Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  On April 16, 1961, following through on Kennedy’s promises of decisive action against Cuba, Kennedy and Allen Dulles authorized the landing of 1,500 armed and trained Cuban refugees at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. They achieved surprise but lost some of their force on uncharted coral reefs. There was some air support, mainly from B-26s, which were no match for the faster aircraft Castro had. Castro also had an army of 25,000, the core of it his loyalists who had driven Batista out. The Cuban government counter-attacked forcefully on April 17 and a somewhat disorganized retreat began. It was over on April 19; 118 of the 1,500 invaders were dead and about 1,200 captured. The Cubans had suffered several thousand dead, but it was a stinging humiliation for the United States. Kennedy took responsibility publicly, and privately felt he had been completely misled by the CIA with predictions of a popular rising such as one would achieve just putting a match to a tinderbox. Allen Dulles replied that he assumed that the administration would prevent a defeat by the insertion of forces if necessary, as Eisenhower had done with Arbenz in Guatemala. They both were out of their minds to imagine anything could be achieved with such a trivial force. Sputnik, the U-2, and the cancellation of the Japan trip had been embarrassments for Eisenhower, but this was an absolute debacle that set Khrushchev crowing from the rooftops of the world, of righteousness, invincibility, and triumphant predestination. Kennedy returned to the drawing board.

  He traveled to Paris in May and had a very satisfactory meeting with Charles de Gaulle, who found him open-minded, well-informed, very courteous, and accompanied by an excessively gracious, attractive wife quite proficient in French. Kennedy was on his way to meet with Khrushchev at Vienna, on June 4, and de Gaulle warned him that Khrushchev would be extremely bombastic and abrasive and that he should simply ignore that and be firm. The Vienna meeting was not a success. The stylish American president was slightly nonplussed by the obese, demonstrative, boisterous Russian. Khrushchev was pushing his plan for a separate peace with East Germany and the withdrawal of all the occupying powers from Berlin, and preferably Germany, under conditions of German disarmament. The problem came down to what it had been for over 15 years: the Russians, having made the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler that started the World War II, found the Nazis at their throats less than two years later, had to endure most of the human and physical cost in subduing Hitler, but at the end of it found themselves facing a rearming Germany, fully backed by the British and the Americans, and by a swiftly rising France in the hands of a leader who had completely outmaneuvered the French Communist Party that Stalin had used to immobilize the country for decades, including during the German blitzkrieg of 1940. And about 3.5 million East Germans had reached the West through Berlin, and Khrushchev saw what the Soviets had managed to seize of Germany slipping away. He said: “Berlin is a bone in my throat.”

  Kennedy did not agree to anything imprudent at Vienna, and warned Khrushchev that any effort to strangle Berlin would lead to war. He and his entourage did feel that he had not replied at all adequately to Khrushchev’s belligerent provocations, and that Khrushchev would take away from the meeting a sense that Kennedy was weak and inexperienced. This he did, and his threats against West Berlin, where large numbers of people were defecting to the West every week, would now increase. Eisenhower had been the first American statesman to draw a possible connection between Cuba and Berlin, when he warned that Khrushchev might imagine he had the right to deploy missiles to Cuba, as the U.S. had to Greece and Turkey Both areas, Berlin and Cuba, increasingly became strategic sore points through 1961.

  Kennedy came back strongly and in a speech in July announced a $3.25 billion increase in the defense budget, including the retention of 200,000 more draftees. He was explicit, as he had been with Khrushchev in Vienna, that an attack on West Berlin would be considered an attack on the United States and would be an act of war. The speech was well-crafted and well-delivered, and all polls showed that it was endorsed by 85 percent of Americans. The following month, the Soviets began cordoning off East Berlin with barbed wire, as people in unprecedented numbers fled westward. To reassure West Berliners of America’s commitment to that city, Kennedy sent Vice President Johnson and others by land through the checkpoints to East Berlin. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev began the construction of the Berlin Wall, as he stopped the subway traffic between the two halves of the city. There were no legal grounds for tearing the wall down, and while all the Western Allies supported the preservation of West Berlin, they were not prepared to go to what would almost surely be a nuclear war to assure the ability of Germans to move freely between the sections of their country that were demarcated by the victorious Allies at the end of a terrible war unleashed by the Germans. A complete impasse was avoided, as the West did not try to demolish the wall and Khrushchev did not interdict traffic between West Germany and West Berlin.

  6. VIETNAM AND THE CUBA–MISSILE CRISIS

  In the transitional briefings for the new administration, Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that Indochina was a serious and growing problem, and he described Laos as “the cork in the bottle,”190 by which he meant that the key was to stop the flow of communist forces and supplies down what was already known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam into Laos and on to South Vietnam. It became a very intricate set of many trails, some of them virtual full-scale highways, that delivered and supported the huge North Vietnamese commitment to the war in the South. Kennedy made a defining decision when in March 1961 he changed the American objective from a “free” to a “neutral” Laos. As the quasileader of the opposition, Richard Nixon, pointed out, this was just “communism on the installment plan.”191 And as the country’s two senior retired generals (Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur) separately warned, it would be impossible to win in the South if the flow of northern reinforcements and supplies through Laos could not be stopped.

  Kennedy did redefine the relationship with South Vietnam from “support” to a “partnership” and sent Vice President Johnson to Saigon in May 1961 to explain the level of American commitment to President Ngo Dinh Diem. There was a good deal of political and social assistance, and through much of 1961 and 1962 a lot of unutterable nonsense about fighting communism by building bridges and schools and clinics. All that mattered was who could occupy the land and control the population. The president steadily increased the number of “advisers,” which included some special forces and a fair amount of military hardware, in a total mission of about 13,000 by late 1963. He authorized increased military assistance by a national-security memorandum of early 1962, and there were a number of initiatives, including defoliation of large areas, to try to make the guerrillas a less elusive target. Vietnam continued to suppurate unsatisfactorily through 1961 and 1962; it would not go away and could not be stabilized by half measures, as Ho Chi Minh felt he had been effectively guaranteed the country at Geneva in 1954, and that the two-year layover was just a face-saver for the French. Though it is difficult to be precise about what Kennedy really thought, or how his views evolved, he appears at the least to have wished to keep Saigon afloat until after the 1964 elections and then make the decision of whether the country was worth an all-out effort, which would require the insertion of sizeable forces, incurring serious casualties.

  East Berlin continued to be walled off and there were painful and awful incidents of individuals trying to escape and being shot down by East German guards, provoking huge and emotional demonstrations on the western side of the wall, which was officially called the “Anti-Fascist, Protection Rampart.” And there were no serious efforts to restrict air and land access from the West to West Berlin. But suddenly, Cuba erupted as the most direct and highest-stakes confrontation of the entire Cold War. It was reported to Kennedy on October 16, 1962, that U-2 photographs revealed Soviet missile launchers in Cuba, and that they were more likely for offensive than defensive missiles. Kennedy was faced with the stern choice of removing the missiles by force, which would involve the exchange of fir
e, and possibly heavy, or even atomic, fire with the USSR; asserting some level of prohibition but signaling that an exchange could be negotiated; or simply acquiescing in the deployment of Soviet missiles in the Americas. The last was out of the question by any measurement.

  A third of those at the National Security Council meetings urged an immediate aerial attack on the sites. The negatives to that were that there was a chance that the air raids would not detect and destroy all the sites, and that the remaining ones could launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. And however it went in Cuba, Khrushchev would have to reply in a place where he had the edge—most obviously, Berlin. He could also attack American missile sites close to the USSR, such as those in Turkey. There were some people present who were concerned about unannounced bombing (as at Pearl Harbor, though the circumstances were hardly comparable), and some foreign leaders were, as America’s allies often are, irresolute and full of caution. (Kennedy sent Dean Acheson to brief General de Gaulle, who assured Acheson that he did not need to look at the aerial photographs, that he would take the word of the president of the United States as he had that of his three predecessors, and promised his complete support of whatever course Kennedy followed. De Gaulle summoned the Soviet ambassador, who replied, “This will probably be war.” De Gaulle said, “I doubt it, but if it is, we will perish together. Good day, Ambassador,” and dismissed the Russian envoy.)192

  Demarcation at End of WWII in Europe. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  This development was particularly galling, because Gromyko had promised on behalf of his government that there would be no missile deployment in Cuba. It was decided to impose a naval quarantine on all sea traffic to Cuba, which the United States Navy certainly had the ships to enforce, and did so on October 24, two days after Kennedy sent a private message to that effect to Khrushchev and advised the nation in a clear and effective television address of the circumstances and of his action. There were four days of unsuccessful messages between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and a request from U Thant193 that both sides undo the steps they had taken in Cuba. Khrushchev accepted to do that but Kennedy declined. After four days, on October 28, and after the U.S. had stopped and searched a Soviet vessel without incident, Khrushchev undertook to remove the missiles and have that verified by United Nations inspectors, and the United States undertook not to invade Cuba and privately agreed to withdraw the intermediate missiles from Greece and Turkey, and later claimed that, although both those countries requested that the missiles remain, the sites were obsolete and were being replaced by missiles launched from the Mediterranean by Polaris submarines.

  A considerable dual myth has arisen about this celebrated and hair-raising episode. The first is that it was a great strategic victory for the United States. It certainly appeared so, as it appeared that the Russians meekly withdrew when Kennedy imposed his quarantine. But it had been a fear in the Soviet bloc that the United States, as had long been its custom in Latin America, might invade Cuba, and that option was given up. And as Khrushchev pointed out, before the crisis arose there had been American missiles in Greece and Turkey but no Soviet missiles in Cuba; and at the end of the crisis, there were no American missiles in Greece or Turkey, and continued to be no Soviet missiles in Cuba and there was an American guarantee not to invade Cuba. The explanation of the Polaris submarines is bunk; the submarines were being commissioned anyway and carried longer-range missiles, and the land-based missiles in Greece and Turkey were an added threat and were withdrawn over protests of the host countries, which weakened NATO in both countries. It was an apparent defeat for the Soviet Union but at best was, in all respects except public relations a draw for the United States. De Gaulle professed, as was his wont, to find it indicative of American untrustworthiness as defenders of Europe if the United States itself were under threat.

  The second myth, and a more consequential one, was that this was a masterpiece of sophisticated and novel crisis management, based on the Critical Path method devised at Harvard University (where the president, Bundy, and much of the rest of his entourage were alumni). This held that virtually scientific calculation determined that with the application of a given amount of pressure the result was predictable. Apart from the self-serving hauteur of this fable, it was propagated on the back of another American intelligence failure: completely unknown to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House, there were two full Russian divisions in Cuba, and the warheads needed for the missiles were in-country, so the quarantine was, so to speak, locking the barn door after the horses had come in. While the quarantine was on, the local Soviet commander could have fired away to his heart’s content and demolished Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, at least, and the land invasion, which some of the military but very few or none of the civilians advocated, would have succeeded eventually, but crushing two divisions of the Red Army would not be like taking over the customs house of the Dominican Republic in the 1920s. Unfortunately, the theory that the Kennedy administration was on to a new level of sophisticated decision-making took hold among the putative possessors of it and led them far astray in years to come, as they wandered down the paths opened up by the president’s inaugural promise to “bear any burden ... oppose any foe,” etc. The hour of hubris was coming, soon.

  What was reassuring and a great presidential accomplishment was that Kennedy, doubtless informed by the Bay of Pigs disaster, had learned a little of the skepticism about the promises of senior officers that had come so naturally to Eisenhower. Kennedy reasoned that a land invasion could be very complicated and dangerous; an air-to-ground attack on the identified sites could work but would almost certainly produce a military reaction elsewhere, probably wouldn’t take down all the launchers, and he at least wasn’t certain that the Russians had not got any missiles to Cuba. It is an academic question, as war was avoided and the Cold War ended happily for the United States and its allies eventually, but if Kennedy had attacked the missile sites by air and left it that any attack on West Berlin continued to be a casus belli as far as the West was concerned, and that missiles would, in due course, be updated and not withdrawn from Greece and Turkey, and that any further deployment of offensive weapons to Cuba would be prevented by whatever means were necessary and in the meantime the quarantine continued, he would probably have won a greater victory. But this is the perfect vision of hindsight (though some, such as Nixon, advocated it at the time), just as various more benign scenarios of Vietnam are hindsight, and even some of Korea, though they were also quite audible in 1950 to 1953. More practical and less humbling to Khrushchev would have been promising no invasion of Cuba for withdrawal and permanent nondeployment of missiles in Cuba, leaving Greece and Turkey out of it.

  Kennedy did manage the crisis well, gained great stature in the country and the world, and scored some gains in the midterm elections a few days later, including the defeat of Richard Nixon in his quest for governor of California, where he very likely would have won without the tension and happy ending of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  In December 1962, Kennedy allegedly told Johnson’s successor as senate leader, Mike Mansfield, that Vietnam might be a lost cause, but that after what had been committed there already, if he now abandoned it, there would be a McCarthy-like Red Scare and he would not be reelected, but that he could pull out after he was reelected.194 It is not certain that he believed this. If he had explained what he thought the war would cost and said that the smart move was to dodge that one and start Eisenhower’s dominoes off one country further on, such as Thailand or Malaysia, or both, the country would have bought it, especially as he could still blame the whole shambles on France, with a slight donkey-kick to Eisenhower. On the other hand, the communists were now a huge threat in Sukarno’s oil-rich but ramshackle Indonesia, the world’s seventh most populous country, which really was a big domino. The strategic decisions that awaited in Vietnam, and could not be long postponed, were very difficult.

  In August 1963, the Diem government in Saigon, as He
nry Cabot Lodge arrived as the new ambassador, began a crackdown on Buddhist monks protesting what they claimed was Diem’s despotism. This resonated very strongly in the United States and there was widespread unease about what America was doing to assist an ally whose conduct caused pacifist Buddhist clergymen to incinerate themselves. Lodge was asked to persuade Diem and his brother to retire, and failing that, to let it be known to Diem’s generals that a coup would be in order. (A subsequent president, Nguyen Van Thieu, told the author, on October 1, 1970, that it was very difficult even to get fuel for his tanks in October 1963, so tightly had the United States clamped down on the regime.) There were contacts between faction heads and the U.S. embassy and repeated exploratory missions from Washington to Saigon to try to sort out the discrepant reports from the Defense Department, which claimed that substantial progress was being made, and the State Department, which reported that the country was being lost to the communists.

  On November 1, one of Saigon’s more egregiously political generals, in intimate contact with everyone from Ho Chi Minh to the Pentagon and the State Department, effected a coup, removing Diem and his brother and murdering them both. The U.S. administration approved a coup, but not the murder, though it might reasonably have surmised that such a fate was eminently possible. Diem had been put in place by Eisenhower, Nixon had represented the United States at his inauguration, and he had been a reasonably competent president in horribly difficult times. The initial reaction in Washington was almost euphoric, and it was assumed that this would clear the way for the triumph of democracy in South Vietnam. The implications of the United States acquiescing in the overthrow and murder of the ally it had encouraged to tear up the Geneva provision for pan-Vietnam elections, and with which it professed to set up an anti-communist “partnership” within SEATO just two years before, were not confidence-building for America’s Asian allies.