Jackie Kennedy’s suggestion to him confirmed his own intentions, and within a year, excerpts of a Kennedy book, A Thousand Days, began appearing in Life. Schlesinger described the book he published in 1966 as more “a personal memoir” that presented “only a partial view” rather than “a comprehensive history.” He predicted that it would be some distant time in the future before a historian will “immerse himself in the flood of papers in the Kennedy Library” and write a more definitive, less subjective account of the Kennedy term. He hoped, however, that his book would contribute to a positive assessment of Kennedy’s leadership. Although many books have been written about Kennedy and various aspects of his administration, some of them highly critical of his temporizing on civil rights, obsessive womanizing, and a hidden medical history that might have cost him the 1960 election if known, Schlesinger’s volume still commands a significant readership and continues to shape judgments about Kennedy’s place in history.