WASHINGTON
During Kennedy’s weekly Tuesday breakfast with Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Mansfield handed him a three-page memorandum titled “Observations on Viet Nam” that suggested the change in American ambassadors presented him with an opportunity to reexamine “the fundamental premise” behind U.S. involvement in the war: the conviction that its outcome was as important to the United States as it was to the South Vietnamese. If it was, Mansfield wrote, “We are stuck with it and must stay with it whatever it may take in the end in the way of American lives and money and time to hold South Vietnam.” He argued that it was not, although Americans had talked themselves into believing that it was by describing Vietnam as vital to U.S. security and giving it “a highly inflated importance.” The crucial question, he said, was “Have we, as in Laos, first over-extended ourselves in words and in agency programs and then, in search of a rationalization for the erroneous over-extension, moved what may be essentially a peripheral situation to the core of our policy considerations?”
He contended that South Vietnam was peripheral to U.S. interests because it offered no great economic or commercial advantages, and any policy requiring the commitment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Asian mainland, where U.S. naval and air superiority was less effective, was clearly irrational. Given this, he urged Kennedy to consider “the point at which the cost in men and money to the United States of essentially unilateral action to achieve the objective outweighs any possible advantage which it might provide to the security and welfare of this nation,” and to declare that although the United States was concerned with the freedom of Vietnam, “in the absence of responsive indigenous leadership or adequate international cooperation . . . the essential interests of the United States do not compel this nation to become unilaterally engaged in any nation in Southeast Asia.” He also recommended toning down the rhetoric, stressing the relatively limited importance of the area in terms of specific U.S. interests, referring the problem to the United Nations, and considering “withdrawing abruptly and in a matter-of-fact fashion a percentage—say, 10 percent—of the military advisors which we have in Vietnam, as a symbolic gesture.”
Hours after Kennedy read Mansfield’s memorandum, South Vietnamese police and Special Forces units trained by U.S. advisers invaded Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam. They vandalized shrines, and arrested and beat more than a thousand priests and nuns, killing an unspecified number. Diem declared martial law, imposed a curfew, and cut phone lines to the U.S. embassy. The crackdown violated his promise to Ambassador Nolting not to take any further repressive measures against the Buddhists, and was a calculated insult to the United States, timed to occur between Nolting’s departure and Lodge’s arrival.
At 4:00 p.m., before knowing the full extent of what was happening, Kennedy took the stage at the State Department auditorium for his sixtieth live televised press conference. The conferences played to his strengths. He looked younger in black and white, had a quick wit, a good memory for facts and statistics, and was a superb extemporaneous speaker. Like his debates with Richard Nixon, they were unequal contests in which he came off as more intelligent, charming, confident, better-looking, better-dressed, and more amusing and thoughtful than his opponents—in this instance, the White House press corps. He held one about every sixteen days, calling them when Salinger warned that reporters were getting restless, or when he wanted to pressure Congress into passing a piece of legislation. The main purpose of his August 20 press conference was to scold House members for making draconian cuts to his foreign aid bill. It was a typical Kennedy performance: fluent responses that read as well as they sounded, and an impressive marshaling of facts and logic leavened by humor. When asked if he was “seeking a man with a business background or a political background” to serve as his next postmaster general, he drew laughs by replying, “There are other fields that are still to be considered, including even a postal background.” There was more laughter when he answered a question about Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, his probable opponent in 1964, becoming a captive of the radical right by saying, “I don’t know who has captured who.”
Sometimes his cool-cat façade fell away and he turned testy, reflective, or passionate, offering a glimpse of his deeply forested interior. This happened on August 20—after calling his foreign aid bill “essential to the continued strength of the free world,” and insisting that with unemployment at 5.6 percent “the state of the economy is good,” and replying to a question on whether black Americans deserved “special dispensation” for having suffered years of second-class citizenship by saying we should “make sure we are giving everyone a fair chance, but not [through] hard and fast quotas”—when, after delivering these replies in a calm and reasoned manner, he was asked to comment on Dr. Edwin Teller’s testimony on the test ban treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Teller had called the treaty a “tragic mistake” that would weaken American defenses and invite a Soviet attack. When Fulbright reported to Kennedy that Teller had impressed some members of the committee, the president had replied, “There’s no doubt that any man with complete conviction, particularly who’s an expert, is bound to shake anybody who’s got an open mind. That’s the advantage of having a closed mind.”
When Kennedy was asked at his press conference to rebut Teller’s charges, his voice hardened and he said, “I understand Dr. Teller is opposed to it. Every day he is opposed to it. I recognize he is going to continue being opposed to it.” He reminded reporters that the United States had needed only a single test to develop the first atom bomb, and now its bombs were “many, many, many times stronger than the weapon that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Pounding on the podium, he asked, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy? . . . What we now have on hand, without any further testing, will kill three hundred million people in one hour,” adding sarcastically, “I suppose they could even improve on that if it’s necessary.”