During their last private meeting, held at Kennedy’s request, the President desperately tried to dissuade him from so rash a step. Khrushchev bluntly refused. “I want peace,” he said, “but if you want war that is your problem.” His treaty decision was irreversible. He would sign it in December. As they parted Kennedy said, “It will be a cold winter.”3
To Reston Kennedy said: “I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it. I think the first part is pretty easy to explain. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into a mess like that could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”
Khrushchev’s credibility would be watched, too, and he knew it. Returning to Moscow, he ordered publication of the two aides-mémoire he had handed the President on nuclear testing and Berlin. Sharp eyes in the State Department saw that here there was no time limit attached to the Berlin demands, but it hardly mattered now. The whole world knew of the Russian ultimatum. Since then Khrushchev had increased the Soviet military budget by 3.144 billion rubles and had delivered a series of chauvinistic speeches.
Kennedy escalated with him. On June 25 he made a telecast report to the American people. “If war breaks out,” he said, “it will have been started in Moscow and not in Berlin…. Only the Soviet government can use the Berlin frontier as a pretext for war.” He asked Congress to approve authorization of $3,247,000,000 for the Pentagon, calling up reserves, tripling draft calls, raising the ceiling for combat troops, and reconditioning planes and ships which were in mothballs. Dean Acheson wanted him to declare a state of emergency, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson agreed. Kennedy preferred to leave the door open to negotiations. He hesitated to make an atomic bluff because it might be called. His chief fear, he told an editor of the New York Post, was that the Chairman “wants to rub my nose in the dirt,” in which case “it’s all over.”
Pressure built up for both leaders. To reassure Germans in the old capital that they would not be abandoned, Kennedy sent his Vice President there with General Clay, the hero of the airlift. Khrushchev warned the world that the USSR could now create a bomb with an explosive power equal to 100 million tons of TNT and had rockets capable of delivering it. As though to prove his point, a Soviet astronaut had already been launched into orbit. Tension rose in the United States. Kennedy urged Americans to build bomb shelters. Meanwhile Berlin was in an uproar. During July, 30,444 refugees flowed into the western part of the city. In the first ten days of August another 16,500 crossed. On the twelfth alone 4,000 were counted, among them a high proportion of physicians, technicians, and skilled workers—the very people necessary for the Five-Year Program of the First Secretary of East Germany’s Communist party, Walter Ulbricht.
At a half-hour past midnight on August 13, sirens screamed down the dark and deserted streets as squat tanks—T-34s and T-54s—led East German military convoys to the twenty-five-mile border that separated the western part of the city from the east. Trucks of steel-helmeted Vopos, East Berlin policemen, took up positions in the major intersections. Troops unloaded wooden horses, concertinas of barbed wire, concrete posts, stone blocks, and picks and shovels. Four hours later, at sunrise, the beginning of a wall was visible. Four days later it was complete, imprisoning the Germans who remained in East Berlin.
The western powers had been caught off balance. Kennedy was away from Washington. It took the State Department four days to deliver a formal protest in Moscow. Then, on September 1, Khrushchev gave the screw another turn. U.S. seismographs recorded unmistakable evidence that the Russians had resumed testing. Kennedy and Macmillan appealed to the Chairman to stop, citing the extent and toxicity of the new fallout. Khrushchev ignored them. Detection devices picked up a second test, and a third. Over the next month the Soviets detonated thirty major devices, nearly all of them in the atmosphere. At the end of the series the Russians had become responsible for more radioactive poison in the air than the Americans, the British, and the French combined. In a speech before the Communist Twenty-second Congress the Chairman announced the imminent explosion of a 50-megaton bomb—2,500 times as large as the one which had been dropped on Hiroshima and five times the size of all high explosives used in all the wars in history. He drew laughter from the delegates at the next session when he told them that the resulting blast “proved somewhat bigger than the 50 megatons that the scientists had calculated,” but that they would not be punished for the “mistake.”
Kennedy decided that if this constituted Khrushchev’s only answer to western proposals for an atmospheric test ban, he had to authorize a resumption of U.S. tests, though he approved only those underground, which had no fallout. In view of the acts of the Soviet government, he said, “we must now take those steps which prudent men find essential.” It was now September 8, the peak of the crisis. The wall was complete, a corral of brick and jagged cement cutting through the heart of Berlin. Since August 22 all but one of the crossing points had been closed to the Allies, and there the Vopos insisted upon inspecting soldiers’ papers. Any approach to the border closer than 100 meters (110 yards) was prohibited. Next notes to Paris, Bonn, and Washington formally demanded that West German leaders be forbidden to enter Berlin by plane. At that, the West stiffened. On September 8 Khrushchev’s insistence that West German flights into Berlin should be controlled was curtly rejected. Ten days later, when Kennedy was about to leave Hyannisport to return to Washington, he was handed a grim note. Dag Hammarskjöld had been killed in a Congolese plane crash which has never been clearly explained. War had not seemed so close since V-J Day.
Two weeks later Khrushchev began to back away from the brink. To the Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak, who was visiting Moscow, he said, “I realize that contrary to what I had hoped the western powers will not sign the peace treaty…. I’m not trying to put you in an impossible situation; I know very well that you can’t let yourself be stepped on.” The bone in the throat wasn’t intolerable, after all. “You know,” he continued to the Belgian, “Berlin is not such a big problem for me. What are two million people among a billion Communists!” Nor was there any hurry now. He had given Kennedy an ultimatum—“by the end of the year”—but to Spaak he said, “I’m not bound by any deadline.” Having built his wall, he now appeared to be trying to wring concessions from the West which would allow him to save face. He made several gestures intended to ease tensions, including generous comments about Kennedy’s maturity and evident wisdom. When there was no response to them, he threw in his hand anyhow. Speaking once more to the Communist Party Congress, he declared on October 17, “The western powers are showing some understanding of the situation and are inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the issue of West Berlin.” He concluded, “If that is so, we shall not insist on signing a peace treaty absolutely before December 31, 1961.”
With that, the confrontation ended. It seemed to be a victory for the Americans. Later the real price paid began to emerge. Given the attitude of Moscow, the Berlin question, and the resumption of nuclear testing, Schlesinger would write, “the President unquestionably felt that an American retreat in Asia might upset the whole world balance.” Kennedy believed that there he must provide his adversaries with additional proof of fearlessness and backbone. To James Reston he observed that the only place where Communists were challenging the West in a shooting war was in Indochina, so “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”
This was a cheerless time for Lyndon Johnson. The year before, he had been the mighty majority leader of the U.S. Senate, and now, as Vice President, he occupied the emptiest, most exasperating position in the government. Every day Jo
hnson’s relative insignificance was driven home to him in countless ways. He was allowed only one parking place at the White House, and just one White House phone extension. (Attorney General Robert Kennedy had three.) His wife had never seen the inside of the presidential aircraft. He himself had been aboard, though not by invitation. Three times Kennedy aides had found him poking around its cabins alone. Inasmuch as they had been there because the President was about to use the plane, they had been obliged to ask him to leave. Each encounter should have been daunting, but he kept returning, fascinated, it seemed, by the symbols of real power.
Kennedy men treated Johnson people as outsiders. With the exception of Walter Jenkins, members of the vice-presidential staff were total strangers to the glamorous presidential advisers. Several lacked credentials to enter the White House and had seen it only as tourists. The obscurity even enveloped Secret Service agents assigned to the Johnson detail. Officially they were full equals of the men who guarded the President. In practice they were ostracized by the White House detail—excluded from their cars, their offices, their social functions. Most of them were philosophical about it. They knew there was nothing personal about the snubs. They had been banished by the elite because the man they were guarding was—there is no other word for it—unimportant.
Kennedy was largely unaware of this. Like most Presidents he kept the man next in line at arm’s length. The occupants of America’s first and second elective offices have never been congenial, for reasons rooted in historical precedent and, perhaps, in human nature. Some Vice Presidents who have been close to their chief executives in earlier years have been hurt to find friendship replaced by icy aloofness. They forget that to a President a Vice President is a daily reminder of his own mortality. He is more. Though individuals may contemplate the grave serenely, they are not constantly shadowed by understudies. Those who expect Presidents to provide Vice Presidents with detailed briefings rarely weigh the implications of it. To grasp it, one must understand the meaning of the Presidency, the legacy the second man stands to inherit. The head of a family may make out his will without flinching, but he would blanch if told that the man next door would, in the event of his death, become father to his children and husband to his wife.
Beyond this institutional difficulty lies another. It is a fact of political life that presidential campaign tickets are “balanced” by pairing two candidates from different parts of the country who appeal to different constituencies and whose make-ups may be antithetical. The husband, in short, must choose as his possible replacement a man who doesn’t look like him, dress like him, talk like him, or share his values. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman bore only the faintest resemblance to one another. The same was true of Eisenhower and Nixon, and of Kennedy and Johnson. To Kennedy, Johnson was a marvelous and often comical prodigy. His self-aggrandizement was shameless and exuberant; on trips abroad he would telephone his Washington office daily for reports on how his activities were being played in the American press. He was always campaigning—“My God!” gasped an American doctor in Pakistan. “He’s shaking hands with a leper!”—and his decision to transform a Karachi camel driver into an ambassador of good will delighted the country. “We have come to see you and your camel,” he told the astonished Bashir Ahmed. “Our President wants to see your camel. He has plans to make things better for you.” He had no such thing, and the stunt seemed certain to backfire. Yet in the end it didn’t. Ahmed’s trip to the United States was an enormous success. Kennedy was impressed. “If it had been me,” he said, “I’d have wound up with camel shit on the White House lawn.”
Knowing how unhappy the Vice President was, the President went out of his way to honor Johnson and invent missions abroad for him. Later some of them became important. It is ironic that the two which appealed to him the least in advance loom largest in retrospect. The first was to Berlin. He was glum before it, but he spoke well there and was on hand to greet the first U.S. reinforcements to enter the city. His hosts believed that his visit was a turning point for the beleaguered city, and he returned home deeply affected.
The other trip, that May, was to Saigon. In the end it was of even greater significance, although that wasn’t apparent then. The journey was a tour of southern Asia. The Vice President was expected to bolster the confidence of non-Communist regimes. He was not, as he had been in Berlin, a symbol of America’s resolve to fight alongside them. At that time U.S. commitments there had not gone that far. Nevertheless, his pledge to Saigon was very strong. Greatly taken with Ngo Dinh Diem, he publicly hailed him as “the Winston Churchill of south Asia.” After the party had left Vietnam, Stan Karnow, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, asked him whether he really believed that. “Shit, man,” the Vice President replied, “he’s the only boy we got out here.”
The Winston Churchill of south Asia was a dark, stubby, chain-smoking bachelor whose most striking trait was his seeming inability to end a conversation. Survivors would emerge from his big yellow stucco Freedom Palace after nonstop Diem monologues that were said to last six, seven, even twelve hours. But he didn’t have many other weaknesses. At sixty he was decisive, dedicated, and firm in purpose. Diem was an archetype of the strong man in power. His title was president, yet he didn’t think much of democracy. He was more of an Oriental despot, or at any rate an aloof mandarin who firmly believed that it was the duty of his people to respect and to obey him. His rivals were sent to concentration camps. Under him there was no freedom of the press and no real reform. Army officers were political appointees, chosen for their loyalty, not their ability, and though Diem himself was honest, the halls of his palace swarmed with the corrupt and the ambitious. Rigid and inflexible, he seemed to feel that Roman Catholics should be privileged for no other reason than that he himself was a Catholic. To an astonishing degree, his responsibilities were undelegated—company commanders couldn’t move their men without his permission, and until late in his regime, no passport was valid unless it bore the signature of Diem himself. With each passing month he held the reins of authority more tightly, consulting only a few trusted aides and the members of his family, particularly an aggressive brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s lovely, venomous wife, known to American foreign correspondents as “the Dragon Lady.” “If we open the window,” Madame Nhu once said, explaining the Ngo philosophy of government, “not only sunlight but many bad things will fly in.”
Little went in and not much came out. This was especially true of information. The lack of hard facts explains one of the two great mysteries about the Vietnam War: why it became a graveyard for the reputations of experts from the West. Rarely in history have so many eminent men been so singularly wrong about such an important event. Right down to October 1972, when Henry Kissinger fell flat on his face by prematurely announcing a settlement of it, soldiers and statesmen misjudged the character of the war and its probable course. On April 6, 1954, a New England senator had diverted his colleagues by reciting some earlier appraisals of it: “the military situation appears to be developing favorably” (Dean Acheson, 1952), “In Indochina we believe the tide now is turning” (Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson, 1953), a French victory “is both possible and probable” (Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, 1954), and “the French are going to win” (Admiral Radford, 1954). The French lost, having sacrificed 19,000 Frenchmen in seven years.4 That would seem to have vindicated the skeptical New England senator, who was John F. Kennedy. Then Kennedy, too, became trapped. In the White House his policy toward Vietnam came to be based on such Lewis Carroll appraisals as a 1960 Senate committee report which predicted that “on the basis of the assurances of the head of the military aid mission in Vietnam… the U.S. military… can be phased out of Vietnam in the forseeable future,” and early in 1961 President Kennedy approved an aid plan based on the assumption that the war would be won in eighteen months.
The second Vietnam mystery is why Americans of so many persuasions, including four Presidents, two Republican an
d two Democratic, felt obliged to rescue the Saigon government. The country was, after all, in Asia, over seven thousand miles away, a primitive land of rice paddies and dense jungle curled around the remote Indochinese peninsula. Yet for over a decade administrations in Washington battled desperately to keep questionable men in power in there, even at the risk of domestic tranquillity at home. The American effort in Vietnam was ill-starred from the outset. Kennedy should have seen that. He was one of the few who had diagnosed the trouble in the beginning. As a congressman, he had toured Vietnam in 1951. “Without the support of the native population,” he had said on Meet the Press on his return, “there is no hope of success in any of the countries of Southeast Asia.” Later he, too, fell under the spell of cold war rhetoric. America had “lost” China, cold-warriors held; now it must not “lose” Indochina.
The original American commitment to Saigon had been made in 1954 and renewed in 1957. In a letter to Diem after the Geneva agreements had been signed, President Eisenhower pledged U.S. support “to assist the Government of Viet-Nam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting subversion or aggression through military means.” Ike made this agreement with the understanding that it would be accompanied “by performance on the part of Viet-Nam in undertaking needed reforms.” The purpose of his assurance was to “discourage any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 137