Ambassador Nolting said that he thought the crisis had passed and left with his family for a sailing vacation near Greece.155
The riots were followed by hunger strikes and mass demonstrations as the public realized how blatantly their government had been lying to them. The crisis was growing to new heights, and government soldiers began using tear gas to control the Buddhist demonstrators. The use of tear gas, or mustard gas, as some suspected, and the severe repression was beginning to pose a very big problem for the United States because of its continued support of the Diem regime. The violence increased daily, and on June 8 Madame Nhu (the outspoken wife of Diem’s brother Nhu) exacerbated the tensions by claiming the Buddhists had been infiltrated by Communists. On June 11, Thich Quang Duc became the first monk to burn himself to death, in an ultimate protest, which would be repeated by other monks in the weeks and months ahead. Madame Nhu gleefully called his immolation a “barbecue” and said that if the Buddhists wanted to have another one, “I will be glad to supply the gasoline.”156
By early 1963, Kennedy was planning to replace Ambassador Nolting with Edmund Gullion, whose diplomatic thinking was more in line with his own. But his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, opposed Gullion, despite his experience as Kennedy’s trusted third world ambassador (in Congo), because he considered Gullion’s diplomatic style as tilted too far toward ceding greater autonomy to other countries, afraid that anything less would be seen as exerting unfair domination—colonialism—over them.157 This speaks volumes about Secretary Rusk’s worldview as contrasted to Kennedy’s; in the same way, Lyndon Johnson was clearly in sync with Rusk. Rusk argued for appointing Kennedy’s old Massachusetts political adversary, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, to take the air out of the Republican right’s demands for an escalated war. But in doing this, he assumed that Lodge would act with some modicum of due deference and respect to Kennedy, which was not to be.158 Instead, Lodge consulted Henry Luce, the archconservative Time-Life media magnate, for advice on how to approach his job as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.159 Luce was one of the chief participants of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird and had assisted the agency in previous sabotage activities in Vietnam for over ten years. Luce recommended that Lodge start by reading the Time articles on Vietnam by staff writer Charles Mohr, which convinced him that he needed to ignore Diem and ride roughshod over the country, imposing his own policies with the full support of the U.S. military and (CIA) intelligence agencies.160 Unfortunately, he also felt he could ignore Kennedy.
When he appointed Lodge to be his Vietnam ambassador, he joked to his aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers about his motives: “The idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible.”161 Regrettably, this joke backfired on JFK, costing him more of the little remaining power he had—over the military, the CIA, and many of his own cabinet members and advisers—to control the events that were rapidly unfolding in Saigon. Lodge had grasped primary control over U.S. policy toward Vietnam and would refuse not only to be guided by Kennedy’s instructions, but also to even communicate his actions to the president.162
Dean Rusk’s lackluster performance as secretary of state and his ineffectual foreign policy initiatives were disappointments for Kennedy, according to John Kenneth Galbraith; in August 1963, he had told Galbraith that after the election in November he might replace Rusk with McNamara as his secretary of state; however, he had some concerns about that when he admitted, “But then if I don’t have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won’t have a foreign policy.”163 According to Kennedy’s assistant secretary of defense, William Bundy, a growing schism between the president and his military and CIA advisers had resulted in completely dysfunctional relationships; by late summer and into the fall of 1963, he had begun keeping his top CIA and Pentagon advisers out of his discussions on Vietnam.164 The continual tensions between them led Kennedy to simply keep his thinking on the controversial subjects to himself and to a tight circle of friends. Kennedy had wanted to end the cold war while most of his official advisers wanted to win it, at all costs. By leaving them out of the loop, he had not fooled them; they knew how his sentiments were being shaped by such things as his aggressive support of the nuclear test ban treaty and the comments he made in his peace speech at American University in June.165
In the test-ban talks which followed the missile crisis, the Pentagon and the State Department weren’t included in the negotiations; instead, the direct communication link between Washington and Moscow was utilized and a treaty was negotiated to ban nuclear testing, except for underground tests.166 In the same process the confrontation over Berlin was ended, although it would not be permanently resolved until the wall was brought down almost three decades later.
At the same time that Kennedy was engaged in the test-ban negotiations and attempting to settle the strained relationship with Khrushchev, the Joint Chiefs were pressing for a renewed buildup of strategic forces, arguing for achieving a first-strike capability. On November 2, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary McNamara that stated that such a capability is “feasible and desirable.”167 The previous year he had attended an NSC meeting in which this idea was first broached, and he asked a series of questions about such an attack’s likely damage to the USSR and its impact on American citizens, such as how long they would have to remain in fallout shelters afterward. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric duly noted in his minutes that “finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it.”168 Against the backdrop of mistrust, paranoia, and mutual derision, Jack Kennedy had begun to form his own ideas as to how to handle the multiple hot spots around the world: Berlin, Cuba, and Vietnam. In almost every aspect, they were positions at odds with those held firmly by the military and intelligence chiefs and of his vice president. In a series of speeches and executive actions, JFK effected changes which, for that era, were regarded by many people—the Joint Chiefs of Staff in particular—as belying a radically left-wing attitude. JFK’s biographer Richard Reeves observed, “By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time.”169 Kennedy himself mused about the irony that he and Khrushchev were in essentially the same position within their respective governments; both were trying to prevent nuclear war, but they were both under “severe pressure from [the] hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement.”170
The situation was reported in the newspapers and magazines at the time; the U.S. News and World Report of August 5, 1963, contained an article headlined “Is U.S. Giving Up in the Arms Race” and referred to “many authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced … [because the] new strategy adds up to a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament.”171 Another article followed in the next edition of the magazine, under the headline “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Business?”172
In his ongoing battles with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and many of his own appointees at the highest levels of the executive department, the schism between the government in its largest context and himself was growing deeper and wider as summer turned into fall. Kennedy was rapidly losing control of his own administration and of the entire government it was supposed to direct. He realized as much when, in September, he discovered that someone had already pulled the plug on the commodity import program that propped up the South Vietnamese economy and might very well trigger a coup against Diem. The head of AID (Agency for International Development), David Bell, made a casual comment that stopped the discussion when he said, “‘There’s no point in talking about cutting off commodity aid. I’ve already cut it off’ … ‘You’ve done what?’ said John Kennedy. ‘Cut off commodity aid’ said Bell. ‘Who the hell told you to do that’ asked the president. ‘No one,’ said Bell, ‘It’s an automatic policy. We do it whenever we have differences with a client government.’”173
The CIA had already
done what the president had been deliberating, irrespective of the possible ramifications, in order to send a message to the Vietnamese dictator, as well as to the generals waiting in the wings to overthrow him. But the larger point was that it was a message the CIA was sending to the president, who was being told who was really in control of his government.174 The shock John Kennedy felt this time was nothing compared to what he would later experience when he discovered that his own government had done an end run around him and his administration with the coup d’état in Vietnam and the assassination of Diem and his brother. Only then did he realize how little control he had over the CIA and the combined military organizations symbolized and headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
JFK Attempts to Avoid United States Involvement
On June 10, 1963, Kennedy made his famous Peace Speech for the commencement address he gave to the 1963 graduates and their guests at American University. This speech came as a surprise to the attendees as well as the news media and his own administration since it was written in the White House, without Pentagon or State Department input or clearance. Kennedy called specifically for a whole new attitude toward the Soviet Union and renewed efforts to achieve world peace. It is the greatest understatement of this book that the Peace Speech was not received well through official Washington, especially the building with the largest footprint ever built, the five-sided one on the Virginia side of the Potomac River named for its polygonal shape; similarly, the views of those on the big campus located about eight miles up the river in Langley were also less than enthusiastic.
The following week Kennedy was brought back to reality; he had received a new proposal by the State Department and the Pentagon to start bombing North Vietnam and to begin mining North Vietnamese ports. This was just another in a long series of proposals for war in Southeast Asia that he had rejected as he attempted to reassert his developing view that the stakes were too high for a continuing increased commitment of U.S. troops. The warnings of such men as de Gaulle and his own advisers John Kenneth Galbraith and Edmund Gullion, Senators Mansfield and Morse, and even Generals Douglas McArthur and David M. Shoup had convinced him that it would be a catastrophic mistake to become any more entangled in Vietnam than was already the case. He struggled furiously with the arguments for and against, but listened intently to these military men who strongly advised against it. Retired General Douglas McArthur had told the president in late April, “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.”175 General Shoup would warn him eleven days before he left for Dallas that “unless we were prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expanded beyond control.”176
On August 14, 1963, at Kennedy’s insistence, Diem was advised that his present relationship with the United States would be in jeopardy if he did not announce a conciliatory policy toward the Buddhists and other critics of his regime. During this period, Kennedy had begun floating the idea of a gradual withdrawal of American personnel from Vietnam, starting in 1963 and planning for a complete withdrawal by the end of 1965. The plan involved taking the men out in four increments. Despite the disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by October 11 he would issue NSAM 263, calling for a thousand-man withdrawal by the end of the year, although the directive stated that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of this order. The primary reason for the secrecy was that he was not yet ready to announce his intentions to Diem.
On August 24, 1963, Kennedy was at Hyannis Port, Rusk in New York, McNamara mountain climbing in Wyoming, and McCone vacationing in California when a series of cables came in from Lodge in Saigon regarding the aftermath of the Nhu’s crackdown on Buddhists known as the “pagoda raids.” Nolting had told Diem that he felt this was a deliberate affront, coming just as a change in ambassadors was being completed, after the appointment of Henry Cabot Lodge. As a proposed response, Roger Hilsman, with Harriman’s support, drafted “the single most controversial cable” of the Vietnam War, miring Kennedy in a plot to overthrow Diem and creating a fundamental division in his administration.177 The cable’s genesis remains controversial because Hilsman claims that he sent a copy to Secretary Rusk, and that he strengthened it; however, Rusk denied that he had seen it or had modified it. Unfortunately, Rusk systematically destroyed many records and refused to make his personal records available. The cable was read to Kennedy by Forrestal and then began to be passed around like a hot potato, with different accounts of how it evolved. The cable reflected the desire of Hilsman and Forrestal to depose Diem and had the effect of forcing Kennedy into backing that action, though it went against his own intentions.178 The germ of this idea became established, and it grew over the next several weeks. The new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, did not think the Diem government was capable of handling itself any better than it had and complained that trying to fix it by getting rid of the Nhus would be regarded by the generals as “a sign of American indecision and delay.”179 Forrestal got Kennedy to endorse the telegram on the basis that all of his advisers had approved the wording for the telegram, which included this phrase: “We wish [to] give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove [the] Nhus, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem.” The coldest translation of this statement was that Kennedy had officially endorsed the removal of Diem if he failed to remove the Nhus.180 The cable was transmitted on Saturday, August 24.
By August of 1963, JFK had managed to keep Lyndon Johnson out of the Vietnam issue for over two years, by simply not inviting him to participate in meetings of his top advisers at the White House. Kennedy’s respite from Johnson’s presence at his deliberations on Vietnam was about to end, however; it came on a day, August 31, when Kennedy was at Hyannis Port and could not attend the meeting of this group. Taking advantage of that development, Lyndon Johnson, who had not attended these meetings for two years, was there, but he was not happy. He complained about having been left out of Vietnam planning and that he had not known about the “Saturday cable” until Tuesday evening. He said that the generals had failed to organize a coup, so he thought that ties to the Diem government should be reestablished as quickly as possible and then we should get on with fighting the war against the Vietcong. Johnson’s comments were “harsh and aggressive” and had a chilling effect on everyone else present.181 “‘We must establish ourselves,’ Johnson profoundly announced, ‘and stop playing cops and robbers.’”182 Johnson was simply against Kennedy’s conciliatory initiatives intended to democratize Vietnam, and in favor of whatever autocratic measures that might solidify the U.S. presence needed to take control over the country. Lyndon Johnson’s 1963 position on Vietnam could not have been more diametrically opposed to John F. Kennedy’s; undoubtedly, Johnson would have exploited their differences, using his military and intelligence contacts to muster whatever advantage he could.
Johnson’s role had surfaced momentarily, while Kennedy was out of town; when he returned, he told Walter Cronkite, in an interview on September 2, about why he could not continue supporting Diem: “Unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support [I don’t think] that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers … but in the final analysis it is their people and their government who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help.”183 Kennedy still hoped that they could persuade Diem to stop the repressive activities of his brother and sister-in-law, and repeatedly tried to get Lodge to keep trying this approach. But Lodge was completely out of step with Kennedy and becoming more aligned with Lyndon Johnson; he had divorced himself from his actual superiors, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, and the president, when he said, “The best chance of doing it is by the generals taking over the government lock, stock, and barrel … I am contemplating no further talks with Diem
at this time.”184 Henry Cabot Lodge had quickly established himself with the Vietnamese generals through longtime CIA operative Colonel Lucien Conine, who had known them for years. He also aligned himself with those who felt that the sooner the coup, the better. Secretary of State Rusk gave Ambassador Lodge “a free hand as long as the ambassador minimized ‘the appearance of collusion with the Generals.’ Certain that the ‘ship of state’ in Vietnam was ‘slowly sinking,’ Lodge saw a ‘drastic change in government’ as the only answer to the difficulties in South Vietnam.”185 Diem and Nhu escaped from the palace on a Friday night, eluding the soldiers surrounding it, and were driven by an aide to Cholon. It was there, at the home of a Chinese businessman, where Diem made his last phone call to Henry Cabot Lodge, asking him for the help he had promised in order to protect his “physical safety.” Lodge offered to give them asylum and do what he could for them, but declined an offer by his own assistant, Mike Dunn, to go to them and bring them back to the embassy, something that President Kennedy would have wanted them to do. Lodge said to Dunn, “We can’t. We just can’t get that involved.”186
On Saturday morning, November 2, Diem and Nhu left the house in Cholon to go to a nearby Catholic church. They had just taken communion when a convoy of two armed jeeps and an armored personnel carrier pulled up in front of the church, sent by General Minh. Based upon what Lodge had told Diem on the phone, he thought they were to be taken to the airport for a flight to another country. Unbeknownst to Diem was the fact that the CIA had no available aircraft capable of flying him far enough away for safe asylum, other than the Boeing 707 that was being held for Ambassador Lodge, of course. Diem and brother Nhu were led to the armored personnel carrier, protesting that it was unseemly for the president to travel in such a fashion when a simple car would do. General Minh’s personal bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, a professional assassin who had killed forty people, assisted them as they climbed aboard the vehicle then down the hatch. Major Duong Hieu Nghia shot them point-blank with his submachine gun while Captain Nhung sprayed them with bullets before using a knife on them.187
LBJ Page 19