If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History

by Greenfield, Jeff

  It was just part of the growing Vietnam mess that he left behind as he headed for Texas on November 21, 1963, when he told Mike Forrestal to organize a top-to-bottom review of “every option we’ve got, including how we get out of there.”

  When he returned from Dallas, that mess was waiting for him.

  • • •

  That decision to return 1,000 men from Vietnam was based on a premise that the effort was succeeding; that the South Vietnamese would have the capacity and the will to fight off the guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. But now, after the coup, there was a military regime in power that lacked even the diminishing support Diem Nhu had achieved. Moreover, his advisors were deeply divided: Defense Secretary McNamara—quite possibly with the quiet encouragement of the President—was pushing for the withdrawal timetable with the blunt assertion that “we need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it.” Mac Bundy, his national security advisor, and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were saying that without a huge step-up in American involvement—including troops—South Vietnam’s government would fall to the Communists.

  So in early 1964 the President gathered his advisors once again and tried to make it clear what he wanted—and did not want—as he campaigned for a second term.

  They gathered in the Laurel Lodge on a Saturday morning in mid-February, wearing sport jackets, corduroy slacks, sweater vests: the semiofficial uniforms of Powerful Men Summoned to Weekend Work. A midwinter snow blanketed Catoctin Mountain and covered the grounds of Camp David. Not a good day for the horseback riding that Jacqueline and the children enjoyed at the presidential retreat, but they had gone to Glen Ora, the Virginia horse farm the Kennedys had rented as a private family retreat. This weekend was strictly business—apart from a few breaks for the President to enjoy rest, recuperation, and recreation. Most of the faces were familiar—Rush, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, Averell Harriman, Bobby, CIA chief McCone—but there were others in attendance whose presence came as an unwelcome surprise to some.

  “What are you doing here?” Rusk snapped to a middle-aged man with a scholarly demeanor.

  “He invited me,” the man said, pointing to Michael Forrestal.

  “And he invited him,” President Kennedy said as he walked slowly into the room on crutches, “because I asked him to.”

  Paul Kattenburg was a forty-year-old State Department Foreign Service officer with a deep immersion in the history, culture, and politics of Vietnam. That was why he had chaired the Department’s Vietnam Working Group—until he had made the mistake of speaking his mind. Back on August 31, 1963, he’d been invited to sit in on a National Security Council meeting, where he found himself appalled at what he was hearing.

  “There was not a single person there who knew what he was talking about,” he said to a colleague. “They didn’t know Vietnam. They didn’t know the past. The more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and thought, ‘My God, we’re walking into a major disaster.’”

  Finally, unable to contain himself, Kattenburg blurted out that perhaps it was time to review the whole mission, that they might want to consider the possibility of an honorable withdrawal—in other words, that the emperor might not be fully clothed. For his pains, he was abruptly cut off by Rusk—and within a few weeks was removed as head of the Vietnam Working Group. When Forrestal mentioned this to the President, Kennedy said, “I’d like him at that review—and tell him to speak his mind. What the hell, they’ve broken it off with him already; what has he got to lose? And make sure Mansfield and Galbraith are there. I’ve got to have other voices. If Tommy Thompson and Bobby hadn’t been in those ExComm meetings during the missile crisis, I don’t know if I’d have been able to stop the push for a strike.”

  The President said little during the first hour or so of discussion, which was as blunt and heated as Kennedy could have hoped for. From Rusk, Bundy, and Taylor came the case for a full military commitment. “We gave the signal for the coup; the new government cannot hold out indefinitely in the face of new Communist offensives; the fall of Saigon imperils Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia; Chinese influence in the region will grow.”

  From Paul Kattenburg, freed from career constraints, came a different view: “I do not recognize the country you’re talking about. Ho Chi Minh has been waging his fight for decades—and he may be the only Communist leader besides Fidel Castro who could win a free election. Our military says it would take a million men and five years to end the threat—and God knows how many bombs. And you know what would happen when those five years are up? They’d start all over again. And about China? The Vietnamese have hated China for a thousand years. They’d rather see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Saigon than a Chinese embassy.”

  Rusk shook his head.

  “So you’re saying what? That Ho Chi Minh is another ‘agrarian reformer’ like Mao and Fidel? That there won’t be reeducation camps, drumhead executions, no police state?”

  “No,” Ken Galbraith interjected. “It’d be the kind of government we’d find intolerable. It might even be worse than what’s there now. But it won’t be East Germany; it won’t be a Soviet satellite . . . more like Tito, I think; and the last time I looked, we were doing a lot of business with Yugoslavia.”

  “And what about our standing in the world?” Bundy asked. “What does it say to our allies when a friendly government is faced with an external threat to its survival and we walk away?”

  “From what they’ve told me,” Kennedy said, “it looks very much like a civil war to them. But I take your point, Mac. It seems to me that the heart of the issue is that we need to find a way out without just ‘walking away.’ It’s remarkable if you think about it: one of the reasons for getting rid of Diem and Nhu was that we’d heard that Nhu was talking to the North—complaining there were too many Americans. Why in hell didn’t we take them up on that?

  “But here’s the point. I’ve said it to you, Mike.” He nodded to Mansfield. “I’ve said it to Kenny O’Donnell. I’ve said it to Charlie Bartlett. We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory to the Communists and then get reelected. If I tried that, we’d have another McCarthy scare on our hands. But I can do it after I’m reelected, even if I become a very unpopular president. So,” he said with a grin, “we better make damn sure I’m reelected. General, I’m obviously not including you in that mission,” he said to Taylor.

  “So what I’m talking about for the rest of the year,” he said, “is a four-corners offense.”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about,” Averell Harriman said.

  “Apologies,” Kennedy said. “In college basketball, you can take as long as you want to shoot a basket; no twenty-four-second rule like in the pros. So a team with the lead late in the game will just hold the ball—pass it from one corner to the other—to try to run out the clock. That’s what I want in Vietnam: a ‘four corners’ offense. Let’s bring those thousand men home, but as quietly and routinely as possible. No bands; no parades. No declarations of ‘victory’ or ‘mission accomplished’ bullshit.”

  He reached for a piece of paper.

  “And I want the language of this action memorandum as noncommittal as possible. No ‘win the fight’ . . . no ‘commitment.’ Nothing that looks like a pledge.” He got up slowly, painfully, and reached for the crutches, and as the group filed out he motioned for Forrestal and Kattenburg to stay behind.

  “Michael,” Kennedy said, “you think there’s room for one more body on the NSC staff?”

  “It’ll be tight, but if Paul’s not too particular about office space . . .”

  “You know where they’re planning to put me?” Kattenburg said. “On the Guyana desk. A broom closet will be fine.”

  “You help me get out of thi
s goddamn mess and you’ll be in that corner office on the seventh floor at State,” Kennedy said.

  • • •

  All through the 1964 campaign, the Kennedy administration and the Kennedy campaign (which was more or less the same thing) had one goal: keep Vietnam as far away from the spotlight as possible, offering no provocations to the enemy. For instance, when the CIA came to Kennedy with an “Operational Plan—34A” to step up covert actions against North Vietnam—naval sabotage operations, aerial reconnaissance, incursions across the 17th parallel—Kennedy said no. When he learned that South Vietnamese patrol boats had likely triggered reprisal hits in the Gulf of Tonkin, his suspicions grew that the CIA just might be encouraging such provocations on the sly. When a series of coups turned the Saigon government into a revolving door—Minh replaced by Khanh, who brought back Minh, who was dumped by Khanh, Thieu, and Ky—Washington issued bland pronouncements of tepid support for South Vietnam’s independence.

  He shaped his campaign rhetoric toward another goal: a cautious, politically sensitive attempt to nudge public opinion away from a cold war frame.

  In the spring, he’d called in Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger and asked the historian about Franklin Roosevelt and the 1940 campaign—when a president looking to help Great Britain stave off a Nazi conquest was running in a deeply isolationist country.

  “It was a terrible challenge,” Schlesinger told them. “It took all of his skills to frame an argument for helping Britain that the country would accept, like ‘lending a garden hose to your neighbor if his house was on fire.’ And there were times when he just flat-out dissembled—as when he said ‘Our boys will not be sent to fight any foreign wars’ when he knew damn well that sooner or later they would be. But, Mr. President, your job will be just as hard. For one thing, everyone—you included—has spent twenty years telling us that if one nation falls, the whole world collapses. And how many times in these last three and a half years have you talked about how ‘not one inch of free territory has fallen to the Communists on Kennedy’s watch’? And then there are all those speeches from the last campaign . . .”

  “Well,” Kennedy said, “it’s not as though I can go on television and talk about what happened to the Russians in Finland, Britain in the Boer War, France in Indochina—no one will know what the hell I’m talking about. And if I say: ‘Sorry, America, I’d like to save Vietnam from a Communist takeover, but they don’t want to save themselves, and we can’t do it without killing thousands of our men and God knows how many of theirs—so we’re throwing in the towel.’ Reelected? Hell, I’d be impeached.”

  So Kennedy and Sorensen took a more elliptical track, using in his stump speech the same formulation he’d used late in 1961 in Seattle, and in other venues, warning:

  “We must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every problem.”

  There was another, less traditional approach that Kennedy took to bending public opinion on matters of war and peace, one that yielded an unexpected, powerful benefit. He was intrigued by the success of Seven Days in May, a novel about an attempted military coup against a peace-minded president, and encouraged Hollywood to turn it into a movie; he even scheduled travels to Hyannis Port on weekends when director John Frankenheimer needed to film in and around the White House. Before that film was released in the summer, another politically charged movie debuted: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about a rogue Air Force general who launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Did Kennedy know the details of the movie when he arranged for a White House screening of the movie? Did he know that one of the characters, Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott), a red-faced, cigar-chomping general with a Let’s-get-it-over-with approach to nuclear war, bore an uncanny resemblance to a real-life red-faced, cigar-chomping high-ranking general with a Let’s-get-it-over-with approach to nuclear war? What became very clear—and very public—was that during the final scene, as a “doomsday device” destroys the world with an endless explosion of hydrogen bombs, Bobby Kennedy was heard to crack: “This public service announcement was brought to you by General Curtis LeMay.”

  When the Washington Star’s Mary McGrory wrote of the screening, and of Bobby’s remark, LeMay resigned his post as Air Force chief of staff with a stinging attack on the “ill-conceived, weak-kneed policies of a president whose incompetence poses a threat to our national security.” Within a month, LeMay had signed on as national security advisor to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. That caused real concern in the Kennedy campaign—an Air Force chief of staff could lend credibility to Goldwater’s claims of weakness and unpreparedness—until LeMay began speaking to the public, happy to use the bully pulpit to ease the public’s fears about the atomic age.

  “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons,” he said in answer to a question from Jack Nelson of the Atlanta Constitution. “I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, public opinion in this country and throughout the world just throws up its hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons because of a lot of propaganda that’s been fed to them.” A few moments later he was waxing nostalgic about a time when the United States had a monopoly on atomic weapons:

  “That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it,” he said, all but echoing the line from Dr. Strangelove when General Turgidson says of World War III, “I’m not sayin’ we wouldn’t get our hair mussed . . .” (For the rest of the campaign, General LeMay’s remarks were confined to four Deep South states and small towns in rural Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.)

  Watching the evening news, Kennedy called in Pierre Salinger and said, “I want you to send a box of our best Havanas to LeMay, and sign it, ‘With deep appreciation for all you are doing for the cause of peace.’” It was an accurate if puckish notion. The more important point, though, was that LeMay’s comments were a more pungent version of arguments that Goldwater himself had made when he argued that nukes were “just another weapon,” suggesting, for example, that foliage protecting Viet Cong guerrillas could be cleared away with the use of such devices. In a populace where the distinction between a twenty-megaton H-bomb and a nuclear-tipped artillery shell was not always clear—and that still remembered a close brush with all-out nuclear war—loose nukes talk sent a chill through millions. In that sense, Barry Goldwater became one of John Kennedy’s best arguments for a new approach to the cold war that would strengthen the case against combat in Vietnam.

  He had another ally as well, one even less likely. Ever since the Moscow summit, where grain sales and trade agreements had put more bread, meat, and consumer goods in Russian stores and sent Khrushchev’s popularity rising, he and Kennedy had formed something of a backdoor mutual assistance society. The Soviet leader’s promise/threat that “we will bury you” had been replaced by more talk about “peaceful coexistence” (or, as he put it to a highly discomfited Averell Harriman once, “Just because two men want to fuck the same girl, it doesn’t mean they have to kill each other. She can pick whoever brings the most flowers, or has the biggest . . . ”).

  For his part, Kennedy reworked Woodrow Wilson’s famous phrase and challenged Khrushchev to join him “in making the world safe for diversity. Mr. Chairman, we will neither fear nor threaten any nation that freely chooses your path; you should neither fear nor threaten any nation that freely chooses liberty.”

  The more important dialogue took place far from the public spotlight, and once again the Kennedys reached out to their longtime back-channel co
nduit, Colonel Georgi Bolshakov. Back in 1962, when the fragile coalition in Laos threatened to explode into full-scale warfare, Kennedy received from Bolshakov assurances from Khrushchev that Moscow would not support any “large-scale actions” by the Communist Pathet Lao in the region. Now Kennedy sent Bobby to meet with Bolshakov while the attorney general was attending an international law conference in New Delhi.

  Bobby had always spoken in unusually candid terms with the Russian, and did so again in an “unofficial” meeting at the Swedish embassy.

  “The President is going to withdraw from South Vietnam,” Bobby said, “but he will do it slowly, more slowly than your government might like. In fact, it would be helpful to him if the Chairman would attack the President for supporting the Saigon government. But the Chairman must know that the more the insurgency attacks U.S. positions in South Vietnam, the harder it will be for us to leave. And the more we can talk about a neutral coalition government that will set the stage for reunification, the better.”

  “Surely you cannot be under any illusions about what the outcome of that unification will be,” Bolshakov said.

  “My brother has his faults, but laboring under illusions is not one of them,” said Bobby.

  Ten days later, word came to the Kennedys from Bolshakov: The National Liberation Front makes its own decisions. The People’s Republic of Vietnam is a sovereign nation. But the Chairman wishes you to know that he intends nothing that would lessen the possibility for a peaceful unification of Vietnam . . . and, based on the conversations in New Delhi, can provide the same assurances as he did to resolve the situation in Laos.

  Left uncommunicated were the words Khrushchev had spoken to a skeptical Presidium: