The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  In August the president scribbled notes to himself for a speech he was to make to a White House seminar. “To govern is to choose,” he wrote, quoting the French leader Pierre Mendes France. That was precisely the nature of presidential power, expressed as succinctly as possible. The implacable riddles of policy reached his desk, issues on which knowledgeable advisers disagreed, decisions fraught with negative side effects. He looked at each matter like an assayer, weighing all the possibilities, observing the subtleties. Knowing the danger that Vietnam represented politically, he would have delightedly willed it to lie dormant until after his reelection. He was trying not to be sucked into the swamp of Vietnam while not abandoning the beleaguered country in such a way that shouts of betrayal and curses of recrimination would sound through the rest of his presidency.

  That summer the president apparently suggested to several people, including Larry Newman, a Hyannis Port neighbor, and Dave Powers, that he planned to withdraw from Vietnam after his 1964 reelection. As much as his auditors thought otherwise, this plan hardly presented as flattering a portrait of their hero as they imagined. If true, Kennedy was willing to let American soldiers die needlessly for over a year because the delay would help his campaign. In all likelihood, Kennedy told his neighbor and Powers what flattered their own desires, and part of his own instincts. The president understood, however, that history can’t be stopped and started at will. Wide and treacherous water may lie between what one hopes to do and what one can do when time and circumstances allow.

  Kennedy faced crucial choices now, and he faced them as he had all the major decisions in the White House, parsing the issue back and forth half a dozen ways. He took a few tentative steps one way and then back the other. On September 2, Kennedy gave a lengthy interview on the first half-hour-long CBS evening news program. The journalist Walter Cronkite quizzed the president about “the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment.” In full public view, Kennedy walked backward and forward at the same time. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there,” he said. “In the final analysis, it is their war.” This was Kennedy’s philosophical underpinning. In Vietnam as elsewhere, a man who lets others fight for his own liberty often ends up being shackled anew, and the man who fights for him risks becoming not his liberator but his keeper.

  Then, after stepping back from involvement, Kennedy moved forward. “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw,” he told the CBS anchor. “That would be a grave mistake…. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.” There was his political underpinning. After all these years, the domino effect was not just a geopolitical theory but a fundamental axiom of American political life. An American leader who lost even a small, distant, corrupt, tortured land to a regime that carried the banner of communism risked losing his own political head as well. This was the President Kennedy who Bobby said in 1964 “felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.”

  In October, Kennedy performed the same dance as he had in the CBS interview. In signing on to national security action memorandum no. 263, he agreed to “plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” There was the step backward. But he did so only because Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor had assured him that “the military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought,” and that “by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn.” That was the step forward. By attempting to have it both ways, Kennedy was beginning the Vietnamization of the war long before that term became common currency.

  The immediate problem was Diem and his brother Nhu, who had proved so ineffectual at leading their war-torn nation. And here too Kennedy walked in both directions. In this crisis, Kennedy did not have many advisers who made articulate, spirited presentations based on the knowledge of their agency or institution. Instead, he was overseeing a petty, preening bureaucratic warfare in which egos and personal ambitions outweighed the crucial issues that his administration faced. He had sent Henry Cabot Lodge as ambassador to Vietnam, hoping that the former senator would show the acumen of a professional politician. Instead, Nixon’s vice presidential running mate became so alienated from the American military that he hardly spoke to them and secretly backstabbed his colleagues in Vietnam. Lodge had a savage realism when he talked of Diem, speaking a language rare to diplomatic discourse. “Viet-Nam is not a thoroughly strong police state (much as the ‘family’ would like to make it one),” he cabled Washington on October 26, “because, unlike Hitler’s Germany, it is not efficient and it has in the Viet Cong a large and well-organized underground opponent strongly and ever-freshly motivated by vigorous hatred. And its numbers never diminish.”

  Lodge made sure that his own stories got into American papers, but he was appalled at the way Diem, and especially his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, gnawed publicly at the hand that fed them. “The United States can get along with corrupt dictators who manage to stay out of the newspapers,” Lodge wrote later. “But an inefficient Hitlerism, the leaders of which make fantastic statements to the press, is the hardest thing on earth for the U.S. Government to support.”

  Lodge called for a coup, as did several of his colleagues at the State Department, including Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman. CIA Director McCone would probably have supported the move as well, but in Bobby’s words, “McCone hated Henry Cabot Lodge, and so he became an ally of McNamara,” who opposed the coup. In essence, the government was split into two unlikely divisions: the State Department favoring the coup, and the CIA and the military leadership opposing it. Those who favored the coup, like Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, tried to convince the president that the die had been cast and Kennedy had no choice but to go along. On August 28, Hilsman told the president that “Diem and Nhu were undoubtedly aware that coup plotting was going on and that the generals probably now had no alternative to going ahead except that of fleeing the country.” Kennedy, for his part, said he “was not sure that we were in that deep.”

  Kennedy was infuriated that he was losing the control of government, and he suspected Harriman of leaking stories of this schism. “You’d better get Averell in, for Christ sake,” Kennedy told Undersecretary George Ball. “The fact of the matter is that Averell was wrong on the coup. We fucked that up. Even though it may have been desirable, so that the Pentagon can go on saying the State Department fucked it up, got us into a lot of trouble, so I think there’s nobody in the position to be pointing the finger at anybody else.”

  On October 29, Lodge told the White House that a coup was in place, to be led by dissident generals, and that the United States should do nothing to prevent it. That day in the counsels of government, Kennedy and his associates discussed a possible coup with the hard-edged logic of those serving an imperial power. No one uttered any bromides about trying to help their Asian brothers find the true light of democracy. Nor did they trouble themselves over the question of whether there was a capable leader to replace Diem. Instead, they counted potential coup leaders and their troops, tallying up who would stand with Diem and who would stand against him. “The key units come out about an even match,” William Colby, the CIA’s former Saigon bureau chief, told the president and his other advisers at the Ex Comm meeting that afternoon. “There’s enough, in other words, to have a good fight on both sides.”

  “So he [Diem] has sufficient forces to protect himself?” Bobby asked, only half a question. What these men were talking about could easily escalate into a civil war, brother against brother, while the Viet Cong stood by as happy spectators.

  “The difficulty is, I’m sure that’s t
he way it is with every coup, it always looks balanced until somebody acts,” the president said a few minutes later, lighting the tedious discourse with a flash of insight. Kennedy’s overwhelming concern, as he expressed it here and in a subsequent meeting, was whether the coup would succeed, not whether his nation should be promoting or acquiescing in such an action, or whether it would change the dynamics in South Vietnam for the better.

  For the most part, this room was full of men acting as technocrats of power, tinkering with formulas, moving their pieces back and forth across their chessboard without seeming to realize that each piece represented a real human being. As they discussed a cable giving Lodge further instructions, Bobby’s voice rose above the banal talk about tank battalions and paratroopers to say something that struck hard and true.

  “I may be in a minority, but I just don’t see that this makes any sense, Mr. President,” Bobby said, employing the same deferential formality as the rest of the officials, but speaking with forceful candor. “What we are doing really is we’re putting the whole future of the country, and Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody [General Tran Van Don] we really don’t know very well. One official of the United States government has had contact with him, and he in turn has lined up some others. It’s clear that Diem is a fighter. He’s not just going to get out of there. If it’s a failure, Diem is going to tell us to get the hell out of the country. He’s going to capture these people. They’re going to say the United States is behind it. I would think we’re just going down the road to disaster. I think this cablegram sounds as if we’re willing to go along with the coup but we think we need a little more information.”

  The first of November is La fete des morts, the Day of the Dead, or All Saints’ Day. It also happened to be the thirty-sixth birthday of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, a senior naval officer loyal to Diem. At around noon his deputy came by his house in Saigon and got him to leave his children to go to a seaside restaurant for a birthday luncheon. On the drive through the suburbs of Saigon, the deputy shot and killed the captain.

  Soon afterward the dissident generals ordered their troops to seize police and naval headquarters, radio stations, and the post office, and to surround Gia Long Palace. The generals took one of their prisoners, Colonel Le Van Tung, head of the notorious Special Forces, and had him telephone Diem to tell him to surrender. The Vietnamese leader refused to give up, and after the phone call Tung and his brother were led away and killed.

  In the middle of the night the insurgents attacked the palace. By dawn the battle was over, but Diem and Nhu had escaped to the Chinese quarters of Chalon. Diem probably could have fled farther into the countryside and sought to rally his own loyalist troops, but he decided instead to surrender. He called General Don and told him that he was prepared to surrender to his troops with “military honors.” He said to those who were harboring him that he did not care whether he lived or died. But he knew these generals as his lifelong colleagues, and he surely expected that they would treat him better than if he had the terrible misfortune of falling into the hands of his Communist enemies.

  General Don was not a bloodthirsty avenger. He and his colleagues asked the CIA’s Lucien Conein for a plane to fly Diem out of the country, and Conein said that it would take twenty-four hours for a plane to fly from Guam that could carry the former president to exile in Europe. A man could die many times in twenty-four hours. It was not that the Americans wanted Diem to die, but they did not care if he lived.

  In all those endless hours of discussion in the White House, no one had ever raised the question of Diem’s fate in a successful coup. A top-secret October 25 State Department “Check-List of Possible U.S. Actions in Case of Coup” mentioned financial inducements to the coup plotters and military aid, but nothing of what might happen to Diem. This was not an esoteric moral subtlety best left to religious philosophers and college dons, but an essential part of the equation of power. These men had met the South Vietnamese president, and some had spent hours with him. Diem could have been fervently pushed to go into exile on his own and warned that if he did not, all American support would end. Of course, that strategy would have run the risk that Diem would fill the streets of Saigon with the blood of those who dared to oppose him.

  Kennedy had learned that language was the bearer of power, and his precise words were the best way to contain his subordinates’ actions. In this instance, he gave no clear directive. There are few things more dangerous than powerful men who think that they have covered all contingencies when they have merely justified what they want to see happen. Kennedy had repeatedly said that if the coup started, it had to succeed. Hilsman took that as his mandate. He let Saigon know that if Nhu and his family were “taken alive, [they] should be banished to France or any other country willing to receive them,” but they could not be allowed to stay in Southeast Asia. That was justification for not flying Diem immediately to Bangkok or some other nearby city where he and his brother could have waited to board a flight to Europe. This did not mean that Hilsman was concerned about whether Diem and Nhu lived. “Diem should be treated as the generals wish,” he wrote in his memorandum on August 30.

  Diem was learning a lesson that many have learned. At times it was almost as dangerous to be a friend of the United States as to be its enemy, for the Americans often saw friendship as a one-sided contract that had to be filled by an endless array of deeds and that they could summarily cancel.

  Diem was a man of ritual, both public and private, and though he said that he did not care if he lived or died, he wanted to be treated with the honor of his status. He was upset when the soldiers arrived at the church in Chalon where he had sought refuge and asked him to get into an army personnel carrier, not into a car worthy of the president of South Vietnam. He and his brother lowered their heads to enter the vehicle. Then their hands were tied behind their backs and the door was shut. When the vehicle arrived at joint general staff headquarters, the door was open. Diem and Nhu were still there, but they had both been shot to death, and Nhu had been stabbed as well.

  “It’s hard to believe he’d commit suicide given his strong religious career,” Kennedy said half to himself soon after the generals announced that Diem had killed himself. Catholics believe that eternal damnation is God’s judgment on those who end their own lives, and he knew that Diem was a man of profound faith.

  “He’s Catholic, but he’s an Asian Catholic,” Hilsman said.

  “What?” Kennedy asked. It may have been that the president was off somewhere in his own thoughts at the Ex Comm meeting on November 2. It was also true that when someone said something especially stupid, the president often asked him to repeat it.

  “He’s an Asian Catholic, and not only that, he’s a mandarin. It seems to me not at all inconsistent with Armageddon.”

  “There’re several different reports here, Mr. President,” Bundy said, having heard enough of this sophomoric digression. He then went on to read an eyewitness report that both Diem and Nhu were dead and had clearly been assassinated. Bundy also read a second report saying the two men had poisoned themselves in the Chalon Catholic church.

  Whatever words these men spoke this day, the first order of business was to convince themselves that they could not be rightfully accused either of having ordered the assassination or of creating the climate that felled Diem and Nhu. They had to make themselves believe that they were innocent. Rusk was obviously the most worried about these accusations, and he sought to convince his colleagues before they could convince the world.

  “I think our press problem is likely to be pinpointed upon U.S. involvement, and we need to get that straightened out,” the secretary of State said. “The fact is, we were not privy to this plan in the sense that we really didn’t know what they were going to do…. The fact that the coup was reported and rumored is not basically different in character than things that have been happening over the last several months…. It would be to our interest to indicate that this was Vietnamese and that w
e were not participants in the coup and try to keep that gap as clear as we can.”

  Kennedy listened to Rusk’s quasi-dissembling, the words set forth in tedious monologue, devoid of affect, so boring that he did not so much win his arguments as numb his opponents into concession. When the secretary of State finally finished, Kennedy found himself asking questions that should have been asked weeks before. “I think one of the problems … is how we square a military revolt against a constitutionally elected government which we approve as opposed to our position on Honduras and the Dominican. How do we square that?” Kennedy had aides who could square anything, and though they had their answers, the overwhelming question still hung there.

  The cabinet officers and other high officials twisted and turned, trying to assure one another that they had done everything possible to get Diem to seek reforms before seeking other ways to remove him, and that they had no complicity in his death. But they were like men standing in front of a small fire on a frigid day: no matter how they turned, they could never quite warm themselves.

  “About this suicide, I’ve brought this to your attention only because there is some question in some of our minds how much we want to know about this, sir, suicide versus assassination,” Hilsman said. The undersecretary may have been a man of bombastic public presentation, but he understood the uses of euphemism and gentle suggestion. He also understood that the ground on which he stood could cave beneath him. The press was already writing about a memo Hilsman had written that the reporters took as giving the generals permission to proceed. He had indeed, at the time of the Buddhist protests, given the embassy in Saigon a secret order approved by the president to “tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [in the] central government.”