The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Not only Kennedy’s advisers, but the Kennedy brothers, supported the Vietnam war for years after John Kennedy’s death. As late as 1966, Robert was still applying the wrong “lesson of the missile crisis” to Vietnam: “As a far larger and more powerful nation learned in October of 1962, surrender of a vital interest of the United States is an objective which cannot be achieved.” This was said to assure people that his proposal for negotiating with the Communists did not mean a surrender—though that proposal was itself no guarantee of a quick solution, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger would find to their sorrow. If it took so long for Robert Kennedy to disengage, even under President Johnson, whose skill at conducting his brother’s policy could be blamed for its mishaps, it would have been impossible to disengage with his brother still in charge and hoping to “win.”

  John Kenneth Galbraith has suggested that Kennedy was about to change his policies because he had expressed a desire to get rid of Dean Rusk after the 1964 election. But that desire signals the opposite of any withdrawal from Vietnam. The man he wanted in Rusk’s place was McNamara, than whom there was no more “hawkish” adviser in 1964. Rusk, despite his hawkish line under President Johnson, was unacceptable to the Kennedys because he seemed too timid and irresolute.

  That Kennedy would have started disengaging from Vietnam, at the very time when he had hope of building a new administration there in the wake of Diem’s overthrow, is unlikely. Though America did not engineer Diem’s assassination, we allowed it, hoping for better things. As Roger Hilsman wrote in 1964: “The downfall of the Diem regime gave Vietnam and the United States a second chance to carry out an effective program to defeat the Communist guerrillas and win the people. Ambassador Lodge and whomever Kennedy might have chosen to replace General Harkins, whose tour of duty was coming to an end, might well have done the trick—if Kennedy had lived.” It should be remembered that Hilsman was considered a “dove.” There was no dove position in Kennedy’s administration that stood for withdrawal. The doves were for winning the war by gentler methods. If Kennedy had wanted to make withdrawal possible, he would have had to invent a new position out of thin air—against all the forces unleashed by his own rhetoric and planning, conveyed through his network of advisers.

  The principal division between Kennedy’s advisers just before his death pitted the “political solution” people against the “military solution” people. But the political solution was for further intervention, more central American command, and increased activity. Hilsman, for instance, thought that more men rather than more bombs were needed:

  Our proposal was to put a division of American ground forces into Thailand as a warning and couple it with communications to North Vietnamese representatives in the various Communist and neutral capitals. If the warning was not heeded, that division could be moved right up to the Laos border, and a second division could be introduced into Thailand. If that set of warnings was also ignored, a division could be introduced into Vietnam, and so on—not to fight the Viet Cong, which should remain the task of the South Vietnamese, but to deter the north from escalating.

  Meanwhile, our “advisers” would direct an illegal “Bay of Pigs” operation into Laos, keeping our involvement clandestine:

  To help protect the more northern portions of South Vietnam, it might be necessary to do the ambushing in Laos. But there was a world of international political difference between a black-clad company of South Vietnamese rangers ambushing a black-clad unit of Viet Cong infiltrators on a jungle trail in Laos and American jets dropping bombs in Laos.

  The “political” solution promised more for less, but involved an even more complete control of the situation. We needed better puppets in Saigon, to be treated as José Miro Cardona had been in New York. Hilsman’s own hope was for the strategic hamlet approach (“clear and hold” rather than “search and destroy”), which had only failed because of a lack of the central discipline Americans must supply: “The major weakness of the program under the previous [Diem] regime, [R. K. G.] Thompson reported, had been the lack of overall strategic direction and Nhu’s policy of creating hamlets haphazardly all over the country.”

  This “lesser” option actually involved greater interference in the entire life of the country—we would build it up from scratch in hamlets we sited and ruled—and a great arrogance about America’s ability to dispose of all things sweetly with minimal violence. The “doves” had decided that the Ngo family could not shed the taint of collaboration with the French colonizers (something America was not guilty of), so they had to go. But Arthur Schlesinger, in his life of Robert Kennedy, points out that the Ngos were showing a willingness to negotiate with the North, rather than allow America to take away the rule of their country, just at the time America helped topple the Ngos. Bad as their family’s record had been, in the eyes of their countrymen, they were at least Vietnamese, and did not want to accept de facto dictatorship by American proconsuls:

  The Ngo brothers were, in their anachronistic fashion, authentic Vietnamese nationalists. They were reluctant about American troops and resistant to American interference. “Those who knew Diem best,” Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker wrote after twenty years in Vietnam, “felt that neither he nor Nhu would ever have invited or allowed 550,000 American soldiers to fight in their country and to permit the devastation caused by air attacks.” Diem may also have felt, as Bui Kien Thanh has suggested, that massive American intervention would provoke massive Chinese intervention and deliver Vietnam to its historic enemy. In May 1963 Nhu proposed publicly that the United States start withdrawing its troops. In the summer he told [Michael] Forrestal in his “hooded” way that the United States did not understand Vietnam; “sooner or later we Vietnamese will settle our differences between us.” “Even during the most ferocious battle,” Nhu said to Mieczyslaw Maneli, the Polish member of the International Control Commission established in 1954 to supervise the Geneva agreement, “the Vietnamese never forget who is a Vietnamese and who is a foreigner.”

  Maneli was a go-between in the diplomatic feelers the Ngos had put out to Ho Chi Minh just before Diem was killed. It was to prevent more negotiating of that sort that General Khanh engineered an anti-Minh coup after the anti-Diem coup had succeeded.

  The self-styled doves were drawing us deeper in while they thought they were getting us out. This corresponds to the general pattern of Kennedy’s administration. It was not the military that caused most trouble, but the civilians; not the bureaucrats but the “best and brightest” who thought they were beating the bureaucracy; not the Joint Chiefs of Staff but their “tamer,” Robert McNamara; not Curtis LeMay, whose thirst to bomb was self-defeating because self-caricaturing, but Rostow and Taylor, who promised that we could get into Vietnam and never feel the urge to bomb. The advocates of “lesser” action envisioned the possibility of greater control—which always (just) slipped their grasp. Attempts at total control always do.

  We have seen that Hilsman wanted to introduce one, or two, or three divisions as a buffer, so his pacification program would have a chance to be tried. The real story of Vietnam is not that of counter-insurgency yielding to regular troops. From the outset, the counterinsurgents needed regular troops to scale the fighting down to a point where the counterinsurgents could be effective. Guerrillas need water to swim in, or an umbrella for their actions. Regular troops were, from the outset, that umbrella. Schlesinger says:

  As for counterinsurgency, it was never really tried in Vietnam. Taylor and Rostow, for all their counterinsurgency enthusiasm in Washington, roared home from Saigon [in 1961] dreaming of big battalions.… The Special Forces were sent to remote regions to help peripheral groups like the Montagnards. At the end of 1963 there were only one hundred Green Berets left in South Vietnam.

  The other “advisers” sent in were regular troops; partly because the Special Forces training program was still in its infancy, but mainly because the circumstances for using the Special Forces had to be created—Diem had to be “
controlled,” we had to give him reinforcements for his army, stiffen his morale, while trying to refashion his regime.

  So much for the lesson of the Bay of Pigs. We were still trying to find a situation that would not call for heavy military commitment, and using heavy military commitment in order to create that situation. The whole mystique of flexible response was that it would fit each contingency with the appropriate force. But rather than adapt to reality, we ended up trying to make reality adapt to our preconceptions.

  At home, the Kennedy people thought they could apply “surgical” control to problems while ignoring the bureaucracy. Problems were isolable, to be removed from prior context and given a neat technical solution. That was a questionable approach even in our own country. “Break the Rules Committee” and you have not solved the problem of congressional recalcitrance—you have only embittered congressmen, who will resist more stubbornly. To think we could go into an alien culture and manipulate the “hearts and minds” of its inhabitants by technical skill—remove a Castro here, put up a strategic hamlet there—was always a delusion. Once again, confidence in our resources and will had made the complex interplay of millions of other wills seem irrelevant. Even the guerrilla experts who talked of winning the hearts of other people thought this could be done by image-manipulation on a level with American campaign tricks. General Lansdale, the most respected of the “hearts and minds” school, ran Operation Mongoose on the assumption that he could woo the people of Cuba from Castro by a religious indoctrination program that presented him as the Antichrist. Other Green Berets naturally reverted to the saying, “If you have them by the balls, their minds and hearts will follow.” The Kennedy pursuit of power never got far away from balls.

  There is no way of knowing what President Kennedy might have done had he lived. Could he have withdrawn from Vietnam without losing face? He thought he could not trade Turkish missiles for Cuban without being impeached, so necessary was it to keep America’s hawks happy with his toughness. Would he have disowned his own policies and advisers in Vietnam, and done it in time to leave him any choice in the matter? Perhaps; there is no knowing. But he did not live—and the lessons of power, the men of power, the examples of power he left behind him gave us the war in Vietnam. Even when a Republican President, after four years of negotiation and bombing, disengaged from Vietnam, some of his critics blamed America for the bloody turmoil in Vietnam and Kampuchea. We never consider that other countries, freed from a colonial framework, must work out their own tribal and historical grievances without regard for us. If anything happens in the world, America must get the credit or the blame—we did not act, or we did not take the right actions. It never occurs to us that we are not all-important in the long-range tides of particular peoples’ histories. Kennedy, though he might eventually have freed himself from these illusions of total American control, helped to strengthen them in other Americans. His real legacy was to teach the wrong lesson, over and over. The attempt at total control does not merely corrupt, as Acton said; it debilitates. It undoes itself.

  24

  The Prisoner of Power

  Those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summit of human life have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON, “Life of Richard Savage”

  Harry Truman established for ex-Presidents the embarrassing custom of building libraries to themselves (Truman used to act as guide through his own shrine, signing things in the imitated Oval Office, or playing the piano). President Kennedy did not live to preside over his library’s construction or arrangement; but one hopes he would have eliminated the more grandiose touches. The worst aspect of the exhibits is an illuminated dateline that runs over all the cases of memorabilia. Below a dividing line are important family dates (from the landing of the first Kennedy on America’s shore), correlated, above the line, with events in world history. So, for 1917, we read “John F. Kennedy born in Brookline,” conjoined with “Russian Revolution,” as if Clio viewed history stereoscopically with a Kennedy always in one slide.

  The pairings suggest, in places, more than coincidence—as when, late in 1963, we read below the line “President and Mrs. Kennedy arrive in Texas for political tour” just after reading, above the line, “Diem government in South Vietnam is overthrown.”

  The events in Edward Kennedy’s life march side by side with history’s major happenings. The Kennedy family’s importance is asserted through this equal billing with World History. But it is hard to shine when one is sharing the stage, always, with Historical Events. Edward Kennedy enters the world, in 1932, partnered with “The New Deal comes to Washington.” Some think he is fading from our politics in the same company. And, even aside from such particular chimings, it must be unsettling for one’s life to be measured out on such a macroscopic scale—to have wars for playmates, manifestos shuffled with the dance cards, weddings woven into the rise and fall of nations. No man’s life should be drawn across the rack of Everything Important supplied by this schedule.

  Even if the exhibit were not there, I suppose, people would construct something like it in their minds. Edward Kennedy lives with two great growth charts traced behind him in the air. In every situation, whomever he is meeting, the implicit question hangs there: How does he measure up? Has he got the stuff to be another John F. Kennedy? Somehow Edward acquired, through his late twenties and early thirties, the reputation of being “the family’s best politician”; but the 1980 race seems to have destroyed that claim. He lacks the John Kennedy flair, the knowing suggestion of familiarity with ideas, the witty aside that reinforced his poised air of dignity. When Edward poses as an intellectual, he looks uncomfortable. He is not dumb, by any means; but his political feel is for people—preferably other politicians—not for books. His “deep” speeches tend to be delivered woodenly. My wife and I saw that at a 1978 meeting in Philadelphia, where Kennedy addressed a group launching “Project ’87” to prepare for the bicentennial of the Constitution’s drafting. The audience was made up of fat cats and scholars. For the scholars he met (James MacGregor Burns pointing them out to him), he ran a tape recorder in his head, the importance of the Constitution today, a perfunctory recital for which he had been programmed.

  That night’s speech was well researched and well written—a timely argument against calling a new constitutional convention. But the audience was cool, made up of conservative Philadelphia money types (some at our table spoke well of the town’s pistol-packing mayor, Frank Rizzo). Those who knew Edward Kennedy only from political rallies full of his supporters were dumbfounded when he spoke so poorly in the 1980 campaign. I was partly prepared for that by his failure to reach out to a skeptical audience in Philadelphia, even with good material prepared for him.

  The demands to live up to the President’s memory make Edward alternate exaggerated efforts at seriousness with collapses into rowdy relaxation; one minute Peck’s Bad Boy, the next an Elder Statesman. When, for instance, he went to a reunion of his Virginia Law School classmates, the same year as that Philadelphia speech, his fellow alumni came to rib him about his school days and his presidential chances. The university president, Dr. Hereford, introduced him by remembering how, as a young faculty member, he rented his home during a sabbatical year to Kennedy and John Tunney. Hereford had some misgivings about turning his house over to students, but these were mollified when he heard that the Kennedy son was bringing a family maid to care for the place. The misgivings revived when he came back to town and heard, from the cabbie who picked him up at the airport, that his address was famous now for the parties thrown, the bands hired, the jolly crowds. As jocular reminiscences were exchanged, Kennedy rose and gave a stiff recital on the privilege of legal training. Just as he is invisibly manacled in the public company of women, so reports of his Charlottesville speeding tickets made him almost a caricature of sober responsibility when he went back to that scene. H
is name and his past imprison him. It is hard to cross every stage escorting History on your arm.

  If Edward is not another poised John Kennedy, he is even less a rumpled and plunging Robert. Robert was a prematurely serious child and he aged into even more childlike earnestness. His haste to be with Cesar Chavez breaking a fast seemed to reflect a desire to make up for lost time, for the vigils in southern churches that Robert had not shared with Dr. King. In the Senate, Robert, the elder, was defiant of custom and lacking in respect for ancient colleagues. Edward, the younger brother, went around picking up Robert’s broken crockery. Edward is temperamentally a joiner—Robert was a resigner. I remember speaking just after Edward Kennedy, in 1972, at an antiwar protest held in the Senate caucus room. Kennedy was one of only two Senators who showed up, and he spoke earnestly against the war. But the group, which was petitioning for redress of the constitutional grievance of undeclared war, got no encouragement from him in its determination to commit civil disobedience. That is not Edward’s way. If Robert had been there, he would have made it clear he shared the group’s gut feelings, even if he did not agree with their tactics. Edward Kennedy is a dutiful liberal, not a natural radical. He will be courageous in his choice of goals, but conventional in his pursuit of them. He stands true to old positions—not breaking into new territory, like Robert. His health plan, for instance, is an old measure adopted in most industrial democracies, and he has maneuvered for it in the accepted Senate ways. But in a period of economic retrenchment and noisy “antigovernment” rhetoric, this essentially centrist politician is thought of as the leftwardmost major figure in our politics, the principal target of right-wing political action committees. With a compromise abortion stand close to the majority position, he is considered a villain by antiabortion groups, in part because of his religion. The gun lovers love to haunt his campaigns. He is the Left to much of the Right, and his downfall would signal the permanent fall of the Left. It is interesting to see how, as his own position has been eroded, the stature of people scheming against him has diminished. At first it was Lyndon Johnson, who tried to oust the Kennedys and establish his own legitimacy. Then it was Richard Nixon, a President hiring gumshoes to pad around Chappaquiddick. Then Jimmy Carter devoted disproportionate time and effort to the project of “whipping his ass.” Now it is John Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee who thinks he holds Kennedy’s fate in his hands. Just by bearing his name, Kennedy has come to resemble the aging gunfighter of western movies, the one every young punk wants to beat as a way of making his reputation.