As Noel Twyman established, “Harvey’s conceptual notes for ZR/RIFLE are a blueprint for the JFK assassination plot, both in concept and detail: First, the employment of French Corsican assassins was planned by Harvey; and evidence shows that French Corsicans were in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and that they were professional assassins. Second, Harvey proposed disinformation schemes to [put the] ‘blame on the Soviets’ and evidence shows that is exactly what happened to Oswald … Third, Harvey was very specific in recruiting only top professional assassins … Fourth, Harvey specified rigid controls to keep plots limited to a few participants with strict rules of conversation and no paper trail … Finally, Harvey clearly specified the use of phony 201 files in CIA records, backdated and forged, to conceal the identity of participants.”103
Kennedy’s Fear of a Quagmire in Southeast Asia
As the cold war escalated throughout the 1950s, some in the military and intelligence services, and the executive advisers and politicians they influenced, became convinced that the growing Communist menace—if not frozen in its tracks throughout the world—would inevitably pose a threat to the national security of the United States. An official theory to which many of the advisers subscribed postulated that an aggressive Communist power could take over entire continents by snatching up little countries, one at a time; the domino theory became the latest fashionable concept among many of the military, intelligence, and political advisers in the early 1960s. For many people who could not quite understand why the United States was being pulled into the civil war of a small, nonthreatening country on the other side of the world, this theory would provide an answer. It was probably the least profound and baseless conceptual war strategy ever developed, and was debunked by the CIA in June 1964 even before Johnson proceeded to escalate the war. JFK never bought into the theory either; in fact he spent his entire presidency trying to keep his administration from accepting its fatal premise. On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson had no compunction about buying it lock, stock, and barrel, because it fit very well into his plan to be a “wartime president,” just like Roosevelt.
The Korean War experience, in which a permanent impasse of sorts had been reached, dividing the country into two quite opposite states, established a precedent of sorts. It also became a kind of mind-set for many as an acceptable solution for other trouble spots, such as Southeast Asia. It eventually became the working assumption that South Vietnam could become like South Korea—a strong ally of the United States—irrespective of the pesky issues of its long history of instability and its then current corrupt regime. Yet Kennedy fought against the “groupthink” phenomenon arrayed against him and did so consistently over a two-year period, even though he allowed the number of advisers to increase during his presidency, as he hoped to slow the escalation by the end of his term. Only one of his senior-level advisers, George Ball, held the same strong views as Kennedy. But others, notably Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, did as well, and they generally had a better understanding of the pitfalls related to committing U.S. forces to a land war in Southeast Asia.104
According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kennedy’s attitudes regarding Vietnam were forged in part by the advice he got from no less a warrior than General Douglas MacArthur, who told him that “it would be a ‘mistake’ to fight in Southeast Asia. ‘He thinks,’ the President dictated in a rare aide-memoire, ‘our line should be Japan, Formosa and the Philippines.’”105 Robert Kennedy added that MacArthur also said that “we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table.”106 According to Kenneth O’Donnell, “MacArthur was extremely critical of the military advice that the President had been getting from the Pentagon, blaming the military leaders of the previous ten years, who, he said, had advanced the wrong younger officers. ‘You were lucky to have that mistake happen in Cuba, where the strategic cost was not too great,’ he said about the Bay of Pigs. MacArthur implored the President to avoid a U.S. military build-up in Vietnam, or any other part of the Asian mainland, because he felt that the domino theory was ridiculous in a nuclear age. MacArthur went on to point out that there were domestic problems—the urban crisis, the ghettos, the economy—that should have far more priority than Vietnam. Kennedy came out of the meeting somewhat stunned. That a man like MacArthur should give him such unmilitary advice impressed him enormously.”107 Kennedy had also discussed the issue with General Charles de Gaulle, who told him, “You will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money.”108
By the end of 1961, the pressures from the military and most of his advisers to send troops to Vietnam had grown ever stronger, despite Kennedy’s view that Ngo Dinh Diem was too much of a tyrant to justify his support. When Ambassador/Professor Galbraith was preparing to return to India, JFK asked him to personally visit Saigon on the way and report back to him; Galbraith’s report said in part, “Diem will not reform … He cannot. It is politically naïve to expect it. He senses that he cannot let power go because he would be thrown out.”109 Diem could not even conceptualize the idea of democratization; it was incomprehensible to him, at least in a land in which the culture regarded the head of state as “sovereign” and answerable only to God, with whom he directly mediated.110 Diem’s attitude was remarkably similar to that of Lyndon Johnson’s after he became president, as will be seen in the last chapter.
Eventually, the pressure from the Pentagon resulted in the Kennedy administration increasing the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam from 685 in January 1960 to 16,732 in October 1963. However, despite this increase in military advisers and material support, Kennedy was still not fully supportive of further increases in troop levels, or of any introduction of combat troops. JFK’s position was described clearly at his first ever press conference, when he expressed his wish to create in Vietnam “a peaceful country; an independent country not dominated by either side but concerned with the life of the people within the country.”111 While Kennedy had gone along with increased levels of advisers and equipment, he steadfastly refused to add combat troops. John M. Newman succinctly summed up Kennedy’s record in Vietnam:
Kennedy turned down combat troops, not when the decision was clouded by ambiguities and contradictions in the reports from the battlefield, but when the battle was unequivocally desperate, when all concerned agreed that Vietnam’s fate hung in the balance, and when his principal advisors told him that vital U.S. interests in the region and the world were at stake.112
George Ball had warned Kennedy in 1961, “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience. Vietnam is the worst possible terrain both from a physical and political point of view.” JFK responded, “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”113 (According to Schlesinger, that sentence didn’t end there; JFK added, “As long as I am President.”)114 Ball turned out to be partially right, of course, even though he underestimated by almost half the number of men who would be committed to the paddies and jungles halfway around the world at the peak of the U.S. intervention by JFK’s successor. Kennedy’s attempts to persuade Ngo Dinh Diem to stop harassing the Buddhists and broaden his government in South Vietnam were unsuccessful. The repressive, often brutal tactics employed by South Vietnam’s president Diem jeopardized the anti-Communist cause and complicated JFK’s ability to provide continuing support; he began to more strongly resist attempts by his advisers to send additional troops to Vietnam.
General Edward Lansdale, who appeared in a similarly distracting role in the Cuban operations, was originally involved in strategizing the Vietnam situation while attempting to manage it in such a way as to further his own career. Of course, he was not the only one using that tactic at the time, including, arguably, many of the military and intelligence officers advising Kennedy. Lansdale had managed to have himself assig
ned to a task force under Roswell Gilpatric to develop broad planning for Vietnam. Although he was generally unpopular in Washington, he apparently had a mentor in Walter Rostow, through whom he had managed to get himself nominated to be ambassador to Vietnam. His flamboyance and conniving manner did not impress a number of people at the State Department, and this caused his name to be pulled from the list of candidates; Frederick Nolting was chosen instead, who was a career foreign service officer with no Vietnam experience at all (that was considered to be an asset, since he had no ties to any Vietnamese leaders or generals that might make Diem suspicious of him).115 According to author John Newman, Lansdale crafted a lengthy plan, listing actionable tasks for handling Vietnam; one of the items included the appointment of a Vietnam task force, but “the real purpose seems to have been for insinuating himself into the government’s policy apparatus, putting himself in charge of it.”116 Lansdale figured on being appointed as the operations officer, and being a part of the three-man group accompanying the newly appointed Ambassador Nolting to Vietnam. His own role would have included the responsibility to “supervise and coordinate the activities of every agency carrying out operations pursuant to the plan.” His own powers would be so vast that he would virtually dictate any changes to Vietnam policy.117
In the spring of 1961, as the Bay of Pigs debacle was unfolding in Cuba, the developing crisis in Laos and the quickly deteriorating situation in Vietnam competed for the attention of the president. As the Joint Chiefs continued pressing for the president to take more aggressive actions in Cuba, they also urged him to intervene in Laos and Vietnam. Lansdale and Gilpatric submitted their report on April 29, just days after the Cuban debacle, but the president was not in the mood to make a final decision then; they reissued the task force report on May 1. The revision was to move the military involvement away from solely training roles toward the direction of combat troops. Possibly as a result of this, Lansdale and the Pentagon itself were removed from the task force as Kennedy directed the State Department to take it over and run it.118 Kennedy told his assistant secretary of state, Roger Hilsman, “The Bay of Pigs has taught me a number of things. One is not to trust generals or the CIA, and the second is that if the American people do not want to use American troops to remove a Communist regime 90 miles away from our coast, how can I ask them to use troops to remove a Communist regime 9,000 miles away?”119
In the meantime, Lyndon Johnson stepped in to fill the void left by Kennedy’s ever-evolving schism with the military and intelligence chiefs; he did so using a clandestine back channel which he had developed through his decades-long relationship with his military aide Col. Howard Burris, who was connected not only to key people in the Pentagon but in Langley as well. One of the military chiefs, General Curtis LeMay, shared many of Johnson’s attitudes, especially about the president, whom he regarded as an indecisive coward and avowed socialist. LeMay thought even less of Bobby, for whom his view was similar to that of J. Edgar Hoover. Burris, LeMay, and Hoover, along with other key people in the military and intelligence organizations of the United States, will be examined further in the next chapter.
Lyndon Johnson Goes to Vietnam,
Praises the “Churchill of Asia”
Shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs venture, Kennedy decided to rely on his vice president to exercise his famous negotiating skills to intercede on his behalf with President Diem of South Vietnam, to redirect his autocratic ways into a more democratic rule. That was a mistake John Kennedy came to regret despite his attempt to neuter Johnson’s ability to effect substantive changes after his departure. Against his consistent resolve to offer President Diem measured support, while prodding him to abandon the harassment of Buddhists and his other autocratic ways, many of his topmost advisers pushed Kennedy to intercede militarily. He decided to send Vice President Lyndon Johnson to Vietnam in May 1961, expecting him to do some hard bargaining with President Diem. Although he finally prevailed on him to make the trip, he probably wished he hadn’t, given the ultimate results.
Johnson was adamantly opposed to making the trip and quickly dug in his heels to avoid it. He had first heard about his new assignment on the radio while he was in New York. According to Air Force Colonel Howard Burris, who had just been appointed Johnson’s military representative, “He came back to the White House and told Kennedy he wasn’t going to go … I remember, I was sitting there against the wall in the NSC meeting listening to all this screaming taking place. Kennedy said he wanted Johnson to go and Johnson just refused. Kennedy said, ‘You’re going tonight and the Foreign Service and [McGeorge] Bundy will brief you.’ [Burris said after that] Johnson went out and just got stoned.”120 Johnson was still in his funk when the plane left Andrews AFB. Kennedy had added a few of his family members to this entourage, including his sister Jean and brother-in-law Stephen Smith, which thoroughly irritated Johnson during the entire trip. Throughout the twenty-plus-hour flight, as he continued drinking and bloviating, Johnson “talked over and over about the fact that he had not been born rich like the Kennedys,” and complained that he had not gone to Harvard but to a “little crappy Texas college.”
Carl Rowan, a distinguished black journalist who became an assistant secretary of state for public affairs, accompanied Johnson on the trip. Rowan, who later gained fame as a syndicated columnist and television pundit, commented that “Johnson had one of the greatest inferiority complexes I ever saw in a high-level official.”121 He helped Horace Busby write the speech Johnson would give before the Vietnam National Assembly. Rowan said Johnson “was drinking a lot in those days, and the more he drank, the meaner he got, and verbally abused his staff ‘in ways I found hard to believe.’”122 During a press conference, for no apparent reason, Johnson had insulted Rowan by calling him a “dummy.” Rowan later called him on it and threatened to take the first plane back to Washington; Johnson responded by telling Rowan that he would not do that again, because he would not be seeing reporters anymore. That promise lasted until noon the next day, when Johnson called Rowan and invited him to bring some reporters to his room, which he did, where they were greeted by Johnson wearing only his underwear. “Hell, bring ’em on in,” Johnson said, proceeding to hold “the only press conference that, to my knowledge, a senior American official held in his skivvies.”123
From Kennedy’s perspective, this trip was a mistake, because rather than elicit support for his position, Johnson’s efforts were functionally reversed: He recast his own role, to become the advocate not of Kennedy’s agenda but of the despotic ruler whom JFK wanted to control. He went well beyond the authority Kennedy had vested in him, even committing the United States to provide equipment (helicopters and armored personnel carriers) without extracting anything about how Diem would finance them. Johnson said that Diem was “tickled as hell,” which, considering that Johnson had just handed him everything he wanted, should not have been a surprise. He did this while conceding on positions that the State Department had held for months.124 Johnson had managed to use his patented “reatment on Diem to get him on his own side, at Kennedy’s expense. He ingratiated himself well when he praised Diem as the “Churchill of Asia” at the reception dinner. As Stanley Karnow put it, it was as if Johnson “were endorsing county sheriffs in a Texas election campaign.”125
Johnson asked Diem to write two letters to Kennedy, the first one general and the second one stipulating everything he wanted on his “wish list,” including his request for an additional hundred thousand men for his army. To get such an approval would implicitly mean additional American troops to train them; the question of asking for combat troops had been discussed as well, and Johnson seemed to have left the two issues dangling when he left for Bermuda to work three days on his report to the White House.126
The day after Johnson left on his trip, Kennedy issued NSAM 52, but he modified the earlier draft to delete a provision allowing that a “commitment might result from an NSC decision following the LBJ-Diem talks.” The result of this
is that Johnson thought he had much more authority than he did; in fact, as soon as he was gone, anything he might do or say was without real authority. By ensuring that Johnson would play no role in any decisions after he had already left on the trip, whatever Johnson might have told Diem would become irrelevant, and anything others, such as the Joint Chiefs, might have been trying to insert would also become moot. During the review process for NSAM 52, the Pentagon’s proposal for combat troops was either blocked from the agenda or dealt with and disapproved.127 While Kennedy technically had the upper hand in this apparent trial balloon of the mission on which he sent Johnson, the fact that Johnson had cobbled together his own agenda for his forced trip around the world still caused major misconceptions in the minds of a lot of people with whom he met. Working secretly behind the scenes in Washington, Edward Lansdale’s unseen hand was manipulating, on behalf of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, to try to get more troops into play (under the guise of their being used only for “training” purposes when they would actually be set up as combat troops). Johnson’s aide Colonel Burris confirmed this: “I remember [General Lionel] McGarr saying the troops were for training, but it was really just under the guise of training.”128
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