He realized that sending armed American advisers on patrol with South Vietnamese forces risked drawing the United States deeper into the conflict. To minimize this happening, he insisted that they participate only in combat-training missions. In the summer of 1962, he was cruising off Newport with Fay when he received a call from the Pentagon reporting that a contingent of U.S. Marine advisers was requesting permission to assist a unit of South Vietnamese troops who were preparing to ambush a Viet Cong detachment. He had the call transferred to the forward cabin, where he and Fay could be alone. “I want you to hear this,” he told Fay. “We’ve got twenty advisors out there who want to attack the Viet Cong. They think they can kill at least over 100 or 150.” While Fay listened, he forbade the marines to engage in combat, adding, “For every one of those advisors that gets involved in it, I’m going to pull them out and an equal number to that.” After hanging up he turned to Fay and said, “We’re going to settle this thing diplomatically.”
Throughout 1962 Kennedy received cables from Ambassador Nolting and General Paul Harkins, commander of the U.S. advisory mission, stating that the counterinsurgency strategy of gathering South Vietnamese peasants in “strategic hamlets” was succeeding. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the Senate’s leading expert on Asia, was the first major dissenter. He had been among Diem’s earliest supporters, praising him in a 1959 speech as a man of “vision, strength, and selflessness,” but while visiting Saigon in November 1962, he was dismayed to find that he was becoming a recluse and had fallen under the influence of his sinister brother, Vice President Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu’s wife. Nhu was an unsavory paranoid who commanded a private army of shock troops trained by U.S. advisers. Because Diem was a celibate bachelor, Madame Nhu had become South Vietnam’s de facto first lady. She was a tangle of contradictions: a dragon lady with long fingernails and tight dresses split from ankle to waist, and a militant Catholic and sexually voracious puritan who had sponsored legislation outlawing contraceptives, abortion, prostitution, and taxi dancing.
Ambassador Nolting told Mansfield, “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” a comment unlikely to impress him since he had first heard it from the lips of the commander of the French forces in 1953. He wrote in a private memorandum that he had left Vietnam “with a feeling of depression and with the belief that our chances may be little better than 50-50.” After returning to Washington he sent Kennedy a confidential report that ranks among the most prescient and depressing documents ever written about that conflict. “Seven years and billions of dollars later . . . it would be well to face the fact that we are at the beginning of the beginning,” he wrote. Success was theoretically possible, but only if both the Vietnamese and Americans pursued the current strategy with “great vigor and self-dedication,” a possibility he considered unlikely. The only alternative was “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 sort of neo-colonial rule in South Vietnam.” He concluded that Kennedy must stress that the primary responsibility for the war rested with the South Vietnamese. Failure to do this could “not only be immensely costly in terms of American lives and resources but it may also draw us into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French.”
Kennedy invited Mansfield to Palm Beach over the Christmas holidays to discuss Vietnam. As they cruised on the Honey Fitz he became furious as he reread his memorandum, and exclaimed, “This is not what my advisors are telling me!” Mansfield said he was courting disaster unless he stopped increasing the advisers and began withdrawing the ones already there. “I got angry at Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” he told O’Donnell afterward, “and I got angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”
At the end of December he sent Michael V. Forrestal of his National Security Council and the State Department’s director of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, to Vietnam to assess the state of the war. Forrestal was close to Averell Harriman, who had become his mentor after the suicide of his father, former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Hilsman was a West Point graduate whose experience fighting behind Japanese lines with Merrill’s Marauders during the Second World War had made him an early expert in counterinsurgency warfare. In a special “eyes only” annex to their report for President Kennedy, they described the situation as “fragile,” and pointed out serious problems in the conduct of the counterinsurgency efforts of the South Vietnam army. As Kennedy was digesting this, the Joint Chiefs made another pitch for combat units, writing in a memorandum to McNamara that if the Diem government could not bring the Vietcong under control, there was “no alternative to the introduction of U.S. military combat forces.”
Kennedy made Hilsman assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summoned him to the White House to discuss Vietnam, and told him that he had received an assessment from Edmund Gullion that had shaken his confidence in Diem. He had decided to continue supporting Diem for the moment, but would not send U.S. troops into battle or bomb North Vietnam. He wanted Hilsman to do everything possible to help the South Vietnamese win without getting the United States dragged into the fighting. Hilsman summarized his position as “Keep it down, no more advisors, we’re going downhill. We’ve reached the peak. From now on we’re going to cut the advisors back. If the Vietnamese win it, okay, great. But if they don’t, we’re going to go to Geneva and do what we did with Laos.”
• • •
ON MAY 8, South Vietnamese police fired into a procession of Buddhists who had gathered in the formal imperial capital of Hue to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday and were flying religious banners in defiance of a law banning them. Although Buddhists constituted almost 90 percent of the population, Diem had given his fellow Catholics easier access to education and government jobs, and demonstrations against the Hue massacre turned into nationwide protests against religious discrimination. On June 12, an elderly monk sat down in a Saigon intersection, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself alive. Kennedy saw a wire service photograph of the man engulfed in flames, shouted “Jesus Christ!” and bolted from the room. He waved the photograph at Lodge when he asked him to go to Saigon.
That spring he complained to his friend Charlie Bartlett, a newspaper reporter and columnist, “We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”
He asked Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Averell Harriman to be ready “to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.”
He had told Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric at the end of 1962 that he believed the United States had been “sucked into Vietnam little by little,” and by the fall of 1963, Gilpatric came to believe that he had become “sick” of Vietnam, and noticed him frequently asking how to extricate America from the conflict.
In the spring of 1963, he told Mansfield that he had made a mistake in increasing the number of advisers, agreed with Mansfield’s recommendation for a complete withdrawal, and said he would begin bringing troops home at the beginning of 1964 but would not remove them all until he was reelected. If he made his intentions known earlier, conservatives would pillory him and he might lose the election. After Mansfield left, he turned to O’Donnell and said, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we better make damn sure I am reelected.”*
Kennedy could point to the Pentagon’s optimistic reports about the progress of the war as an arg
ument for reducing the U.S. commitment. A prime example was a MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) memorandum in the spring of 1963 reporting, “Barring greatly increased resupply and reinforcements of the Viet Cong by infiltration, the military phase of the war can be virtually won by 1963.” The military’s assessments became more cautious after the Buddhist revolt, and on the morning of August 15, the New York Times carried a front-page article by David Halberstam that Lodge and Kennedy had probably read before they met. Headlined “Vietnamese Reds Gain in Key Areas,” it began, “South Vietnam’s military situation in the vital Mekong Delta has deteriorated in the last year and informed officials are warning of ominous signs.”
• • •
KENNEDY ACTIVATED the hidden Oval Office microphone as Lodge was in midsentence. He may have waited until he was distracted, or made a spur-of-the-moment decision to record his former rival. Lodge was describing his dinner with Madame Nhu’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tran Van Chuong. Although Mr. Chuong owed his position as South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States to nepotism, as did his wife, who represented South Vietnam at the United Nations, they had become estranged from Diem, Nhu, and their increasingly erratic and terrifying daughter. Lodge told Kennedy that Madame Chuong believed that the Diem regime was responsible for mass executions, that a coup was inevitable, and that unless her daughter and husband fled, they would be assassinated. She also thought that her daughter’s bizarre and inflammatory comments—she had celebrated the Buddhist immolations as “barbecues,” and had said, “Let them burn, and we shall all clap our hands”—reflected the thinking of her husband and Diem.
As Lodge delivered his dinner-party aperçus about the dysfunctional Chuong family (in 1984 Madame Nhu’s brother would strangle his parents in their bed), Kennedy said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah.” Like his tooth-tapping, finger-drumming, and doodle-drawing, it was a sign that he was bored. Those who knew Kennedy well knew that boring him was a cardinal sin. His former girlfriend Nancy Dickerson, who would become NBC’s first female correspondent, noticed that “when he was bored, a hood would come down over his eyes and his nervous system would start churning. You could do anything to him—steal his wallet, insult him, argue with him—but to bore him was unpardonable.”
During his thirty-five-minute meeting with Lodge he filled a page with doodles, writing in a column down one side, “Saigon / Lodge / No press comment / Cabot Lodge / Henry Cabot Lodge / Ambassador Lodge / Governor / Senator,” and on the other, “No press comment / USOM [United States Operations Mission],” with an arrow pointing downward. “No press comment” was a reminder to ask Lodge not to comment to the press after the meeting, an instruction that, presaging things to come, Lodge would immediately ignore. To be fair, it was not only Lodge’s insights into the Chuong family that Kennedy found tiresome, it was the whole Vietnam mess, a sideshow compared with civil rights, the test ban treaty, and U.S.-Soviet relations.
When he and Lodge met on June 12 he had held up the photograph of the Buddhist monk engulfed in flames. After saying, “I suppose these are the worst press relations to be found in the world today,” he had told Lodge that he expected him to take charge of relations with U.S. journalists in Saigon. Mindful of that exchange, Lodge now offered him a preview of how he planned to handle his first Saigon press conference, saying, “Suppose I am asked, ‘Do you think we can win with Diem?’”
Kennedy, who persisted in viewing Vietnam as primarily a public relations problem needing better management, suddenly showed more interest in the conversation. “You have to think of a rough one for that,” he suggested. Referring to the American press corps, he added, “You’re going to have a difficult time having a satisfactory relationship with them.”
“The very first day I’m going to invite them to lunch with me and my wife and ask their advice. I’ll be too fresh for them to get anything out of me . . . and at least [I can] try to get them into a human frame of mind.”
“The time may come when we’re going to have to do something about this war.” Referring to the possibility of a coup, Kennedy added, “I don’t know who we would sort of support. . . . They [Diem and the Nhus] ought to go but there’s the question of how skillfully that’s done and if we get the right fellow. . . . I just want to be sure that it would be someone better.” Wearying of the conversation, he concluded, “I think [we] have to leave it almost completely in your hands.”
Realizing he had just given a carte blanche to a proud man who had been famously resistant to following orders at the UN, he pulled back slightly, saying, “I don’t know whether we’d be better off with the alternative maybe . . . we’ll have to move more in that direction, but I’ll have to take a look at it before I come to that conclusion.”
“That’s helpful, very helpful. I’ll certainly give it my best. But if they all get assassinated, then you’re really going to have to get on top of it.”
“What about Madame Nhu?” Kennedy asked. But instead of inquiring if Lodge thought she might also be assassinated, he said, “Is she a lesbian, or what? She looks awfully masculine.” (A recent Time cover story had called her “a fragile exciting beauty” known for her “flaming feminism.”)
Lodge could not have anticipated this line of inquiry, but he smoothly shifted gears. “I think she is,” he agreed. “I think she also was very promiscuous, sort of a nymphomaniac.” Realizing he had found a subject that interested the president, he described her campaign to curb vice by shutting down Saigon’s dance halls.
Kennedy declared that promiscuity and Puritanism were “a dangerous combination,” prompting this descendent of Massachusetts Puritans to exclaim, “Very well put!”
The sex lives of heads of state, congressmen, Hollywood stars, and, for that matter, almost anyone crossing his path fascinated Kennedy. Nancy Dickerson recalled a foreign ambassador being shocked when he leaned close to him in a receiving line and asked, “Are you getting any lately?” A young female reporter told Dickerson that while she was interviewing him he had suddenly asked, “How’s your romance going?” After learning that Laura Bergquist had interviewed Fidel Castro in 1961, he asked her, “Who does he sleep with? . . . I’ve heard he doesn’t even take his boots off.” Bergquist said she had no idea, but he persisted. “He runs around making these long speeches,” he said, “but where are the dames?” Bergquist went to Hyannis Port a year later, hoping to persuade him to let Look run some candid photographs of Caroline. While flipping through the pictures of his daughter he asked her about Che Guevara. She had just met him in Havana and had described him as “cool, brainy, blunt, witty, and sensible”—a pragmatic man who could inspire the young, in fact a man not unlike Kennedy. After peppering her with more questions he gave her an appraising look and said, “Something gives me the feeling you’ve got the hots for the ‘Che.’” She spluttered that it was an “odd remark” and reminded him that a photograph of her and Guevara showed they had been two wary antagonists. “Yeah, but you know what psychiatrists say . . . that kind of hostility often leads to an opposite emotion.” She left convinced that he was “a very swinging sexual animal and saw others in his own light.”
He ended his meeting with Lodge soon after discussing Madame Nhu’s sex life. A week later, the proud and imperious Lodge arrived in Saigon believing that the president had left things “almost completely” in his hands.
Friday, August 16–Sunday, August 18
CAPE COD
As Kennedy’s helicopter landed on the lawn of his family compound, his nieces and nephews came running. They surrounded him, and Caroline shouted, “It’s my daddy’s turn! It’s my daddy’s turn!”—meaning it was his turn to treat at the candy store. They clambered aboard his golf cart, sitting on his lap and clinging to the front and rear bumpers as he sped across the lawn and into the village.
“What’s the limit? What’s the limit?” he demanded as they trooped into the store.
“Ev
eryone gets five cents’ worth,” Caroline explained.
“Anybody got a buck?” he asked his Secret Service agents.
“Daddy, did you take us to the store with no money?”
“Oh, Caroline,” he said, “I’ve goofed again.”
Before his inauguration Look had published an article by Fletcher Knebel titled “What You Don’t Know About Kennedy.” It portrayed him as appealingly human and forbiddingly smart, as well as a notorious moocher who seldom carried cash. Knebel’s opening sentence set the tone: “John Kennedy can quote from the classics, poke fun at himself, be as aloof as Charles de Gaulle or as convivial as an Irish baritone, eat gallons of fish chowder, fume like dry ice, drive a car like a fugitive from justice, go weeks without wearing a hat, read esoteric French philosophy, take three showers a day, face physical hazards without a ripple of nerves, lead others with assurance, be casually gracious.” Readers learned that he seldom exploded in anger, was repelled by anything “corny,” demanded privacy, possessed “not a sliver of snobbishness,” could be “thin-skinned,” used profanity “with the unconcern of a sailor,” was “an avid reader,” and was widely regarded as “the most intellectually curious and self-possessed man to win the Presidency in our era.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 9
