WASHINGTON
Eisenhower began honoring his part of the Sherman Adams bargain while Kennedy was flying back to Washington. After the United States docked in New York, he announced at a press conference that although he would not reach a final conclusion about the test ban treaty before studying its full text, “Unless there is . . . some rather hard evidence that the Soviets are way ahead of us in something, or that the security of the United States would be endangered, then I would certainly be on the favorable side.” A frontpage headline in the New York Times the next day declared, “Eisenhower Hints He Backs Treaty,” and it was later reported that he had sent Senator Fulbright a letter formally announcing his support for the treaty.
Minutes after arriving at the White House, Kennedy met with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the former political rival he had appointed ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge’s decision to accept the post struck many as just as inexplicable as Kennedy’s decision to offer it to him. It was not a first-rank embassy, certainly not for a distinguished sixty-one-year-old former U.S. senator, ambassador to the United Nations, and vice presidential candidate. Soon after the inauguration, Lodge had told Secretary of State Rusk that he had “one more tour of public duty in his system” and would accept a “challenging” position in the administration. Two years later, Kennedy ran into Lodge at a dinner and afterward instructed his military attaché, Major General Chester Clifton, to ask him if he was interested in an embassy. Lodge told Clifton that although he was not looking for a job, he would consider something “challenging and difficult.” Clifton relayed this to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who recommended Saigon.
After Lodge accepted the post, he received a condescending letter from the Republican congresswoman Frances Bolton, a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, informing him that she and many Republicans were “deeply disturbed” by his decision. If South Vietnam fell to the Communists during his tenure, she wrote, the GOP would share the blame, and she believed that Kennedy was “perfectly capable of using a possible defeat in Southeast Asia to ruin the Republican Party.” Was Lodge certain he understood “the complexities of these countries,” she asked, and certain of his “capacity for patience, understanding, and really infinite wisdom?” Lodge replied, “American security must always be considered from a totally unpartisan viewpoint, without regard to party politics, important though party politics are.” South Vietnam was vital to U.S. security, the commander in chief had asked him to serve, and under these circumstances, “service is a patriotic duty as well as an honor”—a stirring defense all the more impressive for being voiced in a private communication.
Kennedy’s motives for sending Lodge to Saigon were less estimable. His first choice had been Edmund Gullion, the current ambassador to Ghana and a friend and usher at his wedding who had frequently advised him about foreign affairs. Rusk argued that the post called for someone with more experience and seniority and pushed for Lodge. Kennedy’s other advisers opposed sending a Republican of his stature to Saigon on the grounds that he might resist taking orders from a Democratic administration and prove difficult to fire. Bobby warned him that in about six months they might find him causing a lot of trouble. (In fact, he began causing trouble in less than a week.) Sorensen thought Lodge “lacked the qualities of prudence which were necessary in this kind of area,” and joked that he hoped he was being sent to North Vietnam. O’Donnell was shocked because Kennedy had often disparaged his political skills and dismissed him as lazy. Schlesinger suggested that appointing him might have appealed to the president’s “instinct for magnanimity.” But had he really wanted to be magnanimous he could have offered him a more prestigious post, and Schlesinger conceded that “involving a leading Republican in the Vietnam mess appealed to his instinct for politics.” O’Donnell and Jackie arrived at a similar conclusion, with O’Donnell saying, “The idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible,” and Jackie remarking later that he believed sending a Republican to Saigon “might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless.”
Kennedy certainly had reason to be magnanimous. His victories over Lodge in the Massachusetts Senate race in 1952 and in the 1960 general election, when Lodge had run for vice president, had capped a family rivalry spanning generations. It had started when Lodge’s grandfather Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., had introduced a bill in Congress in 1895 aimed at curbing immigration from southern and eastern Europe by requiring immigrants to be literate in their national languages. When his bill reached the House, Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who was then a congressman, had fiercely opposed it. According to a story that Fitzgerald told for years and his grandson surely knew by heart, when he and Lodge met in the Senate chamber, Lodge had called him an “impudent young man” and asked, “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Fitzgerald had shot back, “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.” Fitzgerald ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1916 and lost. In 1952, his grandson challenged Lodge’s grandson for the same seat and won. Lodge served as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations until he resigned to run for vice president in 1960, and lost to Kennedy again. Two years later, Ted Kennedy beat Lodge’s son in an election to fill the president’s former Senate seat.
The reporter Joe McCarthy had interviewed Kennedy and his father as they cruised off Hyannis Port in 1959. As Jack listened, his father thundered that he had moved his family out of Boston because the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice of the Yankee elite made it no place to raise Irish-Catholic children. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there,” he told McCarthy, adding, “They wouldn’t have asked my daughters to join their deb clubs; not that the girls would have joined anyway—they never gave two cents for that society stuff. But the point is they wouldn’t have been asked in Boston.” Kennedy had enjoyed more social success than his father, attending Choate, an elite prep school, and becoming the first Irish Catholic to join Harvard’s Spee Club. But he remained convinced that the WASP elite was determined to exclude him from its private clubs. While playing golf at the Newport Country Club before his wedding, he had been reprimanded because his foursome did not include a member. “I’m afraid that they feel their worst fears are being realized,” he told his friends, “the invasion by the Irish-Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of America’s socially elite.”
The presidency did not knock the chip off his shoulder. The Irish ambassador to Washington, Thomas Kiernan, was surprised by his frequent references to the legendary (and perhaps imaginary) “No Irish Need Apply” signs in Boston, and he once told Paul Fay, “Do you know it is impossible for an Irish Catholic to get into the Somerset Club in Boston? If I moved back to Boston even after being President, it would make no difference.” He told the columnist Betty Beale that his family was the only Gentile one in the Palm Beach Country Club because it was the only club they could join, and Beale noticed that he seemed upset because he remained on the waiting list to join Washington’s Cosmos Club, although it customarily admitted presidents upon their election. After reading a critical letter in the New York Times signed by a man with a Protestant name and a Westchester County address, he remarked to an aide that WASPs seemed to think that “the world should be made in their image.” After it came out that Ted Kennedy had cheated on a Harvard examination, he said, “It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”
How, then, could he look at Lodge and not see the kind of Brahmin who had driven his father from Boston, and would have blackballed an Irish American president from the Somerset Club? Ken O’Donnell, an expert on the dimensions of the Kennedy chip, believed that he “nursed an Irish distaste for the aloof North Shore Republican [Lodge],” and remembered that after seeing him join Nixon on the dais at the 1960 GOP convention, he had said, “That’s the last Nixon will see of Lodge. If Nixon ever tries to visit the Lodges in Beverly, they won’t let him in the door,” a comment raising the question of how warm a welcome he would have received on the Lodge doorstep. When Bobby Kennedy was asked if his brother had held Lodge in “high regard,” he replied carefully, “I think a fair regard.”
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THE OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF the August 15 meeting between Kennedy and Lodge shows Kennedy leaning back in his rocking chair while Lodge sits perched on the edge of a couch, hands clasped between his knees like a schoolboy summoned to the principal’s office. Here they were, then, inches apart, the last Yankee Brahmin to have a distinguished political career, and the first Irish Brahmin to become president. Ignore for a moment that when Kennedy was a boy his family had moved to New York to escape the snobbery of Brahmins like the Lodges, and that when Lodge was of a similar age he moved with his widowed mother to Paris, where the novelist Edith Wharton (“a most loyal and devoted friend to both my father and mother,” according to Lodge) took them under her wing. And ignore that Lodge’s father had been a poet and a favorite of President Theodore Roosevelt, who described him in a letter that Lodge quoted as “the only man I have ever met who, I feel, was a genius,” and that after an acrimonious meeting with Joe Kennedy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told his wife, “I never want to see that man again as long as I live.” Ignore all the differences of religion, class, and upbringing, and you have two men with more in common than either suspected or cared to acknowledge.
Lodge had lost his father when he was seven, an event leaving him absorbed with his health and, like Kennedy, a careful eater, devotee of bland soups, and afternoon napper. Both had followed mediocre prep school careers with success at Harvard. Lodge had been thirty-four when he won his Senate seat, Kennedy thirty-five, and both were criticized for being young men in a hurry. Both won medals for valor and ran on their war records—Kennedy for the House, and Lodge to regain the Senate seat he had resigned to fight in the war. Kennedy had dabbled in journalism and considered making it a career; Lodge had spent nine years at newspapers in Boston and New York. Both were appalled by baby-kissing, arms-in-the-air politics. When David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote about Lodge, “He is a total politician in the best sense. That is, he is attuned to the needs, ambitions, and motivations of others. Yet his background, coolness, and reserve mark him as essentially different from other, more genial and back-slapping politicians,” he could have been describing Kennedy. Both were also considered liberals, although Kennedy was uncomfortable with the label and Lodge the more progressive of the two. Lodge had written in the Atlantic Monthly in 1953, “In becoming a Republican, I thought I was joining something affirmative, evolutionary, and idealistic—which demanded sacrifice and generosity—not a party which said no to all proposals for change.” He had introduced a bill in the Senate requiring public funding of presidential campaigns “to the exclusion of all other methods of financing,” accused the GOP of becoming a “rich man’s club” and a “haven for reactionaries,” and blindsided Nixon during the campaign by announcing that a Nixon-Lodge administration would appoint the first Negro to a cabinet post. Despite all this, the aristocratic Lodge never connected with ordinary voters, while Kennedy, in the words of one friend, could “loft a pass, swap a joke, hoist a beer, hurt his back and hug his kids like millions of other Americans.”
The button activating the secret Oval Office microphone was concealed somewhere on the round mahogany coffee table. The August 15 photograph shows wires running from the base of this table into the floor. One led from the microphone to the basement tape recorder, although a visitor would assume that they were all telephone wires. In fact, Kennedy was concealing more than a hidden microphone from Lodge. Had Lodge known that he doubted that the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem could defeat the Communist insurgency, and was considering how and when to extricate the more than sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers currently serving in South Vietnam, he might have paid more attention to Congresswoman Bolton’s warning.
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KENNEDY AND HIS BROTHER BOBBY had stopped in Vietnam in 1951 during a private fact-finding tour of the Middle East and Asia. They arrived at a violent juncture in the struggle between the French colonial authorities and Viet Minh guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh. A suicide bomber had killed a French general, antigrenade nets covered government ministries, and artillery flashes lit the horizon as they dined at a rooftop restaurant in Saigon with Edmund Gullion, then serving as the political counselor at the embassy. Kennedy asked Gullion what he had learned. “That in twenty years there will be no more colonies,” Gullion said. “We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us.” Gullion believed that the only way to defeat the Viet Minh was by encouraging a strong and countervailing nationalism among the South Vietnamese, an impossible strategy for a colonial power.
Jack and Bobby also visited Hanoi and the Mekong Delta. A colonel at a frontier post told them France would win, but it might not happen in his lifetime. General de Lattre rolled out maps and declared that if France lost the rich delta, the Communists would seize all of Southeast Asia—the domino theory. Jack spent several hours with the New York Times correspondent Seymour Topping at his apartment in Saigon. Topping told him the French were doomed as long as the Chinese could supply the Viet Minh through mountain passes, and that many Vietnamese detested Americans because they were assisting the French. By the time Kennedy left his apartment, Topping believed that he had been persuaded “that only a truly independent Vietnamese government had any prospect of attracting popular support.”
Bobby wrote in his diary that Vietnam had made “a very, very major impression” on his brother, and had taught them “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments.” Jack added his own entry to the diary, writing, “We must do what we can as our contribution gets bigger to force the French to liberalize political conditions,” “We are not here to help French maintain colonies,” and “Reason for spread of communism is failure of those who believe in democracy to explain this theory in terms intelligible to the ordinary man and to make its ameliorating effect in life apparent.”
After returning to Washington he went on Meet the Press, accused the Eisenhower administration of supporting “the desperate attempt of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire,” and warned that attempting to defeat the Communist insurgency without recognizing the nationalism of the Vietnamese people “spells foredoomed failure.” While running for the Senate against Lodge the following year he stood in front of a map of Vietnam with a pointer and criticized the conflict as “a white man’s war against the natives.”
During a fifty-seven-day siege in 1954 that would end in the humiliating surrender of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Kennedy rose in the Senate to oppose a French request for additional military assistance. Change the dates, substitute the United States for France, and his speech could have been delivered by an antiwar politician in 1968. He said, “To pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive.” After recalling Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s 1952 statement that “the tide is now moving in our favor,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s insistence that American aid would “reduce this Communist pressure to manageable proportions,” he concluded, “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people,’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”
The French surrendered two weeks later, and negotiations at Geneva led to an agreement to divide Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. The Communists under Ho Chi Minh ruled the North, and Emperor Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem head of state in the South. The division was meant to be temporary, and the Geneva Accords called for elections in 1956 to unify the country under a single government. Diem refused to participate, arguing that the Communists would never permit free elections in the North. After the Viet Minh attacked government offices and assassinated officials in the South, Eisenhower increased U.S. economic and military assistance to the Diem government.
Kennedy’s reputation as a zealous cold warrior rests partly on his 1960 campaign speeches, in which he charged the Eisenhower-Nixon administration with allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union militarily, and on the famous passage in his inaugural address in which he pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” His cold war rhetoric was not an act. He subscribed to the domino theory and believed that the charge that his party had “lost” China meant that no Democratic politician could become president without being tough on communism. After taking office, he continued ornamenting his speeches with cold war rhetoric, even after it became apparent to his advisers that if he was a cold warrior, he was a fairly nonviolent one, ready to talk tough, call up reserves, impose blockades, deploy aircraft carriers off coasts, and order convoys up autobahns, but unwilling to “pay any price” if the price was nuclear war, or “bear any burden” if the burden included sending combat troops to Vietnam.
He had hinted at this in his inaugural address. After his “pay any price” passage he had warned, “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish . . . all forms of human life,” and spoke of “that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.” He followed this with a call for negotiations, saying, “Let both sides begin anew the quest for peace,” “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” and “Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms—and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.” The newspapers got it right. Headlines in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington proclaimed, “Kennedy Is Sworn In—Asks Grand Alliance for Peace,” “Kennedy Takes Oath as President, Proclaims a ‘New Quest for Peace,’” “Kennedy Asks World Peace Quest,” and “Kennedy Sworn In, Bids for Peace.”
At a White House meeting a day before Kennedy’s inauguration, Eisenhower warned that the most immediate and important foreign challenge would be the small, landlocked Southeast Asian nation of Laos, where an insurgency by the Communist Pathet Lao was threatening a pro-Western regime. “If we permit Laos to fall, then we will have to write off the whole area,” Eisenhower said, adding that the only solution might be a unilateral military intervention. After leaving the meeting, Kennedy remarked caustically, “There he sat, telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years.”
Laos monopolized his attention that winter. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense McNamara recommended sending in U.S. ground forces and bombing North Vietnam. The chiefs warned that if the Chinese Communists intervened, the United States might have to retaliate with nuclear weapons. In March, the chiefs recommended an expeditionary force of 60,000 troops, with an additional 140,000 readied and armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Their chairman, Lyman Lemnitzer, promised victory if Kennedy approved the use of nuclear weapons.
The president was appalled, telling an aide after the meeting, “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory.” Instead, he ordered a show of force in Thailand and in waters off Vietnam, and asked the veteran diplomat W. Averell Harriman to negotiate the neutralization of Laos. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy both opposed a neutral Laos, arguing that it could hand South Vietnam to the Communists. He ignored them and told Harriman during an overseas phone call, “Do you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.” General Maxwell Taylor, who succeeded Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs a year later, believed Kennedy had resisted escalation in Laos because of “his knowledge of the French problem in Vietnam.” His refusal to intervene in Laos to prevent it falling to the Communists also indicated that, his rhetoric notwithstanding, he did not believe that its loss would imperil neighboring Southeast Asian nations, and represented a de facto rejection of the domino theory.
He also refused the Joint Chiefs’ request to provide air cover and marines to save the Cuban exiles pinned down at the Bay of Pigs, a decision leading to a strained relationship between himself and the chiefs. He was furious at himself for approving the invasion, and furious at the CIA, the military, and his advisers for endorsing it. While dining with family and friends at Hyannis Port that summer, he could still work himself up into a fury over it. “When I sat there and looked at that fat ass [Admiral] Arleigh Burke and fat ass [General] George Decker,” he said, “I looked at their four stars and that wide gold braid, and . . . I figured the selection process that they had to go through in order to achieve that pinnacle in the military—having been in the military myself—I just figured these fellows have got to know what they’re doing.” Later that evening, he resumed his rant while playing dominoes with Fay. “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interest of the country,” he said. “I will never compromise the principles on which this country is built, but we’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason. Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw here this evening? Do you think I’m going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn’t think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he’s crazy.” He picked up his crutches, announced he was going to bed, then swiveled around and added, “I’ll tell you I don’t care who it is, nobody is going to force me to do anything irrational just because they feel that it is going to save the image or the name of the country.”
When Khrushchev threatened to cut off access to Berlin in August 1961, and the East Germans erected a wall separating East from West Berlin, the Pentagon recommended that Kennedy consider using nuclear tactical weapons to maintain Western rights in the divided city. Instead, he increased military spending on conventional forces, called up reserves, doubled draft calls, and put American forces on alert. During the crisis he arrived two hours late for a small White House dinner party. His hands shook as he said, “God, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourselves over here because I’ve been over there in that office, not knowing whether the decisions I made were going to start a war and send the missiles flying.”
In the fall of 1962, he learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba. His civilian and military advisers urged him to bomb the missile sites and invade the island, measures that would have probably precipitated a nuclear exchange. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay recommended surrounding Cuba with warships and sending Strategic Air Command bombers to bomb it with nuclear weapons. Kennedy told John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who was serving as his ambassador to India, that he never had the slightest intention of doing this, and that the worst advice always seemed to come “from those who feared that to be sensible made them seem soft and unheroic.” Instead of bombing Cuba he imposed a naval blockade, demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missiles, and during secret exchanges with Khrushchev agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union doing the same in Cuba. He told Rusk that if the blockade and Turkish deal failed to persuade the Soviets to remove the missiles, he would bring the dispute to the United Nations Security Council instead of attacking Cuba.
He had prefaced his 1954 Senate speech on Vietnam by declaring that American citizens had a right “to inquire in detail into the nature of the struggle in which we may become engaged,” before traveling “the long and torturous road to war—particularly a war which we now realize would threaten the survival of civilization.” After making his own inquiry, he concluded that the United States should not send combat units to save the French. This conclusion guided his own Vietnam policy throughout his presidency, repeatedly putting him at odds with the Joint Chiefs and his civilian advisers.
In the spring of 1961, the chiefs urged him to send 3,600 combat troops to assist Diem’s beleaguered forces. He sent 500 military advisers.
During a visit to South Vietnam in May 1961, Vice President Johnson hailed President Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia” and recommended increasing U.S. economic and military assistance. Kennedy listened instead to General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded American forces in Asia during World War II and the Korean conflict. The two men got along so famously when they dined in New York in the spring of 1961 that Kennedy invited him to the White House for lunch. Before he arrived he read aloud to Bobby and Powers the citation for the decoration that he had won in the First World War. He prefaced it by asking Powers, “Dave, how would you like this to be said about you”—by which he meant that he wished it had been said about him—and read, “On a field where Courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant feature.” In a quiet voice, Bobby, who had never been in combat, said shyly, “I would love to have that said about me.” With this as an introduction, he naturally hit it off with MacArthur again.
MacArthur told him, “What has happened after eight years of Eisenhower is that the chickens have come home to roost. And you live in the chicken house.” He said that anyone who advocated putting American ground troops in Asia should have his head examined. He dismissed the domino theory, saying it would be a mistake to fight the Communists in Vietnam, and recommended drawing a defensive line around Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines. He further endeared himself to Kennedy by saying, “If I was in combat and I commanded an army, I would hope that someone like General Eisenhower was commanding the opposing army.” General Taylor believed that MacArthur’s advice made “a hell of an impression” on Kennedy. Whenever Taylor or others urged him to increase the U.S. military commitment to Vietnam, he would tell them, “Well, now, you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.”
After returning from a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in the fall of 1961, Taylor and Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow recommended sending 8,000 combat engineers to South Vietnam and making preparations to dispatch an additional 205,000 combat troops if North Vietnamese forces launched an invasion. They concluded their report by urging that the United States commit itself to preventing the fall of South Vietnam “by the necessary military actions.” Taylor and McNamara followed this with a memorandum warning, “The chances are against preventing [the fall of South Vietnam] by any measures short of the introduction of U.S. forces on a substantial scale.”
Kennedy told Taylor that he was “instinctively against the introduction of U.S. forces.” Bundy tried to change his mind, reminding him that his advisers had unanimously recommended sending combat units, and suggesting cabling Ambassador Frederick Nolting, Jr., that combat troops would be sent “when and if the U.S. military recommend it on persuasive military grounds.” Kennedy refused. He did, however, approve Taylor and Rostow’s recommendation that the United States increase economic aid and the number of military advisers. He may have done this to placate the Joint Chiefs, who were becoming increasingly mutinous after his responses to Cuba, Berlin, and Laos, and in the hope that the advisers might stabilize the situation sufficiently for Diem to survive until the 1964 U.S. election, or succeed in training enough South Vietnamese forces to wage the kind of successful anti-insurgency operations that the British had mounted against Communist guerrillas in Malaya. What is certain is that he repeatedly and categorically refused to send U.S. combat units to Vietnam, a position leading Taylor to conclude, “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against [sending combat troops], except one man and that was the President.” Kennedy may have had this in mind when he told reporters at a 1962 press conference, “Well, you know that old story about Abraham Lincoln and the Cabinet. He says, ‘All in favor say “aye,”’ and the whole Cabinet voted ‘aye,’ and then, ‘All opposed no,’ and Lincoln voted ‘no,’ and he said, ‘the vote is no.’”
He realized that sending armed American advisers on patrol with South Vietnamese forces risked drawing the United States deeper into the conflict. To minimize this happening, he insisted that they participate only in combat-training missions. In the summer of 1962, he was cruising off Newport with Fay when he received a call from the Pentagon reporting that a contingent of U.S. Marine advisers was requesting permission to assist a unit of South Vietnamese troops who were preparing to ambush a Viet Cong detachment. He had the call transferred to the forward cabin, where he and Fay could be alone. “I want you to hear this,” he told Fay. “We’ve got twenty advisors out there who want to attack the Viet Cong. They think they can kill at least over 100 or 150.” While Fay listened, he forbade the marines to engage in combat, adding, “For every one of those advisors that gets involved in it, I’m going to pull them out and an equal number to that.” After hanging up he turned to Fay and said, “We’re going to settle this thing diplomatically.”
Throughout 1962 Kennedy received cables from Ambassador Nolting and General Paul Harkins, commander of the U.S. advisory mission, stating that the counterinsurgency strategy of gathering South Vietnamese peasants in “strategic hamlets” was succeeding. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the Senate’s leading expert on Asia, was the first major dissenter. He had been among Diem’s earliest supporters, praising him in a 1959 speech as a man of “vision, strength, and selflessness,” but while visiting Saigon in November 1962, he was dismayed to find that he was becoming a recluse and had fallen under the influence of his sinister brother, Vice President Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu’s wife. Nhu was an unsavory paranoid who commanded a private army of shock troops trained by U.S. advisers. Because Diem was a celibate bachelor, Madame Nhu had become South Vietnam’s de facto first lady. She was a tangle of contradictions: a dragon lady with long fingernails and tight dresses split from ankle to waist, and a militant Catholic and sexually voracious puritan who had sponsored legislation outlawing contraceptives, abortion, prostitution, and taxi dancing.
Ambassador Nolting told Mansfield, “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” a comment unlikely to impress him since he had first heard it from the lips of the commander of the French forces in 1953. He wrote in a private memorandum that he had left Vietnam “with a feeling of depression and with the belief that our chances may be little better than 50-50.” After returning to Washington he sent Kennedy a confidential report that ranks among the most prescient and depressing documents ever written about that conflict. “Seven years and billions of dollars later . . . it would be well to face the fact that we are at the beginning of the beginning,” he wrote. Success was theoretically possible, but only if both the Vietnamese and Americans pursued the current strategy with “great vigor and self-dedication,” a possibility he considered unlikely. The only alternative was “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some sort of neo-colonial rule in South Vietnam.” He concluded that Kennedy must stress that the primary responsibility for the war rested with the South Vietnamese. Failure to do this could “not only be immensely costly in terms of American lives and resources but it may also draw us into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French.”
Kennedy invited Mansfield to Palm Beach over the Christmas holidays to discuss Vietnam. As they cruised on the Honey Fitz he became furious as he reread his memorandum, and exclaimed, “This is not what my advisors are telling me!” Mansfield said he was courting disaster unless he stopped increasing the advisers and began withdrawing the ones already there. “I got angry at Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” he told O’Donnell afterward, “and I got angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”
At the end of December he sent Michael V. Forrestal of his National Security Council and the State Department’s director of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, to Vietnam to assess the state of the war. Forrestal was close to Averell Harriman, who had become his mentor after the suicide of his father, former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Hilsman was a West Point graduate whose experience fighting behind Japanese lines with Merrill’s Marauders during the Second World War had made him an early expert in counterinsurgency warfare. In a special “eyes only” annex to their report for President Kennedy, they described the situation as “fragile,” and pointed out serious problems in the conduct of the counterinsurgency efforts of the South Vietnam army. As Kennedy was digesting this, the Joint Chiefs made another pitch for combat units, writing in a memorandum to McNamara that if the Diem government could not bring the Vietcong under control, there was “no alternative to the introduction of U.S. military combat forces.”
Kennedy made Hilsman assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summoned him to the White House to discuss Vietnam, and told him that he had received an assessment from Edmund Gullion that had shaken his confidence in Diem. He had decided to continue supporting Diem for the moment, but would not send U.S. troops into battle or bomb North Vietnam. He wanted Hilsman to do everything possible to help the South Vietnamese win without getting the United States dragged into the fighting. Hilsman summarized his position as “Keep it down, no more advisors, we’re going downhill. We’ve reached the peak. From now on we’re going to cut the advisors back. If the Vietnamese win it, okay, great. But if they don’t, we’re going to go to Geneva and do what we did with Laos.”
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ON MAY 8, South Vietnamese police fired into a procession of Buddhists who had gathered in the formal imperial capital of Hue to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday and were flying religious banners in defiance of a law banning them. Although Buddhists constituted almost 90 percent of the population, Diem had given his fellow Catholics easier access to education and government jobs, and demonstrations against the Hue massacre turned into nationwide protests against religious discrimination. On June 12, an elderly monk sat down in a Saigon intersection, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself alive. Kennedy saw a wire service photograph of the man engulfed in flames, shouted “Jesus Christ!” and bolted from the room. He waved the photograph at Lodge when he asked him to go to Saigon.
That spring he complained to his friend Charlie Bartlett, a newspaper reporter and columnist, “We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”
He asked Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Averell Harriman to be ready “to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.”
He had told Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric at the end of 1962 that he believed the United States had been “sucked into Vietnam little by little,” and by the fall of 1963, Gilpatric came to believe that he had become “sick” of Vietnam, and noticed him frequently asking how to extricate America from the conflict.
In the spring of 1963, he told Mansfield that he had made a mistake in increasing the number of advisers, agreed with Mansfield’s recommendation for a complete withdrawal, and said he would begin bringing troops home at the beginning of 1964 but would not remove them all until he was reelected. If he made his intentions known earlier, conservatives would pillory him and he might lose the election. After Mansfield left, he turned to O’Donnell and said, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we better make damn sure I am reelected.”*
Kennedy could point to the Pentagon’s optimistic reports about the progress of the war as an argument for reducing the U.S. commitment. A prime example was a MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) memorandum in the spring of 1963 reporting, “Barring greatly increased resupply and reinforcements of the Viet Cong by infiltration, the military phase of the war can be virtually won by 1963.” The military’s assessments became more cautious after the Buddhist revolt, and on the morning of August 15, the New York Times carried a front-page article by David Halberstam that Lodge and Kennedy had probably read before they met. Headlined “Vietnamese Reds Gain in Key Areas,” it began, “South Vietnam’s military situation in the vital Mekong Delta has deteriorated in the last year and informed officials are warning of ominous signs.”
• • •
KENNEDY ACTIVATED the hidden Oval Office microphone as Lodge was in midsentence. He may have waited until he was distracted, or made a spur-of-the-moment decision to record his former rival. Lodge was describing his dinner with Madame Nhu’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tran Van Chuong. Although Mr. Chuong owed his position as South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States to nepotism, as did his wife, who represented South Vietnam at the United Nations, they had become estranged from Diem, Nhu, and their increasingly erratic and terrifying daughter. Lodge told Kennedy that Madame Chuong believed that the Diem regime was responsible for mass executions, that a coup was inevitable, and that unless her daughter and husband fled, they would be assassinated. She also thought that her daughter’s bizarre and inflammatory comments—she had celebrated the Buddhist immolations as “barbecues,” and had said, “Let them burn, and we shall all clap our hands”—reflected the thinking of her husband and Diem.
As Lodge delivered his dinner-party aperçus about the dysfunctional Chuong family (in 1984 Madame Nhu’s brother would strangle his parents in their bed), Kennedy said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah.” Like his tooth-tapping, finger-drumming, and doodle-drawing, it was a sign that he was bored. Those who knew Kennedy well knew that boring him was a cardinal sin. His former girlfriend Nancy Dickerson, who would become NBC’s first female correspondent, noticed that “when he was bored, a hood would come down over his eyes and his nervous system would start churning. You could do anything to him—steal his wallet, insult him, argue with him—but to bore him was unpardonable.”
During his thirty-five-minute meeting with Lodge he filled a page with doodles, writing in a column down one side, “Saigon / Lodge / No press comment / Cabot Lodge / Henry Cabot Lodge / Ambassador Lodge / Governor / Senator,” and on the other, “No press comment / USOM [United States Operations Mission],” with an arrow pointing downward. “No press comment” was a reminder to ask Lodge not to comment to the press after the meeting, an instruction that, presaging things to come, Lodge would immediately ignore. To be fair, it was not only Lodge’s insights into the Chuong family that Kennedy found tiresome, it was the whole Vietnam mess, a sideshow compared with civil rights, the test ban treaty, and U.S.-Soviet relations.
When he and Lodge met on June 12 he had held up the photograph of the Buddhist monk engulfed in flames. After saying, “I suppose these are the worst press relations to be found in the world today,” he had told Lodge that he expected him to take charge of relations with U.S. journalists in Saigon. Mindful of that exchange, Lodge now offered him a preview of how he planned to handle his first Saigon press conference, saying, “Suppose I am asked, ‘Do you think we can win with Diem?’”
Kennedy, who persisted in viewing Vietnam as primarily a public relations problem needing better management, suddenly showed more interest in the conversation. “You have to think of a rough one for that,” he suggested. Referring to the American press corps, he added, “You’re going to have a difficult time having a satisfactory relationship with them.”
“The very first day I’m going to invite them to lunch with me and my wife and ask their advice. I’ll be too fresh for them to get anything out of me . . . and at least [I can] try to get them into a human frame of mind.”
“The time may come when we’re going to have to do something about this war.” Referring to the possibility of a coup, Kennedy added, “I don’t know who we would sort of support. . . . They [Diem and the Nhus] ought to go but there’s the question of how skillfully that’s done and if we get the right fellow. . . . I just want to be sure that it would be someone better.” Wearying of the conversation, he concluded, “I think [we] have to leave it almost completely in your hands.”
Realizing he had just given a carte blanche to a proud man who had been famously resistant to following orders at the UN, he pulled back slightly, saying, “I don’t know whether we’d be better off with the alternative maybe . . . we’ll have to move more in that direction, but I’ll have to take a look at it before I come to that conclusion.”
“That’s helpful, very helpful. I’ll certainly give it my best. But if they all get assassinated, then you’re really going to have to get on top of it.”
“What about Madame Nhu?” Kennedy asked. But instead of inquiring if Lodge thought she might also be assassinated, he said, “Is she a lesbian, or what? She looks awfully masculine.” (A recent Time cover story had called her “a fragile exciting beauty” known for her “flaming feminism.”)
Lodge could not have anticipated this line of inquiry, but he smoothly shifted gears. “I think she is,” he agreed. “I think she also was very promiscuous, sort of a nymphomaniac.” Realizing he had found a subject that interested the president, he described her campaign to curb vice by shutting down Saigon’s dance halls.
Kennedy declared that promiscuity and Puritanism were “a dangerous combination,” prompting this descendent of Massachusetts Puritans to exclaim, “Very well put!”
The sex lives of heads of state, congressmen, Hollywood stars, and, for that matter, almost anyone crossing his path fascinated Kennedy. Nancy Dickerson recalled a foreign ambassador being shocked when he leaned close to him in a receiving line and asked, “Are you getting any lately?” A young female reporter told Dickerson that while she was interviewing him he had suddenly asked, “How’s your romance going?” After learning that Laura Bergquist had interviewed Fidel Castro in 1961, he asked her, “Who does he sleep with? . . . I’ve heard he doesn’t even take his boots off.” Bergquist said she had no idea, but he persisted. “He runs around making these long speeches,” he said, “but where are the dames?” Bergquist went to Hyannis Port a year later, hoping to persuade him to let Look run some candid photographs of Caroline. While flipping through the pictures of his daughter he asked her about Che Guevara. She had just met him in Havana and had described him as “cool, brainy, blunt, witty, and sensible”—a pragmatic man who could inspire the young, in fact a man not unlike Kennedy. After peppering her with more questions he gave her an appraising look and said, “Something gives me the feeling you’ve got the hots for the ‘Che.’” She spluttered that it was an “odd remark” and reminded him that a photograph of her and Guevara showed they had been two wary antagonists. “Yeah, but you know what psychiatrists say . . . that kind of hostility often leads to an opposite emotion.” She left convinced that he was “a very swinging sexual animal and saw others in his own light.”
He ended his meeting with Lodge soon after discussing Madame Nhu’s sex life. A week later, the proud and imperious Lodge arrived in Saigon believing that the president had left things “almost completely” in his hands.