Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Soon after his TV address, Kennedy began organizing his own grassroots network to counter the anti-treaty offensive of the military-industrial complex. Once again, he called on Norman Cousins, asking him to help activate “a whirlwind campaign for educating and mobilizing public opinion.” Drawing on his contacts in the peace movement, the crusading journalist quickly assembled a citizens’ coalition of business, labor, entertainment, scientific, and religious leaders to back the treaty. Meeting with Cousins and other coalition representatives in the Cabinet Room on August 7, Kennedy told them they faced formidable opposition from the military world. The generals simply did not want any limitations on the nuclear arms juggernaut, said the president. “In fact,” he told the group, “some generals believed the only solution for any crisis situation was to start dropping the big bombs.” When he challenged their thinking, asking “how bombing would solve the problem,” said Kennedy, the military men would become “far less confident or articulate.” The president’s startling revelation about the Pentagon’s trigger-happy instincts surely drove home the urgency of their task for the citizens’ committee.

  Before Cousins and his group dispersed, Kennedy assured them that they could call upon him to speak personally with any individuals or organizations they felt necessary. Cousins immediately took the president up on his offer, arranging a special meeting between JFK and editors of the major women’s magazines. The peace activist shrewdly recognized the enormous potential power of women voters, who could be roused to action by concerns about the health of the planet and their children. At the meeting, the president stressed the importance of the test ban for world peace, and his remarks were duly printed in all of the women’s magazines, which had a combined circulation of 70 million. “It was the first time that the influential women’s magazines had come together in a joint publishing venture of this kind,” Cousins later noted—a testament to his magazine industry connections and Kennedy’s political charm.

  Kennedy did not limit himself to public campaigning on behalf of the treaty; he also masterfully worked the levers of power behind the scenes. As the arms agreement headed for the Senate floor, the president worried that his predecessor in the White House—the old general whose opinion on matters of war and peace still carried great weight—might torpedo it. Eisenhower had signaled his opposition to the treaty, but JFK had a card up his sleeve. After Kennedy took office, new evidence against Eisenhower’s chief of staff Sherman Adams, who had resigned under a cloud of corruption charges, was brought to the attorney general’s office. Bobby resented the swipes taken at his brother by Ike, who had begun tossing barbs like, “I read that the word ‘victory’ has been expunged from certain New Frontier dictionaries.” The thin-skinned attorney general was not inclined to spare Eisenhower’s former aide the embarrassment of federal prosecution. But Ike asked Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen to intervene with JFK and ask him “as a personal favor to me” to terminate the case. “He’ll have a blank check in my bank if he will grant me this favor,” Eisenhower reportedly said. Over Bobby’s angry objection, the president agreed. Now JFK was calling in his chit.

  Kennedy buttonholed Dirksen and made it clear to the influential Republican that he wanted both him and Eisenhower to reverse themselves and back the test ban. “Mr. President, you’re a hell of a horse trader,” Dirksen responded. “But I’ll honor my commitment, and I’m sure that General Eisenhower will.”

  An air of expectation hung over the Senate chamber when the legislator from Illinois with the familiar gray-white poodle-fluff of hair and rumbling bass voice strode onto the floor. He began reading from a prepared text, confessing that his earlier concerns about the treaty had been misplaced. But then he abruptly put down the pages in his hand and launched into a flowery extemporaneous defense of the arms agreement that was pure Dirksen in all his bombastic splendor. “The whole bosom of God’s earth was ruptured by a man-made contrivance we call a nuclear weapon…Oh, the tragedy. Oh, the dismay. Oh, the blood. Oh, the anguish…A young president calls this treaty the first step. I want to take a first step.” By the time Dirksen modulated to his conclusion, Kennedy knew the treaty would pass. Victory came on September 24, 1963, when the Senate voted by a surprising margin, 80 to 19, to ratify the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

  “No other accomplishment in the White House ever gave Kennedy greater satisfaction,” Sorensen later said. At the signing ceremony in the Treaty Room on the third floor of the White House, the president used sixteen pens to write his name on the document, handing them as souvenirs to the dignitaries gathered around him. He then picked up a final pen, dipped it in the ink, and slashed a bold line underneath his signature. “This one is mine,” said Kennedy with a satisfied smile, slipping the pen into his pocket.

  ONSTAGE IN THE MAIN hall of the Kennedy Library, the ghosts of presidencies past are trying to assign historic blame for the great imperial disaster of their times, the Vietnam War. They sit stiffly side by side, these representatives of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, in the I. M. Pei–designed glass-walled atrium with its sweeping backdrop of the white-capped waters of Boston Harbor. Jack Valenti—the short, chirpy, perennial Washington insider—sits in for LBJ, whom he served as a special assistant; Henry Kissinger—all glowering jowls in his sunken old age—and Alexander Haig—full of knowing winks and sly, sidewise glances—speak for Nixon, whose darkly cunning Realpolitik they helped shape; and at the end of the table primly sits the bespectacled Ted Sorensen, one of the last living links to the inner sanctum of the Kennedy White House. At age seventy-seven, the survivor of a stroke, Sorensen is still a vigilant keeper of the Camelot flame. But his eyes sometimes have a clouded, faraway look, as they do this afternoon.

  The illustrious panel has convened on this bright, late-winter day in March 2006 for a forum titled “Vietnam and the Presidency.” The event—which is introduced by JFK’s sole surviving heir, the ever-poised Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg—is similar to many Kennedy Library functions where Sorensen has held forth. But the picture of the Kennedy administration that is emerging during the two-day conference is one that Sorensen clearly finds disturbing. The assumption that underlies the forum is that Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all bear equal responsibility for the war that laid waste to Indochina and a generation of Americans. There is a continuum that runs from the low-level combat of Kennedy’s term to the apocalypse that loomed in the future. At least that seems to be the consensus of the ruminating scholars, journalists, and public officials who have converged on the Kennedy Library, for the benefit of an overflow crowd and C-SPAN viewers. A genial Jimmy Carter, beamed onto a vast video screen in the main hall, voices this conventional wisdom: “My understanding as a young, non-politician—I was just a peanut farmer then—was that the commitment to go to Vietnam was made basically by the Kennedy administration…it was initiated by President Kennedy.”

  Sorensen’s eyes suddenly come alive. It’s up to him, once again, to set the record straight on the Kennedy presidency. There were only 16,000 U.S. military advisors in Vietnam at the time and JFK had no intention of escalating the war, he declares; it was a minor blip on the administration’s screen. “Vietnam was not central to the foreign policy of the Kennedy presidency,” he tells the library audience. “Berlin was, Cuba, the Soviet Union—but not Vietnam. Vietnam was a low-level insurrection at that point.” Kennedy sent three fact-finding missions to Vietnam, Sorensen points out, and all three urged him to dispatch combat divisions and to bomb North Vietnam. “JFK listened” to his hawkish advisors, “but he never did what they wanted.”

  But even here, at the Kennedy Library, with the president’s daughter sitting in the audience, Sorensen’s points seem to get lost. The discussion quickly moves on. A moist-eyed Valenti reveals how torn up inside LBJ was by his war. “He told me that sending young men out to die is like drinking carbolic acid every morning.” Kissinger irascibly swats away a question from a member of the audience who wonders whether there is anything for
which the distinguished foreign policymaker would like to apologize. “There is no reason that the people who ask that sort of question have a more elevated moral standing than us,” he intones in his guttural, Jabba the Hutt voice. He didn’t need to come here today, he grumbles—he did it as a favor to Caroline Kennedy and her family. In place of the war crimes tribunals and congressional investigations that never followed America’s disastrous Cold War ventures, we have decorous public forums like this one. And even this restrained event proves too nettlesome for Kissinger.

  Is Kennedy really to be lumped in with Nixon and Johnson, with all the gore on their hands? Confusion still seems to reign in historical circles. “I think the issue of how JFK would have acted differently than LBJ [in Vietnam] is something that will never be settled, but intrigues biographers,” Kennedy chronicler Robert Dallek has airily stated. But the truth is—thanks to the work of scholars like Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, David Kaiser, Howard Jones, James K. Galbraith, and Gareth Porter—a clear picture has emerged of Kennedy’s intentions in Vietnam. A conclusive body of evidence indicates that JFK formally decided to withdraw from Vietnam, a process he planned to begin by bringing home 1,000 military personnel in December 1963 and finish in 1965, after his reelection gave him the political cover to complete what he knew would be a controversial action.

  The American public actually first learned of Kennedy’s Vietnam intentions years ago, from the remembrances of administration insiders like Kenny O’Donnell. In spring 1963, after Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield gave Kennedy his unvarnished opinion about the dismal prospects for victory in Vietnam, JFK told O’Donnell that he agreed the United States must withdraw. A U.S. pullout would prompt a “wild conservative outcry,” said the president, so he would not complete the troop phase-out until after the 1964 election. But then he was willing to take the heat, Kennedy told O’Donnell: “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 had better make damned sure that I am reelected.”

  JFK kept his Vietnam plans hidden from his national security bureaucracy, which was hell-bent for war—the military confrontation with communism that Kennedy had repeatedly denied his bellicose advisors, in Cuba, Berlin, and Laos. To avoid an open showdown with the Washington war lobby and maintain his public image as a Cold War militant—which Kennedy realized was still a political necessity in early 1960s America—he avoided publicizing his Vietnam withdrawal plans. As Gareth Porter illuminated in his important 2005 book, Perils of Dominance, Kennedy operated on “multiple levels of deception” in his Vietnam decision making, making minor concessions to the hawks to prevent a public split within his administration, while artfully deflecting demands for escalation and engaging in quiet, back-channel diplomacy. It was a brilliant shadow dance that succeeded in keeping America out of war as long as Kennedy was alive.

  The only White House document that gave some indication of Kennedy’s plan for a phased withdrawal was NSAM 263, issued on October 11, 1963. It revealed the president’s intention to bring home 1,000 military advisors by the end of 1963, but specifically directed that no formal announcement be made about this imminent withdrawal. Because JFK left behind an indefinite paper trail, and a blur of ambiguous public statements, it was easy for his war-minded successors to take control of his legacy and present the jungle inferno as a direct result of his policies.

  “The documentary record does not prove that Kennedy was going to get out, because he did not want to even hint at this at the time,” Daniel Ellsberg observed in a recent interview. “He could not have wanted the generals to know that. He said it to several people, but he never put it in writing. It was understandable, but it was a bad decision because he died and the war went on.”

  Kennedy kept his political enemies in the dark by never making a public speech on Vietnam during his presidency. But, as Sorensen observed, you can find JFK’s true feelings about wars of national liberation by reading two surprisingly prescient speeches he gave on the Senate floor, one about Vietnam and the other on Algeria. The central theme of these two speeches, which rattled the foreign policy establishment at the time, is the same: it is folly for Western powers to resist the rising aspirations of developing nations. Kennedy, one of the most well-traveled presidents in history, had seen the bleak fate of French colonialism at close hand, during a trip to Vietnam he took with Bobby in 1951. On April 6, 1954, the young senator from Massachusetts rose to his feet and warned President Eisenhower not to get caught up in France’s doomed enterprise: “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an ‘enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” This is as succinct a warning about the perils of imperial hubris as has ever been uttered by an American leader. And unlike some of his successors in the White House, Kennedy clearly heeded his youthful insight.

  Kennedy’s elusiveness on Vietnam was typical of his presidential style. “He never made a decision that he didn’t have to make, until time came that he had to make it,” Sorensen says. This reluctance was undoubtedly reinforced by the fractious state of his administration. As the only man in the room who consistently opposed military escalation in Vietnam, the president was compelled to operate in a stealthy fashion to avoid becoming completely isolated within his own government. By the time Vietnam began to reach a crisis point late in Kennedy’s term, much of his national security bureaucracy—weary with the president’s sly maneuvers to keep the country out of war—was in flagrant revolt against him. The Pentagon and CIA were taking secret steps to sabotage his troop withdrawal plan. And even trusted advisors like Harriman, the Moscow-friendly globe-trotting tycoon whom Kennedy thought he could rely on to help broker a deal on Vietnam, were brazenly undercutting his peace initiatives.

  As the political situation in Vietnam deteriorated in fall 1963, the limits of Kennedy’s oblique management style became apparent. Frustrated by the growing instability of South Vietnam’s Diem regime, U.S. officials split over whether to back a military coup to replace it, with Kennedy himself vacillating back and forth on the question. In October, the growing feud between Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who supported a coup, and Saigon CIA station chief John Richardson, who backed the increasingly autocratic President Ngo Dinh Diem, erupted into public view. Richard Starnes, a Saigon correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, filed a remarkable report on the rift, quoting “a high U.S. official here” who charged the CIA with insubordination. The official called the agency a “malignancy” and said he “was not sure even the White House could control [it] any longer.” He then added this eyebrow-raising observation: “If the United States ever experiences a [coup attempt] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon…. [The agency] represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.” Starnes’s stunning report prompted the New York Times’ venerable Arthur Krock to warn Kennedy to get control of his administration. “This is disorderly government,” the old Kennedy press retainer sternly admonished JFK in his October 3 column. “And the longer the president tolerates it, the greater will grow…the impression of a very indecisive administration in Washington.”

  The CIA’s unaccountability in Vietnam brought cries for Congress to “turn a permanent floodlight on the citadel of secrecy,” the New York Times’ Ben Bagdikian reported later that month. Intelligence executives, noted Bagdikian, were “appalled” at the idea of more congressional scrutiny of their machinations. But they had little to fear. For the rest of the Cold War, despite occasional congressional foot stomping, the CIA continued to operate largely unsupervised.

  The sense of an administration in growing conflict with itself only increased on November 1 when South Vietnamese military plotters dra
gged Diem and his brother Nhu out of church, handcuffed the two men and threw them in the back of a truck, where they were stabbed and shot in the head. (The coup was facilitated when the CIA withdrew Richardson from Saigon, allowing the agency to cooperate with the South Vietnamese generals behind the plot.) Kennedy was not opposed to a change of government in Saigon if it brought the kind of stability that could help ease a U.S. withdrawal. But he was sickened and depressed by the bloody disposal of the Catholic leader and his brother, butchered like animals in a rolling abattoir. Robert McNamara, who was with Kennedy when he got news of the brothers’ assassinations, later remarked that he had never seen the president more upset: “He literally blanched.” The murders “shook him personally,” Michael Forrestal, Kennedy’s specialist on Southeast Asia, observed. They “bothered him as a moral and religious matter [and] shook his confidence…in the kind of advice he was getting about South Vietnam.”

  The center was not holding for John Kennedy in the final weeks of his life. The violent overthrow of Diem not only exacerbated the feeling of chaos in Vietnam, it underlined the limits on Kennedy’s ability to control events, in Saigon as well as in Washington. The president who prided himself on his mastery of foreign policy—a man who had been tutored by old pro Joe Kennedy in the wily arts of power—felt the reins slipping from his hands.

  After hearing about Diem, JFK called Mary Meyer—whom he turned to in moments of duress—and asked her to join him at the White House for the afternoon. It was the last time they saw each other.

  Ironically, the only top national security advisor who came around to supporting Kennedy’s Vietnam pullout plan was the man who would go down in history as one of the war’s most reviled architects, Robert Strange McNamara. After returning from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam in October, the defense secretary met with Kennedy in the White House, telling him, “I think, Mr. President, that we must have a means of disengaging from this area, and we must show our country what that means.” It was McNamara who encouraged Kennedy to withdraw 1,000 soldiers by the end of the year.