Eisenhower helped entrench the view that Vietnam’s fall might topple other “dominoes” in the region. History proved Eisenhower partially correct in this regard: after South Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos soon followed. But then the dominoes stopped falling for a number of reasons, including the split between China and the Soviet Union that turned off the funding faucet to the North’s regime.
Meanwhile, even with the scant attention the United States had paid to Vietnam under Eisenhower, the country made progress under its premier, Ngo Dinh Diem (a French-educated Catholic in a primarily Buddhist nation). Advances were so rapid that after a visit to the South in 1958, North Vietnamese commissar Le Doan returned with alarming news that conditions in the South were improving at such a pace that in the near future insufficient sentiment for a communist revolution would exist. Here was the communist bottom line: their cause was only advanced out of misery, and when average people improved their lot, communism came out a loser. To ensure that progress stopped, Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas assassinated government disease-control squads sent out to spray malarial swamps; they killed doctors traveling away from their hospitals en route to the villages; and killed progovernment village chiefs after hacking off the arms of their children, displaying all the impaled heads on stakes outside the village as a warning to others.
Eisenhower had utterly failed to equip and support the interior defense forces in the South. Kennedy, however, wanted to establish the image of a young “cold warrior.” He promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price” and “bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. After failing to support the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy could not afford another foreign policy flop. More than any other twentieth-century president before him, JFK paid attention to propaganda and world opinion. He increased the funding and authority of the U.S. Information Agency, actively challenging foreign governments by market research and advertising.33 His Peace Corps fought communism with shovels and spades instead of guns. Kennedy’s appraisal of communism was not at issue.
Even after the Cuban missile crisis, questions remained about whether he (and America) had the patience to stay the course in a conflict involving international communism. The first threat in Southeast Asia had come in Laos, where again Eisenhower’s failure to commit troops had sealed a country’s fate. Kennedy had to negotiate, leading one of the communist leaders of North Vietnam to note approvingly that “the American government…has fallen entirely within the scope of Communist strategy in Laos.”34 That left Vietnam, and Kennedy made clear that he would not abandon this domino. When, after the disastrous decadelong Vietnam War resulted in public criticism and assignment of responsibility, Kennedy should have been at the top of the blame list. Why he was not is itself an interesting twist in American history.
Just as in later years writers and historians would ascribe to JFK a zeal to rectify economic and racial disparities that he had never displayed while alive, so too they would later seek to insulate him from criticism over his Vietnam policy. John Roche, special consultant to Lyndon Johnson and an adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, recalled that the revival of Kennedy’s Vietnam record began in 1965–66 by a group Roche labeled the Jackobites.35 As Roche recalled, “Odd stories surfaced: ‘Jack Kennedy had [whispered to speechwriter Kenny O’Donnell] that once he was re-elected in 1964 he’d get out of Vietnam.’…The point of all these tales was that Johnson had betrayed the Kennedy trust, had gone off on a crazy Texas-style military adventure….”36
An “alternative history”—having JFK withdraw from Vietnam right after his reelection—has appeared, and some have argued that his strong stance prior to the election was a deception. Whether Kennedy planned to follow through on his “deception,” or whether he ever intended to withdraw from Vietnam remains a matter of high controversy, with two recent books vigorously arguing that JFK would have withdrawn.37 The evidence, however, paints a much different picture.
After JFK’s election, American liberals running the war emphasized “winning the hearts and minds of the people” through material prosperity and general progress. But such progress depended on a climate of security, which Vietnam did not possess. The VC were not impressed, and without American or ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops actually present, full time, to protect villages, locals swung their allegiance to their only alternative for survival, the Viet Cong.
No president did more to ensure the quagmire of Vietnam than John Kennedy. Fully briefed by Eisenhower even before the election of 1960, JFK had been informed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already estimated that 40,000 American soldiers would be needed to combat the estimated 17,000 Viet Cong rebels. If the North Vietnamese got involved, the Joint Chiefs warned, it would take three times that many men. Kennedy was the first to order U.S. military troops into Vietnam—not merely CIA advisers—when he secretly dispatched 500 Green Berets (a new unit of highly trained counterinsurgency soldiers that Kennedy also had formed) into Southeast Asia. He also escalated the buildup of American forces faster than any other president, so that by 1963 almost 17,000U.S. military forces were stationed in South Vietnam, augmented by American helicopters and countless naval units not included in the official commitment levels.38 At his final press conference, Kennedy said, “For us to withdraw…would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia…. So we are going to stay there.”39 All his principal military advisers favored not only remaining, but also increasing the U.S. commitment. Only the Kennedy image machine spun the notion that Vietnam “wasn’t Jack’s fault.”
The commitment to Vietnam involved more than military forces. Kennedy and his advisers had come to the conclusion that they could not effectively control South Vietnamese Premier Diem, who had received sharp Western press criticism for persecuting Buddhists. Far from being the “Jefferson of Asia,” Diem had engaged in a number of distasteful practices. The extent of Diem’s anti-Buddhist policies remains in dispute, but little doubt exists that he oppressed Buddhist leaders. Kennedy worried less about the actual oppression and more about the public relations image. By 1963 he was looking for an opportunity to replace Diem with someone more tolerant and malleable, so the United States quietly began searching for South Vietnamese generals who would perform a coup.40
On November 2, 1963, with full support of the United States and using cash supplied by the CIA, South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem. Coup ringleader Duong Van Minh, or “Big Minh” (no relation to Ho), described by anti-Diem American reporters as a “deceptively gentle man,…[who] when he spoke of the coup d’état that lifted him into office,…[had] a discernable tone of apology in his voice,” nevertheless managed to make sure that Diem and his brother were shot and knifed several times en route to their exile, having given the pair assurances they would be allowed to live.41 Despite the administration’s support of the coup, Kennedy expressed shock that Diem had been assassinated, having fooled himself into thinking that America could topple a regime in a third-world country and expect the participants to behave as though they were in Harvard Yard. Meanwhile, the leader of the Viet Cong called Diem’s assassination a “gift from Heaven for us.”42 It wasn’t the only gift the United States would hand Ho.
Kennedy’s secretary of defense and former Ford executive, Robert McNamara, arrived in Washington with a long record of mastering statistics for his own purposes. In World War II he and other whiz kids had put their talents to great use, calculating the most efficient use of bombing by doing target analysis. After the war, McNamara had used his facility with statistics to win almost every internal debate at Ford.43
Kennedy and McNamara rapidly moved to isolate and weaken the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).44 Often, the JCS did not receive reports critical of the war effort or even objective briefings because of direct intervention by the secretary of defense, the president, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. By the time of the Kennedy assassination, the military had to a great extent been cut out of all substantive
planning for a war it was expected to fight and win. And JCS policy recommendations were in disarray because each service branch sought to take the lead in the Vietnam conflict, and often refused to support the recommendations of other branches. All of these issues, however, were largely obscured by the confused and tragic nature of the events in Dallas in November 1963, less than a month after Diem’s assassination.
The Crime of the Century
No sooner had the blood dried on Diem’s corpse than the American public was shocked by another assassination—that of its own president, on home soil, virtually on national television. By 1963, John Kennedy, having elicited the hatred of Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Americanized Cubans, the Mafia, and many right-wingers because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his fondness (in their view) for using the United Nations to solve problems, had any number of people who wished him dead. To say otherwise would be to ignore reality.
On November twenty-second, Kennedy had gone to Dallas to talk up his nuclear test ban treaty and also to firm up support with Texas Democrats with an eye toward reelection. The visit included a ten-mile motorcade through Dallas, an area termed by Kennedy “nut country.” The Kennedys were greatly troubled by what they saw as the right wing. But the lunatic fringe of the right wing was only one group after JFK’s scalp. Both sides of the Cuban imbroglio felt betrayed by him, as did the mob. He had already received death threats from Miami and other spots, and Kennedy did not take even the most minimal security precautions, riding in an open limo after ordering the protective bubble removed. Near the end of the route, Kennedy’s car passed by the Texas Book Depository building, where a gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, an odd individual, shot him twice. Although the limo immediately sped to Parkland Hospital just a few miles away, the president was pronounced dead within minutes of arrival.
Oswald was arrested just two hours after the shooting, precluding a long investigation that surely would have unearthed a number of facts the Kennedys wanted to remain secret. Indeed, Oswald’s capture had come about after he was first charged with killing a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippitt, who had detained him for questioning after news of the assassination had been broadcast. Later charged with killing Kennedy, Oswald was himself shot at point-blank range two days after his arrest by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby as he was being transferred from one facility to another.
A number of things were suspicious about the Kennedy assassination. The police never conducted a thorough investigation—having caught Oswald so quickly—and the justice system never held a trial because Oswald had been killed. Worse, facts of Oswald’s checkered past leaked out, providing grist for the mill of “researchers” with almost any political viewpoint. Oswald, for example, had become a Soviet citizen in 1959 and had handed out pro-Castro tracts in New Orleans. Yet he was also a former soldier who had grown dissatisfied with the USSR and left voluntarily. Other parts of Oswald’s behavior threw suspicion on the entire assassination investigation. For example, he appeared to have been as much an anticommunist as a pro-Castroite; he served in the marines, where he was a marksman; and his brief stay in Russia led many to argue that he was in fact a CIA double agent.
The newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson knew that an inquiry had to quell fears among citizens that the Soviets or Cubans had assassinated the president, which led to the creation of the Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and including bipartisan officials from both houses of Congress and other parts of the government, including the former head of the CIA. But Johnson gave the Warren Commission two tasks, which might prove mutually exclusive. First, it had to determine who had actually killed Kennedy. Did Oswald act alone? Was there a conspiracy? Were other killers still at large? Second, the commission was charged with reassuring the American public. How could it do the latter if the answers to the former implicated the KGB, Castro, or other sinister elements beyond a “lone gunman”?
In addition, Johnson pressured the members to turn out a report quickly, a requirement that worked against a thorough investigation. Dozens of critical witnesses were never called to testify. The commission never addressed the discrepancies between the condition of Kennedy’s body in Dallas and its condition in Bethesda, Maryland, at the official autopsy. It never called Jack Ruby to Washington to testify, although he had indicated that he would have much more to say there than in a Dallas jail. The commission’s failure to investigate thoroughly opened the doors widely to a variety of conspiracy theorists. More than a few of them have turned up important evidence that the official story left something to be desired. Although several loose threads in the Warren Commission story remain, the essential evidence supports the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. The most challenged aspect of the evidence, the so-called magic bullet, was resolved by Gerald Posner, who used digitally enhanced versions of the film of the assassination made by Abraham Zapruder to show conclusively that there indeed had been a magic bullet that accounted for the multiple wounds.45 “Conclusively” is a subjective term, however, in that dozens, if not hundreds, of “researchers” have created a cottage industry churning out the latest “evidence” that “proves” JFK was killed by a conspiracy of some type. No evidence will satisfy the dissenters, no matter what its nature.
Lyndon Johnson, Champion Logroller
Taking the oath of office while Air Force One remained on the tarmac at Love Field in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought to the presidency vastly different strengths and weaknesses than had Kennedy. He never understood the Kennedy mystique.46 Although he taught school briefly, for the better part of his life LBJ had been a politician and had never run any kind of for-profit enterprise. He was the third consecutive president to have entered the Oval Office without business experience, although Eisenhower’s military service had come close in terms of organizational demands and resource allocation.47 Like Kennedy, Johnson had fought in World War II, and he was the first congressman to enlist in the armed services, serving in the navy as a lieutenant commander. After the war, in 1949, he won a Senate seat. A tireless campaigner, Johnson knew when to get into the dirt, and he had his share of scandals in Texas. His most serious and potentially damaging relationship involved his onetime secretary Bobby Baker, who in 1963 was charged with influence peddling to obtain defense contracts for his own company. The connections to Johnson appeared pernicious enough that Kennedy sought to jettison the Texan before the reelection campaign of 1964, but he thought better of it when the electoral college map was laid before him. Kennedy needed Johnson to carry Texas and parts of the South. Democratic senators closed ranks around Johnson, JFK’s media machine insulated him, and when Baker went to jail, the scandal did not touch Johnson.
As Senate majority leader, Johnson had no equal. His anticipation of potential pitfalls for legislation combined with his ability to jawbone friends and opponents alike made him the most effective politician in either house of Congress. His early election victories had come under a cloud of ballot-stuffing charges (he first won his Senate seat by only 87 votes), which did not seem to affect his ability to steer legislation through the process. Johnson liked to be around people—he and his wife, Lady Bird, entertained more than two hundred thousand dinner guests over a five-year period at the White House—and when LBJ had his choice, he preferred to be around women.48
Johnson had as many sexual escapades as Kennedy, including a long-running affair with Madeline Brown of Dallas. Like Bill Clinton twenty years later, LBJ would have sex in the Oval Office, and like Hillary Clinton, Lady Bird Johnson excused Lyndon’s behavior by pointing out that he “loved people” and “half the people in the world are women.”49 Johnson’s close ties to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover helped keep his liaisons secret: he had made a calculated choice to retain Hoover as director with the memorable phrase, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”
Having emerged from poverty and having seen firsthand as a teacher its impact on human life, Johnson used his legislative skills to mount th
e largest federal programs in history aimed at eliminating poverty. He enjoyed using government to help others, and America’s affluence made it possible to do so. Announcing his proposals in a May 1964 speech at the University of Michigan, he promised to lead America “upward to the Great Society.”
The campaign of 1964 was, for Johnson, merely a speed bump on the highway to that Great Society. The Texan dispatched his conservative Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, with a mix of often irresponsible scare tactics and equally irresponsible promises of government largesse. Goldwater, the most ideologically “pure” candidate since William Jennings Bryan, ran as an unabashed conservative. He championed smaller government, states’ rights (which, unfortunately, put him squarely on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), and a stronger front against communism than Johnson. His book, Conscience of a Conservative (1960), provided a list of Goldwater’s policy positions, including abolition of the income tax and privatization of the Social Security system.50 These were hardly radical positions, and even after the New Deal, a large segment of the public still thought “big government” programs to be a foreign concept. Known for his supposedly inflammatory comment (penned by Karl Hess and borrowed from Roman senator Cicero) that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater provided fodder for outlandish liberal cartoonists, who depicted him throwing nuclear bombs.
Goldwater, although a nonpracticing Episcopalian, had one set of Jewish grandparents, making him (and not Joe Lieberman in 2000) the first American of Jewish ancestry to run for either of the highest two offices in the land. His anticommunist and free-market credentials were impeccable. A World War II veteran and general officer in the air force reserve, he viewed combat in Vietnam as a clear-cut prospect: if the United States committed troops to Vietnam, it should do so intending to win and using any force necessary, including nuclear weapons. Johnson’s crew demonized Goldwater, running what are widely acknowledged as some of the dirtiest ads in political history, one showing a little girl picking flowers just before an atomic blast goes off, convincing many Americans that Goldwater was a Dr. Strangelove.
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