WASHINGTON
During a meeting on Monday, the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, presented Kennedy with a letter from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev representing the latest installment in the secret correspondence between them that had led to the test ban treaty and an agreement to install a “hotline” between Washington and Moscow that would begin functioning on August 30 and transmit its first operational message on November 22.
They had started exchanging letters after the Cuban missile crisis made them the first men in history forced to make decisions that could lead to the instant death of millions of human beings. Kennedy had initiated the correspondence by writing to Khrushchev on October 28, 1962, a day after the most perilous moment in the crisis, “I think we should give priority to questions relating to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, on earth and in outer space, and to the great effort for a nuclear test ban.” When Norman Cousins, who served as an intermediary between them during the spring of 1963, met with Kennedy before leaving for Moscow in April, Kennedy predicted that Khrushchev would say that he wanted to reduce tensions but could see no reciprocal interest in Washington. “It is important that he be corrected on this score,” he said. “I’m not sure Khrushchev knows this, but I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.”
Cousins would make several observations about Khrushchev that also applied to Kennedy, among them his description of the Soviet leader as “a lonesome figure who gave the impression of being gregarious,” and a man who “never attempted to conceal his peasant background” yet “didn’t hesitate to wear expensive silk shirts and gold cufflinks.” Their correspondence also shows them sharing concerns about the health risks of nuclear fallout and proliferation, and understanding that the other faced similar pressures from hard-liners within his own government and military. Kennedy referred to this in his April 11, 1963, letter to Khrushchev, writing, “In closing, I want again to send my warm personal wishes to you and your family. These are difficult and dangerous times in which we live, and both you and I have grave responsibilities to our families and to all of mankind. The pressures from those who have a less patient and peaceful outlook are very great—but I assure you of my own determination to work to strengthen world peace.” Two weeks later, Kennedy told Cousins, who was briefing him on his conversations with Khrushchev, “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and in the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.”
Kennedy had witnessed this when Khrushchev sent him two contradictory communications on successive days during the Cuban crisis. The first was a conciliatory letter, the second a brusque ultimatum. The former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson advised him that Khrushchev might have sent the second message to placate hard-liners and recommended ignoring it and responding to the first message.
The crisis afforded Khrushchev a similar understanding of the pressures on Kennedy. He wrote in his 1970 memoirs that during a secret meeting between Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Dobrynin, Robert Kennedy had said, “The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba.” Considering this, he said, the president “implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer.” He also warned that although the president was “very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”
The American editor of Khrushchev’s memoirs wrote in a footnote, “Obviously, this is Khrushchev’s own version of what was reported to him. There is no evidence that the President was acting out of fear of a military take-over.” Dobrynin gave an account of his conversation with Robert Kennedy in his memoirs that was based on a report he had written in 1962 that supported Khrushchev’s version. He wrote that during his pivotal late-night meeting with Robert Kennedy on Saturday, October 27, the president’s brother “remarked almost in passing that a lot of unreasonable people among American generals—and not only generals—were ‘spoiling for a fight.’”
It is possible that Bobby told Dobrynin that his brother feared a military coup, hoping to frighten the Soviets into removing their missiles from Cuba. But what is certain is that by the fall of 1962 the president not only believed a coup was possible, but had repeatedly discussed its likelihood. That fall, Harper and Row published Seven Days in May, a thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles V. Bailey II about a coup against a U.S. president instigated by his decision to sign a controversial nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union. Knebel got the idea from an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay shortly after the Bay of Pigs. LeMay was still furious with Kennedy for refusing to provide air support for the Cuban rebels, and after going off the record he accused him of cowardice. Knebel also found inspiration in a 1962 conversation with Secretary of the Navy John Connally. With LeMay’s remarks fresh in his mind, Knebel had turned the conversation to the military’s unhappiness with the president. Connally acknowledged that some of his admirals disliked taking orders from the New Frontiersman, and felt they could not express themselves politically. Later in the conversation, Connally mused that the atomic bomb had created conditions in which “the U.S. might unwittingly be laying the groundwork for a military dictatorship.”
On March 13, 1962, six months before the publication of Knebel’s book, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent Secretary of Defense McNamara a top-secret memorandum proposing Operation Northwoods, a program of clandestine actions designed to provide what the chiefs called “adequate justification” for the United States to invade Cuba. It resembled the incursions by German troops dressed in Polish uniforms that Hitler used as a pretext for invading Poland. The chiefs recommended a “logical build-up of incidents” that would “camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility of a large scale,” and “place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba.” To accomplish this, they suggested “well-coordinated incidents” at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in the airspace over Cuba, and on the U.S. mainland. At Guantánamo, anti-Castro Cubans dressed in Cuban Army uniforms would be “captured” by U.S. forces after pretending to attack the base. “Blow up ammunition inside the base,” the Northwoods memorandum recommended. “Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage). . . . Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. . . . Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock victims.” The chiefs also proposed what they called a “Remember the Maine” incident that involved blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay or destroying an unmanned drone vessel in waters off Havana, and blaming Castro. “The U.S. could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation . . . to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew,” they suggested. “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” The memorandum’s most disturbing paragraph began, “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which might entail “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.” It continued, “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”
After receiving a summary of the memorandum, Kennedy told Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer that he could not imagine a set of events “that would justify and make desirable the use of American Forces for overt military action” against Castro’s Cuba. Three months later, he transferred him to Europe to serve as supreme allied commander of NATO, replacing him with Maxwell Taylor. Kennedy was too smart, and too suspicious of the brass, not to recall Operation Northwoods when he read Seven Days in May in galleys a few months later, and not to reason that if the chiefs were prepared to recommend deceptive, violent, and illegal actions on the U.S. mainland that risked harming civilians, it was not preposterous to imagine them cooking up a similar scheme to justify overthrowing a president whose policies they viewed as threatening national security. After finishing the book, he told Laura Bergquist that he had been pondering the possibility of a military coup, and then named some generals at the Pentagon whom he thought “might hanker to duplicate fiction.”
During a discussion of Seven Days in May, Fay asked Kennedy if he really believed a coup was possible. He said it was, and believed it would require three confrontations between a president and the military similar to the one between himself and the Joint Chiefs during the Bay of Pigs. “The conditions would have to be just right,” he said. “If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be certain uneasiness, and maybe the military would criticize him behind his back [as LeMay had done during the Knebel interview] but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there was another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced.’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”
This second Bay of Pigs scenario bore a resemblance to how some of the chiefs would react several months after his conversation with Fay, when he rejected their recommendation to bomb Soviet missile sites in Cuba and instead imposed a naval blockade. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room during the crisis, LeMay told him, “I just don’t see any other solution except military intervention right now,” and condemned a blockade as “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” A few minutes later, LeMay said bluntly, “I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
“What did you say?” Kennedy asked, forcing LeMay to repeat himself.
“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
“You’re in there with me.” After a pause, he added, “Personally.”
“Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?” he asked O’Donnell afterward. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
LeMay’s comment bordered on insubordination and may have contributed to Bobby’s remark to Dobrynin that “the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” LeMay would call the peaceful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis “the greatest defeat in our history.” If he really believed that, why not consider extralegal means to remove the man responsible?
After the crisis ended, Kennedy told Schlesinger, “The military are mad. They wanted to do this [invade Cuba]. It’s lucky for us that we have Mac [Robert McNamara] over there.” He told Bradlee, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.” A year later McNamara informed Kennedy that according to Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson had been “absolutely insubordinate” during the missile crisis and had “consciously acted contrary to the President’s instructions.” Kennedy asked what Rickover had meant by this. McNamara answered, “Rickover said enough to let me know that Anderson was objecting to the instructions that you and I were giving relating to the quarantine and the limiting of action in relation to stopping the Russian ships.” Kennedy asked if this meant Anderson wanted to sink a ship. “That’s right,” McNamara said.
The actor Kirk Douglas was serving himself in a buffet dinner line in the White House in January 1963 when Kennedy came up behind him and asked, “Do you intend to make a movie out of Seven Days in May?” Douglas confirmed that he was producing and starring in a film version of the book being directed by John Frankenheimer. Kennedy said, “Good!” and as their meals cooled spent twenty minutes explaining why Knebel’s book would make a great movie.
Pierre Salinger told Frankenheimer that the president wanted the film made “as a warning to the Republic.” Schlesinger thought he hoped it would “raise the consciousness about the problems involved if the generals got out of control,” and might also serve “as a warning to the generals.” After the Defense Department denied Frankenheimer permission to film at the Pentagon, Kennedy took a long weekend in Hyannis Port so the director could shoot crowd scenes outside the White House.
Kennedy concluded his 1962 conversation with Fay about a Seven Days in May–style coup by saying flatly, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it [a coup] could happen.” He paused to emphasize the significance of his comment before concluding with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”
By August 1963, some opponents of the test ban treaty were calling it a betrayal of America’s strategic interests. An ad hoc organization calling itself the Committee Against the Treaty of Moscow ran a full-page advertisement in U.S. newspapers that quoted General LeMay as saying that he would have opposed the treaty had it not been signed in Moscow before he learned about it. The advertisement also repeated Edwin Teller’s warning to senators that by ratifying the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country.” Referring to the forthcoming ratification vote, it declared, “In September 1963, we shall be asked to repeat the reckless venture in appeasement that culminated in the ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement signed in Munich on September 30, 1938.”
A New Republic article in September titled “Rebellion in the Air Force?” began, “The Air Force’s ruling hierarchy is in open defiance of its Constitutional Commander-in-Chief, and in some ways the situation bears a growing resemblance to the fictional story line of last year’s best-seller Seven Days in May, the account of a nearly successful military coup by an Air Force general in protest against a nuclear arms treaty just concluded with the Russians.” The article’s author, Raymond Senter, reported that during its recent convention, the Air Force Association (AFA), an organization of retired and active-duty Air Force personnel, aerospace contractors, and lobbyists, had issued a blistering statement opposing the test ban treaty. Active-duty AFA members were prohibited from participating in drafting AFA statements, but Senter argued that the prohibition was meaningless since they seldom deviated from official Air Force views. Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert, usually a strong AFA supporter, condemned the AFA statement as “immoderate” and “alarmist,” and canceled his appearance at its convention.
The test ban treaty may have pushed the most extreme elements in the military-industrial complex to the brink of mutiny, but it was not—at least not yet—the “third Bay of Pigs” that Kennedy had mentioned to Fay. But there were two others on the horizon: Vietnam and Ellen Rometsch. Kennedy had told O’Donnell that he expected to be “damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser” when he removed U.S. advisers from South Vietnam, and the revelation that he had bedded a former member of the East German Communist Party months before negotiating the test ban treaty might have tempted his opponents in the military to circumvent a drawn-out impeachment process with an Operation Northwoods–style action.
Khrushchev had also run afoul of his military establishment in the months preceding the treaty. He had told a February 1963 meeting of the Soviet Defense Council, “The time has come when he who is successful in preventing war wins, not he who counts on military victory.” According to his son Sergei, his father followed this with “some absolutely unusual things—things that seemed to me not only seditious, but improbable as well.” These included a plan to stop increasing the Soviet nuclear arsenal because, as Khrushchev told Marshal Zakharov, who headed his general staff, “You plan hundreds of targets, but even a dozen missiles with thermonuclear warheads are enough to make the very thought of war senseless.” (At his August 20 news conference Kennedy had said, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy?”) Khrushchev also recommended scaling back the conventional army on the theory that if nuclear missiles had made war between the great powers senseless, it was equally senseless to spend money to maintain a large conventional army.
Khrushchev believed that more agreements like the test ban treaty might reduce cold war tensions to the point that a large standing army and growing nuclear arsenal might become unnecessary. This was the reasoning behind the letter that Dobrynin handed Kennedy at their August 26 meeting. As Dobrynin watched, Kennedy opened it and read, “Availing myself of the return of our Ambassador A. Dobrynin to Washington I would like to express some of my thoughts in connection with the state of things shaping up now after the Treaty on banning nuclear weapons has been signed in Moscow.” These “thoughts” were so similar to the points Kennedy had made in his nationally televised July 26 speech that Khrushchev could have been plagiarizing them.
On July 26, Kennedy had praised the treaty as “a shaft of light cut into the darkness” and the first agreement to seek control over “the forces of nuclear destruction,” and had said that although it did not “mean an end to the threat of nuclear war” it would “radically reduce the nuclear testing” that might otherwise occur. “This treaty is not the millennium,” he continued. “It will not resolve all conflicts . . . or eliminate the dangers of war. . . . But it is an important first step—a step towards peace—a step towards reason—a step away from war.” He stressed that although “no one can predict with certainty, therefore, what further agreements, if any, can be built on the foundations of this one. . . . The important point is that efforts to seek new agreements will go forward.” He warned against assuming that the new atmosphere between the United States and the Soviet Union would last forever, saying, “We have learned in times past that the spirit of one moment or place can be gone in the next.” After declaring, “for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open,” he evoked the Chinese proverb “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” and concluded, “My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us . . . step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took that first step.”
Khrushchev reiterated these points in his letter, writing that it was important to follow the treaty quickly with more agreements that would demonstrate to critics that its economic and political benefits outweighed any security risks. He called the treaty a “good beginning” and said it “strengthens the hopes of the peoples [of the world] for a further relaxation of tension, [and] gives a prospect of solution of other unsettled questions.” He agreed that “it is important now not to stop at what has been achieved but to make further steps from the good start taken by us” and urged that “there should be no slowing down the pace,” and that the problems separating them “should rather be solved now when a more calm and consequently more favorable atmosphere has been created.”
Dobrynin was a glib and charming man who had served in Washington and at the United Nations during the fifties. He spoke excellent English, so he and Kennedy conversed without interpreters. Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, the only other person in the room, took notes, and Kennedy secretly recorded the meeting. Thompson’s official memorandum is lengthy and detailed. It corresponds closely to the tape but omits some of Kennedy’s playful banter with Dobrynin, and several of the president’s statements that would have been deeply embarrassing had they become public. For example, speaking of the fierce attacks on the treaty during the Senate hearings, Kennedy had asked rhetorically, “What can I do with people like Teller or Senator Goldwater?” Like General de Gaulle, they were, he said, “impervious to reason and raised absurd arguments.”
He told Dobrynin that he hoped the treaty would lead to further agreements, and said that once the Senate ratified it he was prepared to discuss ways to prevent surprise attacks, a declaration prohibiting the introduction of weapons into outer space, and a civil aviation agreement, and would raise all this with Foreign Minister Gromyko when he visited the United States the next month. Kennedy assured Dobrynin that America would not allow West Germany to “carry us into an adventure which we would have to finish,” and, speaking of a possible escalation of tensions in Southeast Asia, said, “I wish one of us never got into Laos.” After Dobrynin confirmed that Khrushchev would soon be visiting Cuba, he said that when the chairman spoke there, he hoped he would remember how sensitive Cuba was in the United States, particularly for a president facing reelection.
Dobrynin pressed him to promise that there would be more agreements and “no slowing down the pace.” He countered that they would have to find “the right time” to sign a civil aviation agreement. Dobrynin pushed back, suggesting they sign it immediately and have it take effect later.
After bemoaning the cost of the space program, Kennedy suggested that the United States and Soviet Union consider coordinating their activities in outer space. Since neither was exploring space for military purposes, it was largely a matter of “scientific prestige,” he said, and even then, the prestige turned out to be fleeting “three-day wonders.” He proposed that they “come to some understanding as to what our space schedules might be.” That way, they might each save “a good deal of money.” He added, “If we’re both going to the moon, we ought to both go to the moon on some arrangement where we don’t use so many resources for something that is, in the final analysis, not that important.”
This was not the first time that Kennedy had proposed that the two nations cooperate in space, even to the point of mounting a joint moon expedition. During the campaign, he had told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that “certain aspects of the exploration of space might be handled by joint efforts, for the cost of space efforts will mount radically as we move ambitiously outward.” He had proclaimed in his inaugural address, “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars,” and had expanded on this in his 1961 State of the Union address, saying that although the United States was ahead in “the science and technology of space,” the Soviet Union led in the capacity to place large vehicles in orbit, and that both should consider “removing these endeavors from the bitter and wasteful competition of the Cold War.”
He had abandoned these noble sentiments after the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit on April 12, 1961. The flight by Yuri Gagarin was a Sputnik-like shock to American self-esteem, and within weeks Secretary of Defense McNamara and NASA’s administrator James Webb had given him a report recommending a program aimed at landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union. They argued, “Dramatic achievements in space . . . symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation.” Such achievements might be “economically unjustified,” but America should nevertheless decide to “pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige,” not least because the competition in space was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” Putting a man on the moon first would represent a decisive victory on this battlefront. With the memory of Gagarin’s triumph fresh, they told Kennedy, “The orbiting of machines is not the same as the orbiting or landing of a man. . . . It is a man, not merely machines, that captures the imagination of the world.”
After accepting the nomination Kennedy had promised Americans a “New Frontier,” of “unknown opportunities and perils” beyond which lay “the uncharted areas of science and space.” In his nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, he compared the space race to the exploits of explorers like Lewis and Clark, and declared, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind. . . . None will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
For a competitor like Kennedy, a race to the moon was the ultimate competition. For a man who loved the sea, space was “the new ocean,” and in September 1962 he told students at Rice University, “We set sail on this new sea because there is knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won and used for the progress for all people.” But he still harbored doubts about the cost and value of a lunar mission. Soon after announcing the program, he suggested a joint expedition to Khrushchev during their summit in Vienna. After initially dismissing the idea, Khrushchev returned to it later, saying, “All right—why not?” But when Kennedy raised it again, he insisted it could only follow a general disarmament.
He remained conflicted about a moon landing throughout 1961 and 1962. The romantic and visionary Kennedy liked its daring and challenge; the practical Kennedy fretted about its expense and wondered if it was simply a cold war stunt. At an August 1962 news conference he said that the United States remained behind the Soviet Union in long-range booster rockets but would soon surpass it. Achieving this, however, was requiring expenditure that he called “a very heavy burden upon us all.”
During a November 1962 meeting he and Webb argued about the relative importance of winning the race to the moon compared with NASA’s other projects. Webb believed that the lunar program was part of the goal of making America preeminent in space, calling it “one of the top-priority programs.”
“Jim, I think it is the top priority,” he said. “I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is going to happen. . . . But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time.” When Webb suggested linking the lunar program to a broader one of making the United States preeminent in space, Kennedy became exasperated, and said, “I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures that wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it . . . is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”
At his July 20, 1963, press conference a reporter asked about rumors that the Russians were abandoning the race to the moon, and wanted to know whether, if this proved to be correct, the United States would still continue its lunar program, or perhaps consider a joint moon mission. Kennedy replied that the United States should push on with its own program in light of “any evidence that they [the Soviets] are carrying out a major campaign,” and called a moon flight important not only for its own sake, but because it would demonstrate “the capacity to dominate space.” He was skeptical about the possibility of a joint flight, saying it would require “a breaking down of a good many barriers of suspicion and hostility.”
Either he was being less than candid or he had changed his mind by the time he and Dobrynin met a month later. When he announced the lunar program in 1961, it had seemed a necessary response to a series of Soviet space triumphs, but if the test ban treaty led to more agreements and a reduction of cold war tensions, then beating the Soviets to the moon suddenly seemed less important, and a joint moon program could both symbolize and further the emerging détente between the two nations. His willingness to dismiss the program as “not that important” also suggests that he trusted Dobrynin and Khrushchev to keep his comments confidential, and that he never intended the recordings of meetings like this one to become public, at least during his lifetime.
After the meeting ended, Kennedy asked Thompson for his impressions. Thompson said that Dobrynin, and by extension Khrushchev, “appeared to be looking for an agreement on almost anything.” Two days later, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times reported that “Soviet propaganda has shown unusual restraint toward the United States for the last two and a half months.” Articles about the U.S. racial situation had also suddenly disappeared from the Soviet press, and the Soviets had stopped jamming the Russian-language broadcasts of the Voice of America.
Minutes after reading Khrushchev’s letter and discussing initiatives to further his spirit of détente with the Soviet Union, Kennedy joined McNamara, Rusk, Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, Forrestal, Taylor, and others in the Cabinet Room to discuss whether a coup in Vietnam might harm or further U.S. interests. The meeting was among the most contentious of his presidency and involved him in a detailed discussion of the loyalties of individual South Vietnamese generals. It quickly became obvious that his advisers had only the vaguest notion of who these generals were. When McNamara asked who belonged to this “general officers group,” Hilsman replied that U.S. officials in Saigon had contacted only three, and that they had declined to name their colleagues.
Kennedy asked what forces they commanded, only to be told that they included staff officers who did not command any combat units and generals who were stationed in the countryside. The preponderance of military forces in Saigon would probably remain loyal to Diem.
Cable 243 had committed the United States to offering the generals “direct support.” McNamara wondered what this meant. Hilsman said it meant assistance that would not be channeled through Saigon. Marine Corps General Victor Krulak, the Joint Chiefs’ expert on counterinsurgency warfare, thought this might prove “extremely difficult.”
Kennedy asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Taylor to estimate the chances that the generals could mount a successful coup, taking into consideration his own experience at the Pentagon. Taylor replied tartly that in Washington they did not turn over the problem of changing a head of state to the military.
During this and four subsequent meetings held over the next three days, Kennedy persistently posed two questions: Was a coup likely to succeed? And could he call it off if he changed his mind?
When the Bay of Pigs invasion had been under consideration, the military and the CIA had argued that because the Eisenhower administration had signed off on the operation and the rebels had been trained, canceling it would be difficult and risky. Now he was being told the same thing about a possible coup in South Vietnam. His military and civilian advisers had unanimously approved the Bay of Pigs, but on August 26 they were sharply divided over the wisdom of encouraging a coup. McNamara, Taylor, and the CIA had serious reservations and believed that Lodge, Hilsman, Forrestal, and Harriman had stampeded him into approving the cable. Taylor would call it “an egregious ‘end run,’” writing, “The anti-Diem group centered in State had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions which would never have been approved as written under normal circumstances.”
There were two factions at these meetings: a State Department one consisting of Harriman, Hilsman, and Ball, joined by Forrestal of the National Security Council, who viewed Vietnam as a crucial cold war conflict that the United States could win only if Diem was deposed; and a Pentagon faction of McNamara, Taylor, and Krulak, who also viewed it as a critical conflict, but one that Diem was more likely to win than were the generals plotting against him. There was also a third, less obvious faction in the Cabinet Room that week, which doubted that Vietnam really was a crucial cold war battleground. It consisted of one person, the president. Forrestal had an inkling of this. He later observed that “we began to lose our Presidential support in the summer of 1963,” and that after the Buddhist crisis, the president was “beginning to resist his staffs’ insistence, and the State Department’s insistence, and the Defense Department’s insistence on increasing the effort,” and “beginning to dig in his heels.”