Since the time of Franklin Roosevelt American policy had had a nominal commitment to anti-colonialism. But the State Department had been dominated by men who, regarding NATO as our top priority, flinched from anything which might bruise the sensibilities of our European allies, some of whom still had colonial possessions. Even in those parts of the Department presumably devoted to the business of the developing world, the aim of helping the new nations meet their problems jostled uneasily with pressure to defend the sanctity of American overseas investment. Such tensions had prevented the formation of a clear American position.
In the December preceding Kennedy’s inauguration, forty-three Asian and African states had submitted to the General Assembly a resolution on “the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples.” The resolution declared that “all peoples have the right of self-determination,” that “inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence” and that “immediate steps shall be taken” in all non-self-governing territories “to transfer all powers to the peoples of those Territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will.”
While the language of the resolution was sweeping, its practical implications, as the debate made clear, were limited. It was less a plea for immediate action than for an affirmation of purpose, and it had actually been worked out by the American delegation with Afro-Asian representatives in order to head off a more demagogic Soviet proposal. Our delegation even had the concurrence of the State Department in Washington in its desire to vote for the resolution. But the British were opposed, and Harold Macmillan called Eisenhower by transatlantic telephone to request American abstention. When an instruction to abstain arrived from the White House, James J. Wadsworth, then our ambassador to the UN, tried to reach Eisenhower to argue the case. Eisenhower declined to accept his call. Wadsworth loyally defended the American abstention in the General Assembly; but, when the resolution passed by 89–0, eight other nations joining the United States in abstaining, an American Negro delegate actually stood up and led the applause. Senator Wayne Morse, another delegate, later condemned the United States decision and declared that “on every major issue of colonialism at the 15th General Assembly, our voting record shows that we rejected our own history, and allowed the Communist bloc to champion the cause of those millions of people who are trying to gain independence.”
In February the session of the General Assembly resumed with Adlai Stevenson as ambassador. Almost immediately the new administration was confronted by a new colonial issue. For some time the nationalist forces in Angola had been in revolt against the Portuguese authorities. Of all the classical colonial countries, Portugal was far the most impervious to the winds of change. Indeed, the Salazar government, hopelessly anchored in its medieval certitudes, had been the real if unstated target of the December resolution. Now, as the fighting in Angola grew more fierce and sustained, Liberia placed before the Security Council a resolution calling on Portugal to comply with UN policy against colonialism and proposing a UN inquiry into the situation. This resolution incorporated by reference the anti-colonialism resolution of December.
Stevenson and Kennedy both saw the opportunity to intimate a change in American policy. The U.S. Mission to the UN, along with Harlan Cleveland and Wayne Fredericks, the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, laid the groundwork for action. There was token opposition from the Europeanists at State; but Kennedy took care that everything should be done with due concern for the feelings of Portugal and the solidarity of NATO. Salazar was informed of the American intention a week before the vote. Stevenson put the case politely in debate, arguing that America “would be remiss in its duties as a friend of Portugal” if it failed to encourage the step-by-step advancement of all inhabitants under Portuguese administration toward full self-determination. The resolution failed in the Security Council, but the new administration was now free of automatic identification with colonialism.
As troubles mounted in Angola, the same resolution came before the General Assembly a month later and this time passed with American support. Our UN votes produced anti-American riots, in Lisbon and a mild surge of criticism in the United States. The New York foreign policy crowd feared that Kennedy was opening a gap in the Atlantic Alliance. Unimpressed by such reactions, Kennedy had authorized a White House statement two days after the first vote pointing out that the decision had not been taken in haste and that our NATO allies had been notified in advance. In the third world the new administration was acclaimed as the friend of oppressed peoples.
For a moment the Bay of Pigs compromised the new American role, but, curiously, only for a moment—partly because it was over so quickly that impressions did not have time to crystallize, and partly because, as Sihanouk said later, hopes were actually “increased by the President’s statesmanlike handling of the crisis.” Kennedy’s “refusal to involve American armed forces directly in an attack on a neighboring country,” Sihanouk later said, “despite a great public outcry by reactionary elements urging this course of action, showed him to be a man of rectitude and courage.” J. K. Galbraith, our new ambassador to New Delhi, reported the same reaction from India.
3. KENNEDY AND NEUTRALISM: LAOS
While these early moves were showing the third world a new American attitude toward colonialism, Kennedy was demonstrating in Laos a new American support of neutralism.
The Laos talks had started in Geneva following the cease-fire of early May 1961. The conference opened in a contentious atmosphere. The Russians insisted that the Pathet Lao be seated on a basis of equality with the representatives of Prince Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist, and General Phoumi, the protégé of the Eisenhower administration, and the British were ready to go along. But the Americans objected at first, and everything seemed blocked. When Rusk, with Kennedy’s approval, finally consented to seating the Pathet Lao, the right-wing delegates walked out. Eventually the three Laotian factions met in Laos and agreed on triple representation.
After a few days Rusk returned to Washington, leaving Averell Harriman in charge. Harriman set to work in characteristic style. He looked first at the American delegation. It consisted incredibly of 126 people, and some of the top officers were evidently out of sympathy with the neutralization idea. Harriman preferred both small staffs and people who agreed with the policy. Finally he reached down to a Class III Foreign Service officer, a young man named William H. Sullivan, whom he had found not only a proficient draftsman but a strong backer of the Kennedy effort, and asked him to recommend how the delegation could be reduced. Sullivan, feeling very bold, suggested that it be cut by half. Harriman told him to cut it by two-thirds and took particular pleasure in collapsing the oversized military complement to a colonel and a sergeant. When Harriman then informed the State Department that he wanted Sullivan as his deputy, State replied that, as a Class III officer, Sullivan could not be put over the Class I and II officers already on the delegation. Harriman’s solution was simple: send the men who outranked Sullivan home.
The Geneva meeting recessed while Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna. Laos was, of course, the sole beneficiary of their conversations, and the talks resumed in June, spurred on by the Kennedy-Khrushchev commitment to “a neutral and independent Laos under a government chosen by the Laotians themselves.” Harriman now plunged into the serious stretch of negotiation. As he saw it, the neutralization policy confronted several obstacles: the Chinese, who wanted the Pathet Lao to win; the Pathet Lao, who hoped to evade the cease-fire and complete the conquest of the country; General Phoumi, who could not believe that Washington was serious about neutralization; and a few people in the State Department, who still considered neutralization a mistake.
The State Department, in fact, was only beginning to recuperate from John Foster Dulles’s attack of pactomania. In July, for example, the Department actually reproved Galbraith in New Delhi for suggesting
to Nehru that the United States was not trying to collect new military allies in Southeast Asia. The Department had better understand, Galbraith replied, in his customary vein, that acceptance of neutrality in Laos or for that matter in India did represent a change in policy from those days when the United States was forming alliances and proclaiming the immorality of neutralism. To advance this understanding, he helpfully passed along page references to the “winning candidate’s” views on SEATO and CENTO* in the compilation of Kennedy’s foreign policy speeches, The Strategy of Peace. He added that military alliances with inefficient and unpopular governments involved grave dangers, especially that of converting legitimate anti-government sentiment into anti-American and pro-Soviet sentiment. “To trade strong neutrality for weak alliances is obviously foolish. . . . At all times we must see the reality and not, as in the manner of our predecessors, be diverted by the words.”
In a similar spirit of devotion to the past, the Department refused to let Harriman talk even informally with the Chinese delegates at the Geneva conference. At the end of July Galbraith wrote me from Geneva, where he had made a brief trip to bring himself abreast of the negotiations. The argument against contact with the Chinese Communists, Galbraith said, is “that if Sarit, Diem and Chiang Kai-shek were to hear, these noble men would think they were being undermined. . . . All this makes Harriman’s task exceedingly difficult and not a little humiliating. Back of it all is only the mindless reluctance to change—and the wish to see foreign relations as a minuet. . . . He has no way of reassuring the Chinese even on minor points, and of course they are naturally suspicious. This is our most experienced and least illusioned negotiator with Communists from Stalin on.” Galbraith concluded: “Harriman is going to talk about [his instructions] with Rusk next Friday in Paris but a word from the White House would be most helpful.’’ When I mentioned the problem to Kennedy, he responded wearily as if to one more example of official idiocy and sent word along that Harriman was responsible enough to talk with whomever he saw fit.
Harriman was determined to keep the talks in low key: he saw no advantage in turning the conference into a shouting match. But the negotiations proved long and tortuous. By mid-September agreement had been reached on only a few of the thirty-three critical items. Then he proposed a series of informal meetings, away from a fixed agenda and daily press briefings. Though the United States had few tangible bargaining assets, Harriman had skill, persistence and cool logic, and he conceived his task in terms not of victory but of settlement. In time, his perseverance began to have effect. G. M. Pushkin, the Soviet representative, finally agreed that Moscow would assume responsibility for the observance of the agreement by the communist signatories; and then both Russia and China agreed that, while recommendations by the International Control Commission had to be unanimous, the minority could not veto majority reports on questions of the violation of the agreement. They agreed further to prohibit the entrance of foreign troops and the use of Laos as a corridor into South Vietnam. By early December the conference completed a draft Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos.
The problem remained of establishing a government of national union. Harriman’s belief that Souvanna was the only possible head of a coalition displeased the diehards in Washington. The deputy chief of the Far Eastern Bureau snapped, after reading one Harriman telegram, “Well, I suppose the next one will be signed Pushkin.” As late as November, when Harriman was trying to organize the coalition, some of our people actually urged Phoumi to hold out for both key ministries of defense and interior. This only reinforced Phoumi’s stubbornness. In December negotiations broke down. Though the Geneva conference persuaded the Laotians to resume talks in January 1962, and Harriman finally got the State Department to say publicly that defense and interior should go to Souvanna, Phoumi continued his resistance.
But Harriman persevered. “He’s putting together a New York state balanced ticket,” the President said one day. “He’s doing a good job.” In February 1962 Averell got Washington to suspend the monthly grant of $3 million which enabled the Phoumi regime to meet its military and civilian payrolls, and in March he went to Laos to tell Phoumi personally that he must accept the Souvanna solution. Speaking with brutal frankness, Harriman informed Phoumi that he could not expect American troops to come to Laos and die for him and that the only alternative to a neutral Laos was a communist victory. Phoumi was still unyielding until April, when the Thai government, which had hitherto backed him, accepted the Harriman logic and urged him to join a government under Souvanna.
No sooner had Phoumi declared a readiness to negotiate than the Pathet Lao broke the cease-fire in a major way. On May 6, with North Vietnamese support, they seized the town of Nam Tha, where Phoumi had imprudently deployed a substantial force. The engagement was, as usual, almost bloodless. The Royal Laotian Army fled, and the communists appeared to be starting a drive toward the Thai border. This flagrant violation of the cease-fire brought a prompt reaction in Washington. Harriman now proposed that a contingent of Marines be sent to Thailand. Kennedy was at first reluctant, fearing that once the Marines were installed in Thailand it would be difficult to find an occasion to withdraw them, but decided to go ahead. The commitment of limited force on May 15 had an immediate effect. The Pathet Lao came to a halt, and negotiations started up again. In Washington Harriman called in the Laotian Ambassador and said that, if the coalition were not immediately completed, it would be the end of Phoumi. When this word reached Vientiane, Phoumi, whose power had vanished with his army, capitulated. On June 12 a coalition government was formed with Souvanna as prime minister and Phoumi and Prince Souphanouvong of the Pathet Lao as vice premiers.
The trouble was not yet over. For a moment South Vietnam threatened to walk out of the Geneva conference. When Michael Forrestal, who covered Southeast Asia for the Bundy staff, reported this from Geneva, the President sent a strong letter to Diem saying that this was a decision involving American lives, it was the best possible solution and it would be in the interests of South Vietnam. On July 23 the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos was finally ratified in Geneva. Kennedy described it as “a heartening indication that difficult and at times seemingly insoluble international problems can in fact be solved by patient diplomacy.” If the settlement could be made to work, “it would encourage us to believe that there has been a change in the atmosphere, and that other problems also could be subjected to reason and solution.”
The settlement did not ‘work’ in the sense that the signatories observed the Geneva declaration. Coalition might have had a chance at the time of the Vientiane Agreement of 1957; but the Eisenhower administration had killed the idea then and again in 1960. In 1962 coalition labored under terrific disadvantages which had not existed five years earlier—the Pathet Lao army, no longer an ill-equipped rabble of 1800 men, now had 20,000 soldiers armed with Soviet weapons; Pathet Lao ministers now controlled not just Economic Planning but Information, Transport and Public Works; and there was a Soviet Embassy in Vientiane. In addition, Hanoi was now deeply committed to the policy of supplying the Viet Cong rebels in South Vietnam through the Laos corridor.
As a result, the Geneva settlement on Laos never went into effect. The Pathet Lao representatives soon withdrew from Vientiane and resumed their effort to take over the country by force; the International Control Commission failed to close the corridor to South Vietnam or otherwise assure neutralization; and Laos fell into a state of de facto partition. The Soviet Union did not—perhaps could not—fulfill its pledge to secure compliance by the communist states. In 1961 and 1962 Kennedy often seized the opportunity in a speech or press conference to remind the world that Khrushchev had promised his support to the neutralization of Laos, and this intermittent needling had intermittent effect. As late as 1963, when Soviet influence in Southeast Asia was in decline, Kennedy sent Harriman to Moscow to recall Khrushchev to his pledge. Khrushchev seemed bored by the subject and asked Harriman irritably why Washington bothered so much abo
ut Laos. But in the next weeks the attitude of the Soviet Ambassador in Vientiane markedly improved.
Yet, despite the systematic violation of the Geneva Agreement, the new policy brought clear gains. The Kennedy strategy ended the alliance between the neutralists and the Pathet Lao. Souvanna, Kong Le and other neutralist leaders became, as Winthrop Brown and Harriman had foreseen, the defenders of Laotian independence no longer against the United States but now against communism. The result was to localize the crisis, stop an imminent communist take-over, place the Pathet Lao in the role of breakers of the peace, block the southward expansion of China and win the American position international support. By 1965, General Phoumi, after the failure of his last intrigue, had fled the country; William Sullivan was now American Ambassador in Vientiane; and Souvanna Phouma was receiving active American assistance in Laos and stoutly supporting American policy in South Vietnam.
The result expressed Kennedy’s ability to see the world in terms more complex and realistic than total victory or total defeat. Laos was neither won nor lost, but it was removed from the area of great-power confrontation. The Laos experiment illustrated both the advantages and problems of neutrality.
4. KENNEDY AND NEUTRALISM: BELGRADE
Washington’s tolerance of neutralism was not based on any sort of New Statesman belief in the moral superiority of neutrals. The President was entirely unsentimental in this respect. But in the case of Laos he saw no other way out, and, with his understanding of the historical inevitability of neutralist attitudes, he was quite prepared, when feasible, to build neutralism as an alternative to communist expansion. Moreover, he had no doubt about the value to the United States of neutralist support in the various disputes with the Soviet Union.
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