Democrats could play the “Who lost ———?” game, too. JFK had proved it in 1960. He blamed Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba on the Eisenhower/Nixon administration—without ever coming up with a way to prevent it (or, as president, to undo it). Arthur Schlesinger, a Kennedy campaign and White House adviser, captured the candidate’s moral dilemma and the speed with which it was resolved:
Cuba, of course, was a highly tempting issue; and as the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy’s innate sense of responsibility. Once, discussing Cuba with his staff, he asked them, “All right, but how would we have saved Cuba if we had the power?” Then he paused, looked out the window and said, “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.” In that spirit, he began to succumb to temptation.1
He succumbed vigorously. The night before his fourth and final televised debate with Nixon, Kennedy blasted the Republican administration for
doing nothing for six years while the conditions that give rise to communism grew … ignoring the repeated warning of our ambassadors that the Communists were about to take over Cuba … standing helplessly by while the Russians established a new satellite only ninety miles from American shores … two years of inaction since Castro took power … this incredible history of blunder, inaction, retreat and failure.2
What made front-page headlines, however, was Kennedy’s declaration: “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”3 Debate continues over whether JFK knew at that time that the CIA was training and equipping anti-Communist Cubans to overthrow Castro, but there’s no question that calling for such action as a candidate made it more difficult for Kennedy to reject it as president. He was unwittingly laying the political groundwork for the Bay of Pigs debacle.
Kennedy also accused Nixon and Eisenhower of letting America lose its nuclear superiority. Kennedy charged that because of Eisenhower’s neglect, the Soviets had, or would soon have, a larger arsenal of long-range nuclear missiles than the United States.4 The “missile gap” was a bogus issue. Eisenhower denied it (and learned how little good such denials do).5 Kennedy was in the White House less than a month before his new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, told reporters that there was no missile gap in the Soviet Union’s favor, though there might be one in America’s.6
In their first televised debate, Kennedy used his opening statement to take the discussion off the agreed-upon topic of domestic policy and mount a hawkish attack on Eisenhower/Nixon foreign policy. Kennedy contended that America’s survival as a free nation was at stake:
In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.… We discuss tonight domestic issues, but I would not want [there] to be any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.… Are we as strong as we must be if we’re going to maintain our independence, and if we’re going to maintain and hold out the hand of friendship to those who look to us for assistance, to those who look to us for survival? I should make it very clear that I do not think we’re doing enough, that I am not satisfied as an American with the progress that we’re making.7
Nixon counterattacked as best he could. He accused the Democrats of the Truman era of leaving a “dangerous missile gap which they handed over to President Eisenhower to straighten out.”8
Neither Kennedy nor Nixon, both World War II Navy lieutenants, could count on their military service to protect them from charges of being weak or worse. Gen. George Marshall’s role in winning World War II didn’t save him from becoming an answer to the question, “Who lost China?” Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s larger role in winning World War II didn’t save him from becoming an answer to the question, “Who lost Cuba?” If a general’s stars could not fend off such attacks, neither could a lieutenant’s bars. Kennedy didn’t have a stronger defense than Nixon, but he did manage a stronger rhetorical offense. In 1960, both nominees tried to out-hawk each other. Kennedy won with “Who lost Cuba?” and the mythical missile gap. He didn’t win fair and square, but he won.
The defeated candidate repaid the new president in full. If JFK could accuse Eisenhower and Nixon of losing Cuba, then Nixon could accuse JFK of losing an opportunity to overthrow Cuba’s Communist government. After the Bay of Pigs, Nixon said Kennedy looked “both weak and aggressive at the same time.”9 Nixon made a standard hawk argument: if force didn’t work, it meant that too little was used. In Cuba, “when the critical moment came, when we had to decide whether we needed additional power to make the project succeed, we decided not to go through with the project we had started,” said Nixon.10 Since he didn’t say what kind of additional power would be needed or what America would do if it succeeded in overthrowing Castro (occupy the country? allow a largely pro-Castro populace to vote on a successor?), no one could prove him wrong.
Nixon also accused JFK of losing ground in Laos. During his first one hundred days, Kennedy decided to seek a coalition government for the kingdom of Laos. Coalition governments share power among competing factions. In Laos, that meant sharing it with the Communist insurgency, the Pathet Lao.11 Once more, Nixon accused Kennedy of weakness, calling the coalition government “a victory for Communist power.”12 (In 1975, Laos would be the last part of Indochina to go Communist, after both Cambodia and South Vietnam.)13
Kennedy, however, avoided the accusation that he lost Vietnam. When he sent American helicopter pilots and military advisers to Vietnam in 1962, Nixon criticized other Republicans for criticizing the president:
I don’t agree at all with any partisan or other criticism of the United States build-up in Vietnam. My only question is whether it may be too little or too late. It is essential that the United States commit all the resources of which it is capable to avoid a Communist takeover in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia.
I support President Kennedy to the hilt and I only hope he will step up the build-up and under no circumstances curtail it because of possible criticism.14
Within this seeming defense of JFK, Nixon hid a hawkish attack. He subtly cast Kennedy as weak (“I only hope he will step up the build-up”) and started placing blame for the buildup’s failure before it even occurred (“My only question is whether it may be too little or too late”). The “too little too late” attack is a classic: it assumes that there is a certain amount of force that will achieve victory, blames the attacked for failing to apply it, and sidesteps all responsibility for coming up with an actual strategy. How could JFK respond to that? By saying that he was doing enough? He would disprove that by continuing to increase the number of American advisers in Vietnam, which rose from 600 when he took office to 16,000 at the time of his death. That was enough to keep him from becoming the answer to the question “Who lost Vietnam?” in his first term. It was not enough, however, to accomplish the mission he defined as training South Vietnam’s army to defend itself without American soldiers. Nothing was.
How else could JFK have replied? By admitting that no amount of American military involvement would make South Vietnam capable of defending itself? That would have given Nixon and others the opportunity to accuse him of defeatism, weakness, cowardice—the standard litany. It would also have forced JFK to explain why he was sending American training troops on a mission that was futile and, for some, fatal.
JFK did have another alternative. If he had lived and won reelection in 1964, Robert Kennedy told one interviewer, “We would have handled [Vietnam] like Laos.” This would have come as a surprise to Kennedy administration officials who had heard JFK rule out a coalition government for South Vietnam.15 A coalition was, however, the only readily available alternative to war, if only because North Vietnam was willing to settle for one. If, however, a coalition led eventually to a Communist government in the South, a president who had agreed to it would be accused of losing Vietnam.
Robert Kennedy fuzzed his own position on a coalition government during his 1968 presidential campaign. When Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, D-Minnesota, called on the Johnson administration to state publicly that a coalition government would be acceptable in South Vietnam, RFK said, “I would be opposed to what I understand is Senator McCarthy’s position to be of forcing a coalition government on the government of Saigon, a coalition with the Communists, even before we begin the negotiations.”16 RFK sounded like he was against a coalition government at that time, but he didn’t rule out the possibility of forcing Saigon to accept a coalition after negotiations began.
By June 1971, Ted Kennedy, the last Kennedy brother, was not only casting a coalition government as a path to peace but also suggesting that this was something his brother Robert had favored in his last campaign.
There will be no peace, there will be no end to killing, until the conclusion, first stated by a man who died three years ago this week—the concept of a coalition government—is met and understood. In those days, that conclusion was ridiculed as placing the fox in the chicken coop. The ridicule was unjust. But today the concept of a coalition government is called “defeat.” And that is hypocrisy.17
Nixon, however, rejected a coalition government outright. In the final week of his 1968 presidential campaign, he said that imposing a coalition government on Saigon would be nothing more than a “thinly disguised surrender.”
To the Communist side, a coalition government is not an exercise in cooperation, but a sanctuary for subversion. Far from ending the war, it would only insure its resumption under conditions that would guarantee Communist victory.18
A “decent interval” deal would have all these flaws as well. It, too, would be imposed on Saigon against its will. It, too, would lead to resumption of the war under conditions (the absence of the American military) that would lead to Communist victory. It, too, would be a disguised surrender.
A “decent interval” had one clear political advantage over a coalition government: the “decent interval” would be a better-disguised surrender. On paper, it would deny the Communists any role in Saigon’s government unless and until they won an election. (They would never get a chance to compete at the ballot box, because Saigon would not allow such an election to take place.)
A coalition government, on the other hand, had one clear advantage over a “decent interval”: Nixon could have gotten a coalition government in his first year as president. Hanoi started demanding a coalition government in 1969 and continued to do so for the next three years. If Nixon had agreed in 1969, he would have avoided four years of war and saved the lives of 20,000 American soldiers as well as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, North and South. He could even have provided safe passage out of the country for the thousands of Vietnamese who fought or worked on the American side as soldiers or civilian government employees. The human cost of a coalition government would have been much lower.
The political cost, however, would have been much higher. If Nixon had accepted a coalition government for South Vietnam in 1969, he would have left himself open to the attacks he had made on JFK for accepting one for Laos in 1961. Nixon’s opponents could have quoted him calling a coalition government “a victory for Communist power.” If the coalition government led to a Communist one, as Nixon predicted, then his name would have become the answer to “Who lost Vietnam?” He could have saved thousands of lives, but he would have lost his reelection campaign.
Nixon publicly dismissed a coalition government as merely a Communist demand “that we overthrow the Government of South Vietnam as we leave.”19