Khrushchev and McCloy swimming at Sochi, U.S.S.R.
Reunion at the Brink
In the long shadows of an early summer’s evening in June of 1961, Kennedy’s young lieutenants briskly filed into the White House for a meeting of the National Security Council. “The long twilight struggle” had flared on two fronts, in Laos and Berlin. An air of crisis pervaded; the new President was pressed to give meaning to the expansive rhetoric of his inaugural address, his promise to “pay any price, bear any burden” to “assure the survival and success of liberty.”
Two elderly gentlemen moved at a more stately pace in the damp heat of summer. Both were tall, taller than the earnest young men who had preceded them, and only slightly bowed in their late sixties, their sixth decade of friendship. Reporters standing outside heard Averell Harriman say, “It seems like old times, Dean,” as he put his arm around Dean Acheson’s shoulder and stepped by the marine guards into the inner sanctum of the West Wing.
Kennedy inherited his global commitments from the foreign policy Establishment he revered, so it is not surprising that in attempting to meet them he turned to Acheson and Harriman for advice. The two old men were not merely advisers in these early crises, however. In both Berlin and Laos, the dominating players were not the best and brightest of Kennedy’s “new generation,” but the aging war-horses of Harry Truman’s old one. Yet Acheson and Harriman returned to power by different routes, and not as allies but as rivals: Acheson by invitation, as a hawk backing military force in Berlin; Harriman by insinuation, urging peaceful diplomacy for Laos.
On the eve of his inaugural, at a meeting set up by the ubiquitous Clark Clifford, Kennedy discussed with Eisenhower the “crisis points” of the world. The outgoing President warned his successor that Southeast Asia was tottering, and that Laos was the “key.” If the Communists took Laos, Eisenhower added, they would bring “unbelievable pressure” on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.
The Eisenhower Administration had already poured money into Laos, some $300 million, or about $150 for every inhabitant, twice the annual per capita income. The investment was a poor one; Laotian generals stole most of the money. Meanwhile, the Communist Pathet Lao were taking over the countryside. Because Dulles believed neutralism to be immoral, the U.S. had wrecked attempts to create a nonaligned regime. The CIA had backed a coup against a neutralist government under Prince Souvanna Phouma and replaced him with a politician named Phoui Sananikone. The agency then dredged up from France a Laotian military officer named Phoumi Nosavan. Phoumi overthrew Phoui, which, as George Ball points out, “could have been either a significant event or a typographical error.” Phoumi was in turn overthrown by a young paratrooper named Kong Le. The Defense Department and the CIA continued to back Phoumi. Squinty-eyed, with a big affable smile, Phoumi was a dubious ally; he had refused to go to the capital for his swearing in because a soothsayer foresaw his violent death.
In early February, as the New Frontiersmen were still moving into their offices, Phoumi’s army, with CIA support, set out to conquer Kong Le’s men. Kong Le, who had sided with the Communist Pathet Lao, held fast, however, and Phoumi’s men broke and ran on the Plain of Jars.
To the Administration, this “Kung Fu movie,” as Ball described it, was a serious crisis. It loomed as the first test of flexible response, of the capacity to fight small brush-fire wars. Walt Rostow, a former MIT professor who had been attacked by the McCarthyites in the early fifties as a Communist sympathizer, showed he was quite the opposite by recommending the air and sea lift of twenty-five thousand U.S. combat troops into the Mekong Delta. At the first meeting on the crisis, Defense Secretary McNamara suggested arming half a dozen AT-6s (old World War II fighters) with hundred-pound bombs and dropping them on the Communists. The Joint Chiefs were more realistic about Asian land wars: they wanted to go in with 250,000 men.
The President, however, was dubious. He had little desire to get tied up in a war in Laos. He hoped that the British would revive an earlier plan for an International Control Commission (ICC) to peacefully settle the dispute. At his urging, talks were scheduled in Geneva for May.
In early April, Averell Harriman was on an airplane bound for a CENTO meeting in Turkey when Dean Rusk told him to go on to Laos to prepare for the Geneva talks. Harriman dutifully went to the American PX in Ankara, bought an ill-fitting summer suit, and embarked on an eleven-day trip through southeast Asia. It was like the old wartime missions, except that he was almost twenty years older: he slept four nights in an airplane and visited seven different capitals. Landing in Vientiane, he found Laos in chaos, on the verge of falling to the Communists. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was already there. Lemnitzer persuaded Harriman to join him in signing a cable calling for a small-scale intervention of U.S. troops.
The hawkish impulse was Harriman’s last, provoked by his admiration for Lemnitzer and the panicked atmosphere of Vientiane. But Harriman was not an orthodox Cold Warrior bent on proving his toughness. From then on, he was to favor diplomacy over force of arms in Southeast Asia. His search for a political solution in Laos began almost immediately, on a side trip to New Delhi.
On his own, without State Department authorization, he sought out Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist Laotian prince who had been driven from the country by the CIA-backed coup during the Eisenhower Administration. French-educated, dandified, and opinionated, Souvanna was nonetheless a gentleman and a patriot. Harriman, who made up his mind quickly about people, sensed almost immediately that he could deal with Souvanna. The arrogant prince seemed to be the answer, the way to avoid fighting a brutal little war in Laos. Souvanna convinced Harriman that he did not want Laos to go Communist but rather to be a neutral country.
Harriman returned to Washington invoking Souvanna’s name as the solution. The State Department was skeptical; still traumatized by the Dulles era, the careerists were suspicious of the Laotian prince, who had once traveled to Moscow and Peking. Rusk was no help. Harriman convinced Souvanna that he should come to Washington in late April to make his case in person, but the Secretary of State snubbed him. He said he had a speaking engagement in Georgia.
Harriman was further convinced that the Soviets wanted a peaceful settlement in Laos, that they did not wish to involve themselves in an Asian war. Finally, late in April, Harriman was granted an audience with President Kennedy to make his case. To his delight, he found the President entirely receptive. That night at a farewell party for John Kenneth Galbraith, who was off to India as ambassador, guests noticed that the normally dour Harriman was ebullient. Arthur Schlesinger recalls that he even outtalked Galbraith.
Harriman’s reward was to be made chief negotiator at the ICC talks on Laos that began in Geneva in mid-May. When Kennedy stopped off to consult with de Gaulle en route to the Vienna summit with Khrushchev in late May, Harriman rushed to Paris, hoping to catch a few minutes with the President. For several hours, Harriman stood about in the hallway of the American Embassy, pacing nervously. He finally had to grab Kennedy by the elbow as he whisked out the door. “Mr. President,” he asked, “I have just one question: Do you want a settlement on Laos or not?” Kennedy brusquely answered that he did. This was all the instruction Harriman needed—though he was to receive, and generally disregard, a great deal more from the Department of State.
At a formal dinner that night Harriman maneuvered himself close enough to Kennedy’s chair to offer some advice about his upcoming meeting with Khrushchev. Don’t take the Russian’s bluster and bluff too seriously, said the veteran of many such situations. Joke with him; don’t try to debate him.
Kennedy ignored Harriman’s advice. Khrushchev huffed and puffed and carried on, vowed that the tanks would roll and the rockets would fly. The young President responded by becoming stiff and combative. As he left the Soviet leader, he said to him, “It will be a cold winter.” Kennedy felt he had been bullied; he was determined to show his resolve. Shortly afterward, the opportunity arose in Berlin.
Ever since Stalin’s humiliation during the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Western occupied zones of Berlin had been for the Russians “a bone stuck in the throat,” as Khrushchev put it. (The Russian leader liked physical metaphors; he told Harriman that Berlin was a “bunion on your toes, which I can step on any time.” Then he ground his foot for emphasis.) In 1958 Khrushchev had threatened to make Berlin a “free city,” i.e., under Soviet control, but backed off. Now he threatened anew. He was afraid that West Germany would build its own Bomb, and he was embarrassed by the stream of refugees from East Berlin to West. He was further offended by the contrast between the gleaming, bustling West and the drab, run-down East. In Vienna, he delivered an ultimatum to Kennedy: he wanted the West out of Berlin.
To Dean Acheson, Berlin was a crucible, “the hardest test of Western will and determination since June 1950, when the Communists attacked Korea,” he wrote his friend John Cowles, the owner of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. “One sure way to lose the Cold War is to lose Germany; and one sure way to lose Germany is to convince the Germans that we are prepared to sacrifice German interests for an accord with Russia.”
To John Kennedy, Acheson was the preeminent authority on Germany, the statesman with the most experience at dealing with Russians on the explosive issue of Berlin. Back in March, Kennedy had asked him to study the problem of Berlin and to propose a strategy for dealing with the Soviet threat. Inexorably, both because of a vacuum of leadership at State and because of his own force of will, the former Secretary began to assume inordinate power for a private lawyer already past retirement age.
Acheson was delighted to be back in the swing. Miss Evans, his loyal secretary of three decades, wrote Marshall Shulman, an old Acheson aide on April 6 that “DA is buoyed up by it all and looks better and younger than I have seen him in years.”
When the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, came to Washington in early April, Acheson was invited to hold forth on Berlin. His recital was “rather bloodcurdling,” Arthur Schlesinger later recalled. “Skipping over possibilities of diplomatic or economic response, Acheson crisply offered a formidable catalogue of military countermeasures, concluding tentatively in favor of sending a division down the Autobahn.”
In the wake of Khrushchev’s ultimatum to Kennedy in Vienna, Acheson delivered a report to the President on June 28 that was even more hawkish. In this test of wills, argued Acheson, any effort to negotiate would be a mistake. The Administration should instead declare a national emergency and fully mobilize its armed forces. A declaration of national emergency carried with it drastic steps: upping the defense budget by $5 billion, standby wage-and-price controls, and a tax increase. This should be enough to deter Khrushchev, Acheson concluded. Even so, the U.S. had to be prepared for the possibility of nuclear war.
Acheson, despite his disdain for Dulles, was calling for brinksman-ship. His outlook was revealed by a chilling talk he had given to Columbia Journalism School students in 1959. The U.S., Acheson said, must be prepared to “raise tensions to the point where people no longer act coolly, they no longer act on the basis of cool calculation, but they act on the basis of fear. . . . So the Russians will say, ‘We may get a strike when we’re not expecting it.’ This is the only thing to do. This is what you call the delicate balance of terror.” As Paul Nitze later acknowledged, “Brinksmanship may have been discredited, but that was our policy.”
At a meeting of the National Security Council on June 29, the day after he submitted his report, Acheson was the dominating force, cowing Cabinet members with his forceful declarations, leavened only by self-deprecating wit. He offered himself up as an “elderly unemployed person” to serve as a smoke screen for a military buildup, as one who would be willing to attend “interminable meetings” with the Soviets “where we can converse indefinitely without negotiating at all.”
Among those listening to Acheson’s bravura performance in the Cabinet Room that evening was Averell Harriman, there to brief the NSC on Laos. Despite his affectionate pat on his old friend’s shoulder as the two had walked into the meeting on that warm June evening, Harriman was appalled by Acheson’s hawkishness. Though he said nothing at the meeting, afterward he grumbled to Arthur Schlesinger: “How long is our policy to be dominated by that frustrated and rigid man? He is leading us down the road to war.” Harriman believed that the U.S. should explore diplomatic avenues with the Soviets before sending a column of tanks down the autobahn.
Harriman’s voice did not carry in that charged atmosphere; Acheson’s did. At the daily meetings of the Berlin Task Force in the Crisis Room on the seventh floor of the State Department, Acheson held sway. The task force was nominally headed by a former staffer of Acheson’s, Foy Kohler; it included another formidable hawk, a man who had also once worked under Acheson, Paul Nitze. Abram Chayes, the State Department legal adviser who sat in on the meetings, recalls that “Dean was riding high. He had the feeling that he was in control.” When Chayes, a dove, tried to come up with a less bellicose alternative than mobilization and declaration of national emergency, Acheson was cutting: “Abe, you’ll see. You can try but you will find that it just won’t write.”
Acheson was in control partly because Dean Rusk was not. The Secretary was keeping his own counsel; already he had earned the nickname “the Buddha” for sitting silently through NSC meetings with an inscrutable half smile affixed on his bland face. “The Secretary never gives me anything to chew on, you never know what he is thinking,” complained Kennedy to his aides. The White House was furious when Rusk’s department took six weeks to produce any paper on Berlin, and then only a cut-and-paste job on the position papers used by the Republicans during earlier Berlin crises. Acheson, forceful and bold, filled the void. When Felix Frankfurter asked him who was “at the helm of the Ship of State?” Acheson was scornful: “Often no one,” though “Adlai has a control wheel in New York,” and “there are several around the White House which are not locked up at night, so that Caroline and some of the other children around there often play with them. . . . Then of course Dean Rusk has one in the State Department, but he hasn’t learned how to work it very well.”
Gradually, however, other voices began to be heard. Schlesinger, Abe Chayes, and Henry Kissinger, who was commuting from Harvard to act as a consultant to Mac Bundy, conspired to rebut Acheson’s “declaration of war.” On July 7, Schlesinger tapped out a persuasive memo warning the President not to see the issue as “are you chicken or not?” (Kissinger, at least, was careful to keep his lines open to Acheson. He wrote him on July 18, “The discussion at dinner the other day [with Administration officials about Berlin] showed such an appalling absence of subtlety and lack of understanding of intangibles on the part of almost everyone that only your presence prevented a real disaster.”)
Kennedy himself had doubts about Acheson’s hard line. He respected Acheson, he wanted his advice, but he found him too hawkish, too willing to take dangerous risks. Bobby Kennedy recalled that his brother also “found him irritating.”
Acheson’s caustic remarks began to grate on Kennedy. When the President had taken him aside in the Rose Garden and told him of the plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Acheson had been cutting. “You don’t have to call in Price Waterhouse to discover that fifteen hundred Cubans aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand Cubans,” he had snorted. Then, after Kennedy seemed shaken by Khrushchev in Vienna, Acheson told a group of retired Foreign Service officers that observing Kennedy was like watching a gifted young performer with a boomerang knock himself out. Kennedy was more than irritated when this remark came back to him. Mac Bundy called Lucius Battle, Acheson’s former special assistant who had risen to become a senior State Department official, to see if he couldn’t persuade Acheson to show some discretion.
To Battle, it was almost as if Acheson was looking for trouble, like a child seeking attention. One evening after dinner that summer, Acheson seemed to be hanging about the Battles’ house, looking for someone to talk to. Battle asked him if he wanted a nightcap. He did. He protested weakly to Battle that he thought his speech to the retired Foreign Service officers was off the record. “Oh, come on,” said Battle. On August 18, Acheson wrote the President to apologize. “I am most distressed. I continually err in regarding my humor as less mordant and more amusing than the facts warrant.”
Gradually, Kennedy’s other senior advisers turned against Acheson on Berlin. Both McNamara and Bundy saw in Acheson’s brinksman-ship too great a risk of nuclear war. At an NSC meeting on July 13, Rusk spoke out against declaring a state of emergency. It “would have a dangerous sound of mobilization,” said Rusk. Acheson cut in: “We must do what is sound and necessary in itself, and not act for the sake of appearances. If we leave the call of reserves to the end, we would not affect Khrushchev’s judgment of the shape of the crisis any more than we could do so by dropping bombs after he had forced the issue to the limit.” Rusk went on to express concern that a declaration of emergency would jeopardize the Administration’s foreign aid bill in Congress. Only one member of the NSC, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, now completely sided with Acheson. On July 19, McGeorge Bundy wrote the President, “I believe there is general agreement that a national emergency is not now necessary, but a hard wing of the Kohler (Berlin Task Force) group led by Acheson and Nitze disagrees.”
Acheson was distressed to see his support ebb. He wrote Harry Truman on July 14, “I find to my surprise a weakness in decision at the top—all but Bob McNamara, who impresses me as first class. The decisions are incredibly hard, but they don’t, like bourbon, improve with aging.” He expressed disdain for the Administration’s concern with “image” and compared the President to a shortstop who wanted to make sure he “looked good” fielding a ball and hence muffed it. Concluded Acheson: “We ought to be acting now to bring home to Khrushchev that we are in deadly earnest about Berlin, which is only a symbol for our world position.”
When President Kennedy addressed the nation on July 25, his speech was not the call to arms Acheson had urged. Though he did announce that he would bring up certain reserve and National Guard units and vowed that the U.S. would not quit Berlin, there was to be no national mobilization. He called on the Soviets to negotiate. “We do not want military considerations to dominate the thinking of either East or West. . . . In the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history.”
Even so, Khrushchev regarded Kennedy’s speech as “a preliminary declaration of war.” At least that is the message he conveyed to his weekend houseguest, John J. McCloy.
McCloy, dressed in oversized bathing trunks lent to him by the Soviet dictator, was splashing about the Black Sea in late July in the cause of slowing the arms race. As Kennedy’s special assistant for disarmament, he had come to the Soviet Union to try to establish a broad statement of disarmament principles. Khrushchev had graciously invited McCloy to spend two days at his dacha in Sochi, on the Black Sea. The Russian leader and the Wall Street lawyer played tennis together; McCloy, his River Club game still sharp, lobbed the ball gently to his less practiced and more portly opponent.
Off the court, Khrushchev ranted about Kennedy’s speech. The Soviets were not backing down, he said; they wanted the U.S. out of Berlin. And if the Americans had any thought of shooting their way back in, they better remember that the Soviets had more men and more tanks and far shorter lines of supply. McCloy, taken aback by Khrushchev’s extreme bluster, reported the tirade to Washington, where it was received with alarm.
Acheson dismissed McCloy’s alarums. He wrote Felix Frankfurter on August 3:
McCloy has caused quite a flurry. He repaired to the Black Sea with quite a harem, his wife, Ellen, daughter, Ellen, and Sharmane Douglas and had a weekend of talks in which Khrushchev said nothing that he has not said at least a dozen times. In the last talk he made extravagant and quite untrue statements about Kennedy’s radio address, which McCloy had not seen. I should have thought the way to treat this quite unpleasant discussion was with “intelligent neglect,” in Brandeis’ words which you so often quote. Instead of this, he appears as a sort of modern Paul Revere, flapping his way through the sky to warn us that the Russians are coming, and give everyone the idea that we are in quite a dither about something, though God knows what!
Acheson had retreated to Martha’s Vineyard “in a rather depressed condition,” he wrote Frankfurter. On the way he had stopped off to commiserate in Maryland with Nitze and in Locust Valley with Bob Lovett. Acheson was still adamant about the proper course: On August 4, he wrote Anthony Eden, “I’m strongly convinced that we must be very tough and not let Mr. K set the pace. We must take great risks to avoid greater ones.”
The next move, however, was Khrushchev’s. On August 13, a few minutes after midnight, the Berlin Wall began to rise up between the Eastern zone and the West. The East Germans laid barbed wire, imposed roadblocks, tore up streets. The world felt itself sliding to the brink. Kennedy himself privately put the odds on Armageddon at one in five. In Washington, worried bureaucrats began stocking their cellars with toilet paper and peanut butter; by late summer there were macabre discussions at Georgetown dinner parties of fallout patterns in metropolitan Washington. Paul Nitze invited the Soviet Ambassador, Mikhail Menshikov, to the Metropolitan Club for lunch to tell him how much of the U.S.S.R. would be devastated by a nuclear attack.
George Kennan returned from his embassy in Belgrade at once. He told Schlesinger, “I’m expendable. I have no further official career and I am going to do everything I possibly can to prevent war.” On August 15, he met with the President for forty-five minutes. His advice was to stay cool, to use caution when dealing with the temperamental Khrushchev. Kennan believed that the wall was an act to head off confrontation, not cause it; that by stopping the flow of refugees and sealing off East Berlin Khrushchev hoped to bandage an open wound. Chip Bohlen gave Kennedy the same advice.
The President listened. But he also felt the need for some gesture; he could not simply sit back and do nothing. His answer was to dust off another old giant of the Cold War, General Lucius Clay, the old warrior who had wanted to ram an armored column down the autobahn in 1948, and send him to Berlin. Accompanied by the Vice-President, General Clay would welcome a battle group of fifteen hundred soldiers who would roll down the autobahn from West Germany. Just as Harry Truman had done in July of 1948, Kennedy sent Chip Bohlen along as a diplomatic hedge on Clay’s warlike instincts.
The soldier, the diplomat, and the Vice-President left Andrews Air Force Base at 9 P.M. on a muggy evening in late August. On the flight, Clay regaled Lyndon Johnson with war stories of how he alone had felt that Berlin could be held against the Soviets in 1948, of how he alone had persuaded Truman to gear up the airlift. If only he had been allowed to smash through that armored column, Clay declared, then there would have been no Korean War. Bohlen just listened. He interjected only when Clay vowed that if he were the President right now, he’d tear down that wall. Bohlen mildly observed that such an act would be a good way to start World War III.
In Berlin, Clay and Johnson greeted the troops; the Vice-President seemed to be running for mayor, hugging women, kissing babies, patting dogs. Over the next two months, Clay could not resist a little brinksmanship; when East German police trained water hoses on American troops, Clay brought up tanks and bayonet-ready assault troops to face down the Soviets. At Checkpoint Charlie, a vital crossing point between East and West, U.S. and Russian soldiers played small, tense games of chicken. But the crisis gradually subsided. Kennan had been right: the wall had served to defuse the Berlin crisis, not bring it to war.
In August, after he returned from Martha’s Vineyard, Acheson was asked by Mac Bundy if he supported General Clay’s demands for vigorous action. Acheson said that it was too late. The time for bold steps had come and gone before the Soviets put up the wall.
Acheson was glum. He wrote Truman in late September that he believed Washington was about to hand Berlin to Russia. He saw appeasement everywhere. “I believe that this autumn we are heading for a most humiliating defeat over Berlin,” he wrote his old boss. “I am now going to—in the current jargon—‘phase out’ for a while. To work for this crowd is strangely depressing. Nothing seems to get decided.”
While Acheson was “phasing out,” Harriman was trying to scramble back in. Laos was his ticket; he and Kennedy were “fully in the same mood,” he later recalled, about the need to avoid an armed confrontation over the tortured little country. At Vienna, Khrushchev had shown no interest in confronting Kennedy over Laos; afterward, the President had called Harriman and said to him, “Governor, do you understand what I want?” Harriman replied that he did. Kennedy went on: “I want to have a negotiated settlement. I do not want to become militarily involved.”
Bored by all the time he seemed to be spending at staff meetings in Geneva, the site of the settlement talks on Laos, Harriman began cutting the size of the U.S. delegation. After one of his aides, a young Foreign Service officer named William Sullivan, had cut the staff by one-third, Harriman grunted, “That’s not good enough. I want it cut by half.” Sullivan warned him that he could not do that without powerful resistance from the State Department bureaucracy. “The hell I can’t,” said Harriman. “Get rid of them.”
Harriman admired young Sullivan, who was tough and bright and who had written thoughtful papers a year earlier recommending improved relations with the People’s Republic of China and neutrality for Laos. Harriman wanted to make him his chief of staff. The problem was that Sullivan, then forty years old, was too junior. Harriman’s answer had been simple: he ordered everyone senior to Sullivan to return to Washington.
Sullivan admired Harriman because he was remarkably free of cant. The State Department had become ossified in the fifties, distrusting Communists of any kind, not distinguishing between them, and making little effort to learn more. Harriman, on the other hand, saw the Communists as “human beings, not automatons,” Sullivan later recalled. During the negotiations, Harriman came to know G. M. Pushkin, the Soviet Vice Foreign Minister, a squat, walleyed man with a quick sense of humor. From Pushkin, Harriman learned a lesson that would stay with him: that the U.S. and the Soviets have a parallel interest in Southeast Asia, to keep peace and control the Chinese. Harriman perceived that the Soviets and the Chinese had different interests and would soon fall out as allies. (He called Mao a “margarine Communist” and didn’t consider him much of a threat; his father’s experience trying to build a railroad through China had convinced him that the Chinese had little interest in the outside world.) Harriman wired the State Department about the growing Sino-Soviet split, “but they didn’t believe us,” Sullivan recalled. “They thought we were dupes.”
Harriman’s method of dealing with State Department and CIA hawks was to ignore them. A CIA operative recalled making an impassioned plea to Harriman for more weapons and support for the anti-Communist forces: “Harriman turned to us, smiled, and asked politely what we had been talking about, showing us that his hearing aid had been turned off.” He told Sullivan that he had received only two or three negotiating instructions in all of World War II, and he did not intend to become a puppet now. Instructions from Washington began to pile up, but Harriman hardly glanced at them. He knew that the State Department bureaucracy did not speak for the President, and that only his instructions mattered.
When Harriman wanted to open talks with the Red Chinese, whom the U.S. did not recognize, the State Department objected. Harriman went ahead anyway and began meeting with the Chinese representatives over chi, or tea, which actually meant vodka. Harriman was disgusted with the bureaucracy. He told Schlesinger that the State Department had become so brainwashed by the rightwingers under Dulles that it needed what the Chinese called “thought correction.” (In November, Mac Bundy wrote JFK, “Averell has strong views on the people who have been shaping our policy in Southeast Asia. He will not volunteer these views in his talk with you, but he will probably respond with alacrity to any questions you might wish to ask him about his judgment of the people involved. P. S., today is his 70th birthday.”)
At the end of August, Harriman had come back to Washington and asked the President if he could deal directly with Prince Souvanna Phouma, rather than be forced to truck with the CIA’s client Phoumi. Kennedy approved. He reiterated that he wanted nothing better than “to get out of Laos, if we can.”
The negotiations were slow and arduous. The Pathet Lao and neighboring North Vietnamese repeatedly broke their word and the Royal Laotian Army provided little leverage. (An American adviser, describing improved morale in the ranks, duly reported that before, when the troops were attacked by the Pathet Lao, they dropped their arms and ran. Now they took their weapons with them.) “How’s it going?” a reporter asked Harriman. “Just about as badly as expected,” he replied. Asked whether he was optimistic or pessimistic he replied, “Neither. I’m determined.”
He was. He worked from nine until midnight; lunches were working lunches and dinners working dinners, recalled an aide, Chester Cooper. He personally chased Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia to Rome and tracked him down in a hotel to force him to sign an accord. Aides described his negotiating style as “water torture.” He would make the same point over and over, letting it drip down until his adversaries gave in. He would use scorn judiciously. When the North Vietnamese, the most devious of the lot, spoke, Harriman would ostentatiously read The New York Times. When a North Vietnamese representative began calling the U.S. a warmonger, Harriman “accidentally” hit the “talk” button on his microphone and said to an aide, “Did that little bastard say we started World War II?”
Harriman finally succeeded in getting what he called “a good bad deal.” After fourteen months and millions of words, the major powers and bordering countries signed an accord in July of 1962 guaranteeing Laos’s neutrality. The North Vietnamese ignored the pact and continued to support the Pathet Lao, but a shaky neutralist regime under Souvanna was installed and preserved. The President’s wish had been fulfilled: Laos was no longer a “crisis point.”
Harriman’s performance earned the admiration of the Kennedys. Bobby Kennedy, in particular, was drawn to the old diplomat. Both shared an impatience with bureaucratic foot dragging, a strong commitment to civil rights, an inner toughness and outward bluntness, and a willingness to change. Harriman’s deafness, once considered a serious liability, became a source of bemusement. The Kennedys laughed about the time Harriman and Kennedy had begun to talk at once during a meeting in the Cabinet Room; the President had tried to override Harriman, but Averell just kept right on talking, slouched over in his chair, his eyes half closed. The President gave up and the others in the room began chuckling. “Did I say something funny?” asked Harriman. “No, Governor,” Kennedy said with a smile, and the room broke up. Mac Bundy began calling Harriman “the Crocodile.” (“He just lies up there on the riverbank, his eyes half closed, looking sleepy. Then, whap, he bites.”) The nickname caught on: Bobby Kennedy gave Harriman a gold crocodile, and Harriman’s staff gave him a silver one “from your victims.”
The Kennedys decided to make use of Harriman’s toughness and iconoclasm. In November of 1961, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, a job that would allow him to shake the department out of its Dullesian rigidity toward Asian Communism.
Harriman, a Europeanist at heart, had wanted to be Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. He was sitting in his office in Geneva with Paul Nitze when Dean Rusk called to offer him Far East. Nitze, who already knew about Harriman’s new post, watched Averell strain to hear what Rusk was saying over a scratchy transatlantic connection. “Yes, sir; yes, sir,” said Harriman. “Whatever the President wants.” He hung up and turned to Nitze. “What did he offer me?” “Far East,” replied Nitze. “Damn,” said Harriman. “I was hoping it was Europe.”
The selection of Chip Bohlen to become ambassador to France was, for Washington, occasion for a whirl of parties. Almost every night during the first two weeks of October 1962, a bright Indian summer in the capital, dinners or dances feted the Bohlens. On the evening of October 15, McGeorge Bundy had just finished greeting guests at his party for the Bohlens when he was called away to the phone. At the other end of the secure line was Ray Cline, a deputy director of the CIA. He had chilling news: U-2 reconnaissance photographs showed a ballistic missile installation under construction in the woods near San Cristóbal, Cuba.
Bundy, sensitive to leaks at Georgetown cocktail parties, coolly told no one. Nor did he call the President. “I decided,” he explained to Kennedy later, “that a quiet evening and a good night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in light of what you would face in the days ahead.”
Around Washington, others who needed to know were quietly informed by the CIA that evening. At a formal banquet for the German Foreign Minister in the State Department’s eighth-floor dining room, Dean Rusk was slipped a note by a waiter. When he returned from the phone, he calmly resumed his discussion of NATO, but at the first opportunity, he signaled Paul Nitze, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, to join him for a private conversation. Out on the terrace overlooking the Lincoln Memorial, dimly lit in the autumn night, Rusk told Nitze about the CIA photographs. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara returned home from an evening with the Robert Kennedys at Hickory Hill, analysts were waiting to show him the evidence.
President Kennedy was still in his pajamas when Bundy came into his bedroom in the morning. “There is now hard photographic evidence,” the adviser said, “that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.” Kennedy knew he was up against it. He had made it explicitly clear that Soviet missiles would not be tolerated in Cuba; the Soviets had made it equally clear that they would not put them there. Now he was being played as a weak dupe.
Ticking off a list of fourteen names, Kennedy ordered Bundy to convene an emergency meeting of an ad hoc group of advisers. They were to become the regulars of an Executive Committee, or ExCom, that for the next 12 days would manage the most dangerous superpower face-off of the nuclear age. When Bundy and Kennedy had finished calling top aides in the Administration, Kennedy decided there was one more man he wanted to consult, a Republican lawyer in private practice on Wall Street.
John McCloy, the only outsider called by Kennedy that day, was direct and sharp. The missiles could not remain in Cuba. The Soviets were testing Kennedy, and he had to respond, quickly and firmly. If need be, an air strike should be launched and the island invaded by American troops.
McCloy was preparing to leave on a private business trip to Germany, and Kennedy did not ask him to change his plans. But he told him to stay in touch. He might need advice, Kennedy said, experienced judgments from those who had been through such crises before and could be depended on to ask the right questions. As it turned out, only two other outsiders, in addition to McCloy, would be included in the critical deliberations: Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett.
Acheson was shown the photographs by Dean Rusk. He predictably and immediately took the side of action. The U.S., he argued, could not afford to sit back until the missiles became operative. Once the weapons “were pointing at our hearts and ready to shoot,” it would be difficult to do anything about them. Thus Acheson said he opposed any course that would result in a protracted showdown.
Acheson, who joined the ExCom after it had already deliberated for a day, found the President’s advisers divided. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, breaking with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his deputy Nitze, argued that “a missile is a missile”—those in Cuba were no more threatening than the long-range rockets based in Russia, and thus did not alter the power balance. Nonsense, snorted Acheson. “Missiles located ninety miles from our coast,” he said, were for the Soviets “a much surer bet than long-range ones.” They would be able to attack almost any city in the U.S., presenting a grave and clear threat to American security. The President’s primary obligation was to protect American security, and that, he unequivocally stated, meant “taking the missiles out.” In addition, the U.S. had to uphold the Monroe Doctrine, forbidding outside meddling in the Western Hemisphere; the President could not afford to vacillate when faced with such a blatant assault on national resolve. “Something should be done quickly,” he said.
Despite his forceful views, Acheson did not consider himself the strongest of hawks. The way he saw the argument shaping up that Wednesday, there was a dangerous coalition forming between the diplomatic doves like George Ball and cautious pragmatists like Bob McNamara in favor of doing nothing at all. Pitted against them were military hawks who wanted to use the crisis as a pretext for invading Cuba. Korea had soured Acheson on the military; “when you get soldiers talking about policy,” he later explained, “they want to go further and further in a military way . . . until their proposals are apt to be at least as dangerous as the original danger.” Acheson’s solution, as he saw it, was a middle ground: a surgical air strike, aimed only at the missiles. Some of the Russian technicians would no doubt be killed, but the general population would be spared.
Acheson was impatient with the circular debates swirling around the table. The formless nature of the meetings bothered him; there was no set structure, and ExCom members, from the President on down, seemed to come and go with the same randomness as the sporadic deliveries of coffee and sandwiches. Acheson continued to be disappointed by Dean Rusk. He felt the reticent Secretary—who kept his own counsel, sidestepped any responsibility for guiding discussion, and even skipped some critical sessions—was letting down the office of Secretary of State as well as the President. Acheson was disturbed that Rusk’s rightful role was being assumed by the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy. With reluctance but without hesitation, Acheson moved to fill what he saw as a void and to act as a counterpoint to the President’s brother.
When the President had to step out on that first Wednesday to attend to official chores, RFK assumed control of the meeting. He had been bothered by the idea of a surprise attack—“I know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor,” he had scribbled on a note to his brother the day before—and Acheson’s forceful arguments provoked a strong reaction. The issue was above all a moral one, Bobby now proclaimed. America’s traditions would not permit the launching of a surprise raid. He insisted: “My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.”
Despite his brashness, Bobby Kennedy, at thirty-six, was a dominating and persuasive advocate. But Acheson, at age sixty-nine, regarded RFK as an impetuous youth, “moved by emotional or intuitive responses more than by trained lawyer’s analysis.” By betraying moral anguish and engaging in sloppy thinking, cardinal sins in the Ache-sonian creed, Bobby drew the old statesman’s scorn. Pearl Harbor was an utterly specious analogy, Acheson declared. The situations were in no way comparable: the U.S. had been warning other nations to keep their hands off the Western Hemisphere for 139 years. Acheson mocked RFK’s example of Pearl Harbor with an analogy of his own: “Was it necessary to employ the early nineteenth-century method of having a man with a red flag walk before a steam engine to warn people and cattle to stay out of the way?”
Acheson was more deferential at a private meeting with the President the next day. For more than an hour the two men talked; Acheson reiterated his arguments and the President listened attentively. Unlike his prickly brother, the President was courteous and thoughtful with Acheson. More importantly, he was President, a distinction that Acheson had deeply understood ever since the day, some fifteen years earlier, when he had pored over maps of the eastern Mediterranean with Harry Truman. Kennedy rose from his rocking chair and stared out the French doors into the Rose Garden. “I guess I better earn my salary this week,” he said. “I’m afraid you have to,” answered Acheson. “I wish I could help more.”
During those uncertain first days of deliberation, the air strike advocated by Acheson, with sporadic support from McGeorge Bundy, became known as the “fast track.” The opposite approach—a quiet series of diplomatic moves designed to avoid a showdown—was meanwhile dubbed the “Bohlen plan.”
Chip Bohlen cared little about Cuba. On a flight from Key West in April of 1961, Kennedy had tried to draw Bohlen out on the Cuba problem. The diplomat protested. He knew nothing about Latin America, had never set foot in Cuba, and did not have anything worthwhile to contribute on the subject. “All right, all right,” the President said, dropping the subject. Bohlen later lamented: “If I had had my wits about me, I would have been in a position to have at least tried to convince the President to call off the plans for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.”
When Bohlen came to pay his official farewell call to the White House before departing for Paris, Kennedy had the surveillance photographs spread out on his desk. “Look at these,” he said. France was forgotten for the next half hour. Kennedy described the ExCom and asked Bohlen to become a member.
Bohlen’s job was to assess the likely Soviet response to any American action. The most dangerous of all things, he told the ExCom that first day, would be the killing of Soviet civilians. The Kremlin would be forced to respond, perhaps in a spasm of nuclear fury. Thus he strongly opposed a surprise air attack. The problem should be first approached by diplomatic means, perhaps a letter to Khrushchev.
At a final farewell dinner for the Bohlens that night at Joe Alsop’s, the President, who was among the guests, pulled Bohlen out onto the porch to discuss the crisis. He was, as usual, irritated at the State Department. “Chip, what’s wrong with that Goddamned department of yours? I can never get a quick answer.” Bohlen, accustomed to bureaucratic compromise and diplomatic nuance, tried to explain that foreign policy making was not conducive to “quick ready-made solutions.” As the Bohlens were saying their goodbyes to the Alsops and other guests, the President whispered to Avis, who had just finished packing her household and three children for Paris, “I wouldn’t be too sure you are leaving. I think I may ask you to stay.” Avis had no idea what he was talking about; as a good Foreign Service wife, she did not ask, or even question, her husband.
Kennedy, in fact, had asked Bohlen to stay on with the ExCom. Bohlen, however, argued to Rusk that it would be unwise for him to delay his departure, that it would arouse suspicion and give the Soviets warning that the U.S. had discovered the missiles. Rusk agreed. Kennedy, nonetheless, was irked and told an aide to page Bohlen at the airport and instruct him that he was “urgently desired” at the White House. Bohlen argued with the aide, Kenneth O’Donnell, insisting that he was scheduled to give a speech in New York in a couple of hours. Slightly incredulous that Bohlen was worried about a speaking engagment when Armageddon beckoned, O’Donnell insisted that Bohlen come to the White House at once. Bohlen asked to speak directly to the President. He told JFK that his plane to New York was leaving in fifteen minutes, and that he could not possibly cancel his speaking engagement without setting off speculation in the press. Frustrated, the President said, “Go on. I guess we’ll have to do without you.”
Bohlen left his advice in the form of a handwritten memo. He suggested that a private communication be sent to Khrushchev to allow him to back down and warned that an air strike “will inevitably lead to war.”
Bohlen’s motives in carrying on with his diplomatic duties and forsaking the ExCom are a source of controversy. Preserving secrecy was vital; even the President was maintaining his campaign schedule on behalf of congressional candidates, and members of the ExCom were sneaking into the White House through underground tunnels. Joe Alsop later argued that Bohlen’s willingness to give up his seat at the most dramatic crisis of the age demonstrated extraordinary selflessness and devotion to duty as a professional member of the Foreign Service. Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, took a harsh view: “Chip Bohlen ran out on us, which always shocked me. That wasn’t necessary. He could always have postponed it. But he decided to leave this country in a crisis.” RFK is unfair; Bohlen was hardly a shirker. On the long voyage to France, Avis later told her children, Chip was exceedingly jumpy and taut, fretful that he was missing the challenge of his career. But he truly believed that he was doing his duty by conducting business as usual. It is likely as well that he knew his own limitations, felt that he had spoken his piece, and trusted his friend Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson, his successor as ambassador to Moscow, to counsel the President on Soviet moves. His judgment on the last was correct; Thompson proved a very able adviser.
The President reached Bob Lovett by phone in New York and ordered him, “Come down at once.” In Washington he was briefed by Bundy. On a small table near Bundy’s desk Lovett noticed a photograph of Henry Stimson. “All during the conversation,” Lovett recalled, “the old Colonel seemed to be staring me straight in the face.” Lovett invoked their mutual icon: “Mac, I think the best service we can perform for the President is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson would.” Bundy agreed; Stimson would be their “bench mark.”
Lovett found Kennedy fuming after a session with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. “All during his denial that the Russians had placed any missiles in Cuba,” Kennedy said. “I had the pictures in the center drawer of my desk and it was an enormous temptation to show them to him.” The President asked Lovett’s advice. The former Defense Secretary proposed the same approach his protégé McNamara had been urging: a blockade, or “quarantine,” of ships headed for Cuba, followed by a gradual increase of pressure as necessary.
An air strike may not be so clean-cut and simple as others claimed, Lovett warned. Though an advocate of air power since his days in the Yale Unit, he knew that quick, unsustained bombing runs were not terribly effective. Bombing needed to be relentless; a “surgical strike” against a small concealed target might not take out the missiles. A blockade, however, was a show of force that gave the Soviets a chance to back down. “We would look ridiculous,” he believed, “if we grabbed a sledgehammer to kill a fly.”
The President would have to resist pressure from the “bleeding hearts” to lift the blockade before it became effective, Lovett warned, but at least he would not be committed to uncontrollable combat. Bobby Kennedy came in from the Rose Garden and asked a few pointed questions, but it was clear to Lovett that both brothers agreed with his assessment about the “desirability of taking a relatively mild and not very bloodthirsty step first.” As Lovett put it: “We can always increase the tempo of combat, but it is very hard to reduce it once the battle is joined.”
Kennedy graciously asked Lovett to stay for a private dinner, but at age sixty-seven Lovett’s lifelong hypochondria had hardly abated. He did not feel well enough, he replied; he was too tired.
Lovett, with his instinct for the center, had found it. By Friday, most members of the ExCom were leaning toward the blockade. Acheson, however, was a vocal holdout. As he had during the Berlin crisis, he argued that the U.S. was faced with a test of wills. The U.S. had to show it was willing to use force, to strike first and hard.
Again, Bobby Kennedy was his nemesis. During the Berlin crisis, when Acheson was so forcefully pressing a hard line, Robert Kennedy had reflected that he never wanted to be on the opposite side of an argument with Acheson. Now, however, he led the opposition. “For one hundred and seventy-five years,” the younger Kennedy said, the United States “had not been [the type] of country” that starts wars; “a sneak attack,” he said, “is not in our traditions.”
Kennedy now held sway, and Acheson recognized that he had lost. When the ExCom began discussing detailed contingency plans for the blockade, the old statesman excused himself. He had given his advice, his course had been rejected, and he felt that it was improper for a man not in government to participate in formulating the details of a secret military operation. So he went off to his farm in Maryland for the weekend.
Acheson had just settled into a quiet Saturday evening in Sandy Spring when Rusk called him again. Kennedy had in fact chosen the blockade option and would announce it in a speech Monday night, Rusk said. He wanted Acheson to undertake a diplomatic mission: enlisting the support of Charles de Gaulle. Bohlen, traveling to France by boat, was still at sea, and Acheson himself had told Kennedy how important it was that a distinguished emissary be sent to critical European allies. In reply, Acheson quoted the adage of Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the U.S. was the least exclusive club in the world but it had the highest dues. “I guess if I belong to that club, I better do what I’m asked to do,” he said. “You don’t mind that your advice is not being followed?” asked Rusk. “Of course not,” replied Acheson. I’m not the President.”
The passport office in Washington opened specially for one patron that Sunday: Acheson’s secretary, Barbara Evans, was there to renew his lapsed passport. The banks were not as accommodating; top State Department officials chipped in to raise sixty dollars in pocket money for the departing emissary. When his plane stopped for refueling at Greenham Common air base in England, Acheson was met by his old friend David K. E. Bruce. In one pocket the distinguished ambassador had a bottle of Scotch, which Acheson gladly shared while waiting to resume his journey. In the other he had a revolver. “Why?” asked Acheson. “The department told me to carry it when I met you,” said Bruce.
De Gaulle agreed to receive Acheson at the Elysée on Monday evening. Along with Cecil Lyon, the charge d’affaires, and Sherman Kent, a CIA analyst, they wandered through the basement corridors and passageways of the palace to avoid the public entrance. Acheson was elated by the occasion, which seemed to remind him of an Alexandre Dumas novel. “Porthos, is your rapier loose in its scabbard?” he exclaimed to his companions.
“Your President has done me a great honor by sending so distinguished an emissary,” said de Gaulle with elaborate politeness. Acheson, for once at a loss for words, responded with a deep bow. After reading the President’s letter and speech, Le Grand Charles asked Acheson: Am I being consulted or informed? Informed Acheson answered, offering to show the photographs Sherman Kent carried with him. “Not now,” said de Gaulle, waving them away. “These will only be evidence. I accept what you tell me as fact, without any proof of any sort needed.”
Suppose, de Gaulle asked, the Soviets do not respond or try to break the blockade? What would the U.S. do then? Acheson, worried about the same possibility, was unsure of the answer. But he thought it unwise to let de Gaulle know this. “We will immediately tighten the blockade to include tankers,” he said. “This will bring Cuba to a standstill. If we have to go further, why of course we’ll go further.” Replied de Gaulle: “That’s very good.”
Only after giving France’s approval did de Gaulle succumb to curiosity and ask to peek at the photos. Studying them with a magnifying glass brought out the old soldier in him. “Incroyable,” he exclaimed at hearing they were taken from sixty-five thousand feet. As Acheson rose to leave, de Gaulle told him, “It would be a pleasure to me if these things were all done through you.”
While Acheson was crossing the Atlantic, Lovett was flying back to Washington from New York. He had left the capital on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday morning the President asked him to come back and help draft the announcement of the quarantine. After lunch at Hickory Hill, Lovett and Robert Kennedy went to the Oval Room where the ExCom was working.
Midway through the session, the President motioned Lovett to join him on the second-floor balcony overlooking the South Lawn and the Washington Monument. Whatever the outcome, the President said, the crisis was likely to involve tough negotiating, perhaps at the U.N. Did Lovett think that Adlai Stevenson could handle it? Lovett had been among those who jumped on Stevenson at the previous day’s ExCom meeting for being too soft, for proposing that America’s missiles in Turkey and its base in Guantanamo, Cuba, be placed on the bargaining table. No, Lovett said, Stevenson was not the man for the job. Instead, he suggested, the President call in John McCloy. It was a recommendation that Robert Kennedy had already made.
Lovett called McCloy’s secretary at home that Sunday to help in tracking him down in Frankfurt. “How soon can you get home?” he was asked. McCloy responded that he was planning to go hunting partridges in Portugal. “No, we mean right away” was the reply. “Well,” said McCloy, “the plane has already gone.” An Air Force plane was promptly dispatched to fetch him.
Averell Harriman felt left out. Although he was then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, he rightly thought of himself as one of the nation’s foremost Soviet experts, a man who had cultivated a relationship with Khrushchev, as he had with Stalin. Yet his advice was not sought.
His ultimate humiliation came that Sunday, the day before Kennedy’s speech. Still hoping to deflect speculation in the press about Cuba, the White House used Harriman as a decoy. While members of the ExCom were sneaking through bomb shelters and tunnels to enter the White House unnoticed, Harriman’s limousine was driven right up to the front of the West Wing. A few journalists were thrown off the scent, speculating about problems developing in the Far East. Harriman, who was brought to a private anteroom in the White House and left there, was miffed. “How long do I have to sit here?” he grumbled.
As Kennedy prepared to go on television, the Strategic Air Command, custodian of the nation’s nuclear bombers, was put on Defcon 2; the only higher state of alert is Defcon 1, which means war. The planes began circling in the air, fully loaded, in what was the biggest alert in SAC history. The 1st Armored Division left Fort Hood, Texas, for deployment on the East Coast.
Kennedy’s seventeen-minute address announcing the “quarantine” was calm and steady. The blame for the situation and the responsibility for resolving it were put squarely on Khrushchev. “He has an opportunity now,” the President said, “to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”
It is hard to overestimate the sense of dread provoked by the sudden revelation of the world’s first full-fledged nuclear showdown. In Los Angeles, out of the range of the missiles, housewives thronged the supermarkets. “One lady’s working four shopping carts at once,” said a manager. “Another lady bought twelve packages of detergent. What’s she going to do, wash up after the bomb?” In Miami, a local judge took his two children and began driving to Missouri. In a small Nebraska town, an air-raid siren went off by mistake, sending citizens scurrying for shelter. Nor was fear confined to the ordinary public. When George Ball awoke that morning from a fitful sleep on the cot in his office, he looked up to find his boss, Dean Rusk, standing there. “We have won a considerable victory,” said Rusk. “You and I are still alive.”
During the edgy four days that followed, Harriman began to worry that the U.S. was forcing Moscow into a confrontation. He knew Khrushchev and understood his insecurities as well as his bluster. But the White House still showed no signs of wanting to hear the advice of the experienced diplomat. Harriman called his friend Arthur Schlesinger. Khrushchev was sending desperate signals that he wanted a way out, said the former ambassador. He was not behaving like a man who wanted war. “If we do nothing but get tougher and tougher,” Harriman added, “we will force them into countermeasures. We must give Khrushchev an out.”
Schlesinger asked whether Harriman had made these points to the State Department. “They never ask my advice about anything outside the Far East,” Harriman lamented.
Acheson, on the other hand, had arrived from Paris as ardent as ever for firm action. In a meeting with Kennedy that Thursday, held as the first ships were being stopped by the American Navy, Acheson pointed out that the missiles still remained in Cuba and work was progressing on them. Time was running out, he said. The blockade would do nothing to stop the deployment. An air strike, he emphasized once again, was the only method of eliminating them.
On the following night, a rambling and plaintive personal missive from Khrushchev came rattling off the telegraph wire at the State Department. It was hard to know what to make of the confused message. Rusk phoned Acheson and asked him to come by. As they waited for the rest of the translation to be transmitted, the two men sat drinking Scotch in Rusk’s seventh-floor office. Acheson agreed with the assessment that Khrushchev must have written the letter himself. He imitated the pudgy chairman pacing back and forth in the Kremlin, dictating the letter and waving his stubby finger. He must have been, said Acheson, “either tight or scared.”
The optimism prompted by Khrushchev’s message worried Acheson. “So long as we had the thumbscrew on Khrushchev,” he recalled thinking, “we should have given it another turn every day.” His pessimism was, in fact, justified. The next day a more formal, harsher message arrived from Moscow, making demands that the White House would not meet.
Robert Kennedy suggested the ploy that broke the crisis: a response was sent accepting most of the points in Khrushchev’s letter of Friday night and ignoring the formal message that had arrived on Saturday. Acheson called it “a gamble to the point of recklessness.” Later, in assessing the strategy’s success, he called it “homage to plain dumb luck.”
But in his letter to President Kennedy at the end of that week, Acheson was very much the loyal public servant. “May I congratulate you on your leadership, firmness and judgment over the past tough week,” he wrote. “We have not had these qualities at the helm in this country at all times. It is good to have them again. Only a few people know better than me how hard these decisions are to make, and how broad the gap is between the advisers and the decider.” Responded Kennedy: “It is a comforting feeling to have a distinguished captain of other battles in other years available for present duty.”
All that remained was working out the final agreement for verifying the removal of the missiles. When he arrived at the U.N., McCloy found that Stevenson was no longer nearly so soft as the Kennedys feared. In fact, McCloy noted, Stevenson was a “hopping mad hawk” after exposing the Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin’s blatant lies in the Security Council session. Nevertheless, the White House wanted McCloy, not Stevenson, to take charge of the final negotiations.
As McCloy’s counterpart, Khrushchev designated Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, a cultivated and gentle diplomat who spoke English fluently and had studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pennsylvania. McCloy was a tough bargainer; he even resisted giving a pledge that the U.S. would not invade Cuba until he was ordered to do so by the White House.
One of the final sessions was held at McCloy’s home in Stamford, Connecticut. Kuznetsov seemed worried that the house might be bugged and suggested they walk outside. Sitting on a wood-rail fence, they continued their conversation. “Well, Mr. McCloy,” said Kuznetsov when they had finished. “We will honor this agreement. But never will we be caught like this again.”
It was the prospect of such an unrestrained arms race that led President Kennedy to end his final message to Khrushchev with a plea for the resumption of nuclear test ban talks in Geneva. Begun in 1958, they had dragged to a halt after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 plane in 1960. After an informal moratorium, both sides had resumed testing in 1961, the Russians exploding a hundred-megaton bomb in the atmosphere. Scientists were beginning to pick up radiation in mothers’ milk as the clouds circled the globe.
Kennedy wanted to salvage some reason from the superpowers’ brush with madness. “Perhaps now, as we step back from danger, we can together make real progress in this vital field,” the American President wrote his Soviet counterpart. He called for both countries to undertake “the great effort for a nuclear test ban.”
Khrushchev agreed to resume the test ban talks in Moscow in July 1963. Kennedy’s first choice to lead the U.S. delegation was McCloy, who during his stint as his disarmament adviser in 1961 had done considerable groundwork for an agreement. But when Kennedy asked McCloy to be chief U.S. negotiator, he begged off. His private interests again predominated; he was deeply involved in handling international negotiations for the world’s major oil companies.
As an alternative, Rusk suggested Harriman, though with little enthusiasm. Despite Harriman’s unsurpassed record at dealing with the Soviets, the Secretary considered him too much of an independent operator, too great a foe of the department’s bureaucracy. Kennedy, however, was all for Harriman; his work on the Laos accords had won Kennedy’s respect. Kennedy quickly approved Harriman’s appointment, knowing that Rusk and his department might have second thoughts. Indeed, the next day State expressed reservations, too late.
Kennedy pleased Harriman at the outset by giving him wide latitude in his formal negotiating instructions. Noted Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg: “The document was broadly couched, as was befitting an emissary of Harriman’s experience and judgment.”
When Harriman arrived at the Moscow airport on July 15, the press was out in force. “How long do you think you’ll be there?” a reporter asked. Harriman figured that if he said the negotiations would be long and complex, the Soviets would feel compelled to make them so. “Well now,” he answered, “if Chairman Khrushchev is as interested in having a test ban treaty as President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan are, we ought to be out of here in two weeks.”
Harriman had deliberately brought a small delegation noted more for its diplomatic skills than its technical expertise. “The expert is out to point out all the difficulties and dangers,” he explained. At a stop in Britain on the way, he had secured from Macmillan a pledge that the British delegate, the shallow and ill-prepared Lord Hailsham, would take a back seat. The Soviets, indicating they meant business, designated Andrei Gromyko as their negotiator.
Khrushchev himself took an active interest in the proceedings, sitting through the entire first day’s session at a massive Gothic meeting hall at the Kremlin. “Why don’t we have a test ban?” he jovially announced at the outset. “Why don’t we sign it now and let the experts work out the details?” Harriman took a blank pad of paper and shoved it toward the relaxed Soviet leader. “Here, Mr. Khrushchev, you sign first and I’ll sign underneath.”
Despite Khrushchev’s jocularity, it quickly became clear to Harriman that the Soviets would not go along with a total ban on nuclear testing. The sticking point was verification; the Soviets were loath to permit on-site inspections. Atmospheric tests were easy to detect, but underground testing could be fairly well hidden.
Grudgingly accepting Soviet intransigence, Harriman reluctantly recommended giving up the quest for a total test ban, and the President agreed to try for a narrower ban, limited to aboveground testing. Years later, in retrospect, Harriman concluded that the U.S. should have pressed harder for a complete ban. “When you stop to think what the advantages were to us of stopping all testing in the early 1960s when we were still ahead of the Soviets,” he lamented, “it’s really appalling to realize what an opportunity we missed.”
Harriman had a condition of his own: the right of any country to withdraw from the treaty if a country that had not signed (such as China or France) built its own bombs and began testing them. The Soviets were uneasy with this; their murky relationship with the Chinese made them reluctant to include a provision that seemed aimed primarily at Peking.
The Soviets tried to slide around this condition with candor that was not exactly disarming. The Leninist view of treaties, they maintained, always permitted them to be abrogated if they threatened the self-interest of the Soviet state. Gromyko held out for a right of withdrawal that vaguely referred to “extraordinary circumstances.”
Harriman was aware that without a specific clause referring to an explosion by a country such as China, the Senate would never ratify the treaty. “If we don’t have a right of withdrawal, we can’t have an agreement,” he said, picking up his papers and preparing to walk out. Lord Hailsham was alarmed. He sent a telegraph to Macmillan saying that Harriman’s tough stance was threatening to wreck the talks, and the Prime Minister transmitted these concerns to Washington through Britain’s ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore. When Kennedy heard what was happening, he broke into a smile. “Agree you should sit tight,” he wired his negotiator. Harriman reflected: “I think his opinion of me rose.” The Soviets backed down; the agreement was signed two days earlier than the two weeks Harriman had predicted.
Rather than wait for an exchange of cables, Harriman simply picked up a phone and with everyone listening called Kennedy directly (he later explained that he had not bothered to return to the privacy of the U.S. Embassy because “I knew they’d be listening whether we called from one place or the other”).
It was still early morning when McGeorge Bundy, in the White House situation room, answered the person-to-person call from Moscow. Kennedy was brought on the line. “Great! Good luck!” he exclaimed. Just then, another call came through from Harold Macmillan in London. The British Prime Minister, not knowing a deal had been struck, began by apologetically explaining his concerns over Harriman’s reported intransigence. Kennedy grinned and broke in, “Don’t worry. It’s been worked out.”
As soon as he had hung up, Harriman walked back to the conference table and asked, “Where are the copies of the treaty we are supposed to initial?” he asked. The leather-bound documents were placed on the table, the mineral water was removed, and the photographers were invited in. Hailsham, in the manner of an English peer whose signature is simply his last name, penned just a single elaborate letter next to Harriman’s WAH and Gromyko’s Russian AG. Harriman had no respect for Hailsham, but he marveled at his lordly signature. “Did you see his ‘H’?” he asked. “It was very beautiful.”
The Kremlin courtyard, closed to all but secret police in Stalin’s day, was opened to the crowds that evening. Shaking hands and pinching cheeks like a congressman, Khrushchev introduced “Gospodin Garriman” to the crowd. “We’ve just signed the test-ban treaty,” he shouted. “I’m going to take him to dinner. Do you think he deserves it?” The crowd roared.
The outpouring was emotional for Harriman, a giddy triumph after three years of toiling stoically in obscurity. “Mr. Harriman showed himself to be worthy of the recommendation that you gave him in your letter,” Khrushchev wrote Kennedy. “Furthermore, we never doubted this.” Kennedy called the accomplishment “a shaft of light cut into the darkness.”
Even Harriman’s neighbors joined in the adulation. On the night he arrived home, they paraded down N Street outside his home holding candles and singing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and an old campaign song, adapted from George M. Cohan, “H-A-double-R-I-M-A-N spells Harriman.” Harriman, in his shirt sleeves, came out on the steps to watch the celebration and mumble some words of thanks. A girl with a small baby in her arms held up her child to Harriman and thanked him for helping “make it possible for him to look ahead to a full and happy life.”
Like an ambitious young careerist, Harriman, who turned seventy in 1961, slowly worked his way up through the State Department ranks. In March of 1963, he won his second promotion, from Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs to Under Secretary for Political Affairs. He advanced by fighting the bureaucracy, a cause Kennedy endorsed, not by ingratiating himself with Rusk. As Under Secretary, he formed a committee to root out and kill useless committees. As Assistant Secretary, he tried to rid Far Eastern Affairs of Dulles holdovers and bring about a less rigid stance toward Red China. FE is “a wasteland,” he told Schlesinger; all the China experts had been exiled. (John Stewart Service was stamping passports in Liverpool, John Paton Davies was making furniture in Peru, and John Carter Vincent was gardening in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) By 1960, there were only two officials who could even speak Chinese in the State Department. Significantly, there were no experts on Vietnamese culture and history at all.
“Young blood,” Harriman would grumble, “we need young blood.” His own top advisers in 1963 were young men: Bill Sullivan, forty-two, his chief aide on the Laos negotiations; Roger Hilsman, forty-three, his successor at FE; and Michael Forrestal, thirty-five, a National Security staffer. The son of James Forrestal, Mike had been virtually adopted by Harriman after his father’s suicide in 1949; in 1962, Kennedy had half joked that Forrestal’s job on the White House staff was to be “my ambassador to that sovereign state known as Averell Harriman.”
Though increasingly deaf, Harriman looked remarkably fit. When a young aide told Marie Harriman that her husband looked “terrific,” she snorted, “You’d look terrific too if you did nothing but play polo until you were forty years old.” Nevertheless, when Harriman, on a diplomatic trip to Buenos Aires, attended a reunion of the Argentine National Polo Team he had beaten in 1928, the old Argentine gentlemen were all leaning on canes or hunched over in chairs. Harriman, who had turned a double play in a State Department softball game against the Japanese Embassy that summer, felt sorry for the Argentines; they had never stopped playing polo.
Harriman busied himself with a wide range of chores in the Kennedy years, hacking at the bureaucracy, patiently negotiating over Laos, winning a quick test ban treaty. But increasingly he was preoccupied with America’s involvement in Vietnam.
In later years, Harriman would erect an elaborate mythology about his early views on Vietnam, a faith that would be propagated by his aides and admirers. Harriman liked to say that he had heard Franklin Roosevelt warn against U.S. involvement in Vietnam back in 1944, and that he had heartily concurred at the time and thereafter. His followers like to point out that Harriman firmly opposed aiding France’s effort in Vietnam, that he had tried to stop the French from diverting Marshall Plan funds to their war in Indochina. He had failed only because the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had interposed himself and permitted the transfer to preserve France as a NATO ally. Harriman later described Acheson’s rationale as “a tragic theory.”
In fact, Harriman had become a hawk on Vietnam by 1954, the year the French were finally defeated by the Vietminh. When Acheson, Harriman, Nitze, Kennan, and several other veterans of the Truman years gathered to discuss their experiences at a seminar at Princeton in May 1954, Harriman was the most ardent advocate of intervention, even more hawkish than Acheson. “I want to go on the record here,” Harriman stated, “that I think we ought to take steps to get troops—American as well as many others—into Indochina and the Red River Delta before this thing begins to go.” When others pointed out the difficulty of fighting land wars in Asia, Harriman responded, “I would hate to see us have any thought of abandoning the whole of Southeast Asia just because it’s a difficult thing to do.”
By the early 1960s Harriman had settled into an uneasy ambivalence about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He was wary of military involvement, but he could not abide the thought of simply abandoning the country to the Communists. This conflict would gnaw at him for years. It set him off on a long, groping quest for a negotiated peace that would climax, and ultimately founder, in his last diplomatic mission for the United States, as chief negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks in 1968.
Harriman’s liberal allies from the Democratic Advisory Council of the 1950s, Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith, were also searching for a peaceful solution during the Kennedy years. Their model was Laos: they wanted to make Vietnam a neutral region. In April of 1962, Galbraith suggested this path to the President in a memo. He warned, “We have a growing military commitment. This could expand step by step into a major, long-drawn-out indecisive military involvement.” Back from India for consultations, Ambassador Galbraith was staying with the Harrimans in Georgetown. He tried to enlist Harriman as an ally to lobby the President.
Harriman, along with Michael Forrestal, met with the President on April 6. He told Kennedy, in his somewhat laconic style, that while he agreed with some conclusions of the Galbraith memo, he had difficulty with others. It was important that the “overt association of [the] U.S. with military operations in Vietnam be reduced to an absolute minimum,” Harriman stated. But he said it was not time yet to seek peace talks. South Vietnam’s President Diem “is a losing horse in the long run,” Harriman added, but he did not think that “we should work against him.” U.S. policy should be to support the government of South Vietnam, but not Diem personally. The President observed guardedly that he wanted to be ready “to seize on any favorable moment to reduce our involvement,” but he recognized that “the moment might yet be some time away.” In a wary conversation laced with hedging and frequent “buts,” neither the young President nor the old statesman seemed very happy with the choices. At any rate, Galbraith’s plan was quickly shot down by the Joint Chiefs of Staff; they chastised the ambassador to India for even questioning the U.S. commitment to containing Communism in Southeast Asia.
Harriman did not have strong convictions about the American role in Vietnam. He preferred a low-profile approach for the U.S. After the Laos accords in July 1962 he told Cy Sulzberger that the U.S. should now retreat from the “front lines” in Southeast Asia and let others visibly share the burden. He added that the CIA had gotten the U.S. into “terrible messes” in Laos and Indochina and that the Truman Administration should have recognized Red China in 1949.
While wrapping up the Laos accords, Harriman had made an attempt to approach the North Vietnamese secretly about a settlement of their war with the South. His initiative was the first in a myriad jumble of diplomatic moves by Washington over the next decade. The meeting itself, in Geneva in June 1962, was an early taste of the ultimate frustration.
Harriman and Bill Sullivan had to sneak down a back alley and in through a kitchen door to a secret meeting place in order to see the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Ung Van Khiem. (The Americans did not want the South Vietnamese delegation, quartered in a hotel across the street, to know.) A small, squat man in a bulky Soviet suit that was so long it covered his chubby hands when he stood, Ung was brutal and contemptuous. He refused to concede that the North had anything at all to do with the fighting in South Vietnam. Harriman was “marvelously patient with this insulting little thug,” Sullivan later recalled. He methodically probed every possibility, searching for some basis of dialogue. When Ung remained hostile and intransigent, Harriman at last stood up, towered over Ung, and dryly told him that he was in for “a long, tough war.”
Harriman’s preference for diplomacy was partly rooted in his disdain for the military. His skirmishes with General Clay in Germany and his all-out war with MacArthur in Korea had left him leery of gold-braided egos. He was impatient even with Maxwell Taylor, the “good general” embraced by the Kennedys and Establishment figures such as Acheson and McCloy. When Taylor recommended sending eight thousand combat troops to Vietnam in 1961, Harriman had bluntly told him, “You were wrong about wanting to send the 82nd Airborne into Rome and you’ve been wrong about everything since.” From his State Department perch as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, Harriman had adamantly opposed the military’s early use of napalm and defoliants in Vietnam. He was angry at Dean Rusk for ceding Vietnam policy making to the Pentagon. When Harriman would complain about napalm, Rusk would say, “No, I think I’ll leave it to the Pentagon.”
Harriman’s successor in FE when he moved up to Under Secretary in March of 1963 was Roger Hilsman, an old Burma hand who had fought in World War II as a jungle commando. Mac Bundy called Hilsman “the confident guerrilla”; he was a brash proponent of unconventional warfare, of “counterinsurgency,” and he proceeded to impose his views on anyone who would listen. He immensely irritated the Pentagon with his second-guessing; the generals did not appreciate it when, at meetings on Vietnam, Major Hilsman corrected their geography.
Counterinsurgency, known in the jargon of the time as CI, was in vogue among some of Kennedy’s young lieutenants, particularly activists such as Walt Rostow, who believed that the U.S. had to play a greater role in the Third World. Rostow envisioned, his colleagues joked, “a TV in every thatched hut.” The purpose of CI was in fact appealing: to win the hearts and minds of the peasants with land reform, honest elections, and generous amnesties, to field special forces that could instruct the locals how to harvest crops and deliver babies as well as how to fight guerrilla warfare. The President was sufficiently impressed to establish, with much fanfare, the Green Berets, an elite special forces unit trained in counterinsurgency.
George Ball later recalled that Harriman was “taken in” by Hilsman and his counterinsurgency ideas. According to Bill Sullivan, however, Harriman “never completely bought” counterinsurgency. He saw it mostly as an alternative to the conventional blunt tactics favored by the military (“grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow” went the Pentagon saying). He believed that counterinsurgency would buy time for the diplomats to work out a Laos-type solution.
Whatever the merits of CI, it was never really tried in Vietnam. Hilsman had ambitious plans for a network of “strategic hamlets” to fence out the Viet Cong, but Diem handed the program over to his nefarious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who had little use for notions like land reform or honest elections. Brother Nhu was principally interested in crushing dissent.
In May of 1963, on the 2,587th birthday of Buddha, government troops opened fire into a crowd of monks, or bonzes, in Hue City, killing nine. President Diem refused to apologize; he did not want to lose face. The Buddhists, foes of the ruling Catholic family, began dousing themselves with gasoline and sitting in the lotus position while they burned to death. Madam Nhu, Diem’s sister-in-law, exclaimed, “Let them burn and we shall clap our hands!” She called the self-immolations “bonze barbecues.”
In Washington, at meetings of a special CI Committee that Harriman chaired, a debate raged that summer over what should be done with Diem and his unsavory relatives. CIA Director John McCone argued that Diem was “a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Harriman, however, believed that Diem was in the thrall of his opium-addict brother Nhu, whom he suspected of cooperating with the Communists based on some suspicious CIA intercepts. He was appalled by the regime’s brutality and the intensity of the Buddhist dissent (he failed to understand, Richard Helms of the CIA later grumbled, that for the Buddhists “self-immolation was just another way to heaven”). By August, according to Hilsman, Harriman “preferred a coup to Nhu.”
On August 21, Nhu ordered his special forces to attack the Buddhist pagodas, which they did with machine guns and tear gas. The CIA reported that dissident generals in Diem’s army feared they would be assassinated by Nhu’s men. Harriman, Hilsman, and Michael Forrestal decided they needed to act quickly. On the afternoon of August 24, they drafted a telegram to the new U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, authorizing U.S. support for a coup against the Diem regime.
It was a hot, sultry Saturday in Washington and most officials had fled the capital. Harriman and Hilsman tracked down George Ball, Acting Secretary of State during Rusk’s vacation, on the ninth green of the Chevy Chase Club golf course. Ball, an Atlanticist and Stevensonian liberal, found the Nhus “noxious” and had no appetite for U.S. engagement in Vietnam. He had warned JFK in late 1961 that on its present course the U.S. would have 300,000 troops in Vietnam in five years. “George, you’re crazy as hell, that just isn’t going to happen,” replied the President (actually, Ball underestimated the eventual number of troops by 200,000). Now, as he read the Harriman/Hilsman telegram, Ball was perfectly willing to go along, though he insisted that the message be cleared with the President. Reached in Hyannis Port, Kennedy seemed agreeable, but he worried that if the coup occurred, the U.S. might not find Diem’s successor any better than Diem himself. Finally, he gave his authorization, on condition that the Secretaries of State and Defense also concurred. Dean Rusk went along, though he later said that he had agreed because he believed Kennedy had agreed. Bob McNamara, climbing Grand Teton Mountain in Wyoming, could not be reached. Nor could McCone at the CIA or General Taylor of the JCS or Bundy of the National Security Staff, though their deputies did sign on.
When the principals returned to Washington on Monday and learned of the telegram, they were outraged. The confusion that followed “illustrated the danger of doing business on the weekend,” Mac Bundy later remarked. According to Bobby Kennedy, “the government split in two” over the telegram. Harriman was almost abusive to “Fritz” Nolting, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Saigon and a Diem supporter. He said there was no reason to listen to Nolting now because his advice had been so bad in the past. He even refused to ride in the same limousine with Nolting, whom he described as “captivated” by Diem. Harriman was just as rough on the military brass, particularly Marine Corps General Victor “Brute” Krulak, the Joint Staff’s officer in charge of counterinsurgency. (Some White House staffers later cranked out a parody of the minutes of one meeting: “. . . Governor Harriman stated that he had disagreed for 20 years with General Krulak and disagreed today, reluctantly, more than ever. He was sorry to say that he felt General Krulak was a fool and had always thought so. . . .”)
President Kennedy was appalled at the infighting. “My God, my government is coming apart,” he told a friend, journalist Charles Bartlett. The President was angry with Harriman for provoking the furor and then exacerbating it, and he told him so. Robert Kennedy later recalled that Harriman “seemed to age ten years that fall.” RFK was so worried about his friend Averell that he spoke to his brother about inviting him into the Oval Office and stroking him a little, “rehabilitating him.”
Meanwhile, the Administration vacillated. The telegram authorizing the coup was remanded, then revived. The dissident generals in Saigon froze, but they can hardly be blamed for uncertainty. Conflicting signals traveled over several different channels of communication between Washington and Saigon—a CIA channel, a State Department channel, Ambassador Lodge’s private channel to the White House, channels the White House was not even aware of. Harriman, with his acute instinct for bureaucratic warfare, sniffed out a back channel between General Taylor and the head of the military mission in Saigon, General Paul Harkins, thereby regaining some of Kennedy’s respect (“Harriman really is a shrewd old SOB”). Kennedy finally sent a mission to Saigon to report on what was happening; General Krulak of the marines declared that the war was going well, and Joseph Mendenhall of the State Department reported that the regime was collapsing. “You did go to the same country, didn’t you?” asked Kennedy.
The President was unsure of what to believe, or do, about the war in Vietnam. With sixteen thousand U.S. military “advisers” already engaged, Kennedy saw clearly the risk of being drawn deeper in. “It’s like taking a drink,” he told an aide. “The effect wears off and you have to take another.” Yet he feared the political fallout of withdrawing. According to Kenneth O’Donnell, he said, “If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red Scare on our hands. But I can do it after I’m elected.” Kennedy’s true intentions are unknowable. But in the atmosphere of 1963, quitting Vietnam outright was almost unthinkable. A State Department official named Paul Kattenburg, head of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, had the temerity to suggest that the U.S. consider withdrawing during an angry National Security Council meeting about Diem on August 31. Shocked silence fell over the Cabinet Room. “We will not pull out until the war is won,” said Dean Rusk. “We’re winning the war,” said Bob McNamara. Kattenburg attended no more high-level meetings. He ended his career as a functionary in Guyana, not far from Devil’s Island.
Beset by conflicting advice, frustrated, unsure, Kennedy finally did authorize a coup, or rather agreed with Ambassador Lodge’s request “not to thwart” one. The Diem regime had become more extreme, raiding schools, locking up high-school and even elementary-school children. The generals finally revolted on October 31, but the coup was messy. Diem’s body was found riddled with bullets and stab wounds.
John Kennedy was himself shot to death three weeks later. Bill Sullivan found Averell Harriman that afternoon sitting on the edge of his chair, in front of a television set, holding his head in his hands.
Lyndon Johnson had opposed the coup against Diem. Publicly, he had called Diem “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.” To journalist Stanley Karnow, he remarked, “Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.” Johnson was suspicious of Harriman. He believed that Harriman had sent the first telegram authorizing a coup at 6 P.M. on a Saturday in August not out of a sense of urgency but out of desire to deceive. Equally suspect, Harriman was Robert Kennedy’s friend. LBJ told aides that he would not trust Harriman “to take out my garbage.”
Harriman was glum about Johnson’s ascendancy. He read with foreboding a memo sent to State Department officials from the new President: “. . . and before you go to bed at night I want you to do one thing for me: ask yourself this one question . . . what have I done for Vietnam today?” Harriman was sure that LBJ was under the sway of hawks like Walt Rostow, who held the job first distinguished by George Kennan, director of Policy Planning at State. Harriman referred to Rostow as “the Air Marshal” for his advocacy of bombing the North (after reading a Rostow memo calling for air strikes, Harriman stated, “I never want to see another memo from that man”). It came as no surprise when LBJ appointed a committee to explore the question of bombing North Vietnam.
At the State Department, the doubters about the war were driven underground. Hilsman resigned a few hours before he was fired; LBJ was angry at Hilsman because he had seen him insult General Lyman Lemnitzer at a dinner party at the Harrimans’. As Hilsman walked out the door of the State Department, Harriman said to him, “If I were your age I’d resign too, but I’m not.” Marie Harriman told Hilsman that if her husband was out of public office he would die.
He was instead “exiled to Africa,” as he later put it, banished from Vietnam and assigned to deal with African affairs. He even lost his title in 1965 and became again a “roving ambassador,” the job from which he had so assiduously worked his way up over the past four years. His friends began to worry about him, reading in his mournful face a sense of rejection and depression. The downcast expression masked resolution. On the street one day in early 1964 Harriman encountered Hilsman. “Johnson’s going to escalate and it’s not going to work,” he told Hilsman. “He’ll have to negotiate and he’ll do it through the Russians. I’m the only one he can send.”