SHARPEVILLE: APARTHEID IS A WAY OF DEATH
Sharpeville was a model South African township, a place often presented as an example of the efficiency and humanity of the apartheid regime. Strategically situated to serve the large industrial cities of Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging in southern Gauteng Province, it was established in 1942 when around 5,500 little houses were built for black workers. Eighteen years later, Sharpeville showed the world the horrors of apartheid.
Townships had been built to provide housing for blacks whose labor was welcome, but whose presence was not. They were the outward and visible manifestations of apartheid, providing a convenient (if grossly unjust) way of separating blacks from whites, while maintaining the essential network of dependencies which existed between the two. They were, in effect, colonies within the mother country.
In contrast to American-style segregation, apartheid was planned, systematic, and universally applied. Central to the system were the pass laws requiring blacks to carry pass books, or dompas, which allowed them to live in a particular township and to work in the city it serviced. “Of all the apartheid laws none is so pervasive, and few are as perverted,” wrote the anti-apartheid activist David Sibeko. “The indignities are legion.” No respect was shown for the sanctity of the family—spouses were separated if one of them failed to obtain the dompa for a particular area, and children over sixteen needed a permit to live with their parents. Dompas also depressed the labor market by preventing workers from migrating in search of better jobs. 1
The ever-tightening apartheid regime, and the worldwide condemnation of it, placed Britain in a difficult position, since South Africa was a member of the Commonwealth. Britain was South Africa’s best and, eventually, only friend. This friendship was partly sentimental but mainly pragmatic: nearly two-thirds of overseas investment in South Africa was British. No wonder, then, that Britain steadfastly resisted calls for economic sanctions. Nevertheless, over time, the British position grew increasingly uncomfortable, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan signaled when he warned the South African parliament on February 3, 1960, that a “wind of change is blowing through this continent.” While the speech was mainly intended to signal that Britain would not resist decolonization, its implications for South Africa were difficult to ignore. Politicians in Cape Town had, however, become quite expert at flouting world opinion.2
Within South Africa, opposition to apartheid was organized by the African National Congress (ANC), a group committed to a multiracial nation. The ANC sought to work within the system to abolish discrimination. Agitation through the political and legal systems was combined with peaceful protests. This strategy was, however, rendered ineffective by a steady stream of laws buttressing apartheid. As a result, some activists grew disillusioned with the ANC. They dubbed their philosophy “Africanism”—a direct rejoinder to multiracialism. Their policy of “Africa for the Africans” was not simply an assertion of sovereignty, but also an affirmation of racial pride. Africanists believed that only by encouraging black nationalism could the masses be mobilized. Eventually, they split from the ANC and formed the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in April 1959, with Robesrt Mangaliso Sobukwe as president. “The issues are clear-cut,” Sobukwe proclaimed. “In the arena of South African politics, there are today only two adversaries: the oppressor and the oppressed, the master and the slave.” He believed that the PAC’s militancy would “awaken . . . the imagination of the youth of our land, while giving hope to the aged who for years have lived in the trough of despair.”3
Extensions to the pass laws served as a catalyst for both the ANC and the PAC. The former was first to announce its plans, outlining a series of protests to begin on March 31, 1960. This alarmed the nascent PAC, still struggling to establish its militant credentials. The PAC decided to steal the ANC’s thunder by launching its own demonstration in the Vanderbijlpark/Vereeniging area on March 21. At a press conference on the 18th, Sobukwe affirmed his intention “to make sure that this campaign is conducted in a spirit of absolute nonviolence . . . . If the other side so desires, we will provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how brutal they can be.” Like civil rights campaigners in the United States, the PAC aimed to goad the police into acting violendy.4
Intent upon a massive demonstration, the PAC left nothing to chance. Activists cut phone lines into Sharpeville, thus restricting residents’ exposure to less militant influences. Bus drivers were forcibly detained on the morning of the action, to prevent residents from leaving the township for their jobs in the city. According to Reverend Ambrose Reeves, when residents found that the buses were not running, “many of them set out on bicycles or on foot to their places of work, but some were met by Pan-Africanists who threatened to burn their passes or ‘lay hands on them’ if they did not turn back.” The post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found “a degree of coercion of nonpoliticised Sharpeville residents who were pressurised into participating in the anti-pass protest.”5
“The step we are taking is historic, pregnant with untold possibilities,” Sobukwe told his followers on the eve of the demonstration. “We must, therefore, . . . appreciate our responsibility. The African people have entrusted their whole future to us. And we have sworn that we are leading them, not to death, but to life abundant. My instructions, therefore, are that our people must be taught NOW and CONTINUOUSLY THAT IN THIS CAMPAIGN we are going to observe ABSOLUTE NONVIOLENCE.” In Sharpeville, around 5,000 protesters assembled. Crowds equally large gathered in the townships of Bophelong and Boipatong, while 20,000 assembled at Evaton. According to the plan, demonstrators were to march to the local police station without their pass books and offer themselves for arrest. The mass arrest would, Sobukwe thought, cause jails to overflow and the local economy to grind to a halt. “Industry will come to a standstill and the Government will be forced to accept our terms. And once we score that victory, there will be nothing else we will not be able to tackle.”6
At first, everything went according to plan. The turnout was impressive and protesters remained entirely peaceful, thanks partly to the presence of large numbers of women and children. Humphrey Tyler, a white journalist, later recalled: “Many people shouted the Pan-Africanist slogan ‘Izwe Lethu!’ which means ‘Our Land!’ or gave the thumbs-up ‘freedom’ salute and shouted ‘Afrika!’ They were grinning, cheerful, and nobody seemed to be afraid . . . . The crowd seemed perfectly amiable. It certainly never crossed our minds that they would attack us or anybody.” When the Sharpeville protesters reached the station, police refused to arrest them. Meanwhile, those at the back continued to advance. Fearing a crush, officers asked PAC officials to disperse the crowd. They complied and the crowd ceased pushing forward. The police, however, were not satisfied. At around 10:00 A.M., a squadron of low-flying jets buzzed the protesters, in an attempt to scare them away. This tactic had worked in Evaton, but the Sharpeville crowd remained steadfast.7
About 300 demonstrators remained in the police compound. “While the crowd was noisy and excitable, singing and occasionally shouting slogans, it was not a hostile crowd,” Reeves insisted. “Their purpose was not to fight the police but to show by their presence their hostility to the pass system . . . . All through the morning no attack on the police was attempted. Even as late as 1:00 P.M. the Superintendent in charge of the township was able to walk through the crowd, being greeted by them in a friendly manner and chatting with some of them.” Perhaps 300 police were present, the vast majority drafted in from outside. They had access to five Saracen armored cars, which were used as platforms from which to observe the crowd. All were armed.8
No one quite knows what caused the police to open fire. Some witnesses heard an order, others a single shot, others still the door of a Saracen slamming shut. At any rate, virtually in unison, at precisely 1:15 P.M., between fifty and seventy-five officers started firing. “I heard no warning to the crowd to disperse,” Tyler insisted. “There was no warning volley.” The police seemed to him intent on mowing down everyone in the compound.
We heard the chatter of a machine gun, then another, then another. There were hundreds of women, some of them laughing. They must have thought the police were firing blanks. One woman was hit about ten yards from our car. Her companion, a young man, went back when she fell. He thought she had stumbled. Then he turned her over and saw that her chest had been shot away. He looked at the blood on his hand and said: “My God, she’s gone!” . . . One little boy had on an old blanket coat, which he held up behind his head, thinking, perhaps, that it might save him from the bullets. Some of the children, hardly as tall as the grass, were leaping like rabbits. Some were shot, too . . . . One of the policemen was standing on top of a Saracen, and it looked as though he was firing his gun into the crowd. He was swinging it around in a wide arc from his hip as though he were panning a movie camera.
In the chilly seconds of uncertainty, the crowd stood still. Once they realized that the police were firing live ammunition, they began to stampede. Officers continued to shoot at their backs. In just forty seconds, 705 rounds were fired. When the shooting stopped, sixty-nine people lay dead, including ten children. At least 180 were injured, of which nineteen were children. Around 150 of the injured were shot in the back.9
Neither police nor government showed remorse. The official line held that the station had come under attack and, fearing for their lives, officers had defended themselves. Blacks were accused of throwing stones and carrying an array of weapons, though no proof ever surfaced. Justification rested on the premise that the sheer number of protesters by definition represented a threat. “The Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration,” claimed Lieutenant Colonel D. H. Pienaar, who emerged as spokesman. “For them to gather means violence.” He insisted that the police response was not excessive. “If they do these things, they must learn their lessons the hard way.” When asked at a Court of Enquiry whether he had learned any useful lessons from Sharpeville, Pienaar remarked “Well, we may get better equipment.”10
Many years later, the TRC found no evidence of panic among the officers, but rather a “degree of deliberation in the decision to open fire.” This indicated “that the shooting was more than the result of inexperienced and frightened police officers losing their nerve.” The TRC concluded that
the police deliberately opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered peacefully . . . . The Commission finds further that the SAP (South African Police) failed to give the crowd an order to disperse before they began firing and that they continued to fire upon the fleeing crowd, resulting in hundreds of people being shot in the back . . . . The Commission finds . . . that many of the people fired upon and injured in the march were not politicised members of any political party, but merely persons opposed to carrying a pass.
The Sharpeville action had precisely the effect the PAC intended. The brutality of the South African government had been clearly exposed, and the anger of the black population overflowed. During the following week, demonstrations, marches, riots, and strikes occurred in every corner of the country, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency. More than 18,000 people were detained.11
The reaction abroad was equally dramatic. Most countries simply lost all patience with South Africa, henceforth treating it as a pariah state. On April 1, the UN Security Council condemned the “colonial oppression of the African people.” This time, Britain was forced to join the chorus of disapproval, with the result that the UN resolution was virtually unanimous (only South Africa voted against). Ironically, however, in the period after the massacre South African exports to Europe, the United States, and Asia steadily increased—by 300 percent in the case of Asia. This suggests that the Northern Hemisphere’s fondness for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and cheap wine outweighed its sense of justice.12
Since South Africa’s economy continued to boom, the government felt no need to respond to moral outrage. Rather than relaxing apartheid restrictions, it tightened them. Under the Unlawful Organisations Act, passed on April 8, both the ANC and the PAC were formally banned. After a referendum resulted in a majority in favor of republicanism, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in March 1961 and officially became a republic the following May. This policy had the overwhelming support of the white minority population, particularly those of Afrikaans descent.
“Sharpeville was a tragedy showing most plainly that the ideology of apartheid is a way of death and not of life,” wrote Ambrose Reeves. The white regime had demonstrated how far it would go to protect its power. It had also graphically revealed its contempt for world opinion. In this context, nonviolent protest was unlikely to succeed. Both the PAC and the ANC reacted to their banning by forming military wings, the latter with Nelson Mandela as chief of staff. Both groups began a campaign of armed resistance.13
During the course of the 1960s, protest groups everywhere turned to violence to further their aims, but none with as much justification as the blacks of South Africa. As Mandela pronounced after his capture in 1962: “We have warned repeatedly that the Government, by resorting continually to violence, will breed in this country counter-violence among the people till ultimately, if there is no dawning of sanity on the part of the Government, the dispute . . . will finish up by being settled in violence and by force.” Having sown the wind, white South Africans would reap the whirlwind.14
BAY OF PIGS: IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA
The Bay of Pigs is situated on a desolate stretch of the Cuban coast, far from centers of population. Mosquito-infested swamps border a small beach. The coastal area then turns hilly, making passage into the interior difficult. In other words, it’s a terrible place to stage an invasion.
On New Year’s Day 1959, rebel forces under Fidel Castro completed the overthrow of the widely reviled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. For those sympathetic to Castro and his sidekick Ernesto Che Guevara, it seemed the perfect example of a peasant-based revolution. Chronicles of the campaign would eventually become required reading for left-wing students around the world. For the American government, however, Castro spelled disaster.
Castro did not at first trumpet his allegiance to Communism, since he still hoped for peaceful coexistence with the United States. He understood precisely how dependent his country was upon America—for aid, investment, and trade. But, like Lumumba, he insisted that the relationship should not compromise the revolution. Before long, the Eisenhower administration decided that Castro’s terms were incompatible with the maintenance of American business interests on the island. As the relationship grew frosty, Castro turned toward the Soviets, who were only too happy to gain a foothold in a country just ninety miles from Key West. Meanwhile, wealthy Cubans were leaving in droves, taking their money with them. Facing total economic collapse, Castro began an ambitious program of nationalization, directly threatening American companies. Keen to protect US interests, Eisenhower began plotting.
The task of toppling Castro fell to the CIA. The agency assumed that the raw material for a coup could easily be found, given the number of wealthy Cuban exiles in America who wanted to reclaim their country. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower approved a CIA memo entitled “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime.” The objective, clearly stated, was to “bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US, in such a manner as to avoid the appearance of US intervention.”15
For the CIA, Cuba became a sacred vocation; agents displayed the zeal of missionaries. Convinced that Castro was deeply unpopular, they decided that toppling him would be easy. Confidence was buttressed by the successful overthrow of the left-wing government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and his replacement by Carlos Castillo Armas, a man amenable to American interests. The CIA confidently assumed that it could make Cuba a carbon copy of Guatemala.
Preparations gathered pace while Nixon and Kennedy were battling for the presidency. As vice president, Nixon had been one of the main sponsors of the CIA plan. The idea was likewise in harmony with Kennedy’s distinctive foreign policy. Kennedy disagreed with Eisenhower’s reliance upon nuclear deterrence, preferring instead a strategy of “flexible response” in which military and political options would be carefully tailored to each foreign challenge. That strategy implied cloaks and daggers.
Plans were essentially set in stone by the time of Kennedy’s inauguration. The CIA had pulled together a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala. In Cuba, spies and saboteurs were already preparing the ground. Exile pilots had been taught to fly B-26B light bombers, which would take out Castro’s small air force. When CIA agents presented the plan to Kennedy, they brought maps with big, thick arrows extending directly from the Bay of Pigs to Havana. They spoke loudly, puffing out their chests like prize cockerels. Secretary of state Dean Rusk found their confidence infectious. “The CIA told us . . . that elements of the Cuban armed forces would defect and join the brigade, that there would be popular uprisings throughout Cuba when the brigade hit the beach, and that if the exile force got into trouble, its members would simply melt into the countryside.” Some officials felt deep misgivings, but could not withstand the tidal wave of confidence. “[I] did not serve President Kennedy very well,” Rusk later admitted. “I should have made my opposition clear . . . because he was under pressure from those who wanted to proceed.”16
The strategists fully accepted that a force of 1,400 soldiers could not defeat Castro’s army on its own. But the imbalance in forces did not matter, since the invasion was sure to spark a general uprising. General David Shoup, the Marine commandant, recalled: “The intelligence indicated that there were quite a number of people . . . ready to join in the fight against Castro . . . . My understanding was that the . . . people were just waiting for these arms and equipment.” Rusk later admitted that “the uprising was utterly essential to success.”17
Confidence was not unanimous. The maverick agent E. Howard Hunt had played a prominent part in the Guatemalan operation. A visit to Cuba convinced him that this was an entirely different affair. “All I could find was a lot of enthusiasm for Fidel Castro,” he recalled.
This was . . . a much larger body of land, an entrenched, well-trained, devoted communist group of followers of Castro—and the kind of psychological warfare we were able to run against Castro was insignificant . . . . Castro was secure, and he was beloved by millions in Cuba . . . . So, instead of our having a problem such as we had in Guatemala, of using less than 200 locals to overthrow a government, we were faced with a Cuban army, a Cuban militia, a loyal population—loyal to Castro, that is.
Hunt insisted upon a number of contingencies prior to invasion, one of which was that “Castro would have to be neutralized.” Over subsequent months, he was shocked to find that nothing was done to satisfy that requirement. “Is anybody going after Castro?” he kept asking. “‘It’s in good hands,’ was the answer I got, which was a great bureaucratic answer.”18
Hunt’s caution contrasted sharply with the optimism of pre-invasion intelligence reports. “The Castro regime is steadily losing popularity,” agents maintained. “Disenchantment of the masses has spread through all the provinces.” Resistance was likely to be low: “It is generally believed that the Cuban Army has been successfully penetrated by opposition groups and that it will not fight in the event of a showdown.” The agency was confident that “the great mass of Cuban people believe that the hour of decision is at hand and that the survival of the CASTRO regime is in balance.”19
Meanwhile, the Castro government remained quietly confident. On April 14, Che told the Soviet ambassador to Cuba that “given the presence of large contingents of well-armed people’s militia and the revolutionary army, an operation of deploying paratroopers, even numbering several thousand troops, would be doomed to failure. Therefore . . . it is unlikely that the forces of external counterrevolution would undertake such a risk now, knowing that it would be senseless to count on any kind of extensive internal uprisings in Cuba.” Che was right about the strength of his forces and the support of his people. He was, however, completely wrong in his assessment of the good sense of the Kennedy administration. Like a teenager buying his first car, Kennedy had bought himself a war without looking under the hood. Yet he was determined to maintain the pretense of detachment. Shortly before the invasion, he openly boasted: “We can be proud that the United States is not using its muscle against a small country.” Everyone understood which small country he meant.20
On the morning of April 15, B-26B bombers flown by exile pilots from a Nicaraguan airfield and painted with the colors of the Fuerza Aerea Revolucionaria (FAR, the Cuban Air Force) attacked three airbases in Cuba. The planes scored some hits but did not come close to destroying Castro’s air power, since he had moved his planes to safety in anticipation of attack. The CIA wanted the world to believe that FAR dissidents had carried out the attacks. The ruse fooled Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the United Nations, but almost no one else.
On April 17 the invasion went forward. The CIA had originally wanted an airborne landing, but, according to Hunt, this was vetoed by Rusk, who feared it would be “too obviously American.” Planners therefore settled on a seaborne landing at the Bay of Pigs. The surrounding high ground offered Castro’s forces plenty of places from which to pour murderous fire onto the tiny beachhead. To make matters worse, Kennedy decided against air strikes on the day of the invasion. That decision might have been motivated by the desire for plausible deniability, even though American involvement was obvious to virtually everyone by this stage. On the other hand, the White House might simply have realized that the plan was doomed and was already cutting its losses.21
The lack of air cover made no difference. A small force of 1,400 men landing on a beachhead with light equipment was doomed to fail against 30,000 Cuban soldiers, reinforced by Russian tanks and heavy artillery. Within minutes of landing, the exile force was cut to pieces. Out in the bay, a supply ship was destroyed by air attack, prompting the others to retreat. “We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach,” a brigade commander radioed. “Please send help.” A short time later came an even more desperate message: “In water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in next hour.” The exiles had been led to believe that US Marines would reinforce them, but that was another of the CIA’s little fibs. By the time the battlefield went quiet, on the 21st of April, 114 exiles were dead and 1,189 captured. A few dozen managed to escape back to the ships.22
“This was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator,” Kennedy insisted on April 20. “While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way.” Rusk called it a minor operation by “a group of courageous men who returned to Cuba determined to do what they could to assist the people in establishing freedom.” Hypocritical platitudes, however, provided no shield against justifiable recrimination. Among the immediate casualties were CIA director Allen Dulles and deputy director Charles Cabell. An internal inquiry was commissioned to determine how the agency could have been so hopelessly misguided. Its conclusions were so damning that the report was embargoed and all but one copy destroyed. Efforts to release it were vigorously opposed until 1998.23
The report was a catalogue of CIA mistakes, misassumptions, artifice, and incompetence. Few of the agents spoke Spanish, which left them vulnerable to highly biased reports from interpreters. The budget, which started out at $4.4 million, rocketed to $46 million within a year. Agency officials treated exiles “like dirt,” leaving the latter “wondering what kind of Cuban future they were fighting for.” Members of the Revolutionary Council, a CIA-inspired alternative to the Castro government, were treated like “puppets” by the agency, and given no say in planning the invasion.
“This operation took on a life of its own,” the report argued. “The agency was going forward without knowing precisely what it was doing.” On the matter of a general uprising, the report revealed that there was “no intelligence evidence that Cubans in significant numbers could or would join the invaders or that there was any kind of an effective and cohesive resistance movement.” Finally, “plausible denial was a pathetic illusion.” The commission concluded that the invasion “carried death and misery to hundreds, destroyed millions of dollars worth of US property, and seriously damaged US prestige.” Analysts could not hide their incredulity over the way the agency had been so hopelessly wrong.24
Undaunted, officials immediately began looking for other ways to topple Castro. On 16 March 1962, the counterinsurgency specialist Edward Lansdale advised the administration on possibilities. The mood was upbeat. “I remarked that the thesis of creating a revolution inside Cuba looked just as valid as ever,” Lansdale recorded. “CIA professionals were now agreeing more and more that . . . the possibility of fracturing the regime pointed to some real opportunities.” General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed that the military “had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force, with the pretexts either attacks on US aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.” One idea involved a rerun of the sinking of the Maine: “We could blow up a US warship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” Another possibility was to “develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington . . . . The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.” Someone suggested “sink[ing] a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida.” Another cunning plan, dubbed “Operation Dirty Trick,” involved blaming the Cubans if the flight of astronaut John Glenn ended in disaster.25
A simultaneous study, called “Operation Mongoose,” was overseen by attorney general Robert Kennedy. Imagination ran wild. “Operation Good Times” involved faking a picture of a half-naked, obese Castro surrounded by two voluptuous beauties “and a table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food.” The photo would carry the caption, “My ration is different.” Covert-action specialists suggested, among other things, giving a poisoned scuba suit to Castro, sneaking him a poisoned pen, placing exploding sea shells on the beach where he swam, and providing him with exploding cigars. One of the best ideas was to doctor his shampoo so that his hair and beard would fall out. “This was a bright idea,” one CIA agent recalled. “The Cuban people would fall all over laughing at him and he would be ridiculed.” According to a Joint Chiefs memo of March 13, 1962, some of these ideas were endorsed as “suitable for planning purposes.”26
Just three months after Kennedy’s rousing inaugural address, the implications of his swashbuckling style had been painfully revealed. Over the years, attempts have been made to deflect blame from Kennedy by arguing that the idiotic Bay of Pigs plan was a legacy from Eisenhower. But Kennedy could have canceled the operation at any time up to April 15, with the stroke of a pen. He did not do so, because it harmonized so well with his determination to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” in the fight against Communism. In going ahead, he got the worst of all possible worlds. He had demonstrated that the United States was prepared to scheme in order to remove a leader it did not like, no matter how popular that leader might have been among his people. More important, he had also demonstrated that there were limits to American commitment—in other words, that the United States would not pay any price. Kennedy had managed the double feat of alienating his friends and angering his enemies.
America’s enemies had long criticized its “imperialist” habits. Until the Bay of Pigs, that criticism was based on debatable evidence. The United States had, after all, championed colonial self-determination at a time when European powers stubbornly clung to colonies. That anti-imperialist reputation was, however, seriously damaged at the Bay of Pigs. America seemed to be embarking on a new wave of colonial adventure under the guise of anti-Communism. For all that Kennedy might have argued that he was only trying to help the poor people “enslaved” by Communism, he could not hide the fact that American tobacco and sugar barons would benefit immensely from his action.
One other result of the fiasco is seldom appreciated. Kennedy gave the emerging student movement a cause and a hero. Throughout the 1960s, students around the world accused the United States of pursuing a cynically imperialist foreign policy. As evidence, they repeatedly cited Cuba, the perfect romantic cause. Thanks to Kennedy, Cuba became defiant David bravely confronting the American Goliath.
Khrushchev called Berlin the testicles of the West. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”27
In truth, Berlin’s pain was felt at least as sharply in Moscow as in Washington. For Khrushchev, that pain was caused by rejection. From 1945 to 1950, approximately 1.6 million people left East Germany, turning their backs on Communism. During the subsequent decade, between 100,000 and 200,000 escaped each year, most using West Berlin as a bolt-hole. To make matters worse, a good number were young, highly trained professionals who were desperately needed for the economic development of East Germany.
In November 1958, Khrushchev took action. He felt he could do so because, for the first time since 1945, the United States was genuinely frightened of Soviet military power. Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, seemed proof of Soviet missile prowess. Feeling confident, Khrushchev gave the Western powers six months to quit Berlin, whereupon it would be declared a free city. As fears grew that the border would be sealed, the exodus quickened.
Soviet and American ambitions were remarkably similar: both sought stability in Central Europe, and both saw Berlin as crucial to this need. American ambassador Llewellyn Thompson advised Eisenhower that the Soviets hoped to use Berlin to force “our recognition in some form of the East German regime.” Khrushchev desperately wanted the West to acknowledge the validity of East Germany, because stability in Eastern Europe would make the Soviet Union feel safer. Stability was, however, threatened by the fact that West Berlin existed as an easy escape route for East German dissidents.28
Khrushchev’s fears increased as a result of West Germany’s rearmament and its role in NATO plans. In 1955, Eisenhower announced his desire for Western Europe to be a “third great power bloc,” to be achieved by helping European powers build their own nuclear arsenals. Bonn’s decision in March 1958 to enter into nuclear sharing agreements with the United States understandably worried Khrushchev. He thought rearmament might give West Germany the confidence to undermine East Germany’s stability. More fundamentally, given memories of 20 million dead in the last war, the prospect of a revitalized Germany—armed with nuclear weapons—frightened him.29
American recognition of East Germany would have eased Soviet fears, but that option was adamandy opposed by West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, on the grounds that it contradicted the official goal of reunification. The German tail wagged the American dog. Since the Americans could not afford to alienate Adenauer, they had to take a tough line on the question of Berlin and East Germany. Adenauer maintained that any concession would open the door to eventual recognition. The Americans therefore had no option but to reject any change in the status of Berlin and to call Khrushchev’s bluff. Secretary of state John Foster Dulles confidently argued that “there is not one chance in a thousand the Soviets will push it to the point of war.”30
Eisenhower therefore answered Khrushchev’s ultimatum with the cold threat of nuclear annihilation. He was optimistic that, if the Soviets were made fully aware of the consequences of aggression, they would be deterred from acting aggressively. His patient determination eventually forced Khrushchev to back down. Instead of enforcing the deadline, Khrushchev agreed to talks. At Camp David, in September 1959, the two leaders agreed that the Berlin problem should be settled by negotiation, not force. There progress halted. Eisenhower seriously considered making Berlin a free city, guaranteed by the United Nations, but Adenauer vetoed the idea. The era of good feelings came to an abrupt end with the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960. In the aftermath of that incident, Khrushchev announced that he wanted to wait at least six to eight months before resuming talks, meaning that he would start again with a new president.
According to Fyodor Burlatsky, a close aide of Khrushchev’s, Berlin offered a genuine opportunity for better US-Soviet relations. “Diplomatic recognition of the GDR [East Germany] could have made a compromise possible and opened up the way for detente,” he feels. Interviewed in September 1988, he could not understand why Kennedy had failed to exploit this opportunity. Carl Kaysen, a Kennedy aide, replied: “A one-word answer would be ‘Konrad Adenauer.’ Kennedy felt . . . responsibility as the leader of the NATO alliance. He felt strongly about the commitment made a long time ago that the Federal Republic [West Germany] was the legitimate government.” Kennedy feared that if Adenauer failed, West Germany might be taken over by “dangerous right-wing radicals” bent on aggressive nationalist resurgence.31
Khrushchev, Burlatsky argues, “had an inferiority complex and was trying to catch up with the United States . . . . I do not feel that John Kennedy understood this.” In fact, the Americans were fully appreciative of Khrushchev’s tender ego. “His convictions reflect . . . his nation’s persisting range of insecurity and inferiority,” a State Department document of May 1961 asserted. “As a result of this, he [is] extremely sensitive to slights real or imagined, direct or inferred, to himself, his political faith, or his nation.” Instead of pandering to Khrushchev’s insecurity, however, Kennedy tried to exploit it.32
Kennedy saw Berlin as more than just a Cold War pawn. As Kaysen argued at the time, American “commitment to the freedom of West Berlin . . . transcends its relation to our ties with Germany or its significance as a forward post in the Cold War. We have repeatedly pledged our word to the two million West Berliners that we would continue to defend their freedom.” In other words, beyond issues of Cold War posturing, Kennedy believed in “doing the right thing.” He was also convinced that he could achieve more in Berlin than Eisenhower had managed. Believing that his predecessor’s strategy of massive retaliation lacked subtlety, Kennedy persuaded himself that a strategy of “flexible response,” when combined with a willingness to increase military spending, would yield a better solution. That confidence applied not just to Berlin, but to every foreign-policy problem.33
In fact, thanks to Adenauer’s intransigence, Kennedy’s options were severely limited. Like Eisenhower, he was forced to fall back upon deterrence. He nevertheless insisted that his brand of deterrence was more credible, since it did not depend exclusively on nuclear weapons. He felt that Eisenhower’s refusal to consider conventional war had rendered Berlin vulnerable because the Soviets did not believe that the United States, in a crisis, would actually decide that the city was worth a nuclear confrontation. Kennedy therefore set out to persuade the Soviets that he could fight a conventional war. A face-off begun with conventional forces would, in his view, demonstrate American resolve and allow the Soviets time to reconsider their aggression. He and his strategists formulated a ladder of escalation in which the first few rungs did not involve nuclear weapons. The first nuclear rungs, for that matter, entailed purely “symbolic” strikes designed only to demonstrate resolve.
To understand this strategy, we must appreciate Kennedy’s credibility problem. Eisenhower, a victorious general, had no problems convincing the Soviets that he meant business. They could not afford to call his bluff, since doing so risked nuclear annihilation. Kennedy, in contrast, seemed weak and unproven—an intellectual, not a leader. The Bay of Pigs fiasco and an egregious settlement in Laos seemed to confirm his weakness. Therefore, unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy could not simply brandish nuclear weapons and expect the Soviets to take him seriously. He had first to prove himself by actually deploying ground troops and forcing a confrontation.
While the administration was reasonably confident that the strategy would work, those at its cutting edge were pessimistic. NATO supreme commander General Lauris Norstad felt that the idea of a non-nuclear battle for Berlin was risky. He questioned whether the Allies would be able to “enforce a . . . controlled development of the battle” and was not confident that they would be able to “dictate the Soviet response.” An even more worrying interjection came from Thompson on May 27, 1961:
[Khrushchev] has so deeply committed his personal prestige and that of Soviet Union to some action on Berlin and German problems that if we take completely negative stand . . . this would probably lead to developments in which chance of war or ignominious Western retreat are close to 50–50 . . . . Both sides consider other would not risk war over Berlin. Danger arises from fact that if [Khrushchev] carries out his declared intentions and we carry out ours, situation likely to get out of control and military as well as political prestige would become involved, making retreat for either side even more difficult.
Again, the issue of credibility proved paramount. A fearsome array of weapons was not by itself enough to demonstrate Kennedy’s resolve. Khrushchev had been doubtful of Eisenhower’s willingness to push the Berlin crisis to the point of thermonuclear war, but never sufficiently so to call the president’s bluff. For a variety of reasons, the Soviet premier was even more doubtful about Kennedy’s determination, and therefore much more likely to call his bluff.34
Despite all the attention paid to Berlin, the Kennedy administration was not adequately prepared for the possibility that the Soviets and East Germans might attempt to solve the refugee problem by building a wall. If the White House considered the possibility at all, it was to accept that little could be done about it, beyond a bit of saber rattling and some complaints to the United Nations. In private, the administration considered a wall a reasonable, if regrettable, solution, in the sense that it would remove the main source of Soviet dismay and perhaps stabilize the situation. That assessment did not, however, take into account the psychological effect upon West Germany.
Burlatsky contends that the decision to build the Wall was more that of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht than of Khrushchev. “You had Adenauer; we had Ulbricht,” he maintains. “At least two or three times each month he would . . . harass Khrushchev about his ability and willingness to support East Germany in its quest for . . . the construction of the Berlin Wall.” That said, Khrushchev appears to have become convinced of its necessity, after visiting West Berlin in disguise. The stark difference in the standard of living between the two halves of the city made him understand why so many people were leaving. “I spent a great deal of time trying to think of a way out,” he later recalled. Since no answers materialized, the simple solution was a wall.35
Construction began on August 13, 1961. Khrushchev saw the Wall not just as a barrier, but also as an instrument of foreign policy—a method of testing American resolve. He agreed to its construction on the condition that the first phase would consist only of barbed wire, so that he could see how NATO would react. He was not prepared to push the issue to the point of war, but if the Americans accepted some kind of barrier, it could then be strengthened.
Kennedy expressed anger, but took no serious steps to block construction. As for Adenauer, the Wall itself was less disturbing than the facile response of the Americans. Fearful that the situation would poison America’s relationship with West Germany, Kennedy reinforced the Berlin garrison by sending a US Army brigade from West Germany toward the city, with no clear instructions as to what it should do if Russian troops blocked its path. He also sent General Lucius Clay to the city as his personal representative, a man chosen precisely because he was known as a hardliner.
Clay soon had a replica section of the Wall built in a secluded park in West Berlin, for the purpose of practicing assaults and frightening the Russians. American troops also launched probes into East Germany in order to assert their right of passage. These, however, appear to have been misinterpreted by the Soviets, who took them as an intention to break through the Wall. Against everyone’s wishes, the situation rapidly escalated. As Norstad had warned, controlling the crisis was easy in theory but difficult in practice. When Clay deployed tanks to reinforce the probes at Checkpoint Charlie on October 27, the Soviets responded in kind. Suddenly, the world stood on the edge of war.
Around this time, Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary, questioned a senior NATO commander about the likely scenario. “He said the Soviets would probably do a and we b; they c and we d; they e and we f; and then they would be forced to g. And when I said, ‘What do we do then?’ he replied, ‘We should use nuclear weapons.’ When I asked how he expected the Soviets to respond, he said, ‘With nuclear weapons.’” In the end, the superpowers managed to find an escape from alphabetic logic. While Clay strutted aggressively, Kennedy and Khrushchev engaged in back-channel communications designed to defuse the situation. This exercise of good sense turned out to be much more important than what American and Soviet troops were doing on the ground.36
The peaceful resolution is all the more interesting in view of the Soviets’ nuclear capability. Kennedy had built his presidential campaign on the “missile gap” which supposedly endangered the United States. Yet surveillance subsequently revealed that the Soviets did not have 1,000 ICBMs, or even 500; they had just four. In a Department of Defense news release of October 21, Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, warned that the United States has a “nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction.” He wasn’t bluffing. In other words, the United States was perfectly capable of enforcing its will over the issue of Berlin.37
The question then arises: If the United States possessed such profound superiority, why didn’t it use that power? Surely if ever there was a time for the country to launch a devastating first strike, this was it. Kennedy, however, backed down, perhaps because a RAND study had predicted that an American first strike, no matter how successful, could not prevent some Soviet nuclear weapons from getting through, with the result that two million Americans might die. An even starker prediction came in early June 1961, when Kennedy inquired how many Americans might die in an all-out nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. The answer came back from the Pentagon: seventy million. Kennedy was visibly shaken. His fears increased when senior strategists admitted on September 20 that they did not know precisely where all the USSR’s nuclear weapons were located.38
Kennedy also discovered that nuclear weapons did not fit well into his strategy of flexible response. On September 6, General Lemnitzer revealed that the United States had only one Single Integrated Operating Plan (SIOP) for deploying nuclear weapons. The latest version included targets in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea, and China. Lemnitzer admitted that although the plan was woefully short on flexibility, “it is far better than anything previously in existence.” Kennedy was not prepared to destroy most of the world in order to achieve victory in Berlin, nor did he believe that his people would consider it worthwhile to sacrifice at least two million American lives in order to enforce a point in Germany. In other words, the United States simply had to learn to live with the Berlin Wall. As Kennedy candidly admitted, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”39
The United States hoped that the fait accompli of the Wall would persuade the West Germans to agree to a de facto recognition of East Germany. Adenauer, however, would not budge. As a result, though the scare of nuclear war rendered the Soviets and Americans more inclined to talk, it did not make it easier to find a solution, since any solution involving formal recognition of East Germany remained intolerable to Bonn. Both sides eventually discovered that the only workable system was the one they already had—namely, where the status of Berlin remained unclear and the West continued to pretend that East Germany did not exist. The United States would maintain a massive military presence in Germany in order to reassure the Federal Republic and the rest of Europe of its commitment. For nearly three decades, bitter antagonism would prove more stable than the unpredictability of negotiation.
And what of the Soviets? They apparently did not see Berlin as a crisis to the same extent that the Americans did. “There was no danger of atomic war in Moscow,” Burlatsky contends. “Maybe in the American point of view this was a frightening consideration, but for the Soviets there was not the danger.” He also argues that, despite all the saber-rattling, neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy managed to convince the Politburo that Berlin was actually a serious crisis. “About 98–99 percent of the Soviets believed Americans would not use nuclear weapons to protect Berlin.” Khrushchev, he elaborated, “never thought that the Berlin crisis was fraught with the danger of an armed conflict. He was convinced that the West would swallow the pill.” This belief gave Khrushchev the confidence to pursue concessions through the old-fashioned method of bullying and swagger. According to Burlatsky, he wasn’t playing a sophisticated game of chess appropriate to the complexities of the nuclear age, but rather a simple game of checkers. “Although he demanded very much, he was satisfied with what he received.” In his memoirs, Khrushchev remarked: “The West had tested our resolve by prodding us with the barrels of their cannons and found us ready to accept their challenge. They learned they couldn’t frighten us. I think it was a great victory for us, and it was won without firing a single shot.” Leaving aside the understandable gloss, this assessment seems rather sound.40
On his visit to Berlin in June 1963, Kennedy proclaimed: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. Therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” They were fine words, even if in this context “ein Berliner” is actually a doughnut. But they were just words. For all that Kennedy feigned contempt for the Wall, he welcomed its existence. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later confessed that “privately, the Kennedy White House breathed a sigh of relief over each brick Khrushchev put into the wall.” On August 15, 1961, the East German paper Neues Deutschland carried an editorial with the headline “Fantastic, How Everything Worked Out.” That sentiment, it seems, was shared by both sides.41
AP BAC: BAD NEWS FROM A PLACE CALLED VIETNAM
Ap Bac was a village of no consequence. Hundreds of hamlets like it existed in South Vietnam—primitive huts clustered around a rice paddy where peasants lived and worked as their ancestors had for centuries. Then, in 1963, Ap Bac suddenly became important because someone decided to hold a battle there. It was chosen at random in this war where place was nothing and killing everything.
In 1961 few Americans could have located Vietnam on a map. Their new president, however, knew the country’s precise location and why that location was important. Vietnam, Kennedy had argued in 1956, was “a proving ground for democracy . . . a test of American responsibility and determination.” At the time he uttered those words, French imperialists were taking a terrible beating from Viet Minh nationalists at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam, Kennedy insisted, was “the cornerstone of the Free World in southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.”42
The defeat of the French in 1956 led to the division of the country between the Communist North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) and non-Communist South (the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN). This was less than the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh expected, but he was a patient man. Standing in the way of complete unification were the South Vietnamese. Like Ho, they were devout nationalists, but unlike him they were rather fond of commerce. Fearful of Ho’s intentions, they looked to the United States for protection, though it galled them to do so. To the United States, the complexities of internal politics were unimportant—Vietnam was crucial because it was a domino that must not fall. In the struggle against Communism, the United States made friends with crooks and tyrants, calling them all patriots. Thus, Kennedy made RVN president Ngo Dinh Diem, a man of dubious virtue, into “one of the true statesmen of the new Asia.”43
As a Democrat and (supposedly) a liberal, Kennedy was deeply distrusted by the anti-Communist lobby. He had therefore to bark louder than Eisenhower in order to command the same level of respect. To complicate matters further, setbacks in Germany, Cuba, and Laos in the first few months of his administration made decisive action in Vietnam imperative. His strategy of “flexible response” put enormous pressure on the military, which had to prepare for a massive war on the plains of Eastern Europe and small guerrilla contests in the jungles of Latin America and Asia. Kennedy also insisted that fighting Communism was not just about winning battles. “Too long,” he argued, “we have fixed our eyes on traditional military needs, on armies prepared to cross borders, on missiles posed for flight. Now it should be clear that this is no longer enough—that our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country, without the firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border.” In other words, where Communist insurgency threatened, military action would have to coincide with efforts to win hearts and minds.44
By the summer of 1961, Communist insurgents in South Vietnam had so effectively undermined Diem’s authority that, according to the CIA, “travel on public roads more than fifteen miles outside of Saigon has become hazardous.” Worried that South Vietnam stood on the brink of collapse, Kennedy added $42 million to an aid program already costing $220 million per year. In addition, General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow (Special Assistant for National Security Affairs) were sent to South Vietnam to investigate. On November 1, they suggested a shift to a “limited partnership” and called for the deployment of 8,000 American combat troops to “provide the military presence necessary to produce the desired effect on national morale.” Taylor and Rostow also maintained that the DRV was “extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off.”45
Secretary of state Rusk and defense secretary McNamara echoed these sentiments. “The United States should commit itself to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Viet-Nam to the Communist[s]” they wrote. “We should be prepared to introduce United States combat forces. . . . It may also be necessary for United States forces to strike at the source of the aggression in North Viet-Nam.” The one dissenting voice was under secretary of state George Ball, who warned Kennedy that if he acted on these recommendations, in five years the United States would have 300,000 men in “the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” He feared “a protracted conflict far more serious than Korea.”46
“George, you’re just crazier than hell,” Kennedy replied. “That just isn’t going to happen.”47
Kennedy nevertheless rejected the recommendations, opting instead for half measures. A changed role for American military advisers was approved, allowing them to work with lower-echelon combat units. Over the following year, an additional 10,000 advisers were deployed, while 120 helicopters and 300 aircraft were also sent. In February 1962, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was formed to oversee the steadily expanding commitment.
Communist forces meanwhile grew like jungle vines. By the end of 1961, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, or Viet Cong), the military arm of the National Liberation Front (NLF), had 20,000 active members—an increase of 12,000 in just six months. Aiding the insurgents was a support system of about 200,000 loyalists infiltrated throughout the country.48 A big army did not, however, mean incessant fighting, since military violence played a small part in revolutionary strategy. Grassroots political indoctrination was still the preferred way of toppling Diem. In fact, Hanoi feared that military escalation might convince the Americans to commit combat troops. Ho wanted to persuade the United States to accept a compromise in South Vietnam, similar to that achieved in Laos. The NLF would then be allowed a part in governing South Vietnam, a position from which it could gradually usurp power. Ho recognized that this scenario would be less likely to occur if American soldiers were fighting and dying in South Vietnam.
Missing from the American perception was an understanding of the political nature of the revolution, and therefore the realization that a pre-dominandy military response to it was bound to be futile. “The people are the eyes and ears of the army; they feed and keep our soldiers,” the great Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh once wrote. “The people are the water and our army the fish.” The revolution was utterly dependent upon a dutiful peasantry. Peasants were (according to Ho and Chinh) “unlucky and simpleminded” people who “accept their wretched state because they do not understand the cause of their misery.” The revolution would enlighten them, whereupon they would “leap into battle, determined to wage a decisive struggle against their exploiters.”49
Once enlightened, peasants provided manpower, transport, food, cover, and intelligence for soldiers. Guerrillas protected the people but, more important, impressed upon them the inexorable strength of the revolution—the idea that resistance was futile. A new social code was enforced, facilitating the complete transformation of the peasant’s world. Cadres were measured by how completely they transformed village life. Those who failed to meet the revolution’s high standards were ruthlessly purged.
Cadres were fanatics wedded to revolution. The NLF was essentially a sophisticated cult in which techniques of mind control were highly refined. Recruits were placed in cells of three to ten individuals and subjected to grueling self-criticism sessions, designed to destroy individuality. “We had no private lives to speak of,” a former cadre recalled. “Although we were teenagers, we didn’t have any girlfriends. I told myself that I should live as a real Communist lives, the pure life of the revolutionary.”50
Only a tiny percentage of the population in the South were ever “true believers,” devoted to the revolution. Most peasants practiced what the French called attentisme—they were opportunistic, their allegiance shifting with the fortunes of the war. Few actually believed in socialism, but instead wanted the parcel of land the NLF offered as a bribe. In many cases, loyalty to the NLF was inversely proportional to the cruelty of the local RVN officials. Peasants who had been alienated by injustice, corruption, and crippling taxes desperately hoped the NLF would provide salvation. As one former NLF cadre admitted, however, there was no sense in rescuing peasants from oppression prematurely, since Saigon’s cruelties proved useful. “According to a saying of Mao Tse-tung: ‘A firefly can set a field ablaze.’ Yet for a firefly to set a whole field ablaze, the field must be extremely dry. ‘To make the field dry’ in this situation meant that we had to make the people suffer until they could no longer endure it. Only then would they carry out the Party’s armed policy.”51
A strict moral code supposedly governed cadre behavior—they were not supposed to steal, rape, despoil, or murder. That code, however, was another handy myth. When manpower was in short supply or when the war was going badly, moral purity became a luxury. Given the obvious iniquities of the Saigon regime, it is safe to assume that a revolution as righteous as the one Ho advertised would have succeeded much earlier. Though most peasants insisted that the NLF treated them better than the ARVN (South Vietnam’s army), thugs existed on both sides.
The revolution was, from the beginning, a brutal, sadistic monster. Its distinguishing feature was not moral purity but naked terror. “Fragment the opposition’s . . . leadership, if necessary using assassination and torture,” cadres were advised. The process of “liberating” a village involved killing those of influence: village chiefs, landowners, district officials, and schoolteachers. Anyone who could read was particularly at risk, since the revolution depended upon ignorance. According to one study, 36,725 assassinations and 58,499 abductions were carried out in the years 1957 to 1972. Terror, argued the senior commander Vo Nguyen Giap, raised the morale of insurgents, frightened opponents, and kept the masses in line. Honest officials were most at risk, since they posed the greatest threat to NLF influence. Crooks, on the other hand, were kept alive to keep the peasants suffering.52
Kennedy’s response to political insurgency of this type involved building strategic hamlets. Peasants were herded into fortified compounds, the logic being that anyone outside the fence was automatically an enemy and could be eliminated. Diem began an ambitious program of construction in early 1962, with the goal of 14,000 hamlets in fourteen months. By October, he was claiming that 7,267,517 people were protected. In truth, the scheme provided a golden opportunity for his cronies to sell American construction materials to peasants at extortionate prices. Peasants consequently hated the hamlets, which seemed another form of oppression. Because the hamlet did not protect peasants from exploitation by their own government, they had little incentive to defend it against PLAF incursions. By spring 1963, only 1,500 of the 8,500 hamlets actually constructed were still viable. The debacle revealed the weakness of Kennedy’s approach. Good intentions and generous funding had not won over the people, who still associated American policy with the venal Diem.
Progress on the military front was even less impressive. Diem’s forces were supposedly better trained, and definitely better equipped, but could not control the war. This was rudely demonstrated on January 2, 1963, when ARVN units went to Ap Bac, in the Mekong Delta, to teach the PLAF a lesson. A short, victorious battle would, it was thought, demonstrate the strength of the Saigon regime and the futility of supporting the NLF. For their part, the NLF welcomed a showdown, since they were keen to demonstrate that American weaponry did not render the ARVN invincible.
PLAF troops were disciplined, well-trained, and deeply committed. Their light weaponry was ideally suited to the type of battle they preferred to fight. By the time the ARVN arrived, they had dug themselves into virtually invisible foxholes on high ground. The plan called for a classic guerrilla ambush: the enemy would be drawn into a trap and dealt a devastating blow, whereupon the guerrillas would escape before ARVN reinforcements arrived.
The ARVN, like their American sponsors, worshiped weaponry. They had a four-to-one advantage in personnel, backed by the best equipment America could provide: helicopters, observation planes, armored personnel carriers (APCs), and fighter-bombers equipped with napalm. What they lacked was leadership—the local commander, Colonel Bui Dinh Dam, was chosen for loyalty rather than competence. He deployed his helicopter-borne troops in the middle of a rice paddy, providing the PLAF with something akin to a carnival shooting gallery. As the helicopters landed, a torrent of fire erupted. Four were destroyed, with seventeen soldiers (including three Americans) killed instantly. At this point, the reserves in the APCs should have been deployed, but their commander was too busy panicking. Skyraiders swooped in with napalm, but with limited effect. When the APCs finally moved in, they were beaten back by ruthlessly precise fire. Troops found themselves pinned down in knee-high water by an enemy they could not even see.
At nightfall the PLAF slipped away, satisfied that a point had been made. The battle was supposed to have demonstrated the invincibility of air mobility—troops in helicopters—but instead confirmed the old values of commitment, discipline, leadership, and training. On the strength of the PLAF’s performance, NLF recruitment dramatically increased. Meanwhile, Americans argued about how to interpret the battle. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, the senior adviser on the scene, and one of the most perceptive commanders to serve in Vietnam, concluded that ARVN troops had no hope of ever defeating the PLAF. The implication was clear: if the United States wanted to destroy Communism in Vietnam, it would have to do the job itself.
Vann was not actually confident that American troops could succeed where the ARVN had failed. Nor was Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, who toured Vietnam around this time. On his return, he warned legislators that, despite all the time and money spent, the task of establishing a non-Communist Vietnam was “not even at the beginning of a beginning.” The implication was painful. The United States would not be able to achieve its aims without “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel . . . and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule.”53
In Washington, Mansfield was easily dismissed as a worrywart. Optimism was official policy at the Pentagon. The congenitally cheerful General Paul Harkins, head of MACV, assured Kennedy that “[we] are winning slowly on the present thrust.” General Earle Wheeler, Army chief of staff, insisted that “improvement is a daily fact.” Analysts magically transformed Ap Bac into a victory, on the grounds that the PLAF had eventually abandoned their positions. It did not occur to them that, in guerrilla warfare, holding ground was immaterial.54
America was slipping into a quagmire without remotely understanding its predicament. Each tiny setback implied increased involvement. Yet greater American involvement weakened the ARVN, alienated the peasantry, and, by implication, strengthened the NLF. According to Arthur Schlesinger, at one turbulent Cabinet meeting, Robert Kennedy asked why, if the situation was indeed so dire, the United States did not simply withdraw. The “question hovered for a moment, then died away.” It was “a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions.”55
NOVAYA ZEMLYA AND CUBA: BIG BOMBS
On October 30, 1961, the Soviets tested a new thermonuclear bomb over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic. Observers saw “a huge bright orange ball . . . powerful and arrogant like Jupiter . . . . It seemed to suck the whole earth into it.”56 The mushroom cloud rose to sixty-four kilometers, the flash was seen one thousand kilometers away, and the explosive force leveled houses hundreds of kilometers distant. The bomb, lovingly called Tsar Bomba, had a yield of fifty-seven megatons, or ten times the combined total of all explosives used during World War II. In fact, the device was designed to yield a hundred megatons, but had been intentionally muted.
Tsar Bomba was a huge atomic raspberry blown at the Americans. It was not a weapon, but a political gesture designed to frighten the United States and to underline Soviet disgust with the slow progress in arms control negotiations. Over the years, both sides had made gestures toward limiting proliferation and testing, but progress always stalled in the quagmire of verification. The Paris conference of 1960 had offered real hope but was thrown into disarray with the downing of a U-2 spy plane. A furious Khrushchev walked out, muttering about the impossibility of trusting Americans.
Tensions ratcheted with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and then Berlin. A voluntary moratorium on testing which had begun while Eisenhower was president was ended in August 1961. Seven months after Kennedy took office, relations with the Soviet Union were worse than at any time since Russian and American soldiers shook hands on the banks of the Elbe. Instead of talking, the superpowers were trading insults.
Prior to the Tsar Bomba test, Khrushchev had openly boasted of his new power. “When the enemies of peace threaten us with force,” he warned, “they must be and will be countered with force, and more impressive force, too. Anyone who is still unable to understand this today will certainly understand it tomorrow.” Washington feigned indifference. The Defense Department proclaimed that American experts had studied the possibility of a huge bomb but had “concluded that the military value was so questionable that it was not worth developing such weapons even though we [have] the . . . capacity to do so.”57
Immediately after the blast, Kennedy assured the American people that it was not necessary “to explode a fifty-megaton nuclear device to confirm that we have many times more nuclear power than any nation on earth.” In fact, the Americans were not as calm as Kennedy suggested. “It became obvious that . . . there was no containing [the Russians],” the nuclear scientist Herbert York recalled. “They were shooting not just this big bomb, but lots and lots of them and we essentially did the same thing. We went and . . . got bombs from wherever we could find ’em and took ’em to Nevada and shot them just in order to respond to these Russian tests. It was a crazy period.”58
The tests provided a drum roll prior to the great dramatic crescendo of Cuba. On October 14, 1962, the Americans discovered that the Soviets were installing ballistic missiles on the island. “The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere,” Kennedy warned eight days later. Such a “deliberately provocative” challenge had to be met “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.”59
For Khrushchev, the missiles were a quick-fix solution to Soviet strategic weakness. According to reliable estimates, the United States had a nine-to-one advantage in deliverable nuclear weapons. In truth, a few missiles in Cuba were inconsequential. Since they were not sufficient to allow the Soviets an effective first strike, to use them would have been suicidal, since the Americans would have responded by leveling the entire Communist world. But that was not the point. Khrushchev must have assumed that Kennedy would not go to war over their removal, since that would mean the certain destruction of a few American cities. The USSR would therefore be allowed to keep the missiles in place, in the process winning a significant propaganda victory that would quiet the Kremlin hawks who were making life difficult for the Russian premier.
Kennedy, however, refused to play ball. He demanded immediate removal, threatening war if the Russians refused. Khrushchev protested that if the United States assumed the right to place missiles in Turkey, why shouldn’t his country have them in Cuba? Double standards, however, were part and parcel of international relations. Kennedy simply ignored the protest—for the time being.
The two leaders gambled with the fate of the world. Khrushchev was stubborn and volatile; Kennedy, cautious but resolute. The Air Force commander General Curtis LeMay, irritated by Kennedy’s equanimity, demanded immediate air strikes against Cuban sites. If that led to full-scale nuclear war, so be it. “The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters,” he argued. “Now we’ve got him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take his testicles off too.”60
LeMay had devoted the better part of his career to the creation of an invincible nuclear force capable of what he called “killing a nation.” As he later confessed, he had repeatedly told Eisenhower in the 1950s that “we could have won a war against Russia . . . . Their defenses were pretty weak.” Yet at the very moment the Soviets provided justification for destruction, the president was reluctant to unleash the dogs of war. It took courage for Kennedy to resist the advice of his generals, who argued that every minute’s delay deepened the danger. Robert Kennedy recalled:
When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him that there would be no reaction. President Kennedy was skeptical . . . . “They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can’t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing. If they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.”
Kennedy instead imposed a blockade, and waited for the Soviets to withdraw their missiles. He understood that Khrushchev did not want war, and had to find a way to allow him to retreat gracefully. “I don’t want to put him into a corner from which he cannot escape,” Kennedy told his aides.61
The world waited. Food was hoarded, survival strategies hastily improvised. At the missile sites, the pace of work doubled, suggesting that the weapons would soon be ready. Then came a single tense moment on October 24, when Soviet ships were prevented from proceeding to Cuba. Triggers were cocked, torpedoes primed. The Soviets, however, turned away. On October 27, Khrushchev sent an anguished note to Kennedy: “If war should break out, it would not be in our power to stop it—war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” A subsequent message was less conciliatory, so Kennedy ignored it. He told Khrushchev that he was “very much interested in reducing tensions.” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a deal involving removal of some missiles from Turkey was struck.62
We now know that LeMay’s confidence was idiotically ill-founded. The Soviets had more missiles in Cuba than American intelligence had estimated, and the possibility of removing all of them with an air strike was remote. Had even one been launched, there is no guarantee that Kennedy would have been able to stop an escalation into full-scale nuclear war. The Americans, it should be recalled, had only one plan: their SIOP involved the release of nearly three thousand weapons, totaling seven thousand megatons. Such an attack would have killed at least 100 million people and would probably have ushered in a catastrophic nuclear winter in the Northern Hemisphere. LeMay, nevertheless, went to his grave believing that an opportunity to destroy Communism forever had been squandered. “We lost the war as a result of the Cuban missile crisis,” he insisted.63
Chastened by the crisis, Kennedy looked for more secure ways to keep the peace. On June 10, 1963, he argued: “Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces . . . . It makes no sense . . . when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” He still believed in deterrence, still believed that the United States needed thousands of nuclear weapons. But, he argued, bombs alone were not the best way to assure peace. Solid agreements were essential. As a gesture of goodwill, he announced that the United States would not be the first to resume atmospheric tests. A test ban of sorts followed, on August 5, 1963. It was deeply flawed in that it pertained only to tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. In the years to follow, the number of tests (albeit conducted underground) would actually increase. But that was not the point. What mattered was that Soviets and Americans had met, talked, and agreed on something.64
The prominent RAND strategist Thomas Schelling felt that “the Cuban missile crisis was the best thing to happen to us since the Second World War. It helped us avoid further confrontation with the Soviets, it resolved the Berlin issue, and it established some basic understandings about US-Soviet interaction. Sometimes the gambles you take pay off.”65 All that was true, but peaceful coexistence was built upon military security, not political harmony. After Cuba, the Kremlin scrapped the idea of deterrence on the cheap and concentrated instead on amassing an arsenal big enough to prevent an American first strike. The Americans responded in kind. Eventually both sides would have weapons sufficient to destroy the world many times over. By 1969 the superpowers were, between them, spending more than $50 million a day on nuclear armaments. Both sides took refuge in the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. The expense was huge, the waste prodigious, but the sense of security was palpable. Around the world, people learned to stop worrying, even if they did not love the bomb.