WASHINGTON
IN THE FALL OF 1963, turmoil in Saigon was starting to match civil rights as issues causing a daily erosion of President Kennedy’s chances to win reelection to a second term in 1964. Kennedy’s failed attempt to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem made the front page of the September 2 Times of Vietnam, an English newspaper financed by the president of South Vietnam. “CIA Financing Coup Planned for Aug. 28 Falls Flat, Stillborn,” said the headline. The next day the paper featured General Ton That Dinh underscoring the disgraceful American diplomacy. “What do you want, gentlemen of the foreign press, while our country is in real danger of an invasion?” Dinh said. “Do you want to do harm to this country while it falls into communist hands?”
That view was echoed in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans Kenneth Keating of New York and Barry Goldwater of Arizona wondered if Kennedy was about to desert Diem. Rusk, the secretary of state, told Kennedy that Lodge should be recalled from Saigon to tamp down Republican criticism. “If he were back here, he could say to those fellows, pipe down,” Rusk said. More important were the misgivings of former President Eisenhower, whose support was vital to public opinion.
At a September 17 White House meeting, Kennedy asked who could visit the old general at his farm in Gettysburg to elicit some sign of support for pressuring Diem. Director John McCone of Central Intelligence was one of the senior Republicans in the Kennedy administration who kept in touch with Ike. “You want to be careful about that,” McCone said about appealing to Ike. “He remains a great admirer of him [Diem].”
“They think this is a left-wing plot by the liberals?” Kennedy said. “Yeah,” McCone said. Ike had called to complain about Lodge’s plunging into the chaos in Saigon. McCone then quoted Ike’s viewpoint: “This is what’s wrong,” Ike said. “Now Diem was the toughest guy, he’s a hard guy to handle, but he fights communism, he’s a tough fellow. Now that crowd down there that you’re associated with are going to dump him, dump Diem, and get Cabot out there and get him all screwed up and Cabot’s going to be in it. And it’s going to be the Republicans’ fault.” As McCone finished, the Cabinet Room exploded with laughter.
Another politician opposed to ousting Diem was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who kept his advice to the president private—one on one. But in one meeting with the president’s national security advisers when Kennedy was not present, Johnson exploded with criticism. “If you want to play cops and robbers, why don’t you get on television, but goddamn it, let’s don’t go doing it with our allies,” Johnson told Rusk, McNamara, Ball, Harriman, and Forrestal shortly after the first coup attempt collapsed. Johnson, as Kennedy’s personal emissary, traveled to Saigon in 1961 to pledge unwavering American support. Along with other veterans of the Senate, he had little confidence in Lodge, who as a senator had a reputation for laziness and an inability to follow through.
Kennedy was unhappy with some important decisions by Lodge in Saigon who was setting his own agenda. Without first getting Washington approval, Lodge severed U.S. relations with the Saigon government agencies and ended personal contact with Diem after his initial August 26 meeting. According to Lodge, he was imposing an official cold shoulder that would force Diem to come to him. Kennedy said nothing despite grumbling by Rusk, McNamara, and McCone. “I had the impression that Kennedy was quite content to give Lodge his head in deciding how far to go against Diem,” said William Colby, the CIA’s expert on Vietnam who sat in most White House coup planning sessions. “Lodge’s involvement and Republican credentials would protect him from recriminations, whatever developed.”
The White House press corps mostly gave Kennedy a pass on pointed questions about the increasing turmoil in Saigon. Not so Walter Cronkite of CBS when he interviewed Kennedy on Labor Day at Hyannis Port. He noted Kennedy’s slide among Southern voters before shifting to Vietnam. “Debacle” was the word used by Cronkite when he asked Kennedy about his policies in Vietnam. In the September 2 interview, Cronkite noted a headline that said the administration was going to use diplomacy in Vietnam. “I thought we were trying diplomacy all along,” Cronkite said. “What can we do in this situation, which seems to parallel other famous debacles of dealing with unpopular governments?”
The president was quick to deplore Diem’s repression of the Buddhists and he said that by becoming out of touch with the people, the Saigon government would lose the war against the communists. “There is still time,” Kennedy told a nationwide audience. With changes in policy and personnel, Diem could recover the popular support necessary to win the war. It was a message from the president directly to the generals plotting the coup against Diem. With the words “change in personnel,” Kennedy probably meant the downfall of Nhu. But he could also have meant Diem. Kennedy’s appearance on CBS and NBC was part of what McNamara called a public education program. Included was a claim by McNamara and Taylor, after a September 28 meeting with Diem, that the war in Vietnam would end in victory in 1965. It was a dubious conclusion based on bogus facts provided by that avowed optimist General Harkins. So suspect were Harkins’s battlefield estimates that McNamara himself gave up reading them. “He placed his principal reliance on information that came to him through the CIA,” said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy defense secretary. For public consumption, however, Kennedy was switching on the light at the end of the tunnel.
So successful was the progress against the Viet Cong, McNamara and Taylor told Kennedy—and later Congress—that a thousand American advisers could be withdrawn from Vietnam. That, too, was a bit of fakery. McNamara told the president is was merely a bit of paperwork in dealing with the coming and goings of U.S. advisers to the Saigon army. “We can say to Congress and the people: We do have a plan to reduce exposure of U.S. combat personnel,” McNamara said of the withdrawal of a thousand advisers. Forty-seven Americans had been killed in combat by 1963. “This will be of great value to meeting the strong view of [Senator J. William] Fulbright and those who think we are becoming bogged down in Vietnam,” McNamara told Kennedy. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Mike Mansfield, the Senate Democratic leader, were urging Kennedy to withdraw from Vietnam.
Again and again at secret White House meetings, Kennedy returned to the issue of retaining or removing President Diem. Another coup effort seemed dubious. “We did follow a policy doing our best to encourage a coup,” Kennedy said. “Now, we weren’t successful. Whether we should or shouldn’t, I don’t know. We weren’t successful. I don’t think Cabot [Lodge] has come up with any proposal to make it more successful.” To Kennedy, Lodge was spinning his wheels in Vietnam. “There is not as yet clear support for a coup. That being true, we are going to have to work along with Diem until there is a coup or a situation that is altered so drastically that we have to take drastic action—cut off aid,” Kennedy said.
Once the coup failed, Kennedy wanted Lodge to resume diplomatic talks to Diem in hopes of stabilizing Saigon Buddhists and conducting an effective war against the Viet Cong. Lodge replied that sitting down with Diem was a waste of time. To brother Bobby, a big part of the problem was Lodge. The new ambassador was convinced pressuring Diem was a waste of time. “You got a man out there who doesn’t want a dialogue,” Bobby said of Lodge. Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, said coup planning was Lodge’s “other big ploy.”
“Want to go ahead with coup planning?” Kennedy asked his advisers. The CIA chief, McCone, said he did not know about Lodge’s coup plans. What followed in the next forty-four seconds is still censored despite the death of all the participants and the expiration of security designations after fifty years. For the record, Rusk told Lodge to suspend coup planning and resume diplomacy with Diem. In reality, Kennedy and Lodge continued to explore fomenting an overthrow by Saigon’s reluctant generals.
Besides American press reports from Saigon, the Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu, was also undercutting Kennedy’s public relations program. As requested, Diem exiled Beautiful Spring from Saigon. However, she was not silenced. On the road, she instilled fear and loathing in the American president. In Belgrade, she likened U.S. advisers in South Vietnam to mere “soldiers of fortune.” Kennedy, at a September 23 White House meeting, raised the issue with his advisers. “I never saw a more featherheaded dame in my life than this bitch,” Kennedy said. “It’s all right when she was attacking me. But when she attacks junior officers in the Pentagon, we’ve got to crack down.” When the laughter subsided, Kennedy and his advisers were still rattled over Madame Nhu’s looming arrival in New York. “She strikes out and confuses the whole situation,” said George Ball, undersecretary of state. “The television stations are going to have a field day when she is here.” McGeorge Bundy sounded ominous when he chimed in at a later meeting. “The worse that woman becomes, the more substantial would be her elimination as an initial step.”
Kennedy’s inability to silence Madame Nhu, control Lodge in Saigon, or get the straight story on the course of the war against the Viet Cong left him in turmoil about the impact of Vietnam—and civil rights—on his 1964 reelection battle. “It was on his mind all of the time,” said Charles Bartlett, a personal friend and newspaper columnist. Outwardly he was confident—he predicted it at a news conference—that Senator Barry Goldwater would be the Republican presidential nominee. But privately to Bartlett, Kennedy feared a much tougher challenge from George Romney, the progressive Republican governor of Michigan who had embraced the civil rights movement ahead of Kennedy. Bartlett spent weekends with Kennedy at Camp David, Maryland, and Atoka, Virginia. “I always had the impression that he viewed George Romney as his stiffest [competition],” Bartlett said. “I don’t think he ever thought he’d be lucky enough to get Barry. He had a sort of sinister feeling that George Romney would be there. He’d be sort of a surprise figure and they could be damned tough. I think what you felt in him as his life came to a close … sort of a gathering tension towards the election.”
Politics was the topic as Kennedy and Bartlett took long walks together. One day they walked through Arlington National Cemetery, inspecting the tombstones of presidents and army privates. At the high point of the grounds near Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Kennedy took in the view of the nation’s capital below. “Wouldn’t this be a fine place to have the White House?” Kennedy told Bartlett.
Surrounded by so many graves, Bartlett wondered where Kennedy would eventually be buried. “Guess I’ll have to go back to Boston,” he said. Bartlett argued for Arlington. “But we left it sort of up in the air,” Bartlett said.