***
On May 29 the President became forty-six years old. His staff had planned a surprise birthday party for him, getting him to it on the pretext that a call awaited him on the scramble phone in the situation room, but not much surprised this President, and he was grinning broadly when Mac Bundy led him into the White House mess. Pierre Salinger, the emcee, handed Kennedy a speech. “We know you usually write your speeches, Mr. President,” he said, “but here is one written by a ghost writer, and we would like you to read it.” It began, “Twoscore and six years ago there was brought forth at Brookline, Massachusetts…” Kennedy was handed a satellite model with a card reading, “Hope you have a good trip, Barry,” and Jackie, teasing her husband over his pride in the new flower garden outside his office, gave him an enormous basket of dead grass. “From the White House Historical Society,” the card read, “Genuine Antique Grass from the Antique Rose Garden.” The evening was lovely. They spent it cruising down the Potomac in the presidential yacht, the Honey Fitz.
It was high tide for the Kennedy regime, but they didn’t know that. They thought they had another five years in the White House, and when the President moved out he planned to start a new Washington newspaper. It would be a great one; the best newspapermen in the country would want to work for it. But that was a long way off, and they were not of an age to brood about the future. Youth continued to be a dominant theme in the administration. Their life-style in many ways was that of what were then called “the young marrieds.” The three Kennedy wives, Jackie, Ethel, and Joan, were all pregnant that spring. Baby carriages and playpens had become familiar furniture in the homes of senior government officials who, in other years, would have been in their late fifties or sixties. That was part of the Kennedy era; like the Peace Corps it reminded young Americans that this was their President. To be sure, he had other constituencies, the intellectual community among them. Celebrating the end of his six-year term as a member of Harvard’s board of overseers, he gave a stag dinner at the Executive Mansion for distinguished Harvard men. But even then he was conscious of his age. “It is difficult to welcome you to the White House, he said, “because at least two-thirds of you have attended more stag dinners here than I have.”
His popularity, like that of any President, fluctuated. After the missile crisis in 1962 Gallup reported that 83 percent of the people approved of him; over the next ten months the figure fell to 61 percent and then 59. In September 1963, when the Senate ratified the nuclear test ban treaty with the Russians, the Gallup curve turned up. He had predicted that. The right-wingers, he believed, were misreading the country’s mood. They made much of what they called a swing to conservatism on the campuses. They held that Admiral Lewis Strauss spoke for millions when he said, at the test ban hearings, “I am not sure that the reduction of tensions is necessarily a good thing,” and that Edward Teller was reflecting the alarm of the entire middle class when he said at the same hearings, “If you ratify this treaty… you will have given away the future safety of this country.” Kennedy didn’t accept that. At Billings, Montana, and at Salt Lake City—in the very heart of what was thought to be Goldwater country—he was given standing ovations when, at midpoint in prepared speeches, he left his text to speak of his pride in the test ban. To friends he said that the treaty was the essence of his foreign policy; if he lost to Goldwater next year he would be willing to pay that price.
The signs of the coming detente were now unmistakable. The test ban, and the expressions of approval Kennedy heard across the country when it became an accomplished fact, had been possible because in Cuba the Russians had finally accepted the principle of verifying missile sites. The world had heard the last of the troika. In East Berlin Khrushchev said that the Wall had diminished the need for a separate German peace treaty. He had learned to live with the bone in his throat. Then Kennedy, speaking at American University on June 20, held out an olive branch to the Russians: “Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man…. Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace… until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude.”
The speech was largely ignored in the American press—his civil rights address, which came the following evening, preempted editorial attention—but the Manchester Guardian called it “one of the great state papers of American history,” and Khrushchev, genuinely impressed, later told Harriman that it was “the greatest speech by an American President since Roosevelt.”
On August 30 the Department of Defense announced that a hot line linking the White House and the Kremlin had gone into operation that same day. In October, when Russia’s rift with China came into the open, Khrushchev said he did not share Mao’s willingness to sacrifice millions of lives in a nuclear showdown with the West. Kennedy then authorized a sale of surplus wheat to the Soviet Union as “one more hopeful sign that a more peaceful world is both possible and beneficial to all.”
The radical right was furious, but he relished its fury. He delighted in building a record as a liberal President. Kennedy chuckled when Ike, baffled by Keynesian economics, cried out in a magazine article: “What can those people in Washington be thinking about? Why would they deliberately do this to our country?” What Kennedy was doing to the country’s economy, with the help of Douglas Dillon and Walter Heller, was producing the longest peacetime expansion in history, resulting in an annual increase in the Gross National Product of 5.6 percent a year. And if Congress would go along with his recommendation for a tax cut, he believed, there would be no recession in 1964, either.
That was by no means certain. The 88th Congress was mulish. The President was far ahead of its conservative instincts with his liberal program calling for Medicare, massive grants to encourage the rebuilding of decaying urban slums, a more sensible farm plan, the development and conservation of national resources, improved social security, his broad civil rights bill, and a growing commitment to the Alianza. At the time, critics gave him low marks in his struggle for legislation. Looking back, it is surprising that he did as well as he did. Of 107 recommendations he had sent to the 87th Congress, 73 had been enacted into law, and the early legislative victories of his successor were programs Kennedy had sent to the 88th.
Addressing the Irish Parliament in June, he recalled a line from George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”2 That was the Kennedy outlook at its best, a blend of social prophecy and political vision. He was not always on that plane. At times he seemed to be looking toward wrong horizons. A decade later his pledges to support manned space flight and supersonic transport would be seen as dubious ventures. But even his errors of exuberance seemed preferable to the stagnation of the 1950s. Like Franklin Roosevelt he was using politics to expand the limits of the possible at home and abroad. In that context his triumphant ten-day tour of Europe five months before his death, of which the Irish visit was a part, is important to an understanding of him. More than anything else he resembled the statesmen of the European left, and they knew it. In him they saw their own idealized self-images. Willy Brandt in Germany, Gaston Defferre and Pierre Mendès-France in France, Harold Wilson in Britain, Pietro Nenni in Italy—all of them praised him, quoted him, and to some extent patterned their political styles after his. “Nenni, the old firebrand Socialist, cannot now contain his praise for Kennedy,” Anthony Sampson wrote in the London Observer. “…There is hardly a word of anti-Americanism, except on the far right.” As a liberal, Kennedy had, among other things, no patience with those who thought men should wear blinders to shield them from evil. Jailing students who wanted to see Castro’s Cuba seemed to him absurd. “Why shouldn’t they go?” he asked. “If I were twenty-one years old, that’s what I would like to do this summer.” And in Amherst on October 26, 1963, he spoke words which would be cherished by historians of his pe
riod: “It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
At such times John Kennedy seemed inevitable. But there was another aspect of him. Astronomers are familiar with the phenomenon of the dark star, a star so feebly luminous as to be invisible, one which follows another star and eclipses it sporadically. Kennedy had a dark star, a shadow of imminent tragedy which was never far from him and those he loved and which would intervene unexpectedly to obscure their most splendid moments. It happened now. In early August Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to a second son, who arrived five and a half weeks prematurely and with a lung ailment. Christened Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the baby struggled for thirty-nine hours before expiring. The President, desolate, tried to lift the little coffin at the services to carry it to the grave; then Cardinal Cushing gently drew him away.
To lift his wife’s spirits Kennedy suggested that she accept an invitation from Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon, for an Aegean cruise on his majestic yacht, the Christina. Later she would remember early October as an unreal time, two dazzling weeks of sunshine between the loss of Patrick and the catastrophe that awaited in November. Dispatches from the Mediterranean traced her progress from Istanbul to Lesbos, Crete, Delphi, Marrakesh, and to an island in the Ionian Sea that Onassis owned. Royalty, beginning with the king and queen of Greece, entertained her and her sister Lee Radziwill; they toasted her, admired her, and gave her exotic gifts. When she returned to the White House on October 17, one member of the White House staff said, “Jackie has stars in her eyes—Greek stars.” The President asked her if she would join him for a short campaign trip. She said fine, and she asked where, and he said Texas.
If there was any one place where things had seemed to be going exceptionally well for Kennedy earlier in the year, it was Saigon. Opening his State of the Union message on January 14, 1963, the President had reported: “The spearhead of aggression has been blunted in Vietnam.” A Pentagon spokesman announced that “we have turned the corner in Vietnam,” and General Harkins said that the war would be won “within a year.” On April 22 Rusk said that the American effort in Saigon was “producing excellent results,” and Ngo Dinh Diem and the Republic of Vietnam were “on their way to success.” U. Alexis Johnson, Rusk’s deputy undersecretary for political affairs, was particularly encouraged by “the intangible knitting together of government and people” in Vietnam and by the strategic hamlet program, which he called “the most important reason for guarded optimism.”
Afterward this seemed puzzling. The fact that these prophets had been wildly wrong was bad enough; why had they been so eager to put themselves on the record? The answer was that they were trying to drown out other members of the government who were convinced that President Ngo Dinh Diem and everyone with him was doomed. The terms hawk and dove were not yet fashionable, but the administration was split along those lines. The chief hawks, or advocates of American involvement in the war, were the generals, including Maxwell Taylor, and McCone of the CIA, Rusk, Rostow, Ambassador Nolting in Saigon, and at this point McNamara, who was impressed by the force and precision of the reports from Saigon. Ranged against them were Robert Kennedy, George Ball, Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman, Michael Forrestal, Richard Helms at the CIA, the American colonels in the field with Vietnamese troops, and American war correspondents, who sang to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:
We are winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
In the delta, things are rough.
In the mountains, mighty tough.
But we’re winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
If you doubt this is true,
McNamara says so too.
As the third year of the Kennedy Presidency opened, no one could be said to be winning the war, because hardly anyone was fighting it. The Viet Cong was husbanding its strength, waiting to pounce, and the Republic of Vietnam’s overcautious commanders had no intention of stirring them up. The calm was deceptive. The country was seething with resentment, and not all of Diem’s critics were in the Viet Cong. Because he represented what might be called the Vietnamese establishment, the conservative, upper-class mandarins who spoke French and worshipped God as Roman Catholics, his natural adversaries in the non-Communist community were the young Buddhist priests and monks, who were poor, militant, middle- and lower-class, radical, and distrustful of everything western. Their religious faith was that of the majority, and they bitterly resented the privileges accorded the Catholics. Both sides were in a belligerent mood, needing only an incident to kindle a struggle between them.
It came in early May 1963. The Buddhists were celebrating Buddha’s 2587th birthday in the ancient imperial city of Hue when officers commanding government troops ordered a group of them to disperse. They refused and the soldiers fired into the crowd, killing nine. Diem refused to express regrets—he said privately that he would lose face—and on June 11 a Buddhist monk, Quang Due, protested with a spectacular demonstration of self-immolation. Sitting on the pavement, he waited patiently while his fellow monks drenched him with gasoline; then he struck a match and went up in flames. Other suicidal Buddhists followed his example, providing the press (which was notified in advance each time) with outstanding photographs. The newspaper-reading American public was appalled, but the government in Saigon was unmoved. President Diem at this point was almost entirely under the influence of his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was usually under the influence of opium. Madame Nhu demonstrated the ruling family’s genius for public relations by telling reporters that she gaily clapped her hands each time one of these “so-called holy men” put on a “barbecue show.”
Under great American pressure Diem tentatively agreed on June 15 to meet some of the Buddhist demands. Almost immediately it became clear that he had no intention of following through. On June 30 the Buddhist demonstrations were renewed. Students rioted in Vietnam schools, and American correspondents who were writing about the turmoil were attacked in the streets and beaten. This was too much for President Kennedy. The cold war thaw had provided him with a new incentive for wanting the shooting in Vietnam stopped. A truce was necessary before he could offer the world what he had called a “strategy of peace” at American University: “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war… not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men; not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
Apart from other considerations—such as corruption and ineffectuality—the rigid anti-Communism of Diem and the Nhus had no place in these plans for a new foreign policy. Kennedy wanted to take a strong hand with them, and when he discovered in early July that Nolting was absent on a two-month cruise in the remote Aegean, he decided that his first step should be to dispatch a new envoy to Saigon. Rusk picked the man, Henry Cabot Lodge. It was an excellent choice. Liberals in the administration were uneasy at first, fearing that as a patrician Lodge might favor South Vietnam’s aristocracy. They didn’t understand that as a Boston Brahmin Lodge expected the well-born to be gentlemen, which Diem and Nhu definitely were not. Among other things, gentlemen do not betray their friends. Whatever else may be said of Nolting’s tenure, he had been a good friend to Diem, and they were about to repay him with an act of shocking treachery.
In a farewell speech at the airport Nolting spoke of bonds between the two countries: “humility and tolerance, respect for others and a deep sense of social justice.” Correspondents thought these strange words in Vietnam, but Nolting believed them to be justified; the South Vietnamese president had just given him his word that there would be no more attacks on the Buddhists. Six days later Diem sent his secret police out on a midnight raid to seize the pagodas, arrest the priests and monks, and terrorize their followers. The raiders tried to camouflage their ident
ity by wearing regular army uniforms, but the truth emerged forty-eight hours later after Madame Nhu, in a reference to a gang of cutthroats, which had been rooted out several years before, said that the sally had brought her “the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Binh Xuyen in 1955.”
Lodge arrived in Saigon the following evening. He saw the raid as a studied act of scorn for the Americans. It was, in fact, a new low for Diem, and it marked the beginning of his isolation from other Vietnamese conservatives. His foreign minister quit in protest and shaved his head like a Buddhist monk. In Washington Madame Nhu’s father, South Vietnam ambassador to the U.S., disowned his daughter. The Voice of America placed the blame for the storming of the pagodas squarely on the Nhus. Diem’s generals, wanting no part of the atrocity, began plotting against him. Lodge cabled Washington that the plotters wanted to know what the American attitude would be if a coup was successful. What should he tell them?
The answer said much about the fissure in the Kennedy administration over the Vietnam question. It was August 24, a Saturday. The President was in Hyannisport. McNamara and McCone were on vacation, Rusk was out of town, and General Taylor could not be reached. Their key deputies were Gilpatric in the Pentagon, Helms at the CIA, and Ball at State, all critics of the regime in Saigon. The cable they approved was drafted by Ball, Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal, and it bluntly told the American ambassador that the Nhus must go. Afterward, when everyone was back in Washington, there were bitter recriminations, but when the President decided to put everyone on record no one was willing to take the responsibility for repudiating it.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 148