WASHINGTON AND CAPE COD
Kennedy spent the last week in August attempting to regain control of his administration’s Vietnam policy and to distance his administration from a coup that was sounding more and more like a potential second Bay of Pigs.
On Monday, he worried that David Halberstam’s negative articles about Diem were having an undue influence on administration policy. “When we move to eliminate a government,” he told his advisers, “we want to be sure we’re not doing it because the New York Times is excited about it.” He scolded Forrestal for the slipshod way he had cleared Cable 243. When Forrestal offered to resign, he turned on him and said, “You’re not worth firing. You owe me something, so you stick around.”
On Tuesday, he suggested asking Lodge and General Harkins, the commander of the U.S. military assistance program in Vietnam, “what they feel their prospects are for success and do they recommend continuing it [support for the coup] or do they recommend now waiting.” Minutes later, he worried about the consequences of rescinding his approval for the coup, asking, “Ah, do we cut our losses in such a way where we don’t endanger those who we’ve been in contact [with]?” He added bleakly, “The response that we’ve gotten on the coup at this point does not give us assurances that it’s going to be successful.”
The cables from Saigon were contradictory and confusing. On Wednesday, the CIA station chief reported that according to the chief plotter, a General Khiem, a committee of unnamed generals had decided to mount a coup within a week. The same day, Ambassador Lodge cabled, “As of now there are no signs, apart from Khiem’s receptiveness to initial approach, that these or any other generals are really prepared to act against the government.” Lodge continued to support a coup, cabling the next day that he believed its members were the “best group that could be assembled in terms of ability and orientation,” although “our knowledge of composition of coup group and their plans is derived from a single source.” He warned that “chances of success would be diminished by delay,” and said he was “concerned over possibility attempt by Nhu to preempt the coup by arresting its leaders.” The CIA station chief agreed, cabling, “Situation here has reached point of no return. . . . It is our considered estimate that General officers cannot retreat now.”
At the Wednesday meeting on Vietnam, Kennedy was even more pessimistic, musing aloud about calling off the generals. “I don’t think we ought to take the view that this has gone beyond our control,” he said, “’cause I think that would be the worst reason to do it.” When Bundy responded that both Lodge and Harkins favored the operation as currently planned, he said, “Well, I don’t see any reason to go ahead unless we think we have a good chance of success.”
The former ambassador to South Vietnam Richard Nolting was at the Wednesday meeting and argued that only Diem had “a reasonably good prospect of holding this fragmented, divided country together.” Harriman interjected, “Needless to say I don’t agree with this.” When Nolting attacked Cable 243 as improvident, Harriman yelled, “Shut up!”
At one point during the meeting Kennedy said, “This shit has got to stop!” and he told Bobby afterward, “My God! My government’s coming apart.”
Before attending Thursday’s Vietnam meeting, he received a cable from Lodge that began, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.” There was no turning back, he said, “because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end . . . and will become more so as facts leak out,” and because “there is no possibility . . . that the war can be won under a Diem administration.” After reminding Kennedy that this was the policy Cable 243 had instructed him to carry out, he recommended making an “all-out effort to get Generals to move promptly.” He explained that he had decided to ignore the instructions in an earlier cable directing him to ask Diem to rid himself of the Nhus before giving the generals his final approval, because the generals were already concerned about American indecision and delay.
Lodge’s vaguely insubordinate cable prompted Kennedy to shoot back a top-secret cable. Soon after arriving at Squaw Island on Thursday evening, he called McGeorge Bundy and dictated a cable flagged “Personal for the Ambassador from the President” and “No Department or other distribution whatever.” He told Lodge, “We will do all that we can to help you conclude the operation successfully. Nevertheless, there is one point on my own constitutional responsibilities as President and Commander in Chief which I wish to state to you in this entirely private message, which is not being circulated here beyond the Secretary of State.” With the Bay of Pigs obviously in mind, he continued, “Until the very moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals, I must reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions. While fully aware of your assessment of the consequences of such a reversal, I know from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision. I would, of course, accept full responsibility for any such change as I must bear also full responsibility for this operation and its consequences.” He added, “When we go, we must go to win, but it will be better to change our minds than fail. And if our national interest should require a change of mind, we must not be afraid of it.”
Had the nationally syndicated columnist George Dixon known about any of this he might not have written in his weekend column, one Kennedy must have read because it appeared in the Washington Post, “I wouldn’t be surprised if John Fitzgerald Kennedy looks back upon the week of Aug 25 to 31, 1963 as the most gratifying week of his life.” During these seven days, Dixon said, “a nuclear test ban treaty grew almost certain of passage, not a single incident marred the civil rights march,” and the president was “more popular than the day he took office.” He concluded, “No matter what reversals may be in store for him in the years ahead, the President can assuage his woes by looking back upon last week.”
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KENNEDY RETURNED FROM a cruise on the Honey Fitz on Friday afternoon to find that Lincoln had left a message on his bed reporting that a federal judge had just sentenced James Landis to thirty days in jail for tax fraud, a reminder that his own deal with Dirksen had spared Sherman Adams from a similar fate.
He was having second thoughts about Jackie’s cruise, perhaps because he had been aboard the Christina and could imagine how the press would play up the First Lady’s presence on a ship boasting a liveried crew, gold-plated faucets, El Greco paintings, and bar stools upholstered with the skin of whale testicles—the kind of vulgar wealth-flaunting he had been raised to disdain. On Labor Day she proposed bringing Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and his wife as chaperones. He gave in, calling Roosevelt at his farm in upstate New York and telling him, “Lee wants Jackie to be her beard [to disguise her affair with Onassis]. You are the only one she has agreed to have come along.” The Roosevelts understood their role. “I don’t think Jack wanted Jackie to go,” Susan Roosevelt said later. “I think he was appalled by it, so he arranged for us to make it look less like the jet set.”
He had reinjured his back by stepping into a hole on the Hyannis Golf Course at the beginning of August and aggravated it by playing more golf two weeks later. X-rays were taken, diagrams drawn, hot packs prescribed, bandages wound around his back and groin, and a misleading story concocted for the press to explain why he appeared to be limping. “I don’t want to read anything in the papers about my groin,” he told Salinger. “We can attribute it all to the back. . . . I don’t want the American public thinking that their president is falling apart: ‘Now he’s got a bad back, now his groin is going.’”
Dr. Kraus was on a climbing holiday in Italy so his associate, Dr. Willibrand Nagler, examined Kennedy on August 22 and 27. He diagnosed a muscle sprain, recommended continuing with the hot packs and bandages, and told him to avoid walking or climbing stairs. When the pain persisted, Kennedy insisted on seeing Kraus in person. Kraus and the famed mountaineer Gino Solda had just climbed Cima Kennedy, a mountain in the Dolomites that Solda had arranged to have named for Kennedy despite the custom of naming alpine peaks posthumously. Burkley called Kraus in the middle of the night and said that an Air Force jet was being sent to fly him to Cape Cod.
Kraus arrived on August 31, examined Kennedy, and confirmed Nagler’s diagnosis, a strain of the hip flexor muscle, and not a very serious one. He advised him to continue the hot packs and bandages for two or three days, and then resume exercising. Kennedy pretended not to know that Kraus had cut his holiday short, although it is unlikely that Nagler and Burkley would not have told him that Kraus was abroad. The next day he telegrammed Kraus, “I have just learned that you cut your vacation to come up here. I am extremely sorry that this was permitted although I am grateful to you for your kindness in coming.” It was a gracious gesture, but it might have been more gracious to have borne the pain a few days longer.
Sometime that weekend, most likely on Saturday, Clifton handed Kennedy a sealed envelope from Bundy containing Lodge’s reply to his eyes-only cable as well as a copy of the initial cable. Bundy had instructed Clifton in an accompanying memorandum that “the enclosed envelope should be opened by the President only, and when he has read the messages it contains you should destroy them. The reason for this extraordinary procedure is that these messages are not in the normal series and their existence is not known except to the President and to the Secretary of State, so I do not want them in a message file that may be seen by others who believe themselves privy to most classified material.”
Lodge’s reply was curt and to the point: “1. I fully understand that you have the right and responsibility to change course at any time. Of course I will always respect that right. 2. To be successful, this operation must essentially be a Vietnamese affair with a momentum of its own. Should this happen you may not be able to control it, i.e. the ‘go signal’ may be given by the Generals.” In other words, it was too late to for the president to countermand Cable 243. He could order Lodge around, but he could control neither the Vietnamese officers nor the timing or success of their coup. It was the reply he deserved. He had appointed Lodge for frivolous and political reasons, cavalierly told him that he would leave the planning of a coup in his hands, and approved Cable 243, ignoring the lessons of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. The only good news was that leaks to the press and mixed signals from the embassy in Saigon had so unsettled the generals that they had suspended their plotting.