2. THE DILEMMA OF LAOS
Prospects in South Vietnam, however, were favorable compared to those in Laos. This curious land of perhaps two million inhabitants—no one knew how many—lay between Vietnam and Thailand along the east bank of the Mekong River and wandered into mountains farther to the north. It was a state by diplomatic courtesy. Though a royal family sat in Luang Prabang, the Lao, a relaxed and lackadaisical people, lacked the nationalist frenzy; and the hill tribes, untouched by the revolution of rising expectations, hardly knew that they lived in a new nation or cared who their rulers might be. As Buddhists, the Lao favored contemplation and disliked killing. Their ambition was to be let alone to enjoy themselves. Politics was reserved for a small elite, largely related to each other, who had begun a movement for independence at the end of the Second World War. When the French came back in 1946, some of these went into exile. Most returned in 1949, except for Prince Souphanouvong who joined Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam and formed the Pathet Lao (“Land of the Lao”) to free Laos from the imperialists. His half brother Prince Souvanna Phouma soon became head of the regular government at Vientiane. In 1953 the Pathet Lao, with Viet Minh support, occupied two provinces in northeastern Laos. The Geneva Agreement now called for a ceasefire and for the reintegration of the Pathet Lao into what was optimistically termed the ‘national community.’ Provisions against foreign military aid and bases, even though qualified to permit exceptions for purposes of defense, implied a desire to keep Laos out of the cold war—a policy explicitly avowed by Prince Souvanna as prime minister.
But the Laotian ambition for a quiet life was to be further disturbed. For Laos had an evident strategic importance. If the Communists gained possession of the Mekong valley, they could materially intensify their pressure against South Vietnam and Thailand. If Laos was not precisely a dagger pointed at the heart of Kansas, it was very plainly a gateway to Southeast Asia. As the French prepared to depart, Dulles performed his usual incantations and devised a new military pact—the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—including three Asian states (Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines) with the United States, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand. A special protocol extended the protecting arm of the organization around South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Dulles plan for military containment required Laos to become a ‘bulwark against communism’ and a ‘bastion of freedom.’ As part of this program, Laos was expected to build an army of 25,000 men—a State Department idea which the Defense Department had originally opposed as ridiculous.
In pursuit of this dream, the United States flooded the wild and primitive land with nearly $300 million by the end of 1960. This amounted to $150 for every inhabitant—more aid per capita than any other country and almost double the previous per capita income of the Laotians. Eighty-five per cent of this went to pay the total bill for the Royal Laotian Army, which by 1959 was outfitted in American style with jeeps, trucks and a Transportation Corps (all despite the fact Laos had no all-weather roads), as well as an Ordnance Corps, a Quartermaster Corps and Military Police. When trained at all, and effective training did not begin till 1959, the Laotian troops learned, not counterguerrilla warfare, but conventional maneuvers. Of the $300 million, only $7 million went for technical cooperation and economic development.
It was a misbegotten investment. Laos simply did not have the national or social structure to absorb the remorseless flood of American bounty. Instead of lifting living standards or even producing military force, aid led to unimaginable bribery, graft, currency manipulation and waste. Expensive motor cars thronged the dusty streets of Vientiane. The Laotian officials themselves were demoralized, and the army officers, rejoicing in American patronage, grew increasingly involved in politics and graft. As money flowed into Vientiane, the gap widened between the capital and the countryside. The Pathet Lao, speaking out for virtue and the people, gathered strength in the villages. Prince Souvanna Phouma, seeking the reintegration of the dissidents, conducted long talks with his half brother. In November 1957 they finally negotiated the Vientiane Agreements providing for a neutral Laos under a coalition government. The Pathet Lao were to be incorporated in the army and the cabinet, Souphanouvong himself becoming Minister of Economic Planning (the other Pathet Lao post was Minister of Religion).
The Eisenhower administration watched the developments within its bastion with alarm. “I struggled for sixteen months,” the American Ambassador, J. Graham Parsons, later said, “to prevent a coalition.” In 1958 Washington decided to install a reliably prowestern regime. CIA spooks put in their appearance, set up a Committee for the Defense of the National Interests (CDNI) and brought back from France as its chief an energetic, ambitious and devious officer named Phoumi Nosavan. Prince Souvanna, who had shown himself an honest and respected if impulsive leader, was forced out of office; a veteran politician named Phoui Sananikoune took his place. In 1959 the State Department backed Phoui, but the CIA preferred Phoumi. The CIA station chief refused to follow the State Department policy or even to tell the Ambassador his plans and intentions. One Laotian leader complained to the Ambassador about American policy, “Since so many voices are heard, it is impossible to tell which has an authoritative ring.” When Phoui dismissed a CDNI leader as foreign minister and the CDNI seemed on the verge of falling apart, the CIA moved in to preserve its investment. Phoui was overthrown, and Phoumi now was in control. Prince Souphanouvong was in jail (from which, after winning over his guards, he soon escaped to the north). The Pathet Lao took to the hills and resumed the civil war.
During early 1960 Phoumi dominated non-communist Laos. Recognizing that Defense and CIA were committed to him, he felt free to ignore their advice, rigging the spring elections so blatantly, for example, that the results lacked any color of legitimacy. In August a new figure, who had neither a family tie to anyone nor a name like anyone else’s, entered the drama. Kong Le, a young paratroop captain, was a simple man, without ambition for himself, who wanted to end domestic corruption and foreign intervention and bring peace to his people. One day when most of the government was out of town he seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new government. Souvanna’s aim as ever was to establish a neutralist regime; and he sought a coalition with the right in order to bargain with the Pathet Lao. Winthrop Brown, who had recently arrived in Vientiane as American Ambassador, supported the idea of bringing Souvanna and Phoumi together. This obviously would mean a return to the Vientiane Agreements of 1957 and the end of the bastion-of-freedom dream. But Brown, a clearsighted and independent-minded man, doubted on the evidence that it would be possible to build a pro-western state in the jungles and mountains of Laos. The proper strategy, as he saw it, was to associate the neutralists and the anti-communists in the defense of a neutral Laos against the Pathet Lao.
A united embassy, including CIA, followed Brown in recommending that Washington accept the coalition. But Kong Le opposed the inclusion of Phoumi; and Phoumi himself began to play for United States backing. For its part, the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs in Washington considered Kong Le a probable communist and looked with great dubiety on the neutralist solution. Nowhere was the pure Dulles doctrine taken more literally than in this bureau. In 1953 the Republicans had purged it of the Foreign Service officers they held responsible for the ‘loss’ of China. Then they confided Far Eastern matters to a Virginia gentleman named Walter Robertson. Robertson, like Dulles, judged Chiang Kai-shek moral and neutralism immoral and established policy on those principles. His successor in 1959 was the J. Graham Parsons who had been applying those principles so faithfully in Laos.
As for the Defense Department, it was all for Phoumi. Possibly with encouragement from Defense and CIA men in the field, Phoumi took the Royal Laotian Army to Svannakhet in September, proclaimed a new government and denounced Souvanna. The Phoumi regime became the recipient of American military aid, while the Souvanna government in Vientiane continued to receive economic aid. Ambassador Brown still worked to bring them togethe
r, but the military support convinced Phoumi that, if he only held out, Washington would put him in power.
At the working level in Washington doubts were beginning to rise. Some people in State thought that a ‘military’ (i.e., Phoumi) solution would work only if in the end we were ready to send in American troops. If we were not ready to do this, then should we not try for a ‘political’ (i.e., Souvanna) solution? Defense backed away from the idea of American troops but not from Phoumi. The Eisenhower team concept required that State’s instructions be cleared through Defense, which led to long delays and sometimes contradictory instructions. As James Douglas, the Under Secretary of Defense, put it, “By the time a message to the field had been composed in Washington, it had ceased to be an operational order and had become a philosophical essay.” The British and French favored Souvanna and did not want SEATO involved in a fight to put Phoumi in power. President Diem in Vietnam and Marshal Sarit in Thailand favored Phoumi lest neutralization threaten their own lands; Sarit even imposed a blockade on goods to Vientiane.
In October Eisenhower dispatched J. Graham Parsons to Laos in a strange effort to straighten out the situation. Since Parsons had been identified with the previous humiliation of Souvanna (who regarded him as “the most reprehensible and nefarious of men” and “the ignominious architect of disastrous American policy toward Laos”), he was not perhaps the ideal envoy. He put intense pressure on Souvanna to forsake neutralism, accept Phoumi and make Laos a bastion of freedom again. Souvanna’s lack of enthusiasm about these suggestions confirmed Washington’s mistrust of him. In late October, a few days before the American election, State and Defense agreed that Souvanna must go, though they disagreed on how this should be accomplished. For his part, Souvanna not unnaturally took the Parsons mission to mean that Washington was preparing to dump him. In a last test, he asked the United States for rice and oil to relieve the needs created by the Thai blockade. When Washington refused, Souvanna turned to the Russians, who established an embassy in Vietnam and instituted an airlift from Hanoi—first rice and oil; later guns.
In December, a few weeks after the election, Phoumi marched on Vientiane and with plans drawn up by his American advisers won the only military victory of his life. Souvanna fled to Cambodia and soon after came to terms with Souphanouvong, while Kong Le and his troops, leaving Vientiane in American trucks loaded with American supplies, joined up with the Pathet Lao in the field. Moscow and Peking continued to recognize the Souvanna regime as the true government of Laos. Winthrop Brown’s hope of uniting the neutralists and the right against the communists had been thwarted. Instead, the Eisenhower administration, by rejecting the neutralist alternative, had driven the neutralists into reluctant alliance with the communists and provoked (and in many eyes legitimatized) open Soviet aid to the Pathet Lao. And all this was done without serious consultation with the incoming administration which would shortly inherit the problem.
The British, alarmed by this result, now bestirred themselves, sending a note to the Soviet Union in early January 1961 urging a revival of the International Control Commission in Laos. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia suggested a fourteen-nation conference. Belatedly aware that the United States was losing all international support (save for Thailand and South Vietnam), the State Department itself receded a little from the decisions of December. Officers down the line had discussed for some time the possibilities of neutralization. Now the Department said publicly that the United States “had no desire to establish a western military position in Laos” and expressed readiness to accept a revived ICC if the Laotians wanted it. In the meantime, in Laos itself the civil war had succumbed to the national indolence. Phoumi’s Royal Laotian Army let two weeks go by before taking out after the fleeing Kong Le. By the time of Kennedy’s inauguration, Phoumi’s men, having managed to cover sixty-five miles in twenty-nine days, were in the outskirts of Vang Vieng. They had successfully avoided contact with the enemy. Their only casualty was a lieutenant who accidentally shot himself in the foot.
3. THE RIDDLE OF INTERVENTION
The new President had a clear historical view of Laos. He thought that this was not a land “worthy of engaging the attention of great powers,’’ that the effort to transform it into a pro-western redoubt had been ridiculous and that neutralization was the correct policy. But he knew that the matter was not that simple any longer. For the effort had been made, American prestige was deeply involved, and extrication would not be easy. To strive now for neutralization it was essential to convince the Pathet Lao that they could not win and to dissuade the Russians from further military assistance. In view of the pacifist inclinations of the Royal Laotian Army, moreover, it would be hard to induce the Pathet Lao to call off the war. And Phoumi himself, still receiving American military assistance, supposed that Washington would back his regime to the end. This made him more defiant and unmanageable than ever. One American official observed that he was behaving like a kid out of West Side Story.
In his first press conference Kennedy announced his hope for the establishment of Laos as “a peaceful country—an independent country not dominated by either side.” This policy became an engrossing personal concern. In the first two months of his administration he probably spent more time on Laos than on anything else. Determined to lift the problem out of the slow-moving machinery of government, he established a Laos task force and sent word to the first meeting that he wanted daily reports on its progress. The change in Washington was instantly reflected in the instructions to the field. Instead of the confused and murky cables of a short while before, the embassy received straight orders and clear answers; Winthrop Brown later exclaimed with relief and admiration how much help it was “when the President is your desk officer.” Soon Brown himself came back for consultation and received the usual rapid-fire Kennedy interrogation. The President asked particularly about the dramatis personae—a sound instinct in a country where organization and ideology mattered little and where so much of past American error had arisen from misjudgments of Souvanna, Phoumi and Kong Le.
In early February Phoumi set out on a new campaign. Our military experts assured Kennedy that this would lead to the speedy recapture of the Plaine des Jarres in north central Laos. Instead, the Royal Laotian Army retreated after a series of skirmishes more bloody in communiqué than in fact. This fiasco confirmed Kennedy’s impression of Phoumi’s singular incompetence. He now decided that Laos must have a coalition of the sort that Eisenhower’s State Department had vetoed six months before. Brown still considered Souvanna the only possible leader. But Souvanna, bitter at his treatment by the Americans, had been traveling to Hanoi and later to Peking and Moscow. The State Department, having driven him to the communists, now flourished his itinerary as proof of his perfidy. In fact, Souvanna was pursuing the same neutralist course he had followed for a decade. “The Americans say I am a Communist,” he now said. “All this is heartbreaking. How can they think I am a Communist? I am looking for a way to keep Laos non-Communist.”
On the international front, Washington worked out an alternative to the ICC proposal, to which Moscow had not replied, in the form of an Asian commission, composed of Burma, Cambodia and Malaya, charged with investigating foreign intervention in Laos. On February 19 the King of Laos, who spent most of his time trying to stay out of politics, issued a statement, drafted in the State Department, declaring a policy of non-alignment, appealing to all countries to respect his nation’s independence and neutrality and asking his three neighbors to serve as guarantors. Cambodia (despite a personal letter from Kennedy to Prince Sihanouk) and Burma both declined, however, and in any case Moscow, Peking and Prince Scmphanouvong all attacked the plan.
In the meantime, the Soviet airlift was increasing the flow of arms and ammunition to the Pathet Lao. G. M. Pushkin, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, later told Averell Harriman that, apart from the Second World War, this was the highest priority Soviet supply operation since the Revolution. In early March the Pathet Lao were
ready to take the offensive. The Royal Laotian Army began a circumspect withdrawal, and the Mekong valley itself was threatened. The Pathet Lao attack put the crisis in bleak outline. The peace plan had failed, the pro-western Laotians were in retreat, the Russians were increasing their military support, the British and French were indifferent to everything except the thought of their own involvement, and the idea of an independent Laos seemed doomed.
There still remained the thin hope that the Russian interest sprang less from a desire to get in themselves than to keep the Chinese out and that they might eventually accept the policy of neutralization. But, as the Pathet Lao moved forward, it became a question whether Moscow could turn the local boys off even if it wanted to. In any case, the United States had no choice but to stiffen its position, whether in preparation for negotiation or for resistance. On March 9 the task force proposed stepping up military assistance to the Royal Laotian Army. On March 15 Kennedy told his press conference that “a small minority backed by personnel and supplies from outside” was trying to prevent the establishment of a neutral Laos; “we are determined to support the government and the people of Laos in resisting this attempt.” Three days later Dean Rusk made one more attempt to convince Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister, of America’s earnest desire for neutralization. Gromyko gave no ground, but Rusk may have got through better than he thought at the time. On March 20 Kennedy scheduled a National Security Council meeting on the problem.
He had asked me to join him earlier that day for luncheon with Walter Lippmann. Laos was much on his mind. He remarked a little dourly that the United States was overcommitted in Southeast Asia but that he had to deal with facts as they were. It was indispensable to prevent “an immediate communist takeover.” We must hold Vientiane in order to have a basis for negotiation. “We cannot and will not accept any visible humiliation over Laos.” On the other hand, Eisenhower’s recommendation for unilateral intervention was not militarily feasible on any major scale, and it could not command allied support. Moreover, it was hard to fight for a country whose people evidently could not care less about fighting for themselves. And it was also hard to understand why the United States had to take the responsibility. “I don’t see why we have to be more royalist than the king,” Kennedy said. “India is more directly threatened than we are; and, if they are not wildly excited, why should we be?” Nor could he see why the U.S.S.R. would not accept neutralization; “they are much better equipped to fight within a neutralized Laos than we are.” At one point he said ruefully, “If I decided to do nothing, I could be an exceedingly popular President.”
A Thousand Days Page 40
