NEW YORK
THE WALLS IN WILLIAM AVERELL Harriman’s uptown Manhattan apartment would make any museum curator salivate. Fifty years of collecting meant a rotating selection of gems from around the world. One he bought on a Paris honeymoon with his second wife—Vincent van Gogh’s Roses—was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art, where it was valued at $50 million. The day president-elect John F. Kennedy came for lunch, Pablo Picasso and André Derain caught the eye.
Ostensibly, the lunch was for a secret meeting with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the British Labour Party. It was a diplomatic no-no for a new president to be meeting with the opposition of the British government. The proper form was for Kennedy to first see Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, head of the Conservative Party. But Gaitskell asked Harriman to arrange the confidential session with the new American leader. The real topic, however, was the future of Averell Harriman in the New Frontier. The young president-elect was eyeing the old party war-horse for a powerless and almost honorary post in the New Frontier. Instead, Harriman’s ambitions would drag Kennedy into the most sordid government business of his administration and open the door to the ten-year American war in Vietnam.
No one—most of all Kennedy—could foresee what would grow out of lunch that day in Manhattan. Gaitskell first met Harriman while he was in Paris disbursing another $13 billion in U.S. dollars under the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. It was the second American gift to those wrecked societies since the war ended. Before the plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, had been put in place, Washington had already supplied $13 billion to clear the rubble. While acting as the Marshall Plan ramrod in Paris, Harriman suffered a major setback. He seemed on the verge of becoming the secretary of state after eight years of being America’s most distinguished diplomat. Then an aide at the Talleyrand Hotel brought him a dispatch from the United Press teletype: Truman had selected Dean Acheson for the post. Harriman’s face sagged with disappointment. The consolation prize was to become the first White House adviser on national security affairs.
But that was 1948. This was 1960. Kennedy had yet to name anyone to the most important foreign policy portfolio. Harriman’s qualifications quickly surfaced when the table discussion turned to dealing with the Soviet Union and its new premier, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. A year earlier, as a mere tourist, Harriman was the first American to conduct a lengthy meeting with the new Soviet leader—ten hours that began in the Kremlin and wound up in the Russian’s Moscow dacha for dinner. Harriman gave a 6,000-word report to the grateful U.S. ambassador, who had yet to meet the new Russian leader. For Kennedy, who relished reading about the past, Harriman was a historic figure. In almost every photo, every newsreel of Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, Harriman can be picked out in the background. There he is on the deck of a warship off Newfoundland, standing behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Atlantic Charter is hammered out in 1941 with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Or at Churchill’s side as they witness Adolf Hitler’s bombers set London afire during the blitz. And with Churchill again as they are greeted by Joseph Stalin in Moscow.
As FDR’s personal representative in London and later as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman was in every meeting aimed at destroying Nazi Germany and Japan as well as rebuilding the world’s shattered economies. He had become the communists’ favorite capitalist, the font of $11 billion in wartime Lend-Lease—everything from coffee to war planes, trucks, guns, and bullets. Stalin, the mass murderer, stood up and smiled for Comrade Averell. For Harriman, the Kremlin door was always open. That could be an important asset for a new president confronted with the uncertainty of the cold war with the Soviet Union.
Against Harriman’s selection was Bobby Kennedy. Harriman favored Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri for the 1960 presidential nomination. Also, Harriman thought the time was not right for a Roman Catholic president. When Kennedy fund-raisers approached the heir to a fortune second only to the Rockefellers, Harriman offered only a pittance of $10,000. Worse, he had a public dislike for Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., whom Harriman viewed as a nouveau riche brigand. Harriman’s biggest impediment was his age. At seventy, his hearing had gone from bad to worse, but he refused a hearing aid, that symbol of elderly weakness. As governor of New York, Harriman had selected a budget director who also had a hearing problem. Their public meetings were shouting matches that reminded Albany reporter Jack Germond of the children’s game “Sounds Like.”
To fill out the luncheon table, Harriman had included one of his protégés, Michael Forrestal. He was the son of Defense Secretary James Forrestal, who had overworked himself into a depression and other mental problems that ended in suicide. The fifth at the table was Harriman’s executive secretary, Jonathan Bingham. When dessert was served, Harriman offered an analysis of Khrushchev’s mind-set and the Soviet intervention in the Congo. Gaitskell offered a few words of dissent. Harriman’s hearing again betrayed him. He thought the dissent came from Bingham. With a flash of anger, he reprimanded Bingham as ignorant and inexperienced. Kennedy stared into space and Gaitskell looked at his coffee cup. The brief display of temper had underlined Harriman’s failing. On the way out, Kennedy called Forrestal aside. “Jesus,” thought Forrestal. “He’s going to make Averell Secretary of State!”
Instead, Kennedy began with a little laugh. “Now, this is very serious,” Kennedy told Forrestal. “Averell’s hearing is atrocious. If we’re going to give him a job, he has to have a hearing aid, and I want you to see that he does.” The job of secretary of state went to Dean Rusk. Some last-minute lobbying by old friends helped Harriman get a post that seemed almost honorary, a selection for past deeds. John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy’s professor from Harvard, told the new president it would be a mistake to bypass an insider from two shooting wars, the reconstruction of Europe and the cold war. So Harriman’s appointment was characterized as that of a roving ambassador and troubleshooter without portfolio. “An act of sentiment,” said Bobby Kennedy.
What Kennedy had done out of sympathy was akin to melting a block of ice enclosing a saber-toothed tiger who suddenly sprang to life. With razor-sharp claws, Harriman shredded friend and foe alike as he moved from rover to the number three post at the Department of State. As undersecretary of state, Harriman would issue what became the death warrant for Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam and the leader of the American crusade against communism. Kennedy would bitterly resent Harriman for manipulating the president into approving Diem’s overthrow.
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Harriman’s use of a hearing aid quickly transformed his perceptions of the world around him. Or more accurately, he was transformed by his wife Marie. She bought him the latest in hearing aids, a small flesh-colored plastic device with an on-and-off switch that fit within and behind the contours of his ear. Sometimes it would whine noisily when the volume was too high. Soon Harriman turned this symbol of infirmity into a sword. He would use the hearing aid to shock, insult, intimidate, or even cut down anyone who challenged him. He slashed his way through the Washington jungle with the skill of a master bureaucrat. In close combat, Harriman would become rude, savage, relentless, and overbearing. Confrontations with him would leave civil servants or foreign government leaders flustered, struggling to figure out just the right response. Just as the unwitting victim was about to respond, Harriman would shut off his hearing aid, sit back, and glare—or even worse, shut his eyes.
William Colby, who had become Harriman’s counterpart at the Central Intelligence Agency, got the full treatment. As were many, Colby was deferential because of Harriman’s age, his long career in government, and his personal connection with the president. “[Harriman] put me directly to the test,” Colby recalled. “He would sharply—sometimes almost insultingly—jab questions at me, scarcely leaving me time to reply. He insisted on direct answers, some impossible to give, and [would] then turn away and ignore the answers. If a subject I was reporting on struck him as not that important, he would ostentatiously turn off his hearing aid and leave the matter to his aides to follow. On more than one occasion, he baited me sufficiently to cause me to shout my answers in apparent anger at him.”
In his first year, Harriman ascended from a rover without portfolio to a post in control of American policy in the Far East as one of five assistant secretaries of state. His harsh treatment of subordinates on the Far East desk earned Harriman a new and lasting nickname—the Crocodile. They gave him a silver replica of the beast that was inscribed “From His Devoted Victims.” Harriman won the post by enabling Kennedy to avoid a hopeless war that was dropped in his lap the very day before his inauguration as the 35th president of the United States.
The 34th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, left his young successor in a bind. Perhaps the old soldier delighted in taking the wind out of Kennedy’s sail. After all, Kennedy had maligned Ike’s leadership throughout the 1960 campaign. It was Eisenhower, Kennedy said, who let the Soviet Union gain superiority in the number of nuclear-tipped missiles that could strike the United States. “I don’t want that goddamned son of a bitch sitting in this seat,” Eisenhower told one aide in the Oval Office during the campaign. The genial general was not beyond political revenge. Richard M. Nixon, who suffered for eight years as his vice president, saw Eisenhower as a subtle manipulator. “He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized,” Nixon said. “In the best sense of those words.”
Eisenhower bequeathed Kennedy two bombshells. One, with a delayed fuse, exploded on April 17, 1961, when the CIA’s invasion of Cuba floundered in failure before the world. The Bay of Pigs would show Kennedy to be reckless, naïve, and unwilling to use the naval armada that Ike had planned to crush Fidel Castro, Moscow’s man in Havana. Following Ike’s plan, the U.S. Navy had situated an aircraft carrier, Marines, and other warships within striking distance of Cuba. But Kennedy vetoed their use even as CIA-backed Cuban invaders were killed and captured by Castro. Underpinning the invasion was the idea that Cubans would rise up in revolt against Castro, a notion that seemed ridiculous in hindsight. The plot was handcrafted by Ike’s director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, and his deputy, Richard Bissell Jr.; Kennedy would fire them both. But it was Kennedy, on nationwide television, who took the fall for the fiasco at the Bahía de Cochinos.
The second bombshell produced more dread than noise in the Oval Office on January 19, 1961. Laos, a tiny isolated country of mountains and jungles, was about to fall into the communist orbit. With airlifted Soviet arms, the communist faction, the Pathet Lao, with support of Hanoi’s Viet Minh army, was on the verge of seizing all the strategic locations. It could become a staging base for a communist takeover in the neighboring countries of Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia to the east and South Vietnam to the west. Communist China sat on the northern border of Laos. Eisenhower had pumped millions of dollars into competing factions, including enough to build a 29,000-man army equipped with America’s weapons. But it was not enough.
“This is the cork in the bottle of the Far East,” Eisenhower told Kennedy. “If Laos is lost to the free world, in the long run we will lose all of Southeast Asia.” Ike was restating his domino theory—if one country turned red, the rest would topple in a row. Initially, the thought was that the Philippines, Indonesia, and India would fall to the red menace as well. This idea fell into disfavor decades later. But Kennedy had become a true believer of this theory.
“You are going to have to put troops in Laos. With other nations if possible—but alone if necessary,” Ike said.
Kennedy paused before replying. “If the situation was so critical,” he asked Ike, “why didn’t you decide to do something?”
“I would have, but I did not feel I could commit troops with a new administration coming to power,” Ike replied.
At first Kennedy rattled the American saber at a White House news conference. Maps of all Southeast Asia were displayed, and Kennedy vowed to confront communist-backed gains. The Laotian communist offensive was slowed after Kennedy ordered the U.S. Seventh Fleet deployed to the Gulf of Siam. This same March order sent three hundred U.S. Marines to Thailand, where they serviced twenty new helicopter supply ships flown by the CIA to Laos in support of anticommunist forces. Marine combat troops were landed later on the Thai–Lao border. But Kennedy quickly retreated after a closer look at Laotian geography. He must have wondered about Eisenhower’s advice after a series of briefings by his top military advisers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How could a five-star general favor fielding U.S. soldiers in the face of a logistical nightmare? There was no effective way to support American ground troops in landlocked Laos. Two small airports could not handle an aerial invasion—one likely to come under fire by communist troops. There was no way to ship arms, food, and other equipment except from Vietnamese ports and then over mountain ranges on dirt roads that turned to mud in monsoon rain. Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Kennedy that the only certain way to remove the communist threat was the use of tactical nuclear weapons, particularly if Communist China intervened, as they had done in Korea. Kennedy, still stung by military advice on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion a month earlier, was reluctant to accept the Pentagon’s invasion plans for Laos.
Rather to stand and fight in Laos, Kennedy decided the better solution was to leave. The best way out of Laos was a diplomatic deal announced May 13 with the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the five neighboring countries. But this had to be done without its being viewed as another retreat by Kennedy from a communist challenge. Things were going from bad to worse in Laos just after Kennedy avoided the use of military power during the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. Outwardly, Kennedy’s goal was for establishment of a neutralist government after all foreign forces withdrew from Laos. In reality, neutrality meant concessions to the communists—primarily to Hanoi and its relentless goal to seize South Vietnam.
With American diplomacy and the president’s political stature on the line, Kennedy turned to his roving ambassador without portfolio. By late April, Harriman was off like a shot to Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and even smaller villages, where he met with princes and generals. Eleven days in Laos and then on to Rangoon, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Saigon. Harriman explained the political dimension of his mission in a letter to Winthrop Brown, the American ambassador to Laos. “Our job is not to confront the president with a situation requiring a decision on whether to permit Laos to be overrun by the Commies, or introduce American combat forces,” Harriman said. In Geneva, Harriman reestablished his friendly working relationship with the Soviet delegate to the talks. In past administrations, he had been free to make decisions on his own. But Rusk bound Harriman to strict instructions that chafed. At one point, Harriman wanted to meet privately with the Communist Chinese delegate. Rusk vetoed the move. There has been no diplomatic relations with Beijing since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Harriman did an end run around Rusk. He complained about the State Department’s strictures in a letter to John Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India. Harriman knew Galbraith would pass along the complaint to Kennedy. Soon Kennedy told Rusk that Harriman could do anything he wished at Geneva. But by the time the carte blanche arrived in Geneva, the Chinese delegate had left the talks. Reopening ties with China would have to wait until Richard M. Nixon was president.
As the diplomatic smoke screen began to evaporate in Geneva, the governments in Bangkok and Saigon began to balk at Harriman’s handiwork. He had accepted a series of concessions that eliminated international enforcement of troop withdrawals by Hanoi. And Hanoi was known for reneging on solemn promises. For Ho Chi Minh, Laos provided the ideal route for arms and food supplies to his guerrilla army in South Vietnam. The supply line also was protected by an international border: The treaty prohibited cross-border attacks by Saigon to interdict Ho’s supply line. Hanoi was already paving parts of a jungle highway that became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Pressed by the British and French in Geneva, Harriman also agreed to withdraw CIA operatives from Laos who were fostering attacks by primitive mountain tribes on Hanoi’s supply line. Included was a ban on South Vietnamese forces crossing the Laotian border to attack North Vietnamese infiltrators.
To the president of South Vietnam, Harriman’s quest for neutrality in Laos was exposing his country’s flank to an unchallenged assault by the communists in Hanoi. Ngo Dinh Diem’s agitation was clear to the new American ambassador in Saigon, Frederick Nolting. He spoke flawless French with a soft Virginia accent and was polite and mannerly, while his predecessor had been rude and confrontational with Diem. Just as Geneva got under way, Diem had been reelected as president by a landslide. Nolting, a star in the U.S. Foreign Service, was under orders from Kennedy to drop the hard line and coax and cajole Diem into accepting American policy. Nolting shared Diem’s dismay over Harriman’s concessions in Geneva. “The effectiveness of this agreement depended entirely on the good faith of the parties involved,” Nolting said. “If Laos did not really become neutral, South Vietnam’s flank would be exposed, its defenses greatly endangered.” Nolting approached Harriman with Diem’s misgivings about the Geneva concessions during a conference in Bangkok. Harriman reminded Nolting that he was working for Kennedy, not Diem. And the president had “directed” Harriman to get a diplomatic settlement and “that he was determined to do so.” According to Nolting, his meeting with Harriman grew heated. In an effort to reassure Nolting, Harriman said his talks with the Soviets gave him a “fingertips feeling” that the Russians would enforce a withdrawal of Hanoi’s troops from Laos. “Even so, I said that my fingertips gave me precisely the opposite impression,” Nolting said.
It soon became clear that protests by Saigon and Bangkok would do little to change the outcome in Geneva. Through his delegate to the conference, President Diem announced he would not sign the treaty. Now Harriman could become as obsequious as any fawning diplomat in the service of his country. When Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, bolted from Geneva in protest, Harriman chased after him. Learning Sihanouk was driving to Italy, Harriman flew ahead to Rome and greeted the prince as he checked into his hotel. Harriman’s cajoling led to Cambodia’s ambassador returning to Geneva.
But there would be no soft soap and kid gloves in Saigon for Diem, who was struggling against a growing communist onslaught. Diem’s refusal to sign could jeopardize Harriman’s pledge to Kennedy. So Harriman arrived in Saigon with an ultimatum for Diem. Nolting recalled the confrontation that took place in a steamy palace room on September 20, 1961: Diem launched into one of his monologues about Vietnamese history, stretching back to the 1930s, detailing the communism penetration into Southeast Asia and a trail of broken agreements and bad faith. “The historical record was impressively long and accurate,” Nolting said. “Its relevance to signing the treaty on Laos without safeguards was clear.”
But when Diem was in mid-monologue, Harriman drew his sword. “Harriman had turned off his hearing aid and closed his eyes,” Nolting said. “Diem noticed this with some annoyance but continued.” Nolting wondered if the long flight had tired the old man, who was now asleep. He nudged Harriman. The Crocodile opened his jaws. “I have a fingertips feeling, Mr. President,” Harriman snapped. “The Russians will police this agreement and make the others live up to it. We cannot give you any guarantees, but one thing is clear: If you do not sign this treaty, you will lose American support.” Then, looking at the small, plump man in the white sharkskin suit, Harriman said with a tone of finality: “You have to choose.”
After much hand-holding by Nolting, Diem—or at least his representative—did sign the 1962 Geneva Treaty on the Neutralization of Laos. But he never recovered from being slapped down by Harriman. “They took a violent dislike to each other from their first meeting in 1961,” said Diem’s presidential secretary, Nguyen Dinh Thuan. “It was very unfortunate. Diem did not understand Harriman’s role in the Democratic Party and Harriman did not understand Diem.”
Harriman, too, would never forget Diem’s threat to block the Geneva agreement. The effrontery of the challenge by this Asian pip-squeak was lodged forever in Harriman’s memory, particularly when some issue arose about South Vietnam. Nolting would also be savaged later by the Crocodile for his opposition. Two months after their meeting, Harriman was in Geneva putting the finishing touches on the treaty that permitted Kennedy to avoid Eisenhower’s edict for a ground war in Laos. The secretary of state called Harriman with news of his promotion. Kennedy had made him one of the five assistant secretaries of state. But his hearing aid didn’t quite pick up which post Rusk had mentioned. Harriman called Rusk back and learned he would take over U.S. policy for the Far East—that meant South Vietnam and Diem.
Little more than a year later, Harriman’s name was being sardonically celebrated in Saigon. As predicted by Diem, Ho Chi Minh quickly violated the Laos treaty. Moscow had washed its hands of Laos. Hanoi reinforced its troops in Laos and the pipeline to South Vietnam was soon overflowing with men and equipment for the guerrilla war against Saigon. At the American embassy in Saigon, the trail through Laos no longer bore the name of Ho Chi Minh. Instead, it was called the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway. By 1963, Kennedy was secretly financing an army of 20,000 Meo tribesmen to attack the highway and Hanoi’s troops headed for South Vietnam.
Kennedy’s escape from Laos soon turned into another international defeat one month after the Bay of Pigs. Journalists and academic experts in Southeast Asian politics sided with Diem in viewing the treaty as surrender to the communists. Time magazine recalled Kennedy’s inaugural pledge to “pay any price” on behalf of liberty.
“The price in Laos seemed too high,” Time said in its June 5, 1961, edition.