XIX
THOUGH KENNEDY WAS deeply concerned with the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, he did not consider that conflict the source of all mankind’s troubles. In 1961 this was still rather a novel viewpoint for an American President. The tendency in the years after the Second World War had been to see the planet as tidily polarized between America and Russia. In the 1950s John Foster Dulles had transmuted this from an assumption into a dogma. The Dulles world rested on unitary conceptions of the opposing blocs: on the one hand, the ‘free world,’ capaciously defined to include such places as Spain, Paraguay, Batista’s Cuba and Mississippi and destined ultimately for the private enterprise of the Secretary of Commerce and the god of the Secretary of State; and, on the other, the ‘communist camp,’ a monolithic conspiracy with headquarters in Moscow, enslaving captive peoples and orchestrating global crises according to a comprehensive master plan.
Countries which did not fit into one category or the other were regarded as anomalies. Dulles, it is true, was no great believer in the virtues of European colonialism. In certain moods, he even took a missionary’s relish in discomfiting the empires of mammon. But, like a missionary, he expected the primitive peoples to accept the true faith, only instead of gathering them down by the river for a mass baptism he tried to herd them into the military pacts he scattered across the face of Asia. If they declined to ally themselves to the United States or went their own way in the United Nations or indulged in tirades against the west or engaged in social revolution, it was due to inherent moral weakness compounded by the unsleeping activity of the minions of a communist Satan. Summing up his creed in 1956, Dulles described neutralism as the principle “which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others” and excommunicated its devotees as “immoral.” Though the Dulles doctrine was considerably tempered in application, he succeeded in implanting both in American policy and in opinion the idea that those who were not with us around the earth were against us.
Of the various transformations wrought in the Kennedy years none was less noted or more notable than the revolution in American attitudes toward the uncommitted world.
As Senator, Kennedy had come to object to the Dulles doctrine both as morally self-righteous and as politically self-defeating.
Thus, where Dulles saw neutralism as immoral, Kennedy felt that the new states, absorbed in the travail of nationhood, were as naturally indifferent to the ‘moral’ issues in the cold war as Americans in a comparable stage of development had been to the moral issues in the Napoleonic wars. The spread of neutralism consequently neither surprised nor appalled him. “Oh, I think it’s inevitable,” he told John Fischer of Harper’s in 1959. “During the immediate years ahead this is likely to be an increasing trend in Africa and probably also in Latin America. . . . The desire to be independent and free carries with it the desire not to become engaged as a satellite of the Soviet Union or too closely allied to the United States. We have to live with that, and if neutrality is the result of concentration on internal problems, raising the standard of living of the people and so on, particularly in the underdeveloped countries, I would accept that. It’s part of our own history for over a hundred years.”
He felt, moreover, that the third world had now become the critical battleground between democracy and communism and that the practical effect of Dulles’s bell, book and candle against neutralism could only be to prejudice the American case and drive the developing nations toward Moscow and Peking. The battle for Europe, Kennedy believed, had been, except for Berlin, essentially won by the end of the forties. “Today’s struggle does not lie there,” he told Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium in the spring of 1963, “but rather in Asia, Latin America and Africa.” Where Dulles divided the world on the question of whether nations would sign up in a crusade against communism, thereby forcing the neutrals to the other side of the line, Kennedy, by making national independence the crucial question, invited the neutrals to find a common interest with us in resisting communist expansion.
As for anti-colonialism, which Dulles approved only so long as it remained within the bounds of gentility, Kennedy saw it as inherently non-genteel and probably inseparable from disorder, excess and a certain bitterness toward the west. The issue, he said in 1959, “is one of timing—and whether once that freedom is achieved, they will regard the United States as friend or foe.” Even if the new countries declined to adopt the free enterprise system or enlist in the cold war, the strengthening of their independence was still likely to be a positive good for the United States. In the end, the secure achievement of national identity, he thought, could only set back the Soviet conception of the future world order and strengthen the American. “The ‘magic power’ on our side,” he said in 1959 to James MacGregor Burns, “is the desire of every person to be free, of every nation to be independent. . . . It is because I believe our system is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature that I believe we are ultimately going to be successful.”
It was partly knowledge of these views and partly also his youth and the sense he gave of freedom from preconception which led the third world to take heart from his election in 1960. Even that most irascible of neutralists, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, later remarked how the news “was welcomed in Cambodia, where nerves had become somewhat frayed by the obvious determination of the outgoing government to ignore the powerful forces making for change . . . a tendency sometimes to be found among older men, who have failed to keep abreast of the times.” This was typical of the sense of relief, curiosity and hope Kennedy’s accession to office stirred in neutral capitals.
In Washington the President’s desire to give our relations with the uncommitted world a new cast received ardent support from Chester Bowles, Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Mennen Williams, Harlan Cleveland and Edward R. Murrow as well as from Robert Kennedy. In the White House we were all sympathetic; and Robert Komer, who patrolled the gray areas from Casablanca to West New Guinea, and Walt Rostow gave particular attention to these matters. Still the policy remained peculiarly an exercise in presidential diplomacy. Kennedy became, in effect, Secretary of State for the third world. With his consuming intellectual curiosity, he generally knew more about the Middle East, for example, than most of the officials on the seventh floor of the State Department; and the Assistant Secretaries in charge of the developing areas dealt as much with him as with the Secretary of State. Moreover, he conducted his third world campaign to an unprecedented degree through talks and correspondence with heads of state. He well understood that personalities exert a disproportionate influence in new states without stable political systems, and he resolved to turn this situation to his own purposes.
The leaders of the new nations, it must be said, did not always make this task any easier. They were often ungenerous and resentful, driven by historic frustrations and rancors and brimming over with sensitivity and vanity. Moreover, anti-American bravado was always a sure way to excite a crowd and strike a pose of national virility. The President, understanding this as part of the process, resolved not to be diverted by pinpricks. He was sometimes greatly tried, and on occasion the dignity of the United States required some form of response. But most of the time he was faithful to the spirit of Andrew Jackson who in 1829 had called on his fellow countrymen, in the event of foreign provocation, “to exhibit the forbearance becoming a powerful nation rather than the sensibility belonging to a gallant people.”
And so the new President set out to adjust American thinking to a world where the cold war was no longer the single reality and to help the new countries find their own roads to national dignity and international harmony. But in his own government he immediately ran head-on against a set of inherited policies on colonialism, on neutralism and on foreign assistance, deeply imbedded in the minds of government officials and the structure of the executive branch.
The first problem was colonialism. This was, in one sense, a dying issue. In the fifteen years of the United Nations some forty countries, containing nearly a billion people, had won their independence. In Africa, the colonial continent par excellence, there were twenty-two new states. Yet these successes had only increased the sense of grievance in Asia and Africa about the dependencies which remained. And anti-colonialism was still the most convenient outlet for the revolt of the rest of the world against the historic domination of the west—that revolt so long suppressed, now bursting out on every side.
Since the time of Franklin Roosevelt American policy had had a nominal commitment to anti-colonialism. But the State Department had been dominated by men who, regarding NATO as our top priority, flinched from anything which might bruise the sensibilities of our European allies, some of whom still had colonial possessions. Even in those parts of the Department presumably devoted to the business of the developing world, the aim of helping the new nations meet their problems jostled uneasily with pressure to defend the sanctity of American overseas investment. Such tensions had prevented the formation of a clear American position.
In the December preceding Kennedy’s inauguration, forty-three Asian and African states had submitted to the General Assembly a resolution on “the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples.” The resolution declared that “all peoples have the right of self-determination,” that “inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence” and that “immediate steps shall be taken” in all non-self-governing territories “to transfer all powers to the peoples of those Territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will.”
While the language of the resolution was sweeping, its practical implications, as the debate made clear, were limited. It was less a plea for immediate action than for an affirmation of purpose, and it had actually been worked out by the American delegation with Afro-Asian representatives in order to head off a more demagogic Soviet proposal. Our delegation even had the concurrence of the State Department in Washington in its desire to vote for the resolution. But the British were opposed, and Harold Macmillan called Eisenhower by transatlantic telephone to request American abstention. When an instruction to abstain arrived from the White House, James J. Wadsworth, then our ambassador to the UN, tried to reach Eisenhower to argue the case. Eisenhower declined to accept his call. Wadsworth loyally defended the American abstention in the General Assembly; but, when the resolution passed by 89–0, eight other nations joining the United States in abstaining, an American Negro delegate actually stood up and led the applause. Senator Wayne Morse, another delegate, later condemned the United States decision and declared that “on every major issue of colonialism at the 15th General Assembly, our voting record shows that we rejected our own history, and allowed the Communist bloc to champion the cause of those millions of people who are trying to gain independence.”
In February the session of the General Assembly resumed with Adlai Stevenson as ambassador. Almost immediately the new administration was confronted by a new colonial issue. For some time the nationalist forces in Angola had been in revolt against the Portuguese authorities. Of all the classical colonial countries, Portugal was far the most impervious to the winds of change. Indeed, the Salazar government, hopelessly anchored in its medieval certitudes, had been the real if unstated target of the December resolution. Now, as the fighting in Angola grew more fierce and sustained, Liberia placed before the Security Council a resolution calling on Portugal to comply with UN policy against colonialism and proposing a UN inquiry into the situation. This resolution incorporated by reference the anti-colonialism resolution of December.
Stevenson and Kennedy both saw the opportunity to intimate a change in American policy. The U.S. Mission to the UN, along with Harlan Cleveland and Wayne Fredericks, the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, laid the groundwork for action. There was token opposition from the Europeanists at State; but Kennedy took care that everything should be done with due concern for the feelings of Portugal and the solidarity of NATO. Salazar was informed of the American intention a week before the vote. Stevenson put the case politely in debate, arguing that America “would be remiss in its duties as a friend of Portugal” if it failed to encourage the step-by-step advancement of all inhabitants under Portuguese administration toward full self-determination. The resolution failed in the Security Council, but the new administration was now free of automatic identification with colonialism.
As troubles mounted in Angola, the same resolution came before the General Assembly a month later and this time passed with American support. Our UN votes produced anti-American riots, in Lisbon and a mild surge of criticism in the United States. The New York foreign policy crowd feared that Kennedy was opening a gap in the Atlantic Alliance. Unimpressed by such reactions, Kennedy had authorized a White House statement two days after the first vote pointing out that the decision had not been taken in haste and that our NATO allies had been notified in advance. In the third world the new administration was acclaimed as the friend of oppressed peoples.
For a moment the Bay of Pigs compromised the new American role, but, curiously, only for a moment—partly because it was over so quickly that impressions did not have time to crystallize, and partly because, as Sihanouk said later, hopes were actually “increased by the President’s statesmanlike handling of the crisis.” Kennedy’s “refusal to involve American armed forces directly in an attack on a neighboring country,” Sihanouk later said, “despite a great public outcry by reactionary elements urging this course of action, showed him to be a man of rectitude and courage.” J. K. Galbraith, our new ambassador to New Delhi, reported the same reaction from India.
While these early moves were showing the third world a new American attitude toward colonialism, Kennedy was demonstrating in Laos a new American support of neutralism.
The Laos talks had started in Geneva following the cease-fire of early May 1961. The conference opened in a contentious atmosphere. The Russians insisted that the Pathet Lao be seated on a basis of equality with the representatives of Prince Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist, and General Phoumi, the protégé of the Eisenhower administration, and the British were ready to go along. But the Americans objected at first, and everything seemed blocked. When Rusk, with Kennedy’s approval, finally consented to seating the Pathet Lao, the right-wing delegates walked out. Eventually the three Laotian factions met in Laos and agreed on triple representation.
After a few days Rusk returned to Washington, leaving Averell Harriman in charge. Harriman set to work in characteristic style. He looked first at the American delegation. It consisted incredibly of 126 people, and some of the top officers were evidently out of sympathy with the neutralization idea. Harriman preferred both small staffs and people who agreed with the policy. Finally he reached down to a Class III Foreign Service officer, a young man named William H. Sullivan, whom he had found not only a proficient draftsman but a strong backer of the Kennedy effort, and asked him to recommend how the delegation could be reduced. Sullivan, feeling very bold, suggested that it be cut by half. Harriman told him to cut it by two-thirds and took particular pleasure in collapsing the oversized military complement to a colonel and a sergeant. When Harriman then informed the State Department that he wanted Sullivan as his deputy, State replied that, as a Class III officer, Sullivan could not be put over the Class I and II officers already on the delegation. Harriman’s solution was simple: send the men who outranked Sullivan home.
The Geneva meeting recessed while Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna. Laos was, of course, the sole beneficiary of their conversations, and the talks resumed in June, spurred on by the Kennedy-Khrushchev commitment to “a neutral and independent Laos under a government chosen by the Laotians themselves.” Harriman now plunged into the serious stretch of negotiation. As he saw it, the neutralization policy confronted several obstacles: the Chinese, who wanted the Pathet Lao to win; the Pathet Lao, who hoped to evade the cease-fire and complete the conquest of the country; General Phoumi, who could not believe that Washington was serious about neutralization; and a few people in the State Department, who still considered neutralization a mistake.
The State Department, in fact, was only beginning to recuperate from John Foster Dulles’s attack of pactomania. In July, for example, the Department actually reproved Galbraith in New Delhi for suggesting to Nehru that the United States was not trying to collect new military allies in Southeast Asia. The Department had better understand, Galbraith replied, in his customary vein, that acceptance of neutrality in Laos or for that matter in India did represent a change in policy from those days when the United States was forming alliances and proclaiming the immorality of neutralism. To advance this understanding, he helpfully passed along page references to the “winning candidate’s” views on SEATO and CENTO* in the compilation of Kennedy’s foreign policy speeches, The Strategy of Peace. He added that military alliances with inefficient and unpopular governments involved grave dangers, especially that of converting legitimate anti-government sentiment into anti-American and pro-Soviet sentiment. “To trade strong neutrality for weak alliances is obviously foolish. . . . At all times we must see the reality and not, as in the manner of our predecessors, be diverted by the words.”
In a similar spirit of devotion to the past, the Department refused to let Harriman talk even informally with the Chinese delegates at the Geneva conference. At the end of July Galbraith wrote me from Geneva, where he had made a brief trip to bring himself abreast of the negotiations. The argument against contact with the Chinese Communists, Galbraith said, is “that if Sarit, Diem and Chiang Kai-shek were to hear, these noble men would think they were being undermined. . . . All this makes Harriman’s task exceedingly difficult and not a little humiliating. Back of it all is only the mindless reluctance to change—and the wish to see foreign relations as a minuet. . . . He has no way of reassuring the Chinese even on minor points, and of course they are naturally suspicious. This is our most experienced and least illusioned negotiator with Communists from Stalin on.” Galbraith concluded: “Harriman is going to talk about [his instructions] with Rusk next Friday in Paris but a word from the White House would be most helpful.’’ When I mentioned the problem to Kennedy, he responded wearily as if to one more example of official idiocy and sent word along that Harriman was responsible enough to talk with whomever he saw fit.
Harriman was determined to keep the talks in low key: he saw no advantage in turning the conference into a shouting match. But the negotiations proved long and tortuous. By mid-September agreement had been reached on only a few of the thirty-three critical items. Then he proposed a series of informal meetings, away from a fixed agenda and daily press briefings. Though the United States had few tangible bargaining assets, Harriman had skill, persistence and cool logic, and he conceived his task in terms not of victory but of settlement. In time, his perseverance began to have effect. G. M. Pushkin, the Soviet representative, finally agreed that Moscow would assume responsibility for the observance of the agreement by the communist signatories; and then both Russia and China agreed that, while recommendations by the International Control Commission had to be unanimous, the minority could not veto majority reports on questions of the violation of the agreement. They agreed further to prohibit the entrance of foreign troops and the use of Laos as a corridor into South Vietnam. By early December the conference completed a draft Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos.
The problem remained of establishing a government of national union. Harriman’s belief that Souvanna was the only possible head of a coalition displeased the diehards in Washington. The deputy chief of the Far Eastern Bureau snapped, after reading one Harriman telegram, “Well, I suppose the next one will be signed Pushkin.” As late as November, when Harriman was trying to organize the coalition, some of our people actually urged Phoumi to hold out for both key ministries of defense and interior. This only reinforced Phoumi’s stubbornness. In December negotiations broke down. Though the Geneva conference persuaded the Laotians to resume talks in January 1962, and Harriman finally got the State Department to say publicly that defense and interior should go to Souvanna, Phoumi continued his resistance.
But Harriman persevered. “He’s putting together a New York state balanced ticket,” the President said one day. “He’s doing a good job.” In February 1962 Averell got Washington to suspend the monthly grant of $3 million which enabled the Phoumi regime to meet its military and civilian payrolls, and in March he went to Laos to tell Phoumi personally that he must accept the Souvanna solution. Speaking with brutal frankness, Harriman informed Phoumi that he could not expect American troops to come to Laos and die for him and that the only alternative to a neutral Laos was a communist victory. Phoumi was still unyielding until April, when the Thai government, which had hitherto backed him, accepted the Harriman logic and urged him to join a government under Souvanna.
No sooner had Phoumi declared a readiness to negotiate than the Pathet Lao broke the cease-fire in a major way. On May 6, with North Vietnamese support, they seized the town of Nam Tha, where Phoumi had imprudently deployed a substantial force. The engagement was, as usual, almost bloodless. The Royal Laotian Army fled, and the communists appeared to be starting a drive toward the Thai border. This flagrant violation of the cease-fire brought a prompt reaction in Washington. Harriman now proposed that a contingent of Marines be sent to Thailand. Kennedy was at first reluctant, fearing that once the Marines were installed in Thailand it would be difficult to find an occasion to withdraw them, but decided to go ahead. The commitment of limited force on May 15 had an immediate effect. The Pathet Lao came to a halt, and negotiations started up again. In Washington Harriman called in the Laotian Ambassador and said that, if the coalition were not immediately completed, it would be the end of Phoumi. When this word reached Vientiane, Phoumi, whose power had vanished with his army, capitulated. On June 12 a coalition government was formed with Souvanna as prime minister and Phoumi and Prince Souphanouvong of the Pathet Lao as vice premiers.
The trouble was not yet over. For a moment South Vietnam threatened to walk out of the Geneva conference. When Michael Forrestal, who covered Southeast Asia for the Bundy staff, reported this from Geneva, the President sent a strong letter to Diem saying that this was a decision involving American lives, it was the best possible solution and it would be in the interests of South Vietnam. On July 23 the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos was finally ratified in Geneva. Kennedy described it as “a heartening indication that difficult and at times seemingly insoluble international problems can in fact be solved by patient diplomacy.” If the settlement could be made to work, “it would encourage us to believe that there has been a change in the atmosphere, and that other problems also could be subjected to reason and solution.”
The settlement did not ‘work’ in the sense that the signatories observed the Geneva declaration. Coalition might have had a chance at the time of the Vientiane Agreement of 1957; but the Eisenhower administration had killed the idea then and again in 1960. In 1962 coalition labored under terrific disadvantages which had not existed five years earlier—the Pathet Lao army, no longer an ill-equipped rabble of 1800 men, now had 20,000 soldiers armed with Soviet weapons; Pathet Lao ministers now controlled not just Economic Planning but Information, Transport and Public Works; and there was a Soviet Embassy in Vientiane. In addition, Hanoi was now deeply committed to the policy of supplying the Viet Cong rebels in South Vietnam through the Laos corridor.
As a result, the Geneva settlement on Laos never went into effect. The Pathet Lao representatives soon withdrew from Vientiane and resumed their effort to take over the country by force; the International Control Commission failed to close the corridor to South Vietnam or otherwise assure neutralization; and Laos fell into a state of de facto partition. The Soviet Union did not—perhaps could not—fulfill its pledge to secure compliance by the communist states. In 1961 and 1962 Kennedy often seized the opportunity in a speech or press conference to remind the world that Khrushchev had promised his support to the neutralization of Laos, and this intermittent needling had intermittent effect. As late as 1963, when Soviet influence in Southeast Asia was in decline, Kennedy sent Harriman to Moscow to recall Khrushchev to his pledge. Khrushchev seemed bored by the subject and asked Harriman irritably why Washington bothered so much about Laos. But in the next weeks the attitude of the Soviet Ambassador in Vientiane markedly improved.
Yet, despite the systematic violation of the Geneva Agreement, the new policy brought clear gains. The Kennedy strategy ended the alliance between the neutralists and the Pathet Lao. Souvanna, Kong Le and other neutralist leaders became, as Winthrop Brown and Harriman had foreseen, the defenders of Laotian independence no longer against the United States but now against communism. The result was to localize the crisis, stop an imminent communist take-over, place the Pathet Lao in the role of breakers of the peace, block the southward expansion of China and win the American position international support. By 1965, General Phoumi, after the failure of his last intrigue, had fled the country; William Sullivan was now American Ambassador in Vientiane; and Souvanna Phouma was receiving active American assistance in Laos and stoutly supporting American policy in South Vietnam.
The result expressed Kennedy’s ability to see the world in terms more complex and realistic than total victory or total defeat. Laos was neither won nor lost, but it was removed from the area of great-power confrontation. The Laos experiment illustrated both the advantages and problems of neutrality.
Washington’s tolerance of neutralism was not based on any sort of New Statesman belief in the moral superiority of neutrals. The President was entirely unsentimental in this respect. But in the case of Laos he saw no other way out, and, with his understanding of the historical inevitability of neutralist attitudes, he was quite prepared, when feasible, to build neutralism as an alternative to communist expansion. Moreover, he had no doubt about the value to the United States of neutralist support in the various disputes with the Soviet Union.
This led to considerable White House interest in a meeting of unaligned nations, called by Nehru, Tito, Nasser and Sukarno for Belgrade in early September 1961. George McGhee, as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, responded to our concern. But elsewhere in State there was the usual indifference, if not opposition, to the whole idea of taking special trouble with the third world. When we suggested a presidential message to the conference, State was very cold. A few days before the conference opened, I learned that the Department was about to inform Belgrade no message would be forthcoming.
With the President’s approval, I succeeded in stopping the cable and asked Alexis Johnson at State to call a meeting to reconsider the decision. The meeting later in the day was almost a travesty of those Foggy Bottom séances which haunt one’s memory. The men from the Department arrived with a whole series of feeble reasons for doing nothing. As Tom Sorensen of USIA and I knocked one down, they clutched for another, until, as Sorensen said later, he was sure that someone would argue that the cable would cost $12.20 and the Department couldn’t afford it.
Finally Carl Rowan, who was then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and plainly unsympathetic with his colleagues, scribbled an excellent draft on a yellow pad. At the end of the day, Alexis Johnson called to say that he was prepared to back the message if we would agree on a few changes. Most were trivial and unobjectionable, but, when he suggested that a passing presidential expression of good wishes be deleted, this seemed to carry caution to the point of inanity. Johnson, who was good-natured about these matters, consented not to press for this final excision, and the message went out. It was probably worth the effort—at least Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the sagacious editor of Foreign Affairs, who covered the Belgrade meeting, told us later that it had been a success and its omission would have been a serious error.
By this time, Kennedy was deep in the year’s troubles with the Soviet Union. As the American fight for a test ban met Soviet resistance in the spring and Khrushchev gratuitously reopened the Berlin crisis in the summer, the President was beginning to wonder why American policy had so little backing, or apparently even understanding, among the neutrals. Therefore, a fortnight before Belgrade, he addressed a series of pointed questions to Stevenson and Bowles, as the chief local champions of the third world policy, and also to Galbraith, as his specialist on Nehru. He asked, in effect, why we were failing to put across our position on Berlin to the third world; why the neutrals seemed to equate our firmness with belligerence, as over Berlin, and our moderation with weakness, as over Laos; and why they appeared to judge American actions with such severity and Soviet actions with such apparent charity.
The replies showed considerable convergence of diagnosis. The trouble with Berlin, everyone agreed, was that it was so far away. “These European quarrels,” Galbraith said, “are not for Asia. The outcome short of war has little implication for the Indian national interest.” If we seemed more belligerent, it was because our papers reported so much about the agony of decision. “Opinions, or alleged opinions, of Acheson, the Joint Chiefs, Joe Alsop and numerous other statesmen and sages have been exhaustively cited. The lineage from the USSR is infinitely less.” Moreover, as Stevenson emphasized, when questions involved the danger of war but not their own interests, “neutrals will almost inevitably favor compromise between Western and Communist positions with little regard for the rights and wrongs of the case.” The experts suggested that we could strengthen our case in Berlin if we would say something about negotiation, base our argument on self-determination rather than on legalistic talk about rights of conquest and prove the genuineness of our devotion to self-determination by extending the principle from white men in Berlin to black men in Angola and to Indians in Goa. As for the double standard, we should not be unhappy if the neutrals implicitly expected better behavior from us than from the Russians; and we had no choice but to accept the less agreeable fact that they knew us to be responsive to public criticism as the Russians were not. All this would naturally lead them to concentrate their pressure on us. In general, the consultants concluded, our wealth and power, the color of our skins and our association with the colonial nations of Europe, condemned us to an almost irreducible barrage of heckling, and we should have to grin and bear it.
These remarks coincided, I believe, with Kennedy’s own fundamental view. But it was hard to be philosophical in the midst of the Berlin crisis, and even harder when, after the Soviet Union resumed nuclear testing, the neutral leaders gathering at Belgrade reacted with stupefying forbearance. We all knew how they would have blackened the skies with resolutions if we had been the first to resume; and the contrast drove Kennedy to great and profane acrimony. He said in a moment of irritation, “Do you know who the real losers were at Belgrade? Stevenson and Bowles.”
As it turned out, the Belgrade conference disappointed Moscow about as much as it did Washington. The Soviet Union conspicuously failed to win neutral support for its positions on Berlin, on disarmament and on the troika approach to the UN; there was considerable resentment in the corridors about the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing; and anti-American speeches and statements were notable for their absence. (Our embassy in Belgrade, summing up the conference, reported that the patience with which the United States had recently been treating the neutrals was evidently having its effect.) Indeed, the Belgrade meeting disappointed everybody, even its sponsors, for it revealed such internal differences among the twenty-eight participating nations that it destroyed the dream of a neutral bloc as a unified force in world affairs. In their devotion to the principle of non-alignment, the new states were evidently prepared to apply it to each other.
Their final declaration dealt very largely with colonial questions, the one great bond which held the very motley group together. Then Nehru, with Nkrumah of Ghana, was dispatched to Moscow and Sukarno, with Keita of Mali, to Washington to carry the Belgrade gospel to the great powers. Kennedy observed, “Khrushchev certainly drew the pick of the litter,” but he received the emissaries politely and ended up having a spirited and enjoyable talk with the African.
For a moment the Belgrade interlude strengthened those in the State Department who opposed the neutralist experiment, whether because they regarded neutralists as potential communists or because, in the more sophisticated version, they believed that the neutralists would always throw their weight against the more reasonable party to a conflict. The White House took the matter more calmly. A few weeks after Belgrade Walt Rostow sent the President a memorandum arguing that neutral states, like all other states, were moved by their own views of their national interests. As Keita had pointed out to Kennedy, most of the neutrals were militarily weak; their extremely serious domestic problems generally determined their foreign policies; and their foreign policy interests were in any case local and regional. Their attitudes toward the cold war, Rostow argued, depended on the policies most likely to help them maintain their independence and pursue local advantage.
Our interest, Rostow continued, lay primarily in building this independence, in steering their energies toward internal development and in leading them into long-term association with the west. This, he added, was one vital role of foreign aid. Keita and Sukarno had told Kennedy that the unaligned countries, in their positions on international issues, did take into account where the aid came from; and, in analyzing the Belgrade conference, Rostow was able to show that, of the eighteen moderates, the great majority had either received most of their aid from the United States or were hoping for increased American aid, while, of the six extremists, all except Yugoslavia (and including Indonesia) had received substantially more aid from the Soviet Union.
This, I believe, made great sense to Kennedy, and the Belgrade meeting did not deflect him long from his chosen course.
Of all the neutral countries, Kennedy was most interested in India, which he had long regarded as “the key area” in Asia. The spectacle of this great nation, weighed down by legacies of centuries, making a brave attempt to achieve economic modernization within a democratic polity captured his imagination. The struggle between India and China “for the economic and political leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia,” he said in 1959, would determine the Asian future. Along with John Sherman Cooper in the Senate and Chester Bowles in the House, both former ambassadors to New Delhi, he had introduced a resolution calling for a joint American-European financial effort in support of India’s five-year plan. “We want India to win that race with China,” he said . . . If China succeeds and India fails, the economic-development balance of power will shift against us.” He added characteristically: “It is not enough merely to provide sufficient money. Equally important are our attitude and understanding.” Nor should anyone be put off by the Indian commitment to neutrality: “Let us remember that our nation also during the period of its formative growth adopted a policy of noninvolvement in the great international controversies of the nineteenth century.”
Yet this desire to aid India coexisted with a certain skepticism about Indian leadership. When Kennedy had visited New Delhi in 1951, Nehru for some reason—perhaps because all he could see was an unknown young Congressman—treated him with marked indifference. The visitor had been warned that, when Nehru became bored, he would tap his fingers together and look at the ceiling. Kennedy was in the office, he later liked to recall, for about ten minutes when Nehru started to tap his fingers and gaze abstractedly at a spot over his visitor’s head. Moreover, Nehru’s talent for international self-righteousness led Kennedy in some moods to view him as almost the John Foster Dulles of neutralism. Still, Nehru was unquestionably one of the great men of the century; and, even if he were not, India remained the key area of Asia.
In sending Galbraith as his ambassador to New Delhi, Kennedy deliberately chose a man who could be depended upon to bring to Indian problems his own mixture of sympathy and irony. Kennedy was delighted by Galbraith’s wit, effrontery and unabashed pursuit of the unconventional wisdom, and they were now exceptionally good friends. Nor did the President appear to mind Ken’s guerrilla warfare against the ikons and taboos of the Department of State. From time to time, the President took pleasure in announcing that Galbraith was the best ambassador he had.
Galbraith went to New Delhi with several advantages: an acquaintance with Nehru, his own prestige as an economic and social philosopher, and the President’s strong belief in increased economic assistance to India—this last quickly resulting in a $500 million appropriation for Indian development. But he also had the disadvantage of the Dulles legacy and especially of the policy of American military aid to Pakistan. Soon after his arrival, for example, he learned that Washington was planning a delivery of F-104 airplanes to Karachi—planes which the Indians assumed could only be used against themselves. When Galbraith proposed that he inform the Indian government that there were only twelve planes involved, the State Department refused. Finally—“more or less by physical violence,” he later said—he was able to extract permission from Washington to communicate the number of planes to Nehru. “Parliament assembled a week or two ago,” he wrote me toward the end of August, “and during the recess two things had happened: We had committed a half billion in aid to India and the twelve F-104 planes to Pakistan. The ratio of questions, words, comment and emotion has been not less than ten to one in favor of the planes. Such is the current yield of the Dulles policy.”
Very early Galbraith decided that the best way to erase memories of Dulles was to expose Nehru to Kennedy. The two leaders shared that address, patrician instinct and long historical view which made them, next to Churchill, the two greatest statesmen on the British model of their day. But by 1961 Nehru, alas, was no longer the man he had once been. It had all gone on too long, the fathership of his country, the rambling, paternal speeches to his flock, the tired aristocratic disdain in New Delhi, the Left Book Club platitudes when his face was turned to the world. His strength was failing, and he retained control more by momentum of the past than by mastery of the present.
Galbraith thought that Nehru would prefer no fuss on his visit and that everything should be kept easy and private. The President was dubious, remembering other visitors (he had Prince Sihanouk especially in mind) who said in advance they wanted nothing special and then seemed unhappy when they were taken at their word. But Galbraith insisted that Nehru really would wish to be received in a home. Hyannis Port seemed a little too depressing to the Kennedys, and they decided to invite him to Newport. Nehru arrived in New York on November 5, 1961, was promptly subjected to a sharp and unceremonious inquisition by Lawrence Spivak on Meet the Press, and the next morning departed for Rhode Island.
The President met him at the naval base and brought him back to the Auchincloss residence on the Honey Fitz. Along the way, he gestured at the great mansions shining in the sun, their green lawns stretching down to the seawall, and said, “I wanted you to see how the average American family lives.” Nehru responded that the American Ambassador had been giving him special instruction in the affluent society. When they arrived at Hammersmith Farm, Jacqueline and Caroline were waiting at the front door. The little girl had picked a flower and now she made a curtsy and presented it to him. He smiled and was briefly gay with Mrs. Kennedy. But when the talk turned to Vietnam during luncheon, he fell into remote silence. It was heavy going, then and later.
They all went back to Washington in the afternoon for a state dinner in the evening. It was the first big affair of the autumn, and the staff had forgotten to open the flue in the fireplace on the first floor. The smoke poured into the room, causing confusion and smarting eyes. My wife and I were among the party of about twenty-five, too many for the family dining room on the second floor but a little too few for the state dining room. During dinner Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, assailed the President about American policy, praised Krishna Menon, the professional anti-American of New Delhi, and otherwise elevated the mood of the evening.
The President, unperturbed, gave one of his graceful and witty toasts. “We all want to take this opportunity to welcome you to America, Mr. Prime Minister,” he began, “though I doubt whether any words of mine can embellish the welcome already extended to you by Larry Spivak.” Nehru listened without expression. His own toast was discursive and overlong, though rather touching. He spoke about Gandhi and other passages in what he called “life’s tortuous course.” One or two of his allusions, especially a bit on Ireland, seemed to me a trifle condescending. In conversation he displayed interest and vivacity only with Jacqueline. (When I mentioned this later to the President, he said, “A lot of our visiting statesmen have that same trouble.”) The next morning B. K. Nehru, the astute and delightful Indian ambassador to Washington, summoned a group of New Frontiersmen to the Indian Embassy for an audience with the Prime Minister. This session confirmed one’s feelings of the night before. I had the impression of an old man, his energies depleted, who heard things as at a great distance and answered most questions with indifference.
The private meetings between the President and the Prime Minister were no better. Nehru was terribly passive, and at times Kennedy was hard put to keep the conversation going. The President talked a good deal more about Vietnam, but the Prime Minister remained unresponsive. At one point Nehru expressed doubt about the American commitment to disarmament, citing Eisenhower’s valedictory warning about the “military-industrial complex.” Was it not a fact, he asked, that powerful interests would bring enormous pressures to bear against any policy that threatened an end to arms production? Kennedy, instead of indulging in statesmanlike banalities about American hopes for peace, answered frankly that his visitor did not know the half of it, that the pressures were indeed enormous; he named particular Congressmen, generals and industries. But even this candor failed to elicit much response. It was, the President said later, like trying to grab something in your hand, only to have it turn out to be just fog. It was all so sad: this man had done so much for Indian independence, but he had stayed around too long, and now it was all going bit by bit. To Galbraith he once remarked that Lincoln was fortunate; Nehru by contrast much less so.
The following spring, reminiscing about the meeting, Kennedy described it to me as “a disaster . . . the worst head-of-state visit I have had.” It was certainly a disappointment, and Kennedy’s vision of India had been much larger before the visit than it would ever be again. Nehru was obviously in decline; his country, the President now decided, would be increasingly preoccupied with its own problems and turn more and more into itself. Though Kennedy retained his belief in the necessity of helping India achieve its economic goals, he rather gave up hope, after seeing Nehru, that India would be in the next years a great affirmative force in the world or even in South Asia.
Five weeks after Nehru left the United States he ordered his army to occupy the ancient Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. Galbraith, in a valiant last-minute effort to stop the military action, got it put off for three or four days. But Washington only authorized him to offer vague diplomatic pressure on Portugal in exchange for a six-month standstill by India. To be effective he needed more specific assurance that sooner or later we would get the Portuguese out.
In Paris, where NATO was meeting, Dean Rusk conversed with Dr. Franco Nogueiria, the Portuguese foreign minister, on the eve of the invasion. It was not a high point of American diplomacy. At no point did the Secretary express any reservations about permanent Portuguese control of Goa or even acknowledge that the Indians might have a legitimate point in resenting the Portuguese presence. In New Delhi Galbraith read the report of this session with incredulity and then sent what he described as “a surprisingly mild commentary” to Washington. “This job,” he later complained to me, “is taking all the edge off my personality.” Galbraith’s cable argued sensibly that, just as we had at all times made clear to the Indians our opposition to aggression, so we must at all times make clear to the Portuguese our opposition to colonialism.
Franco Nogueiria had concluded his talk with Rusk in Paris by warning him that the Goanese would fight to the end; they all might die in the resulting slaughter but not until each had killed ten Indians. At midnight on December 17 the invasion began. It was over in twenty-four hours. Forty-five Portuguese and twenty-two Indians were killed. The historical and political reasons for the invasion were understandable enough; but the contrast between Nehru’s incessant sanctimony on the subject of non-aggression and his brisk exercise in Machtpolitik was too comic not to cause comment. It was a little like catching the preacher in the hen-house; and it suggested that Harrow and Cambridge, in instilling the British virtues, had not neglected hypocrisy. If such judgments were unfair, it was almost too much to expect the targets of Nehru’s past sermons not to respond in kind.
In Washington Harlan Cleveland called a meeting at the State Department to consider the American reaction. Obviously we had to condemn the Indian resort to force in unequivocal language. The only issue was whether we should stop there or go on to say, as Galbraith had recommended and Stevenson now urged, that we regarded the Portuguese enclave as anachronistic and looked forward to a peaceful termination of Portuguese colonialism in India. It seemed obvious that our condemnation of aggression would have greater force if at the same time we dissociated ourselves from the Portuguese empire. But the State Department political officers resisted. It finally turned out that Salazar had requested that we keep things to the narrow issue of aggression and that the Department had assured our ambassador in Lisbon the night before that we would not raise the colonial issue. This commitment, undertaken without White House consultation, tied our hands at the United Nations. The State Department, over Stevenson’s protest, insisted that he cut out the allusions in his speech to Portuguese colonialism, and this made the speech when delivered at the Security Council seem all the more unfeeling to the Indians.
It was one of Adlai’s most effective efforts. He began with a pleasing picture of Krishna Menon, “so well known in these halls for his advice on peace and his tireless enjoinders to everyone else to seek the way of compromise,” standing on the border of Goa rallying his troops at zero hour. Stevenson then called for a withdrawal of the invading forces and concluded that, “if the United Nations is not to die as ignoble a death as the League of Nations, we cannot condone the use of force in this instance and thus pave the way for forceful solutions of other disputes.” These remarks infuriated the Indians. Indeed, Stevenson himself in a few days began to feel he might have gone a little far.
In New Delhi Galbraith called on the Foreign Secretary and observed that India had been utterly callous to American opinion from beginning to end. Stevenson’s speech, he said, was a measure of how brilliantly they could alienate a good friend. He noted his own difficulty in seeing precisely how India had advanced its position by creating more troubles for the President on foreign aid, the Congo and opposition to colonialism. It was a useful session, he informed Washington afterward, and “I greatly enjoyed hearing my points being made.”
Nehru himself sent the President a long and plaintive letter at the end of the month. “Why is it,” he asked, “that something that thrills our people should be condemned in the strongest language in the United States?” He had been “deeply hurt,” he remarked, by the “extraordinary and bitter attitude of Mr. Adlai Stevenson.” Then in an unfortunate effort at justification, well calculated to set Kennedy’s teeth on edge, he added, “You may be interested to know that even the Cardinal Archbishop of Bombay, the highest dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in India, who is himself a Goan, expresses his satisfaction with [the Goa action]. So also some other dignitaries of the Catholic Church.”
The President took his time about replying. In three weeks he wrote:
You have my sympathy on the colonial aspects of this issue. . . . Sometimes, perhaps, we are inclined to talk a little too unctuously about the colonial origins of the United States, now nearly two centuries in the past. But, like many others, I grew up in a community where the people were barely a generation away from colonial rule. And I can claim the company of many historians in saying that the colonialism to which my immediate ancestors were subject was more sterile, oppressive, and even cruel than that of India. The legacy of Clive was on the whole more tolerable than that of Cromwell.
But he was much concerned, Kennedy continued, about the possible chain reaction to Goa. “All countries, including of course the United States, have a great capacity for convincing themselves of the full righteousness of their particular cause. No country ever uses force for reasons it considers unjust. . . . I fear that the episode in Goa will make it harder to hold the line for peace in other places.” He concluded by suggesting that one difficulty was that the invasion followed so soon after Nehru’s visit to the United States. “I confess to a feeling that we should have discussed this problem.”
Nehru hastily answered that he had said nothing then because he had no intention of taking action; the Portuguese provocations at the end of November had brought the matter to a head. This seemed a little disingenuous. On October 23, a fortnight before he departed for America, he had said in Bombay that “the time has come for us to consider afresh what method should be adopted to free Goa from Portuguese rule.” The whole episode further diminished Kennedy’s hope that India had a serious role to play in the struggle for peace.
Yet, with his usual realism, he avoided recriminations; and, indeed, Indian sensitivity lasted longer than American, as I discovered myself in India in February. I had gone there on another Food for Peace mission with George McGovern. We found Goa still the compulsory subject of conversation; even the obsession with Pakistan was taking second place. When M. C. Chagla, a former Indian ambassador to Washington, presided over a meeting for us in Bombay, he began his introduction with a diatribe against the American refusal to applaud Goa and later assailed us privately for our attitude. As McGovern and I traveled around, we sought explanations for the Indian action. We were particularly pleased by the explanation offered by Frank Moraes, the talented Bombay journalist. The New Delhi government, he thought, had wished to show that, though it was doing nothing about Chinese incursions on the northern frontier, it could still be tough; “it was a little like stamping on a mouse in the kitchen when there was a tiger at the door.” G. L. Mehta, another former ambassador to Washington and considerably more thoughtful than Chagla, suggested that Nehru was acting to rehabilitate himself in the anti-colonial world; if the Africans were taking on Portugal over Angola, the least the Indians could do was to move against Goa.
Kennedy, in any case, had no desire to protract resentments. In November Nehru had invited Jacqueline to visit India, and during the winter Galbraith enthusiastically worked out a long and full schedule. The President was all for the trip in principle; but, when Galbraith’s itinerary arrived, Kennedy, after one glance, pronounced it worse than a political campaign. One day he called Ken in New Delhi from Palm Beach and told him the trip would have to be cut back: “She’s tired. I’m not going to let her do it. It’s too much for her.” Again as in a political campaign, the advance man objected: everyone was expecting the President’s wife; the children at Mysore were weaving garlands; we could not risk disappointment. But the President persisted; the itinerary was revised to his satisfaction; and Jacqueline with Lee Radziwill arrived in India in March.
It was a happy journey. Nehru was in a gentle and winning mood, much more himself than he had been in Newport or Washington. He was delighted by his guests, evidently welcomed the relief from pressure and liked to take them for strolls through his gardens. He scrupulously avoided politics and did not lobby about Goa, Kashmir or Pakistan. Jacqueline and Lee then went on to Pakistan as part of Washington’s policy of non-discrimination within the subcontinent.
On the first day of April, a few days after Jacqueline’s return, Galbraith, my wife and I went out to Glen Ora, the Kennedy weekend retreat in Virginia, to watch the NBC television report on the trip. It was a cool, wet Sunday in early spring. As we drove through the pleasant Virginia countryside, the rain stopped; and by the time we arrived Caroline was cheerfully sloshing around in the puddles by the swimming pool. We had tea in the handsome early-nineteenth-century house and at six-thirty switched on the television set. The President said to Jacqueline, “Well, while you and Ken watch yourselves on television, Arthur can read some of his old books and I will listen to some of my old speeches.” After the show, much improved by a running commentary from Jackie and Ken, we finished our drinks and went in for dinner. Just as we sat down, Caroline appeared, her eyes filled with tears and a book clutched under her arm. Jackie said, “Oh, I promised Caroline that I would finish her story,” and disappeared for a few moments to complete her assignment.
Jacqueline’s trip had been a great success. It disposed of the lingering pique about Goa and re-established the process which was making the President so popular a figure throughout India. In this era of Nehru’s decline, with India receding from the world stage, young Indians in particular were fixing their hopes more and more on the American President. Even the communist press treated Kennedy with respect.
Then in the autumn the Chinese themselves provided valuable cooperation by invading India from the north. Nehru, forgetting the virtues of non-alignment, sent a desperate appeal for American help. With Kennedy’s strong backing, Galbraith took the opportunity to consolidate the American friendship with India. Acting with great sense and skill, and after the usual arguments with the dilatory Department, he succeeded in working out air defense arrangements and otherwise making clear that, in case the war intensified, India could expect American assistance.
Nehru, now frail and sick, was less and less in active command of his government. But, with Galbraith’s expert management, the Chinese invasion and then the soothing ministrations of Chester Bowles, his relations with Kennedy were stabilized by 1963. This became evident in the controversy over American aid to the state-owned Bokaro steel mill. Aid to India came up with awful regularity every year when the general aid bill was under consideration. In 1962 Senator Symington had tried to cut down our assistance, and Kennedy personally intervened to save the Indian appropriation. In 1963 congressional opposition centered on the Bokaro project. “The Congress may have other views,” Kennedy said in May, “but I think it would be a great mistake not to build it. India needs that steel.” Congress did have other views, and Nehru, more sensitive now to the President’s problems, withdrew the project in the summer. Kennedy wrote him an appreciative letter in early September. “I have been a strong supporter of Bokaro, and I am still,” he said, but he feared that insistence on it would have eroded support for the aid bill, and he thanked Nehru for making things easier. If India were not to be the positive international force for which Kennedy had hoped, nevertheless it had acquired a sober confidence in the American government and a tremendous admiration for the American President.