XXXVII

Autumn 1963

THE SUMMER OF 1963 ended in sadness. In early August Jacqueline gave birth prematurely to a five-pound boy. Young Patrick Bouvier Kennedy came into the world with respiratory troubles. After thirty-nine hours of struggle, the labor of breathing proved too much for his heart, and he died in a Boston hospital. The President’s anguish for his wife and their dead son gave August a melancholy cast. Early in September he and Jacqueline quietly observed their tenth wedding anniversary in Newport.

But in public policy the Presidency of John F. Kennedy was coming into its own. He was doing at last in the summer of 1963 what he had been reluctant to do before: putting the office of the Presidency on the line at the risk of defeat. He was staking his authority and his re-election on behalf of equal rights, the test ban, planned deficits in economic policy, doing so not without political apprehension but with absolute moral and intellectual resolve. As he had anticipated, the civil rights fight in particular was biting into his popularity. In November Gallup would report that national approval of his administration was down to 59 per cent. Most of this decline was in the South; there, if the Republicans, as he came to believe they would, nominated Barry Goldwater, Kennedy expected to carry only two or three states. Moreover, this had been the hardest of his congressional sessions. At the end of July, according to the Congressional Quarterly, 38 per cent of the administration’s proposals had not yet been acted on by either house. Civil rights and tax reduction were making very slow progress. Knives were sharpening for foreign aid. Even routine appropriation bills were held up.

Then Senate ratification of the test ban treaty in September gave his leadership a new access of strength. “There is a rhythm to personal and national and international life,” he had said in the winter, “and it flows and ebbs.” It had ebbed for many weeks. Now perhaps it was beginning to flow again.

1. JOURNEY TO THE WEST

On the day the Senate ratified the treaty, Kennedy left Washington for a trip to the West. It was ostensibly a non-political tour, its pretext conservation. This was a genuine, if somewhat abstract, concern, and he welcomed the chance to see the condition of the national estate at first hand. But the trip had other motives too. Of the eleven states on his itinerary, he had lost eight in 1960; with the South turning against him, he needed new sources of support. Furthermore, ten had senatorial contests in 1964, and in several the John Birch Society was active. Above all, he considered Washington overexcited in its response to public issues; impressions lasted longer “out there”; and the trip offered him a chance to reestablish contact and purpose with the people.

He conscientiously pursued the conservation theme for several speeches. Then late on the second day, at Billings, Montana, he struck, almost by accident, a new note. Mike Mansfield was present and in his third sentence Kennedy praised the Senate leader for his part in bringing about test ban ratification. To his surprise this allusion produced strong and sustained applause. Heartened, he set forth his hope of lessening the “chance of a military collision between those two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill 300 million people in the short space of a day.” The Billings response encouraged him to make the pursuit of peace increasingly the theme of his trip. In Great Falls, Montana, he discussed the illusions of isolationism. “You must wonder when it is all going to end and when we can come back home,” he said. “Well, it isn’t going to end. . . . We have to stay at it. We must not be fatigued.” The competition with communism would dominate the rest of our lives, but we must not let it become a competition in nuclear violence. Let us, he said, show the world which society could grow faster, which could educate its children better, which could produce more cultural and intellectual stimulus, “which society, in other words, is the happier.”

Then to Hanford, Washington, and on September 26 to Salt Lake City, where he defined America’s role in the modern world. I had worked on this speech. The President, recalling that the Mormons had started as a persecuted minority, originally thought of it as a discourse on extremism; then, after seeing a draft, he decided that he wanted to concentrate on extremism in foreign policy—a masked comment, in effect, on Goldwater. Though he eventually cut out direct allusions to the ‘total victory’ thesis, the point of the speech was nonetheless unmistakable; and he delivered it in a city which, because of Ezra Taft Benson and his son as well as Mayor John Bracken Lee, Washington regarded as a stronghold of the radical right.

The President’s unusually cordial reception on the streets belied this impression. Then, before an immense crowd at the Tabernacle of the Latter Day Saints, he began his speech. “We find ourselves,” he said, “entangled with apparently unanswerable problems in unpronounceable places. We discover that our enemy in one decade is our ally in the next. We find ourselves committed to governments whose actions we cannot often approve, assisting societies with principles very different from our own.” It was little wonder that in a time of contradiction and confusion we looked back to the old days with nostalgia. But those days were gone forever; science and technology were irreversible. Nor could we remake the new world simply by our own command. “When we cannot even bring all of our own people into full citizenship without acts of violence, we can understand how much harder it is to control events beyond our borders.” Our national interest was “best served by preserving and protecting a world of diversity in which no one power or no one combination of powers can threaten the security of the United States.”

The forces of diversity, he added, were “in the ascendancy today, even within the Communist empire itself. . . . The most striking thing about our world in 1963 is the extent to which the tide of history has begun to flow in the direction of freedom. To renounce the world of freedom now, to abandon those who share our commitment, and retire into lonely and not so splendid isolation, would be to give communism the one hope which, in this twilight of disappointment for them, might repair their divisions and rekindle their hope.” At the end the audience stood at their seats and cheered for many minutes.

He had hit his stride, reached the deeper concerns of his audience, and the rest of the journey was a triumphal procession. He always found journeys “out there” refreshing, but this time he returned in a state of particular exhilaration. Whatever the stalemate in Congress, he knew now that he had immense resources of affection and strength in the people. He knew too that peace, economic growth and education would be powerful themes for 1964.

Before his departure, when pressed at a news conference about a Goldwater suggestion that the test ban treaty contained secret commitments, he simply denied the assertion; asked then if he cared to comment further on “this type of attack by Senator Goldwater,” he said, “No, no. Not yet, not yet.” Now the time had come. On his return, discussing a complaint of Eisenhower’s that he was unclear where Goldwater stood on issues, Kennedy observed with evident relish that the Arizona Senator was “saying what he thinks as of the time he speaks. . . . I think he has made very clear what he is opposed to, what he is for. I have gotten the idea. I think that President Eisenhower will, as time goes on.” Thereafter the inevitable Goldwater question filled each news conference with expectant delight. So, on October 31, when Kennedy was asked to comment on a Goldwater charge that the administration was falsifying the news to perpetuate itself in office, the gleam came into his eye, and he said that Goldwater had had such “a busy week selling TVA, and giving permission to or suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons, and attacking the President of Bolivia while he was here in the United States, and involving himself in the Greek election. So I thought it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him.” Plainly the President could not wait for 1964. “Politically the country is closely divided,” he told Sidey when queried (as a matter of form) whether he planned to run for a second term, “so it will be tough. But then everything is tough.”

2. THE VIETNAM QUANDARY

Nothing was tougher at the moment than the situation in South Vietnam, where the abrupt collapse of the hopes of 1962 had provided the unpleasant surprise of 1963.

Our policy in 1962 had been dominated by those who saw Vietnam as primarily a military problem and who believed that its solution required unconditional support of Diem. The reports rendered by Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins to Washington conveyed the picture of a regime led by an unquestionably difficult but statesmanlike and, in any case, irreplaceable figure making steady progress in winning over the peasants, pacifying the countryside and restoring the stability of government. The local opposition, in this view, consisted of intellectuals, neutralists and agents of the Viet Cong, concerned more with their own petty grievances and ambitions than with winning the war. The only way to improve things, they believed in all sincerity, was to reassure Diem about the constancy of American support.

Through most of 1962 this policy appeared to be producing results. The Saigon government, so near collapse at the end of 1961, had recovered much of its authority. The strategic hamlet program, in the considered judgment of the Departments of State and Defense, was bringing the countryside into firm alliance with the regime. The Viet Cong were presumably making little progress. Indeed, in the spring of 1963 Alexis Johnson claimed that 30,000 casualties had been inflicted on the guerrillas in 1962—a figure twice as large as the estimated size of the Viet Cong forces at the beginning of the year. In the same month Secretary McNamara authorized the Defense Department to announce “we have turned the corner in Vietnam,” and General Harkins predicted that the war would be won “within a year.” The communists themselves acknowledged 1962 as “Diem’s year.” The American advisers and the helicopter war had increased the cost of guerrilla action, and the Viet Cong almost reached the point of giving up in the Mekong delta and withdrawing to the mountains.^* Kennedy, beset by the missile crisis, congressional elections, Skybolt, de Gaulle, Latin America, the test ban negotiations and the civil rights fight, had little time to focus on Southeast Asia. His confidence in McNamara, so wholly justified in so many areas, led the President to go along with the optimists on Vietnam.

Not everyone shared this optimism, and dissent arose first among the American newspapermen in Vietnam.^* The reporters were bright, inquisitive, passionate young men in their late twenties or early thirties with careers to make—Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press, Cornelius Sheehan of the United Press International, David Halberstam of the New York Times, Charles Mohr of Time, François Sully of Newsweek. They saw Diem not as a selfless national leader but as an oriental despot, hypnotized by his own monologues and contemptuous of democracy and the west. They detested the Nhus. They considered the strategic hamlet program a fake and a failure; and their visit to dismal stockades where peasants had been herded, sometimes at bayonet point, to engage in forced labor confirmed their worst misgivings. They did not believe Diem’s communiqués; and, when Harkins and Nolting insisted they were true, they stopped believing Harkins and Nolting. They had too often heard American advisers in the field sing a bitter little song to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:

 

We are winning, this we know.

General Harkins tells us so.

In the delta, things are rough.

In the mountains, mighty tough.

But we’re winning, this we know.

General Harkins tells us so.

If you doubt this is true,

McNamara says so too.

 

In time the disagreement between the officials and the newspapermen hardened into deep antagonism. Nolting, a conscientious Foreign Service officer, honestly saw no alternative to working with Diem. Diem, who supposed that the American press was as controlled as his own, believed, or pretended to believe, that the newspaper stories were expressing the secret views of the United States government and used his fury over lost face as one more excuse for resisting American advice. The reporters, as Nolting and Harkins saw it, were therefore damaging the war effort; instead of making carping criticisms, they ought, as patriotic Americans, to help the Embassy build up Diem and strengthen his national control and international reputation. In their reports to Washington the officials even gave the astonishing impression that there would be no trouble in Vietnam if only the newspaper fellows would follow the line.

As for the newspapermen, they resented the view that their duty was to write stories in support of official policy. They could never get over Admiral Felt’s reproach to Malcolm Browne: “Why don’t you get on the team?” They angrily refused to become, as they thought, myth-makers and invoked with solemn indignation the traditions of a free press. “The U. S. Embassy,” David Halberstam wrote in a characteristic outburst, “turned into the adjunct of a dictatorship. In trying to protect Diem from criticism, the Ambassador became Diem’s agent. But we reporters didn’t have to become the adjuncts of a tyranny. We are representatives of a free society, and we weren’t going to surrender our principles to the narrow notions of a closed society.” One encounter after another made the newspapermen more certain that the Embassy was deliberately lying to them. They did not recognize the deeper pathos, which was that the officials really believed their own reports. They were deceiving not only the American government and people but themselves.

Not everyone in Washington, however, was deceived. Averell Harriman as Assistant Secretary for the Far East had long felt, as by the pricking in his thumbs, that we were on the wrong course. Roger Hilsman, as head of the State Department Office of Intelligence and Research, also doubted whether things were really as splendid as they appeared in Embassy dispatches. In the White House Michael Forrestal shared this skepticism. And, as 1962 gave way to 1963, it seemed increasingly evident that, despite the communiqués and the statistics and the dispatches, the Viet Cong were as omnipresent and the Saigon government as ineffectual as ever. The point was made with some vividness on January 2, 1963, at Ap Bac, fifty miles from Saigon, when a considerable force of Diem’s regulars encircled a Viet Cong battalion one-tenth its size, declined to close with them and finally permitted the Viet Cong to escape in the night after they had knocked down five American helicopters and killed three American advisers. A senior American adviser present later surmised that the Vietnamese commander was “reluctant to attack for fear he would take casualties, incur the displeasure of political leaders in Saigon and ruin his military career.” Though General Harkins tried to claim Ap Bac as a Vietnamese victory, the newspapermen at the scene reported otherwise, and their reports were not implausible.

Those in Saigon and Washington who saw Vietnam as primarily a military problem thought that the answer to Ap Bac was an intensified military effort—more advisers, more helicopters, more mortars, more defoliation spray, more napalm bombs, more three-star generals in Saigon, more visitations by VIPs. After all, the American presence was still negligible—11,000 troops in all and, in the last two years, a total of thirty-two killed in battle and eighty wounded. But the Harriman group now questioned the exclusively military strategy more insistently than ever. “Fighting a guerrilla war in an underdeveloped nation,” Hilsman, the veteran of jungle warfare in Burma, had argued the previous September, “requires as much political and civic action as it does military action.” There was danger, they thought, in what Hilsman called the “overmilitarization” and “over-Americanization” of the war. The Army, after all, had never cared much for counter-insurgency; at one point, of twenty-seven American generals in Saigon, not one had attended the school at Fort Bragg. The more elaborate the American military establishment, the doubters feared, the more it would be overwhelmed by brass, channels and paperwork, the more it would rely on conventional tactics and the more it would compromise the Vietnamese nationalism of Diem’s cause. Worse, the growth of the military commitment would confirm the policy of trying to win a political war by military means.

What was lacking, the Harriman group felt, was any consuming motive to lead the South Vietnamese to fight for Saigon. Why, for example, should peasants die for a government which, when it recovered territory from the Viet Cong, helped the local landowners collect their back rent? General Edward Lansdale, whose experience in guerrilla warfare made him suspect in orthodox military circles, did his best to argue the point in Washington. “The great lesson [of Malaya and the Philippines],” he wrote, “was that there must be a heartfelt cause to which the legitimate government is pledged, a cause which makes a stronger appeal to the people than the Communist cause. . . . When the right cause is identified and used correctly, the anti-Communist fight becomes a pro-people fight.”

3. THE BUDDHISTS

This was a minority view. The Secretary of State was well satisfied with military predominance in the formation of United States policy toward Vietnam. As late as April 22, 1963, in a speech in New York, Rusk discerned a “steady movement [in South Vietnam] toward a constitutional system resting upon popular consent,” declared that “the ‘strategic hamlet’ program is producing excellent results,” added that “morale in the countryside has begun to rise,” assured his listeners that “to the Vietnamese peasant” the Viet Cong “look less and less like winners” and concluded, “The Vietnamese are on their way to success” (meaning presumably the South Vietnamese). So too Alexis Johnson, speaking for right-thinking officials, cited the strategic hamlet program as “the most important reason for guarded optimism.” “Perhaps the most important result,” Johnson declared, “is the intangible knitting together of Government and people.”

Intangible the knitting together certainly was. Exactly a month after this piece of official wisdom and a fortnight after Rusk’s assurances a group of Buddhists gathered in Hue to protest a Diem order forbidding them to display their flags on Buddha’s 2587th birthday. Diem’s troops fired indiscriminately into the crowd, leaving a moaning mass of dead and wounded. Indignation spread through the towns of South Vietnam; and, when Diem proved unyielding and unrepentant, the anger took appalling forms, culminating in the spectacle of Buddhist bonzes dousing themselves in gasoline and burning themselves to death.

Though the Buddhists had suffered legal discrimination in South Vietnam, they had not been actively persecuted. The upheaval, while religious in pretext, was social in its origins and quickly became political in its objectives. It went beyond bonzes and students to militant young army officers exasperated by the caprice and confusion of Diem’s direction of the war. As the protests spread, the Buddhist revolt threatened to become the vehicle by which all those opposed to the regime, including, no doubt, fellow travelers of the Viet Cong, might hope to bring it down. It was at bottom an uprising, wholly unanticipated by American diplomats, against the hierarchical structure of traditional Vietnamese society—against the older generation of Vietnamese nationalists who, like Diem and Nhu, were upper-class, Catholic, French-speaking, in favor of a new nationalist generation, drawn largely from the middle and lower classes, anti-western, radical, impassioned: it was, in effect, the angry young men massing to throw out the mandarins.

The Buddhists, with their fiery adventures in self-immolation, engaged the sympathy of the American newspapermen and through them of many people in the United States. Diem helped this process by refusing gestures of contrition or conciliation lest, as usual, he lose face. Washington now instructed the Embassy to bring pressure on him to compose the Buddhist quarrel, warning that, if the situation grew worse, the United States might have to disavow his Buddhist policy publicly. In Saigon, Nolting, to Kennedy’s irritation, had departed on a long-planned holiday cruise in the Aegean. His absence, however, permitted his able Deputy Chief of Mission, William Trueheart, to state the American position more bluntly than Diem had ever heard it before.

In response, Diem began to make a few nominal concessions, if with visible resentment. The Nhus, who wanted him to crush the uprising altogether, were even more resentful. In the steaming Saigon summer the incipient hysteria in the presidential palace boiled over. Diem and the Nhus saw plots everywhere: the Buddhists were Viet Cong agents; the American reporters were communists or agents of the CIA; the CIA was even collaborating with the Viet Cong. Madame Nhu said gaily that she clapped her hands whenever more bonzes “barbecued” themselves and only wished that David Halberstam would follow their example. Nhu told Morris West, the Australian novelist, that the Americans should get out and that he was in touch with some fine nationalist communists in Hanoi. About this time John Mecklin, the USIA chief, had a nightmare about an American diplomatic mission which gradually discovered it was dealing with a government of madmen, whose words meant nothing, where nothing that was supposed to have happened had actually happened; yet there seemed no escape from dealing with the madmen forever.

The paranoia in Saigon strengthened the Harriman position in Washington. Kennedy himself, who had been doubting the official optimism for some time, used to say dourly that the political thing there was more important than the military, and no one seemed to be thinking of that. When Mecklin visited Washington in the spring, the President asked him why there was so much trouble with the reporters and, after hearing the explanation, personally instructed the Saigon Embassy to change its attitude and start taking American newspapermen into its confidence. Now he began to conclude that the new situation required a new ambassador. Six months before, Nolting had asked, for personal reasons, to be relieved; and, after the Buddhist outburst, the President decided (with some reluctance: like F.D.R. he hated to fire people; moreover, he like Nolting) that the time had come.

I have the impression that he wanted to send next to Saigon Edmund Gullion, from whom he had first learned about Indochina a dozen years before and who had performed with such distinction in the Congo; Gullion was certainly the candidate of at least some at the White House. But Dean Rusk, in a rare moment of selfassertion, determined to make this appointment himself. He did not want Gullion, and his candidate, to the astonishment or dismay of the White House staff, turned out to be Henry Cabot Lodge.

This was not a wholly irrelevant idea. Lodge, who had been a liaison officer with the French Army during the Second World War, spoke fluent French. In his capacity as reserve officer, he had written a paper on Vietnam in the spring of 1962 and had wanted to take his tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a public-spirited man who felt unhappy out of government and who made clear to Rusk and others his interest in serving in a hardship post. Yet as Ambassador to the United Nations in the Eisenhower years he had displayed no great understanding of the third world and no great talent in dealing with the representatives of new nations. The White House staff feared that once in Saigon he would instinctively side with General Harkins and Diem. But the President was attracted by the idea, not only because he considered Lodge an able man but, because the thought of appointing the man whom he had beaten for the Senate in 1952 and who had run on the opposing ticket for Vice-President in 1960 appealed to his instinct for magnanimity, and also no doubt because the thought of implicating a leading Republican in the Vietnam mess appealed to his instinct for politics. So the appointment was made late in June.

Since Lodge could not leave until late August, it was decided to send back Nolting, who had finally arrived in Washington from his holiday, for one last try of the pro-Diem policy. Nolting, angered by Trueheart’s forthright representations to Diem in his absence, felt when he got back to Saigon on July 11, that his labor of two years lay in ruins. Nor had the recent troubles altered in the slightest his estimate of the situation. He considered the Buddhists unappeasable, believing their goal to be the overthrow of the regime. He felt American pressure on their behalf, especially any public disavowal of Diem’s anti-Buddhist actions, would only incite Diem to more stringent repression or his opponents to a coup. Any effort to divorce Diem from the Nhus would be useless: “trying to separate the members of that family would be like separating Siamese twins.” The best course remained unconditional support of Diem. In order to repair relations with Diem, he now even went to the point of defending the regime’s record on religious matters.

In Washington, meanwhile, Kennedy sought to put Saigon’s problems in perspective by reminding a press conference that Vietnam after all had been at war for twenty years. “Before we render too harsh a judgment on the people, we should realize that they are going through a harder time than we have had to go through.” Our goal, he continued, was “a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence. We believe strongly in that. . . . In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.” He then expressed the hope that the regime and the Buddhists could “reach an agreement on the civil disturbances and also in respect for the rights of others.” (In Saigon this last sentence was killed by the censorship.)

Neither Nolting’s return nor Kennedy’s temperate words had much effect, though, before Nolting left in mid-August, Diem did assure him there would be no more attacks on the Buddhists. Then six days later, Diem’s troops assaulted the pagodas, arresting hundreds of bonzes and seizing the temples of worship in a night of violence and terror. It was, Mecklin wrote later, “ruthless, comprehensive suppression of the Buddhist movement.” Madame Nhu described it to a reporter as “the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Binh Xuyen [a private army of brigands] in 1955.”

The Americans were caught completely by surprise. Genera] Harkins had noted the Vietnamese troop movements but thought they were being deployed for an attack on the Viet Cong. “We just didn’t know,” the CIA chief told Halberstam. It was an act of calculated contempt for the Americans. The next evening in the midst of a hot, soggy drizzle of rain Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon.

4. THE SOUND OF MUTINY

The White House doubters had been mistaken about Lodge. We had forgotten his patrician’s preference for fair play and his patriot’s pride in the dignity of his country. Both had been considerably affronted as he read through the Saigon cable file in preparation for his mission. Now Diem and Nhu had obviously carried out their attack against the pagodas the day before his arrival in order to present him with a fait accompli, expecting that the Americans would give in, as they had always done before. But Lodge in Saigon agreed with Harriman and Hilsman in Washington that, if we were to retain any credibility in Vietnam, we had to stand up this time.

In Vietnam the brutality of the assault sent a shudder even through the Diem regime itself. The foreign minister resigned and, in a gesture of defiance, shaved his head like a bonze. Madame Nhu’s father resigned as ambassador to Washington with a denunciation of his daughter. Above all, the action crystallized the disaffection of the generals who, in the confusion, had been themselves blamed (by, among others, the Department of State) for the atrocity. Now they began sending clandestine messages to the new ambassador. They first wanted it made clear that they had nothing to do with the raids. Then they inquired with oriental suavity what our attitude would be if they were to take action against the regime, should Nhu, for example, make a deal with Hanoi. Lodge cabled Washington for instructions.

The reply was drafted on August 24. The American government, it suggested, could no longer tolerate the systematic repression of the Buddhists nor the domination of the regime by Nhu. The generals could be told that we would find it impossible to support Diem unless these problems were solved. Diem should be given every chance to solve them. If he refused, then the possibility had to be realistically faced that Diem himself could not be saved. We would take no part in any action; but, if anything happened, an interim anti-communist military regime could expect American support.

August 24 was a Saturday. The President was on Cape Cod; McNamara and Rusk were out of town; McCone was on vacation. The draft was cleared through all the relevant departments but not at the top level. Defense accepted it because it understood that the cable had already gone; McNamara, if he had been consulted, would have opposed it. So also would McCone. No one is sure what Rusk’s position would have been. The President saw the draft at Hyannis Port without realizing that the departmental clearances did not signify the concurrence of his senior advisers.

On his return to Washington Kennedy felt rather angrily that he had been pressed too hard and fast. He discussed the situation with Robert Kennedy, who talked in turn with McNamara and Maxwell Taylor. The Attorney General reported back with great concern that nobody knew what was going to happen in Vietnam and that our policy had not been fully discussed, as every other major decision since the Bay of Pigs had been discussed. The President thereupon called a meeting on Vietnam for the following day and asked that Nolting be invited.

The former ambassador gave a dignified and uncritical statement of the case for Diem and expressed doubt whether the generals involved could carry off a coup. He suggested that we should not jump unless we knew where we were jumping. The President agreed and began a process of pulling away from the cable of August 24. Vietnam meetings continued for several days, and messages flashed back and forth between Washington and Saigon. While the talks went on, the coup itself gradually evaporated. Nolting had been right: these generals could not carry it through.

Diem and Nhu proceeded quickly to exploit their victory. There were more arrests, especially among students, thousands of whom, including boys and girls of high school age, were carted off to indoctrination centers. In Washington policy weakly reverted to collaboration with Diem, encouraged by CIA’s suggestion that Diem might have been sufficiently alarmed by the coup rumors to do some of the things we wanted. The President, however, did not wish to leave Diem in any doubt about how he felt, especially about Nhu. In a television interview on September 3, he tossed aside a moderate statement his staff had prepared in light of his reaction to the August 24 telegram. Instead, he said:

 

I don’t think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort and, in my opinion, in the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people.

The repressions against the Buddhists, we felt, were very unwise. . . . It is my hope that this will become increasingly obvious to the government, that they will take steps to try to bring back popular support. . . . With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think that the chances of winning it would not be very good.

 

No one could misinterpret the reference to changes in personnel. Kennedy also emphasized that “in the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam.”

The contrast between this statement and his reaction to the August 24 cable suggested Kennedy’s own perplexity; and, in a new effort to find out what the situation was, he sent another mission early in September. It consisted this time, not of the usual senior officials, but of two old Vietnam hands, General Victor Krulack of the Marines and Joseph Mendenhall of State, a Foreign Service officer. After a frenzied weekend of inspection and interrogation, the two men flew back to Washington. Mecklin, who came back with them, observed that “the general and the FSO not only appeared to dislike each other, but also disagreed on what should be done about Vietnam. On the whole flight they spoke to each other only when it was unavoidable.” They reported immediately to the National Security Council. Krulack told the assembled dignitaries the war was going beautifully, that the regime was beloved by the people and that we need have no undue concern even about Nhu. Mendenhall told them that South Vietnam was in a desperate state, that the regime was on the edge of collapse and that Nhu had to go. The President listened politely and finally said, “Were you two gentlemen in the same country?” And so the meetings on Vietnam continued.

 

INTERLUDE

MINUTES OF THE NEXT HIGH-LEVEL MEETING ON VIETNAM^*

The Secretary of State opened the meeting, in the absence of the President, by urging that priority be given to the key question of the past thirteen hours, How did we get here, and Where do we go from here?

On the one hand, he said, it was important to keep moving forward. But on the other hand, we must deal with things as they are.

The Secretary of Defense concurred but felt that we must not permit the views of a handful of neurotic Saigon intellectuals to distract us from the major goal, which was to get on with the war. He asked General Krulack to report on his latest sampling of opinion among the trainers of Vietnamese secret police at Fort Belvoir.

General Krulack reported that morale among the trainers at Fort Belvoir was at an all-time high. Many felt that we had turned a corner, and all were intent on moving on with our objectives.

Mr. Hilsman asked if General Krulack had had an opportunity to talk to the Vietnamese at Fort Belvoir as well as the trainiers.

Ambassador Nolting interjected the comment that Mr. Hilsman had expressed doubts about the Vietnamese at Belvoir ten months ago. He wondered, in view of this fact, whether Mr. Hilsman’s question was relevant.

General Krulack responded that the American trainers had advised him to refrain from talking with the Vietnamese since their views were well known to the trainers, and conversation would distract them from the purpose at hand, i.e., to win the war.

Governor Harriman stated that he had disagreed for twenty years with General Krulack and disagreed today, reluctantly, more than ever; he was sorry to say that he felt General Krulack was a fool and had always thought so.

Secretary Dillon hoped that press leaks on the cost of opinion-sampling at Fort Belvoir would be kept to a minimum as the dollar reserve problem was acute. He, for one, was against moving forward until the risks had been calculated.

General Taylor said that if risks were involved, “you can count me out.”

The Secretary of State re-phrased the basic question in terms of Saigon’s 897. What were we to do about the 500 school-girls who were seeking asylum in the American Embassy?

(At this point, the President entered the room.)

The President said that he hoped we were not allowing our policies to be influenced by immature twelve-year-old school-girls, all of whom were foreigners. He felt that we must not lose sight of our ultimate objective, and in no state was the Vietnamese vote worth very much.

The Attorney General said that it was high time to show some guts, and here was a good place to begin. “After all,” he said, “I too am a President’s brother.”

The Secretary of Defense heartily concurred; as a former businessman, he said, he knew the importance of getting on with business as usual.

Mr. Hilsman raised the question of disaffection among ninety percent of the soldiers, as reported in Saigon’s 898. Was not an action plan, phase by phase, now clearly necessary?

The Vice President said that he had lived with both affection and disaffection in Texas and the Senate for thirty years, and he felt we could ride this one through. We must not lose our sense of humor, he said.

The President asked that interagency committees be put to work on the nature of our dialogue with Diem, and he suggested that the ExCom meet again in a week or so. Next time, he said, he hoped that a good map of South Vietnam might be available.

5. THE FALL OF DIEM

Lodge had begun his Saigon tour with the usual calls on Diem and Nhu. When he got nowhere with them, he stopped calling on them. “They have not done anything I asked,” he would explain. “They know what I want. Why should I keep asking? Let them come to ask me.” The anti-Diem section of the Embassy and American press in Saigon, enormously cheered, said to each other: “Our mandarin is going to beat their mandarin.” Lodge kept cabling Washington that the situation was getting worse and that the time had arrived for the United States to increase its pressure. He recommended in particular the suspension of American aid.

McNamara and Rusk were at first opposed. The suspension of aid, they said, would hurt the war effort. And Lodge did not help his case by a Bostonian high-handedness which not only turned his embassy into a one-man show but also made him uncommunicative and at times almost derisive in response to inquiries from Washington. But Kennedy, I believe, came to the conclusion in mid-September that Lodge, Harriman, Hilsman and Forrestal were right on the question of pressure, though he remained wary of anything which might involve the United States in attempts against the regime. Accordingly he decided to send McNamara and Taylor on one more trip on the Saigon shuttle in the hope that exposure to Lodge and the facts would convince them too that pressure was essential.

In the past, McNamara’s susceptibility to quantification had led him to take excessive comfort in General Harkins’s statistical optimism, embodied, for example, in tables purporting to correlate government and Viet Cong casualties; and Nolting had done little to assert the importance of things which could not be quantified. In Saigon, as in Washington, the State Department had acquiesced in the theory that Vietnam was basically a military problem. But Lodge considered intangibles like political purpose and popular support as of the highest importance. For a few days after McNamara’s arrival, Lodge and Harkins engaged in a quiet duel for the Secretary’s ear. In the end Lodge made the political case so effectively that McNamara agreed there was no alternative to pressure; indeed, McNamara returned to Washington doubting whether Diem could last even if he took corrective action. But he also thought that the political mess had not yet infected the military situation and, back in Washington, announced (in spite of a strong dissent from William Sullivan of Harriman’s staff who accompanied the mission) that a thousand American troops could be withdrawn by the end of the year and that the major part of the American military task would be completed by the end of 1965.

This announcement, however, was far less significant than McNamara’s acceptance of the Lodge pressure program. Some thought had already been given to the problem of picking out of the aid effort the cuts which would do the least harm to the war, and early in October a selective suspension went quietly into effect. It was hoped that the absence of publicity would encourage Diem to do something about the Nhus and the Buddhists without seeming to act under pressure and thereby losing face. But, in due course, the Vietnamese bitterly announced the suspension themselves. Madame Nhu now appeared in the United States to lobby against the new policy; for a moment she won support from right-wing politicians, though in the end her extravagances injured her own cause. In Saigon her husband apparently renewed his efforts to make contact with Hanoi. Speculation bubbled up again about possible successors to Diem. One official, asked about specifications for the new man, replied crisply, “First of all, he should be an only child.”

As for Diem, there is some suggestion that the program of pressure, so belatedly adopted, was having effect. “With or without American aid,” he said in mid-October, “I will keep up the fight, and I will always maintain my friendship toward the American people.” On the last day of the month Diem and Lodge made a trip together to dedicate an experimental reactor at Dalat. Diem for the first time indicated an interest in compromise and asked Lodge what he had to do. Lodge told him to send Nhu out of the country and institute some reforms. Diem, instead of turning this down out of hand, said that he needed a little time to think about it. It was too late. The next day the generals struck. Diem and Nhu were murdered, and the history of Vietnam entered a new phase.

It is important to state clearly that the coup of November 1, 1963, was entirely planned and carried out by the Vietnamese. Neither the American Embassy nor the CIA were involved in instigation or execution. Coup rumors, epidemic in Saigon since 1960, had begun to rise again toward the end of October; and on October 29 the National Security Council met to consider American policy in the event that a coup should take place. The Attorney General characterized the reports as very thin. The President, noting that the pro-Diem and anti-Diem forces seemed about equal, observed that any American action under such conditions would be silly. If Lodge agreed, the President said, we should instruct him to discourage a coup. But Lodge knew little more than he had reported to Washington. Indeed, on the morning of November 1 he actually took Admiral Felt to call on Diem—an incident which alarmed the conspirators who, knowing Diem’s gift for long-distance talking, feared he would detain his visitors past one-thirty in the afternoon, when the revolt was scheduled to begin.

What lay behind the coup was not the meddling of Americans, quiet or ugly, but the long history of Vietnamese military resentment against Diem, compounded now by the fear that Nhu, with his admiration for totalitarian methods of organization, might try to transform South Vietnam into a police state. It was almost inevitable that, at one point or another, the generals would turn against so arbitrary and irrational a regime. As Lodge later put it, the coup was like a rock rolling downhill. It could have been stopped only by aggressive American intervention against the army on behalf of Diem and the Nhus. This course few Americans in Saigon or Washington were willing to recommend.

I saw the President soon after he heard that Diem and Nhu were dead. He was somber and shaken. I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs. No doubt he realized that Vietnam was his great failure in foreign policy, and that he had never really given it his full attention. But the fact that the Vietnamese seemed ready to fight had made him feel that there was a reasonable chance of making a go of it; and then the optimism of 1962 had carried him along. Yet, with his memory of the French in Indochina in 1951, he had always believed there was a point at which our intervention might turn Vietnamese nationalism against us and transform an Asian civil conflict into a white man’s war. When he came into office, 2000 American troops were in Vietnam. Now there were 16,000. How many more could there be before we passed the point? By 1961 choices had already fatally narrowed; but still, if Vietnam had been handled as a political rather than a military problem, if Washington had not listened to General Harkins for so long, if Diem had been subjected to tactful pressure rather than treated with uncritical respect, if a Lodge had gone to Saigon in 1961 instead of a Nolting, if, if, if—and now it was all past, and Diem miserably dead. The Saigon generals were claiming that he had killed himself; but the President, shaking his head, doubted that, as a Catholic, he would have taken this way out. He said that Diem had fought for his country for twenty years and that it should not have ended like this.

6. TROUBLES IN THE HEMISPHERE

Cuba was another unsolved problem. Fidel Castro did not cease to call for revolution in Latin America. “We do not deny the possibility of peaceful transition,” he said in January 1963, “but we are still awaiting the first case. . . . That is the duty of leaders and the revolutionary organizations: to make the masses march, to launch the masses into battle. That is what they did in Algeria. And that is what the patriots are doing in South Vietnam.” In July he added the hopeful thought that conditions for revolution in many Latin American countries were “incomparably better than those that prevailed in our country.”

But Fidel’s appeal to the hemisphere had steadily waned. His opposition to the Alliance for Progress had cast doubt on the selflessness of his interest in social betterment. Then the missile crisis displayed him as a rather impotent and ignominious Soviet tool, warned other Latin revolutionists that they could not count on Soviet support once the chips were down and demonstrated to non-communists the danger communist bridgeheads brought to all Latin America. At the same time, Washington pursued its measures of economic, diplomatic and military containment. Kennedy’s policy of isolating and ignoring Castro worked well. By 1963 he was hardly even a thorn in the flesh. Once his influence in Latin America was destroyed, the survival of a mendicant communist regime in the Caribbean was not important.

As for the future, Kennedy, as usual, refused doctrinaire conclusions in a world where history produced such astonishing and unforeseen reversals. “There are a good many things which have happened in the last three or four years,” he said at the end of 1962, “which could not have been predicted in ’57 or ’58. No one can predict what the exact course of events will be in Cuba, what movement will take place there.” He continued to keep the door open to those within the Castro regime itself who might want to return to the hemisphere. “We believe,” as Assistant Secretary Martin told a Senate committee in May 1963, “that it would be a serious mistake to give those in Cuba who are struggling against communism the idea that they are being disregarded and that they have no role to play in determining how Cuba will be governed.”

I have the impression that in the autumn of 1963 the President was reappraising the Castro problem. When Tito came to the White House in October, Kennedy remarked that he did not know what was going to happen, but, if Cuba rid herself of Soviet influence, perhaps we could deal with a domestic revolutionary regime; on the other hand, if Castro’s refusal to sign the test ban treaty meant that China was now playing a role in Cuba, that could hardly be considered a desirable development. Jean Daniel, who saw Kennedy a few days later, reported him as saying, “The continuation of the [economic] blockade depends on the continuation of subversive activities.” Daniel was on his way to Cuba to interview Castro, and Kennedy invited him to stop by on his return.

In the meantime, unofficial soundings encountered difficulties on the two points of submission to extra-continental influence and subversion directed at the rest of the hemisphere. On November 18 in a speech at Miami Kennedy sent a message across the water to Cuba. A band of conspirators, he said, had made Cuba the instrument of an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American republics. “This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which in a few short years stirred their hopes and the sympathy of. . . . the hemisphere.”

Two days later Jean Daniel saw Castro in Havana. The Cuban leader expressed feelings of “fraternity and profound, total gratitude” toward the Soviet Union; there was no give here. As for Cuban subversion, Castro predictably denied that it was the cause of revolution on the mainland. He denounced Washington and the CIA. Still, of Kennedy, Castro said he could “be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. . . . Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse.” He concluded: “As a man and as a statesman, it is my duty to indicate what the bases for understanding could be.” And so the matter rested, with lines of communication still open.

“Two dikes are needed to contain Soviet expansion,” Kennedy had told Daniel: “the blockade on the one hand, a tremendous effort toward progress on the other.” He followed the Alliance for Progress with ever watchful eye. The recommendation of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council in 1962 had led to a review of the Alliance by Lleras Camargo of Colombia and Kubitschek of Brazil. “Nothing that needs to be done in Latin America is easy,” Lleras said. Yet, while noting the disappointments of the Alliance, he wrote that it had made “an extraordinary impression upon the old, hardened crust of Latin American society. . . . Governments, which had been indifferent to the anxiety of the people, have shown as never before a zeal for economic development.” While the two Latin American leaders disagreed on certain issues, they united in recommending the establishment of an inter-American development committee to preside over the Alliance. When the IA-ECOSOC met in November 1963 at Sao Paulo in Brazil, it established the Inter-American Committee for the Alliance for Progress (CIAP). This body, on which Walt Rostow became the United States representative, marked the ‘Latinization’ of the Alliance and gave it new coherence and purpose.

But the road to democracy remained hard. On September 25, 1963, the Dominican military overthrew Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic. A week later another military coup overthrew the regime of Ramón Villeda Morales in Honduras. Kennedy promptly recalled our ambassadors and economic and military aid chiefs from Santo Domingo and Tegucigalpa. “We are opposed to coups,” he said, “because we think they are defeating, self-defeating and defeating for the hemisphere . . . not only because we are all committed under the Alliance for Progress to democratic government and progress but also because of course dictatorships are the seedbeds from which communism ultimately springs up.”^*

Still, despite political setbacks, the Alliance for Progress continued to gain. In 1963 eight countries attained increases in per capita income of nearly 5 per cent—almost twice the target of Punta del Este. In 1964 Latin America as a whole fulfilled the Punta del Este goal. And the rise of new leaders like Eduardo Frei Montalva in Chile and Belaunde in Peru expressed the vitality of the democratic revolution.

The President was more troubled than ever by the organization of Latin American affairs within our own government. Late in October he discussed with Richard Goodwin and me the old problem which Berle had raised in 1961 of an Under Secretaryship of State for Inter-American Affairs, embracing both the Alliance and the political responsibilities of the Assistant Secretary. Kennedy, remarking sharply that he could not get anyone on the seventh floor of the State Department to pay sustained attention to Latin America, dictated a plain-spoken memorandum to Rusk saying that he wanted to create the new Under Secretaryship. “I am familiar,” he said, “with the argument that, if we do this for Latin America, other geographical areas must receive equal treatment. But I have come increasingly to feel that this argument, however plausible in the abstract, overlooks the practicalities of the situation.” Historically Latin America was an area of primary and distinctive United States interest; currently it was the area of greatest danger to us; and operationally it simply was not receiving the day-to-day, high level attention which our national interest demanded. “Since I am familiar with the arguments against the establishment of this Under Secretaryship,” his memorandum to the Secretary concluded somewhat wearily, “I would like this time to have a positive exploration of its possibilities.”

He had in mind for the job Sargent Shriver or perhaps Averell Harriman, whom he had just designated to lead the United States delegation to the Sâo Paulo meeting. We later learned that Rusk sent the presidential memorandum to the Assistant Secretary for Administration, who passed it along to some subordinate, and it took Ralph Dungan’s intervention to convince the Secretary that this was a serious matter requiring senior attention. Receiving no response, the President after a fortnight renewed the request.

7. REVOLUTION IN FISCAL POLICY

The year 1963 was one of initiatives not only in the pursuit of peace and in the struggle for equal rights but in national economic policy.

In the autumn of 1963 the administration had quietly committed itself to a radical principle: the deliberate creation of budgetary deficits at a time when there was no economic emergency—when, indeed, the budget was already in deficit and the economy was actually moving upward. This idea was the wildest heresy to those like George Humphrey who used to predict a depression to curl a man’s hair if the government did not balance its books. It would have seemed extreme to the contracyclical spenders of the New Deal, who were prepared for deficits in depression in order to offset declines but supposed that the proper policy in prosperity was to keep taxes up and retire the national debt. Kennedy was even moving beyond his own theory in 1961 of a budget balanced “over the years of the economic cycle” when he adopted the theory of deficits at the peak of the cycle so long as unemployment remained high.

Because the principle was so revolutionary, it exacted a price, or rather a series of prices. The first had been the decision to create the deficit through tax reduction rather than through social spending. Kennedy, in spite of his sympathy with the Galbraithian concern for the public sector, simply considered the expenditures route politically impossible and accepted Walter Heller’s argument that the increased revenues produced by the tax route would eventually increase public benefits. The second price, not so serious, was the decision to stretch out the projected cut of about $10 billion over three years. The Treasury favored this, the Council of Economic Advisers opposed it, and the President went along with the Treasury, partly because he did not want to jeopardize the tax bill by requesting a rise in the debt limit and partly because he wanted to keep his own deficit under Eisenhower’s record peacetime deficit of 1959. The third price was more serious: an assurance to Wilbur Mills that tax reduction would be accompanied by an “ever-tighter rein on Federal expenditures.” The President’s assumption here, I think, was that, once he had completed the diversification of national defense required by the strategy of flexible response, military spending would level off, and, as the budget grew in pace with growth in population and output, more money would be available for civil purposes.

A fourth price was the gradual erosion in Congress of most of the tax reforms to which Dillon and Mills had devoted so much attention in the years preceding. The tax reform program, in essence, was an effort to close loopholes in the tax laws in exchange for a reduction in the surtax rates. Galbraith once complained to Kennedy that it was “a commendable program to get greater equity among the rich, but it affects only a small fraction of the population—a comparative handful of affluent Republicans. This reform is not an exercise with any meaning whatever to the people at large.” (He added—this was at the end of 1962—that in any case tax reform would not get anywhere: “Depletion allowances, preferential treatment of capital gains, tax exempt securities will all be preserved. . . . Anyone who disagrees with this prediction can reasonably be requested to put it in writing.”)

Galbraith was right in the short term, and Kennedy was prepared to pay this price for the tax cut. But the President reserved the problem in his own mind for treatment in the longer run. He was outraged to discover that an oil man reputed to be among the richest living Americans had in certain years paid income taxes of less than $1000; that, of the nineteen Americans with incomes of more than $5 million a year, more than 25 per cent had paid no income tax at all in 1959 and that of the rest not one had paid in the 80 to 85 per cent bracket to which their income nominally consigned them; that in a recent year one American received an income of nearly $20 million and paid no taxes at all.^* The President and the Attorney General, brooding over these figures, decided to make a major issue of the tax-avoidance spectaculars after the 1964 election.

Even with all these concessions, the principle of the planned deficit remained too startling for easy acceptance. Mythology died hard. In May 1963 President Eisenhower in an agitated magazine article expressed his “amazement” about this “vast, reckless” plan for “a deliberate plunge into a massive deficit.” “What can those people in Washington be thinking about? Why would they deliberately do this to our country? I ask myself.” The deficit road, the former President grimly warned, “through history has lured nations to financial misery and economic disaster.” And in the business community, a number of leaders, while applauding the idea of tax reduction, especially for higher brackets and for corporations, insisted that it be accompanied by a parallel reduction in government expenditures. It required patient explanation before they began to understand that this approach, by taking out of the spending stream with one hand what was being put in by the other, would nullify the stimulative value of the cut.

The bill made slow progress through Congress. Public reaction at first was muted. Kennedy used to inquire of the professors of the Council what had happened to the several million college students who had presumably been taught the new economics. He wrote Seymour Harris, “As a teacher you must be discouraged that none of the obvious lessons of the last thirty years have been learned by those who have the most at stake in a growing prosperous America.” The President watched with envy as the British government called for a tax reduction of comparable size in April, then added a large increase in expenditures and had the program in effect by summer. Still, when the House of Representatives passed the tax bill by 271 to 155 on September 25, 1963, the worst was over. Though Senator Byrd showed every intention of dragging out the hearings before the Senate Finance Committee, enactment sometime in early 1964 was reasonably assured. The Yale speech had not been in vain; and the American government, a generation after General Theory, had accepted the Keynesian revolution.

But a problem remained. The steady increase in national output since the bottom of the 1960–61 recession had not been accompanied by any equivalent lessening of unemployment. The decline in joblessness from 6.7 per cent of the labor force in 1961 to 5.6 per cent in 1962 left the level far above the 4 per cent economists were willing to tolerate; and the re-employment rate was slower than in any comparable post-recession period since the Second World War. Would the tax cut do any better in cutting into chronic unemployment?

This question had worried Kennedy ever since the primaries in the spring of 1960 had carried him into the blasted valleys of West Virginia. In the campaign he derided Nixon’s view that conditions in the United States could not be better:

 

Let them tell that to the 4 million people who are out of work, to the 3 million Americans who must work part time. Let them tell that to those who farm our farms, in our depressed areas, in our deserted textile and coal towns. Let them try to tell it to the 5 million men and women in the richest country on earth who live on a surplus food diet of $20 a month.

 

“The war against poverty and degradation is not yet over,” he said, “. . . As long as there are 15 million American homes in the United States substandard, as long as there are 5 million American homes in the cities of the United States which lack plumbing of any kind, as long as 17 million Americans live on inadequate assistance when they get older, then I think we have unfinished business in this country.” Repeatedly through the campaign he called for “an economic drive on poverty.”

Now as President he confronted an economic system which seemed to be able to do everything but give all its people jobs and decent lives. Population growth compounded the challenge: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1962, 2.5 million new young workers would begin their careers each year in the sixties. The progress of automation further complicated the problem by bringing the period nearer when technology would begin to destroy more jobs than it created. How could an increasingly computerized economy, using fewer people to produce more goods, provide useful employment to those displaced by technological change, to those traditionally discriminated against in the labor market and to those entering that market for the first time? This question did not worry him politically, because he was sure the unemployed would never turn to the Republicans to create jobs for them. But it worried him socially. Unemployment was especially acute among Negroes, already so alienated from American society, and among young people, and it thereby placed a growing strain on the social fabric.

The President had always regarded as artificial the debate about the character of American unemployment: whether it was primarily the result of economic slowdown and thus to be cured by aggregate fiscal and monetary stimulus, or whether it was primarily structural and thus to be cured by institutional remedies. “Our feeling,” as he said in the spring of 1963, “is that the economy, if sufficiently stimulated . . . could reduce unemployment to the figure of about 4 per cent. There will be some hard-core structural unemployment in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, particularly the coal and steel centers, which will not be substantially aided by the tax bill or even by the general rise in the economy. I do think, however, that if we could reduce unemployment to four per cent, then those programs which are specifically directed toward these centers of chronic unemployment . . . may be able to make a further dent.”

Tax reduction, in short, was the first part of the assault on unemployment. After the artillery barrage, the structural troops were then expected to move in and mop up remaining pockets of resistance. A basis for structural action had already been laid by legislative enactment: the Area Redevelopment Act, passed in 1961 after having been twice vetoed in the Eisenhower administration, and the Accelerated Public Works Act of 1962. Both of these were put under the charge of William L. Batt, Jr., who had been Commissioner of Labor in Pennsylvania and was now head of the Area Redevelopment Administration in the Department of Commerce. In addition, the Manpower Training and Development Act was passed in 1962, and bills for vocational education and youth employment were moving through Congress in 1963.

Progress had also been made in devising regional strategies. The President directed Batt to work closely with the Conference of Appalachian Governors, organized in 1960 for a multi-state attack on the spreading economic decay in the hills and valleys of the Appalachian mountains. Appalachia, a region as large as Britain, stretching from northern Pennsylvania into northern Alabama, had been primarily a coal area. Now the mining towns were crumbling away. Unemployment was twice the average for the nation. The people were sunk in lethargy and squalor. Those of intelligence and energy, who might have provided local leadership, fled the region as fast as they could. On the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Kentucky 19 per cent of the adults could not read or write. Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 1963, with its powerful portrait of life in the southern Appalachians, made the nation uneasily aware of the horror of underdevelopment it had hidden in its bosom. Caudill’s book came out with a foreword by Stewart Udall and was widely read in New Frontier Washington.

Kennedy, who never forgot West Virginia, followed developments in Appalachia with particular interest. This region, as he once put it, would be “very hard to reach even if the economy is going ahead at a strong rate.” From the start, he steered a great variety of government programs—ARA, highway construction, Army Corps of Engineers, TV A, food stamp—into Appalachia. In the spring of 1963 he established a joint federal-state Committee on the Appalachian Region and, with nice historical eye, appointed Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., the Under Secretary of Commerce, as chairman. Roosevelt took hold of the project with ability and energy. It seemed in 1963 that the Appalachia program might become a model for comparable programs in other parts of underdeveloped America, such as the upper Great Lakes region and the Ozarks.

Within the executive branch the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency had been developing under Robert Kennedy’s goading perhaps the most imaginative attack on the structure of poverty. The Committee decided to use its funds—$10 million a year—to stimulate cities to come up with coordinated plans, uniting federal, municipal and private instrumentalities in an effort to help boys and girls in the slums. When the plans met the Committee’s criteria, more money would be available for their execution. In order to make sure that they would not just be schemes benevolently imposed by social workers and welfare agencies, Robert Kennedy insisted on bringing the poor into planning and execution—an innovation of great significance, stoutly resisted in many cases by city administrations. He also laid emphasis on pre-school education, pointing out that the formative years of a child’s life were before the age of six or seven and that many children from poor families arrived in the first grade so far behind that they could never catch up. The Committee concentrated on sixteen cities in the course of 1963 and approved plans in ten of them. Mobilization for Youth and the Haryou program in Harlem were among the best known. Out of this experience there emerged the concept of ‘community action’ as a fundamental part of the war against deprivation.

Yet, apart from the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, none of the structural efforts quite worked. The Area Redevelopment Administration received inadequate appropriations and, because of political pressure as well as human need, had to spread them too thin over too wide an area. After a year and a half, only slightly more than 150,000 were in training under the Manpower Development and Training Act. The youth employment bill, proposing a Youth Conservation Corps, passed the Senate in April 1963 but bogged down in the House. And the Appalachia program threatened to be dominated by the state governors, who flinched from offending the absentee corporate owners of the area and wanted to put the bulk of government funds into highway construction.

8. THE WAR AGAINST POVERTY

As Kennedy reflected on these matters in the spring of 1963, he began to feel that the problem was one not only of greater investment in private industry but of greater investment in public services and human beings, not only of distressed areas but of distressed individuals, not only of vocational training but of elementary education, medical care, civil rights, community action and personal morale. He was reaching the conclusion that tax reduction required a comprehensive structural counterpart, taking the form, not of piecemeal programs, but of a broad war against poverty itself. Here perhaps was the unifying theme which would pull a host of social programs together and rally the nation behind a generous cause.

Kennedy knew that unemployment and poverty were in part separate problems (indeed statistics showed that a majority of the unemployed were not below the poverty line and a majority of the poor were not unemployed); but the problems overlapped in the area of structural remedy. This concern for poverty as a problem distinct from unemployment—for chronic or, in bureaucratese, ‘hardcore’ poverty—was relatively new. Franklin Roosevelt in his Second Inaugural had spoken of “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . . lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions”; but, in the depression, he had the unemployed primarily in mind. The war made people think of other things. Then in 1949 the Joint Committee on the Economic Report established a Subcommittee on Low-Income Families, which began to demonstrate by statistical analysis the persistence of poverty in the national community. Two old New Dealers, Averell Harriman and Isador Lubin, were quick to see the significance of this work. In 1953, when Harriman became president of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation, he decided to focus its program on the third of the Four Freedoms, Freedom from Want. By 1956, with Harriman now governor of New York and Lubin his labor commissioner, Harriman asked the legislature to set up a commission to study the causes and remedies of poverty. Harriman’s message to the Legislature on January 31, 1956, contained the basic elements of the war against poverty begun half a dozen years later. It defined the problem as something separate from unemployment and even from distressed areas, set.forth its composition and magnitude and laid emphasis on the need to help the individual make his own escape from poverty through “medical and vocational rehabilitation.” Leon Keyserling, another old New Dealer still in Washington, put out a series of well-documented papers discussing what he called “the gaps in our prosperity,” and the Joint Economic Committee continued its work on low-income families. But neither the statistics in Washington nor Harriman’s little New Deal in Albany had much impact on the comfortable fifties. Indeed, one of Nelson Rockefeller’s first acts as governor in 1959 was to abolish Harriman’s commission.

It was not till toward the end of the decade—and especially with the publication in 1958 of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and its chapter xxiii on “The New Position of Poverty”—that chronic poverty began to impinge on the national consciousness as a distinct issue. Galbraith warned that the poor, unlike the ambitious immigrants of the nineties or the politically aggressive unemployed of the thirties, were now a demoralized and inarticulate minority who in many cases had inherited their poverty and accepted it as a permanent condition. Because of their apathy and invisibility they had ceased to be objects of interest to the politician. Nor would the increase of the gross national product of itself solve their problems. But he insisted that an affluent society, through investment in the public sector, could begin to take measures which might at least keep poverty from being self-perpetuating. Then in 1962 The Other America, a brilliant and indignant book by Michael Harrington, translated the statistics into bitter human terms. If Galbraith brought poverty into the national consciousness, Harrington placed it on the national conscience.

Kennedy read both Galbraith and Harrington; and I believe that The Other America helped crystallize his determination in 1963 to accompany the tax cut by a poverty program. Galbraith’s unremitting guerrilla warfare in support of the public sector against “reactionary” Keynesianism certainly played its part too.^* The Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Manpower, under the leadership of Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, conducted a series of thoughtful hearings to determine what the proper ‘policy mix’ should be to achieve full employment. And the Council of Economic Advisers itself, amending its earlier emphasis on aggregate measures, provided a main stimulus to the new structural effort.

In the spring of 1963, Robert Lampman, who had conducted poverty studies for the Joint Economic Committee in 1959 and was now a member of the Council staff, brought his researches up to date. His data, as Heller explained in a memorandum to Kennedy on May 1, underlined the drastic slowdown in the rate at which the economy was taking people out of poverty. In spite of the remarkable increase in the gross national product, the absolute number of the poor appeared to be slightly larger than in 1957 and the proportion only 1 percent lower. By reasonable definitions—an annual income of $3000 for a family or $1500 for an individual—one-fifth of the nation lived in an underworld of poverty beyond the reach of most government programs, whether housing, farm price supports, social security or tax reduction.

It puzzled Kennedy that the poor were not angrier and more politically demanding. “In England,” he said one day in the spring of 1963, “the unemployment rate goes to two per cent, and they march on Parliament. Here it moves up toward six, and no one seems to mind.” But, as he said to Heller, the time had come for action. There were doubts in other parts of the government, even in Heller’s own staff. Ted Sorensen, however, told Heller, “This is the President’s kind of program. Go ahead on it.” Early in June Heller circulated a memorandum within the Council asking “what lines of action might make up a practical Kennedy anti-poverty program in 1964?” Through the summer and fall the Council carried on its work. During the cabinet meeting on October 29, 1963, the President scribbled, as usual, on a yellow lined pad; the doodles show the word “poverty” half a dozen times, encircled and underlined. On Armistice Day, 1963, Kennedy told Heller, “First we’ll have your tax cut; then we’ll have my expenditures, program.” One day in November, musing about the 1964 State of the Union message, he remarked to me, “The time has come to organize a national assault on the causes of poverty, a comprehensive program, across the board”; this, he suggested, would be the centerpiece in his 1964 legislative recommendations. On November 19 he observed to Heller that the middle class might feel threatened and we would have to do something for the suburbs, but the Council should go full speed ahead to get the program ready for 1964. Between tax reduction and the war against poverty, Kennedy believed that he had finally put together the elements of a total program for economic growth and opportunity.

Already the policies of the Kennedy years had resulted in the longest American peacetime expansion of the economy in the century of recorded business cycle history. The average increase of the gross national product in real terms was 5.6 per cent a year^*—measurably more than the 5 per cent Kennedy had talked about in the 1960 campaign. Profits, wages and salaries were higher than ever before; yet costs and prices remained stable, and wage rates on the average rose no faster than productivity.

The sources of this triumph can be briefly enumerated. The steady rise in expenditures, averaging over $5 billion a year, contributed basic economic stimulus.^** The investment tax credit and the liberalized depreciation allowances encouraged investment. The Federal Reserve Board followed the elections returns and, where the balance of payments permitted, pursued a policy of monetary ease. The guideposts and the steel fight restrained the wage-price spiral. Roosa’s legerdemain defended the dollar. Neither of the right-wing bogies of the fifties—the passion for a balanced budget or the fear of inflation—was allowed to abort the boom. Then the tax cut promised to infuse the body economic with new energies for consumption and investment and the poverty program to open the gates of escape from deprivation and squalor.

Dillon, describing these years as a “watershed in the development of American economic policy,” thus summed up their meaning:

 

They have borne witness to the emergence, first of all, of a new national determination to use fiscal policy as a dynamic and affirmative agent in fostering economic growth. Those years have also demonstrated, not in theory, but in actual practice, how our different instruments of economic policy—expenditure, tax, debt management and monetary policies—can be tuned in concert toward achieving different, even disparate, economic goals. In short, those years have encompassed perhaps our most significant advance in decades in the task of forging flexible economic techniques capable of meeting the needs of our rapidly changing economic scene.

 

It was, indeed, an unprecedented performance in economic management; and its success was due to Heller and Dillon, whose creative debates first illuminated the choices and then led to consensus, and above all to Kennedy, whose political instinct determined the timing of policies and whose intellectual leadership made them acceptable to the country.

The growing accord between Heller and Dillon expressed a convergence of opinion among most economically literate Americans.^* So Business Week suddenly discovered that Keynesianism was not so radical after all; “it is, in fact, a new variety of middle-of-the-road conservatism.” Perhaps only a Wall Street banker could have enrolled the leaders of American business in the Keynesian revolution. Like Vandenberg’s conversion to internationalism in 1945, Dillon’s espousal of Keynesianism (though he did not much like to be called a Keynesian) was one of those timely actions which carried over the line thousands of others, who had too long been suppressing doubts about the laissez-faire verities. When Dillon retired as Secretary of the Treasury in 1965, leaving behind an appeal for tax reductions in the lower brackets, warnings against high interest rates and emphasis on the growing need for public services, his record and leadership were warmly praised on the floors of Congress by such liberal Democrats as Paul Douglas, Henry Reuss and even that scourge of bankers Wright Patman. Nor had the educational process been all one-way. The liberals learned things too—that measures to induce business investment, price stability and wage restraint, for example, were not all bad. It became a time, as Heller liked to say, of “the decline of the doctrinaire.”

The question remained of the extent to which the new ideas were penetrating beyond the still smallish circle of the economically literate. Though Wall Street was coming to accept deficits as a benign invention, Main Street still evidently regarded them as the work of the devil. The mythology about the sinfulness of federal spending and the wickedness of a growing federal debt had deep roots in the folkways. Heller, in a moment he was not soon allowed to forget, attributed this to “the basic Puritan ethic of the American people”; but, if so, it was a very peculiar Puritanism, for it permitted the people to indulge freely in all the vices—to unbalance budgets, to go into debt, to spend more than they earned—they would righteously deny their government. Indeed, consumer debt had increased about 1000 per cent since the war, while the national government’s debt had only increased 18 per cent. Perhaps Heller had Mencken’s view of Puritanism in mind: “The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.” In any case, so long as the national government itself continued to encourage the mythology—even Kennedy, to meet his congressional problems, used occasionally to talk about frugality in government as if the reduction of public spending were per se a good thing—the new economic policy could not be wholly secure.

The job of public education which Kennedy had begun so brilliantly at Yale was yet to be completed. Still, these years equipped the republic with policies which promised to advance economic growth, move toward full employment and relieve the age-old burdens of poverty.

9. ONE ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT

On a beautiful autumn Saturday at the end of October the President flew to Amherst College in Massachusetts to take part in a ceremony in honor of Robert Frost. He had decided to speak about Frost’s inaugural theme of poetry and power. When we were talking over what he might say, we had chatted about Frost’s poems. He recalled “I have been one acquainted with the night” and said, “What a terrific line!”’ Now on Air Force One he worked over the speech some more and then joined Stewart Udall, James Reed, his friend of PT-boat days, now Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and me in the forward compartment. The President’s mood was gay. Udall remarked that he feared a lady of his acquaintance, fanatically anti-Kennedy, might appear and even try to interrupt the ceremony, “so if you see me in the crowd struggling with a woman and rolling on the ground, you will know what is going on.” “In any case, Stewart,” the President said, “we will give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Soon we landed and motored over to the college. It was Indian summer, golden and vivid but with forebodings of winter. “The men who create power,” Kennedy told his Amherst audience, “make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable . . . for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.” Frost, he continued, saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization,” he said, “than full recognition of the place of the artist.” And then he offered his vision of the American promise.

 

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. . . .

I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

 

This was his sense of the future, and he embraced it as if on a rising tide of confidence. A few days later at a press conference someone asked him how he felt about the Presidency. He replied, “I have given before to this group the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again: it is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.” For all the congressional problems of 1963, he knew he had had a good year, and he anticipated 1964 with relish. So much beckoned: the enactment of the civil rights and tax reduction bills; the war against poverty; education and Medicare; the pursuit of peace beyond the test ban; the advance of the Alliance for Progress; a visit from de Gaulle in February; a trip with Jacqueline to the Far East in the spring; the presidential election in the fall.

He had little real doubt, I think, that he would win the election with ease, especially against Goldwater. This would give his second term the congressional margin and the popular mandate the first had lacked. He saw his second administration, like Theodore Roosevelt’s, as the time of great legislative action, when the seeds planted in the first term would come to fruition. He expected, of course, to make some changes. The conduct of foreign affairs never ceased to bother him. Discussing the de Gaulle visit with Ambassador James Gavin in late October, he said, “In the meantime, though, I must get something done about that State Department.” He continued to hope for the best from his Secretary of State; but the frustrations—the Under Secretaryship for Inter-American Affairs was only the most recent and one of the more trivial—were accumulating. He wanted ideas, initiatives and action from State, not cautious adherence to the policies of the past varied by anxious agnosticism in face of new problems—for example, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, Berlin, Vietnam, the Congo, disarmament, Skybolt, de Gaulle, Italy, Latin America, India—on very few of which had his Secretary of State vouchsafed a definite view. With reluctance, because he still liked Rusk and thought he had useful qualities, he made up his mind to accept his resignation after the 1964 election and seek a new Secretary. He always had the dream that a McNamara might someday take command and make the Department a genuine partner in the enterprise of foreign affairs (though he also said that he had to have a McNamara at Defense in order to have a foreign policy at all). He planned other changes in his administration, some notable, though none, so far as I know, in the cabinet (unless he could not persuade his brother to stay on as Attorney General). Then after the election, he could not only complete his present program but move forward to new problems—tax evasion was one, an attack on the structure of government subsidies was another, the rationalization of the city, the promotion of the arts and the protection of the natural environment, others. In foreign affairs he looked forward particularly to the possibility, if the détente held, of a journey to the Soviet Union.

Sometimes he would muse about life beyond 1968. He had remarked early in his administration that, “whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age—too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” Many thoughts drifted through his mind about the future—publishing a newspaper (he sometimes joked with Ben Bradlee about buying the Washington Post), returning to Congress like John Quincy Adams, traveling around the world, writing a book. As the plans for his presidential library at Harvard took shape, he began to visualize the future with more particularity. They would, he thought, live part of each year in Cambridge. Here he could use his offices in the Library, work on the history of his administration, hold seminars and talk to students. He hoped that the Library might become a center where academicians, politicians and public servants could challenge and instruct one another, thereby realizing his old dream of bringing together the world of thought and the world of power.^*

But 1969 was a long time away, and there remained the hurdle of 1964. The President looked forward with high anticipation to running against Goldwater. I think he felt that this would give him the opportunity to dispose of right-wing extremism once and for all and win an indisputable mandate for his second term. On November 12 he convened his first strategy meeting for 1964—Robert Kennedy, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Sorensen, John Bailey and Richard Maguire of the National Committee, Stephen Smith and Richard Scammon, a political scientist, director of the Census Bureau and a lively expert on voting statistics. They discussed the South and its representation at the national convention, meditated on the suburbs, considered the organization of the campaign, then reverted to the South, where the President was to go in another ten days to carry the fight to Florida and Texas. It was a sanguine meeting, filled with badinage about the future. A notable absentee was the Vice-President of the United States.

Johnson’s absence stimulated a curious story that the Kennedys intended, in the political idiom, to dump him as the vice-presidential candidate in 1964, as Roosevelt had dumped John Nance Gamer in 1940. These stories were wholly fanciful. Kennedy knew and understood Johnson’s moodiness in the Vice-Presidency, but he considered him able and loyal. In addition, if Goldwater were to be the Republican candidate, the Democrats needed every possible asset in the South. The meeting on November 12 assumed Johnson’s renomination as part of the convention schedule.

It had not been an easy year for Johnson. One saw much less of him around the White House than in 1961 or 1962. He seemed to have faded astonishingly into the background and appeared almost a spectral presence at meetings in the Cabinet Room. Though his fidelity to the President was constant and his self-discipline impressive, the psychological cost was evidently mounting. Theodore White has written, “Chafing in inaction when his nature yearned to act, conscious of indignities real and imagined, Johnson went through three years of slow burn.” The Vice-President disagreed with administration tactics in 1963 on a number of points—on the civil rights bill, on the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, on selling wheat to the Soviet Union, on Vietnam. He evidently felt he should have been consulted more, especially in legislative matters. Yet about the President himself Johnson always spoke with deep and unaffected admiration. He would mention the grace with which he bore his burdens and say that, when Kennedy went around the room with the question “What would you do?”, he would pray that he would not have to answer first.

As 1964 approached, Kennedy looked to Johnson for particular help in the Vice-President’s own state. There John Connally, who had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to run successfully for governor, and Senator Ralph Yarborough were engaged in the latest phase of the quarrel which had plagued the Texas Democratic party ever since Garner had opposed a third term for Roosevelt in 1940. The conservative Democrats of Texas were increasingly based on the oil industry, the young suburban businessmen and the rural conservatives, while the liberal Democrats had joined the old populist tradition with the new force of organized labor. The conservatives had won out in the late forties and fifties; this had been reflected in Johnson’s own movement from the aggressive young New Dealer to the cautious middle-of-the-roader of the Eisenhower years. Yet, though in the course of this journey he had estranged many Texas liberals, his heart had remained with the New Deal. Kennedy now looked to him to use his personal influence with Connally and his ideological affinity with Yarborough to end the wracking fight in the Texas Democracy. By going to Texas himself, the President hoped to use the presidential authority to help the Vice-President bring the warring Texans together.

On November 19 he had the usual breakfast with the congressional leaders. Chatting about his trip, he said that the Texas feuds would at least create interest and bring people out. He added, “Things always look so much better away from Washington.” The next night was Robert Kennedy’s thirty-eighth birthday. At the party at Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy, instead of making her usual chaffing toast about her husband, asked us all, with simplicity and solemnity, to drink to the President of the United States. The next morning the President and Mrs. Kennedy flew to Texas, with stops scheduled for San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Austin.

10. DALLAS

Exactly four weeks before, Adlai Stevenson had gone to Dallas for a meeting on United Nations Day. The National Indignation Convention, still active on the radical right, decided to counter this visit by holding a “United States Day” meeting the previous day with General Edwin A. Walker as the main speaker. Governor Connally, without perhaps knowing the character of the occasion, dismayed the friends of the UN by giving “United States Day” the sanction of an official proclamation. That night General Walker denounced the United Nations. The next day handbills with photographs of the President of the United States—full-face and profile—were scattered around Dallas: “WANTED FOR TREASON, THIS MAN is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States,” followed by a scurrilous bill of particulars.

That evening many of Walker’s patriots returned to the same auditorium to harass Stevenson. While Adlai spoke, there was hooting and heckling; placards and flags were waved, and noisemakers set off. When the police removed one of the agitators from the hall, Stevenson, with customary poise, said, “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.” At the close he walked through a jostling crowd of pickets to his car. A woman screamed at him, and he stopped for a moment to calm her down. The mob closed in on him. Another woman crashed a sign down on his head. A man spat at him. As the police broke through to him, Stevenson, wiping his face with a handkerchief, said coldly, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”

The next morning Kennedy read the story in the papers. He considered Stevenson’s coolness under fire impressive and particularly admired the presence of mind which produced the line about forgiveness and redemption. “Call Adlai,” he instructed me, “and give him my sympathy, and tell him we thought he was great.” Stevenson had left Dallas, but I soon tracked him down in Los Angeles and transmitted the President’s message. He was pleased, joked a bit about the night before and then said, “But, you know, there was something very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere. Later I talked with some of the leading people out there. They wondered whether the President should go to Dallas, and so do I.” After all, the assault on Stevenson was by no means an isolated event. During the 1960 campaign Lyndon Johnson himself, accompanied by his wife, had been hissed and spat upon by a screaming mob in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel.

Still, as Kenneth O’Donnell said later, the President “could not possibly go to Texas and avoid Dallas. It would cause more controversy—and it would not accomplish for us what really was the long-range purpose of the visit.” In any case, I was reluctant to pass on Stevenson’s message lest it convict him of undue apprehensiveness in the President’s eyes. In a day or so Adlai called again to ask whether I had spoken to the President and expressed relief when I said I had not. He said that it would of course be out of character for Kennedy to avoid something because physical danger might be involved. Moreover, he had just received a reassuring letter from a leading Dallas businessman reporting that the outrage had had “serious effects on the entire community. . . . You can feel that your visit has had permanent and important results on the city of Dallas.”

Dallas plainly was a peculiar place. It was the newest rich city in the country. As late as 1940, it had been a medium-sized community of less than 300,000 people. But the discovery of the East Texas oil pool was already turning it into the financial capital of East Texas. Its population considerably more than doubled between 1940 and 1960; and now it was dominated by raw new wealth flowing from the oil fields into banking, insurance, utilities and real estate. The manners of the Dallas plutocracy had been somewhat refined by Neiman-Marcus, but its politics had been kept in a primitive and angry state by the Dallas Morning News, whose publisher two years before had told Kennedy at the White House that the nation needed a man on horseback while he was riding Caroline’s tricycle. A white collar city, it had neither a traditional aristocracy nor a strong labor movement to diversify its opinions or temper its certitudes. The fundamentalist religious background of many of its inhabitants had instilled a self-righteous absolutism of thought; the Dallas Citizens’ Council, an organization of leading businessmen, imposed a solid uniformity of values and attitudes; and the whole community, with bank clerks and real estate hustlers sporting Stetsons and sombreros, carefully cultivated the myth of the old Texas and its virile, hard-riding, hard-shooting men taking the law into their own hands.^* Texas had one of the highest homicide rates in the country—far higher, for example, than New York—and Dallas, which murdered more people some years than England, doubled the national average. By November 1, it had already had ninety-eight murders in 1963. It was a city of violence and hysteria, and its atmosphere was bound to affect people who were already weak, suggestible and themselves filled with chaos and hate.

But not all Texas was in the image of Dallas. San Antonio, where the President stopped early Thursday afternoon, had recently sent Henry Gonzalez, a liberal Democrat, to Congress, and it greeted Kennedy with great enthusiasm. Even conservative Houston was almost as friendly later that same day. Kennedy, delighted by the warmth of his reception, remained, however, in a mood of puzzlement and annoyance over the backbiting of Texas Democratic politics. He had insisted that Senator Yarborough come along; but Governor Connally, it seemed to the White House, despite the presidential wish for reconciliation, was doing all he could to keep Yarborough out of as many things as possible, including even the great reception at the gubernatorial mansion designed to climax the trip Friday evening in Austin. Yarborough, sure that Johnson was siding with his former protégé, declined both in San Antonio and Houston to ride in the same car with the Vice-President.

Kennedy, who thought these disputes childish and unnecessary, wanted Yarborough to have the respect due the Democratic Senator of the state; and he counted on Johnson to compose matters. But Johnson had lost much of his standing in Texas: his association with the New Frontier had greatly hurt him with the conservatives, and the liberals had mistrusted him for years. In the limbo of the Vice-Presidency, he was now only a name and a memory. Yarborough and Connally, on the other hand, had their own political bases in Texas, and each was a determined man—the one to uphold the banner of New Frontier liberalism, the other to display his control over the Texas Democratic party. Probably the President overestimated the Vice-President’s capacity to deal with the situation. In any case, in a brief but cogent private talk at the Rice Hotel in Houston on Thursday afternoon Kennedy expressed his discontent with the situation.

Later the President spoke to the League of United Latin-American Citizens, recalling the Good Neighbor policy and the Alliance for Progress. Then, “in order that my words may be even clearer,” he introduced Jacqueline who said a few words in Spanish. As they left for a dinner in honor of Congressman Albert Thomas, a group of Cuban refugees held signs and shouted slogans. In their midst, Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer saw one old man waving over his head a small sign: “Welcome Kennedy.’’^* At the dinner Kennedy began by saying that, when he heard Thomas was thinking of resigning, “I called him up on the phone and asked him to stay as long as I stayed. I didn’t know how long that would be.”

Later that night the presidential party went on to Fort Worth. Before breakfast the next morning, Friday, November 22, Kennedy read the Dallas Morning News. The day before a sports columnist in the News had suggested that the President talk about sailing in Dallas in order to avoid trouble. “If the speech is about boating you will be among the wannest of admirers. If it is about Cuber, civil rights, taxes or Vietnam, there will sure as shootin’ be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grape shot in the presidential rigging.” This morning the News ran a full-page advertisement headed: WELCOME MR. [sic] KENNEDY TO DALLAS. It claimed to speak for the “America-thinking citizens of Dallas” who still had, “through a Constitution largely ignored by you,” the right to disagree and criticize. It then set forth a series of questions: why had Kennedy “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’”? why had the foreign policy of the United States “degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communist Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated”? why had Kennedy “ordered or permitted your brother Bobby . . . to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you”? why had Gus Hall, head of the American Communist Party, “praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election”? why, why, why—a list designed to suggest that the President was systematically pro-communist if not a traitor. Kennedy pushed the paper aside with disgust. He asked, “How can people write such things?” To Yarborough he said, “Did you see what the Dallas News is trying to do to us?” adding that he had “a very strong feeling” about this sort of thing. “He did not say it,” Yarborough said later, “in the light bantering manner that he often used when meeting criticism.”

But he was light and bantering when he addressed the citizens of Fort Worth a little later in the soft rain in front of the Texas Hotel. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he said. “It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” Then he went on to speak at a breakfast of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. “No one expects that our life will be easy,” he said. “. . . History will not permit it . . . [But] we are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do, as we have done in our past, our duty.” At the conclusion the chairman of the meeting presented him with a cowboy hat. The President, who never put on funny hats, looked at it with suspicion and finally said, “I’ll put it on at the White House and you can photograph it there.” Back at the Texas Hotel, he chatted with Jacqueline and Kenneth O’Donnell about the role of the Secret Service. All they could do, he said, was to protect a President from unruly or overexcited crowds. But if someone really wanted to kill a President, it was not too difficult; put a man on a high building with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend a President’s life. O’Donnell said afterward that Kennedy regarded assassination as a risk inherent in a democracy; “it didn’t disturb him at all.”

During the short trip to Dallas, the men in the plane discussed the city’s aberrant atmosphere. The President “seemed puzzled by the prevalent Dallas attitude,” Congressman James Wright later recalled, “and asked questions of each of us in an attempt to understand its genesis.” Fanaticism was what he detested most—as the reason and poise he incarnated were what distraught and rootless people, drawn to Dallas by the climate of alienation and anger, might find most intolerable. The general conclusion, in Wright’s words, was that the real culprit was “the steady drum-beat of ultra right-wing propaganda with which the citizenry is constantly besieged.”

When they arrived at Love Field, Congressman Henry Gonzalez said jokingly, “Well, I’m taking my risks. I haven’t got my steel vest yet.” The President, disembarking, walked immediately across the sunlit field to the crowd and shook hands. Then they entered the cars to drive from the airport to the center of the city. The people in the outskirts, Kenneth O’Donnell later said, were “not unfriendly nor terribly enthusiastic. They waved. But were reserved, I thought.” The crowds increased as they entered the city—“still very orderly, but cheerful.” In downtown Dallas enthusiasm grew. Soon even O’Donnell was satisfied. The car turned off Main Street, the President happy and waving, Jacqueline erect and proud by his side, and Mrs. Connally saying, “You certainly can’t say that the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome,” and the automobile turning on to Elm Street and down the slope past the Texas School Book Depository, and the shots, faint and frightening, suddenly distinct over the roar of the motorcade, and the quizzical look on the President’s face before he pitched over, and Jacqueline crying, “Oh, no, no. . . . Oh, my God, they have shot my husband,” and the horror, the vacancy.

11. THE DRUMS OF WASHINGTON

On Friday morning I had flown to New York with Katharine Graham, whose husband Philip had died three months before, for a luncheon with the editors of her magazine Newsweek. Kenneth Galbraith had come down from Cambridge for the occasion. We were still sipping drinks before luncheon in an amiable mood of Friday-before-the-Harvard-Yale game relaxation when a young man in shirtsleeves entered the room and said, a little tentatively, “I am sorry to break in, but I think you should know that the President has been shot in the head in Texas.” For a flash one thought this was some sort of ghastly office joke. Then we knew it could not be and huddled desperately around the nearest television. Everything was confused and appalling. The minutes dragged along. Incomprehensible bulletins came from the hospital. Suddenly an insane surge of conviction flowed through me: I felt that the man who had survived the Solomon Islands and so much illness and agony, who so loved life, embodied it, enhanced it, could not possibly die now. He would escape the shadow as he had before. Almost immediately we received the irrevocable word.

In a few moments Galbraith and I were on Katharine Graham’s plane bound for Washington. It was the saddest journey of one’s life. Bitterness, shame, anguish, disbelief, emptiness mingled inextricably in one’s mind. When I stumbled, almost blindly, into the East Wing, the first person I encountered was Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. In a short time I went with my White House colleagues to Andrews Field to await the return of Air Force One from Texas. A small crowd was waiting in the dusk, McNamara, stunned and silent, Harriman, haggard and suddenly looking very old, desolation everywhere. We watched incredulously as the casket was carefully lifted out of the plane and taken to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda. Later I went to my house in Georgetown. My weeping daughter Christina said, “Daddy, what has happened to our country? If this is the kind of country we have, I don’t want to live here any more.” The older children were already on their way back from college to Washington.

Still later I went back to the White House to await the last return. Around four in the morning the casket, wrapped in a flag, was brought from the Naval Hospital and placed on a stand in the East Room. Tapers were lit around the bier, and a priest said a few words. Then Jacqueline approached the bier, knelt for a moment and buried her head in the flag. Soon she walked away. The rest of us waited for a little while in the great hall. We were beyond consolation, but we clung to the comradeship he had given us. Finally, just before daybreak, we bleakly dispersed into the mild night.

We did not grieve alone. Though in Dallas school children applauded the news^* and in Peking the Daily Worker ran a savage cartoon entitled “Kennedy Biting the Dust” showing the dead President lying in a pool of blood, his necktie marked with dollar signs, sorrow engulfed America and the world. At Harvard Yard the bells tolled in Memorial Church, a girl wept hysterically in Widener Library, a student slammed a tree, again and again, with his fist. Negroes mourned, and A. Philip Randolph said that his “place in history will be next to Abraham Lincoln.” Pablo Casals mused that he had seen many great and terrible events in his lifetime—the Dreyfus case, the assassination of Gandhi—“but in recent history—and I am thinking of my own lifetime—there has never been a tragedy that has brought so much sadness and grief to as many people as this.” “For a time we felt the country was ours,” said Norman Mailer. “Now it’s theirs again.” Many were surprised by the intensity of the loss. Alistair Cooke spoke of “this sudden discovery that he was more familiar than we knew.” “Is there some principle of nature,” asked Richard Hofstadter, “which requires that we never know the quality of what we have had until it is gone?” Around the land people sat desperately in front of television sets watching the bitter drama of the next four days. In Washington Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, said, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time. . . . Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens, Mary. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’”

In Ireland, “Ah, they cried the rain down that night,” said a Fitzgerald of Limerick; he would not come back in the springtime. David Bruce reported from London, “Great Britain has never before mourned a foreigner as it has President Kennedy.” As the news spread around London, over a thousand people assembled before the embassy in Grosvenor Square; they came in endless thousands in the next days to sign the condolence book. That Was The Week That Was on television, unwontedly serious: “the first western politician to make politics a respectable profession for thirty years—to make it once again the highest of the professions, and not just a fabric of fraud and sham. . . . We took him completely for granted.” “Why was this feeling—this sorrow—at once so universal and so individual?” Harold Macmillan later asked. “Was it not because he seemed, in his own person, to embody all the hopes and aspirations of this new world that is struggling to emerge—to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old?” In West Berlin people lighted candles in darkened windows. In Poland there was a spontaneous mass mourning by university students; church bells tolled for fifteen minutes on the night of the funeral. In Yugoslavia Tito, so overcome that he could hardly speak, phoned the American chief of mission; later he read a statement over the state radio and went in person to the embassy to sign the book. The national flag was flown at half-mast, and schools were instructed to devote one full hour to a discussion of the President’s policies and significance. In Moscow Khrushchev was the first to sign the book, and the Soviet television carried the funeral, including the service in the church.

Latin America was devastated. Streets, schools, housing projects were named after him, shrines set up in his memory; his picture, tom from the newspaper, hung on the walls of workers’ shacks and in the hovels of the campesinos. “For Latin America,” said Lleras Camargo, “Kennedy’s passing is a blackening, a tunnel, a gust of cloud and smoke.” Castro was with Jean Daniel when the report came; he said, “Es una mala noticia” (“This is bad news”). In a few moments, with the final word, he stood and said, “Everything is changed. . . . I’ll tell you one thing: at least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed.” In Cambodia Prince Sihanouk ordered court mourning; “a light was put out,” he later said, “which may not be re-lit for many years to come.” In Indonesia flags flew at half-mast. In New Delhi people cried in the streets. In Algiers Ben Bella phoned Ambassador Porter in tears and said, “I can’t believe it. Believe me, I’d rather it happen to me than to him.” In Guinea Sékou Touré said, “I have lost my only true friend in the outside world.” The embassy reported, “People expressed their grief without restraint, and just about everybody in Guinea seemed to have fallen under the spell of the courageous young hero of far away, the slayer of the dragons of discrimination, poverty, ignorance and war.” In N’zérékoré in the back country, where one would hardly think they had heard of the United States let alone the American President, a group of natives presented a sum of money to their American pastor to buy, according to the custom of the Guerze people, a rush mat in which to bury President Kennedy. In Kampala Ugandans crowded the residence of the American Ambassador; others sat silently for hours on the lawns and hillsides waiting. In Mali, the most left-wing of African states, President Keita came to the embassy with an honor guard and delivered a eulogy. In the Sudan a grizzled old Bisharine tribesman told an American lawyer that it was terrible Kennedy’s son was so young; “it will be a long time before he can be the true leader.” Transition, the magazine of African intellectuals, said, “In this way was murdered the first real chance in this century for an intelligent and new leadership to the world. . . . More than any other person, he achieved the intellectual’s ideal of a man in action. His death leaves us unprepared and in darkness.”

In Washington grief was an agony. Somehow the long hours passed, as the new President took over with firmness and strength, but the roll of the drums, when we walked to St. Matthew’s Cathedral on the frosty Monday, will sound forever in my ears, and the wildly twittering birds during the interment at Arlington while the statesmen of the world looked on. It was all so grotesque and so incredible. One remembered Stephen Spender’s poem:

 

I think continually of those who were truly great. . . .
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

 

It was all gone now—the life-affirming, life-enhancing zest, the brilliance, the wit, the cool commitment, the steady purpose. Richard Neustadt has suggested that two years are the period of presidential initiation. He had had so little time: it was as if Jackson had died before the nullification controversy and the Bank War, as if Lincoln had been killed six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Roosevelt at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Marshall Plan.^*

Yet he had accomplished so much: the new hope for peace on earth, the elimination of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and the abolition of nuclear diplomacy, the new policies toward Latin America and the third world, the reordering of American defense, the emancipation of the American Negro, the revolution in national economic policy, the concern for poverty, the stimulus to the arts, the fight for reason against extremism and mythology. Lifting us beyond our capacities, he gave his country back to its best self, wiping away the world’s impression of an old nation of old men, weary, played out, fearful of ideas, change and the future; he taught mankind that the process of rediscovering America was not over. He re-established the republic as the first generation of our leaders saw it—young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing, exultant in the excitement and potentiality of history. He transformed the American spirit—and the response of his people to his murder, the absence of intolerance and hatred, was a monument to his memory. The energies he released, the standards he set, the purposes he inspired, the goals he established would guide the land he loved for years to come. Above all he gave the world for an imperishable moment the vision of a leader who greatly understood the terror and the hope, the diversity and the possibility, of life on this planet and who made people look beyond nation and race to the future of humanity. So the people of the world grieved as if they had terribly lost their own leader, friend, brother.

On December 22, a month after his death, fire from the flame burning at his grave in Arlington was carried at dusk to the Lincoln Memorial. It was fiercely cold. Thousands stood, candles in their hands; then, as the flame spread among us, one candle lighting the next, the crowd gently moved away, the torches flaring and flickering, into the darkness. The next day it snowed—almost as deep a snow as the inaugural blizzard. I went to the White House. It was lovely, ghostly and strange.

It all ended, as it began, in the cold.