An earlier draft of their report had recommended that the Defense Department “announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963,” adding that “this action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort.” This passage had alarmed Averell Harriman’s assistant William Sullivan, who told McNamara that pulling out all the U.S. advisers by the end of 1965 was “totally unrealistic,” and threatened to write a dissenting report. To placate him, McNamara and Taylor eliminated the recommendation to withdraw a thousand advisers.
As soon as Kennedy noticed the omission, he suspended the meeting and took McNamara and Taylor into the Oval Office. When they returned, McNamara announced that the report now contained a troop-withdrawal schedule. Kennedy asked McNamara if reducing the number of advisers was dependent on military progress. “No. No, sir,” McNamara said emphatically, adding that even if the military campaign went beyond 1965, “we believe we can train the Vietnamese to take over the essential functions and withdraw the bulk of our forces. And this thousand is in conjunction with that.”
“What’s the point in doing it?” McGeorge Bundy asked skeptically.
“We need a way to get out of Vietnam,” McNamara said. “This is a way of doing it.”
Taylor backed him up. He had asked the U.S. officers whom he interviewed, “When can you finish this job in the sense that you will reduce this insurgency to little more than sporadic incidents?” Most had said a year would be “ample time,” assuming there were “no new major factors.”
“Well, let’s say it anyway,” Kennedy interjected. “Then in ’65 if it doesn’t work out [unclear audio], we’ll get a new date.”
McNamara emphasized that the withdrawal was not contingent on winning the war, merely on completing the training of the South Vietnamese army, adding, “The only slightest difference between Max and me in this entire report is in this one estimate of whether or not we can win the war in ’64 in the upper [unclear] territories and ’65 in the [unclear]. I’m not entirely sure of that. But I am sure that if we don’t meet those dates, in the sense of ending the major military campaigns, we nonetheless can withdraw the bulk of our U.S. forces, according to the schedule we have laid out . . . because we can train the Vietnamese to do the job.”
Taylor now defined “victory” in terms making the withdrawal of the advisers justifiable under most circumstances, saying, “It ought to be very clear what we mean by victory or success. That doesn’t mean every Viet Cong comes in with a white flag, but that we do suppress this insurgency to the point that the national security forces of Vietnam can contain [it].”
Chester Cooper, a CIA officer serving in the State Department as an assistant for policy support, was working in a basement office in the White House that morning. He protested when McGeorge and Bill Bundy brought him the final draft of a press statement announcing that the U.S. military mission in Vietnam would end in 1965. Bill Bundy, in a tone of voice that Cooper described as reflecting his “utter exasperation,” said, “Look, I’m under instructions,” meaning that the president had insisted on including this passage in the report. McGeorge Bundy asked McNamara to persuade Kennedy to remove the pledge to withdraw in 1965, but as Cooper wrote later, “McNamara seems to have been trapped,” because “the sentence may have been worked out privately with Kennedy, and therefore imbedded in concrete.”
After hearing more protests during a National Security Council meeting that afternoon, Kennedy demanded that everyone support his policy. “Reports of disagreements do not help the war effort in Vietnam,” he said. “We must all sign on and with good heart set out to implement the actions decided upon.”
McNamara suggested announcing the withdrawal timetable in order to “set it in concrete.” Kennedy agreed, but wanted it presented to the press as something that McNamara and Taylor had proposed. As McNamara left the Cabinet Room to brief reporters, Kennedy shouted after him, “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too.”
McNamara’s statement was front-page news. He informed reporters that “the military program in South Viet Nam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought,” that “Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965,” and that “by the end of the year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where one thousand U.S. military personnel assigned to South Viet Nam can be withdrawn.”
Some of those attending the October 2 meetings understood that the policy that Taylor and McNamara had proposed, and that Kennedy had approved, had been Kennedy’s policy all along. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric said that McNamara told him afterward that the withdrawal “was part of a plan the President asked him to develop to unwind the whole thing.”
After listening to a recording of the October 2 meeting thirty years later, McNamara found that it confirmed his impression that the decision to announce the withdrawal had divided the president’s staff. “Many, many were opposed to approving a plan to remove all advisors and all military support within two years by the end of ’65. Many, many were opposed to withdrawing a thousand within ninety days. And then after that decision was made, many, many were opposed to announcing it,” he said. “And he [Kennedy] went through those controversies and the tape is very clear on this. First, the controversy over whether to establish the plan and have it as an official government policy. And second, the controversy over whether to put it in concrete by announcing it. He did both.” McNamara believed he had done this because “he believed the primary responsibility of a president was to keep the nation out of war if at all possible.”
• • •
JACKIE HAD BEEN CAREFUL not to spoil John and Caroline, but the moment she left for Greece, Kennedy asked his driver Muggsy O’Leary to buy some toy horses for Caroline, and sent out Lincoln to buy model planes so he could give one to John when he dashed into his bedroom every morning. John was too young for school, so he received the most attention. Kennedy played with him before his first meeting of the day, swam with him before lunch, played games of “through the tunnel and under the mountain,” standing with his legs apart so John could crawl underneath, tickled him until he wet his pants, and let him ride along to Andrews and Camp David in the helicopter, putting on a helmet and touching the controls. He told a friend, “I’m having the best time of my life.”
He brought John along on Wednesday for the first leg of a trip to Arkansas, taking him to Andrews by helicopter and letting him sit in the presidential compartment on Air Force One. He was going to dedicate a dam that lay within the congressional district of Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and to gain a sense of how much his civil rights bill had damaged his chances of winning the state. Accompanying him was Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a Rhodes scholar, an internationalist, and a liberal in everything but civil rights. Two years earlier, Fulbright had seized the opportunity of sharing a flight with him to give him a memorandum opposing the Bay of Pigs operation and recommending a policy of isolating and containing the Castro regime. After reading it, Kennedy had invited him to attend the final Bay of Pigs review. Fulbright denounced the invasion as a violation of the nation’s moral principles. Everyone in the room, including Kennedy, ignored him.
During their flight to Arkansas on October 3, Fulbright urged Kennedy to skip Dallas when he visited Texas. Fulbright’s liberal positions on foreign affairs had made him persona non grata in the city, the wealthy Hunt family had funneled money to his opponents, and the Dallas Morning News had called him a “red louse.” The attacks had so unnerved him that he steered clear of the city. He told Kennedy it was “a very dangerous place,” adding, “I wouldn’t go there. . . . Don’t you
go.”
If Kennedy had harbored any doubts about visiting Dallas, an article that week in Time titled “Box Score for ’64—Can Anybody Beat Kennedy?” would have dispelled them. It reported that although most political observers considered him a sure winner in 1964, a state-by-state survey by its correspondents indicated that Goldwater would give him “a breathlessly close contest.” The article came with a box score showing him losing the South to Goldwater, winning most Northeastern states, some Midwestern ones, and California. The outcome might be decided by Texas, but because Vice President Johnson was “not the power he once was,” Time said, Kennedy could “only be rated even there.” If he won Texas, he would have 280 electoral votes, 10 over the 270 he needed, but if Goldwater won the state he would have 266 votes, “with an excellent chance for picking up the necessary additional four from among the Kennedy-hating unpledged electors of Alabama and Mississippi.”
Kennedy found the article so unsettling that he had raised it with his political advisers on October 2. He did not usually tape meetings concerning politics, but he neglected to switch off the microphone, inadvertently recording this one. Because the participants kept moving around the room, only snatches of their sentences are sometimes audible. He began by asking, “Did you read that Time magazine yet?” Referring to Goldwater, he said, “I guess he’s a Puritan, so anybody who’s got any girls, just play it more quiet.” Because Goldwater did not fool around with women, Kennedy assumed he would be less tolerant of people (such as himself) who did, and said, “I just figure that a guy who’s getting laid is not going to go after a guy who’s getting laid.” Speaking of a staffer who liked flight attendants, he said, “He ought to look like he’s all business. If he’s parading stewardesses around he’s going to make all the other guys sore.” Returning to the Time survey, he called the writers and editors responsible for it “those cocksuckers,” and complained, “I thought I was a sure thing.” He insisted that even if he lost the West, he could still be reelected, “if I win California and Texas.”
• • •
THE ARKANSAS CROWDS WERE large and friendly, but Fulbright was alarmed by how freely the president mingled with people at Heber Springs, where, he noted, “any one of a thousand or two thousand could easily have done him harm . . . because the poor Secret Service were lost in the crowd.” There were no boos, only a few hostile placards, and he received loud applause when he mentioned the test ban treaty. An editorial in the friendly Arkansas Gazette predicted that he was “destined to join the silent company of great Presidents.”
The next day he met in the White House with Governor John Connally of Texas, who was even less enthusiastic than Fulbright about his trip to Texas, although for different reasons. The Kennedy-Connally relationship had been one of dramatic fluctuations. At the 1956 convention, Connally had persuaded the Texas delegation to back Kennedy for the vice presidency, but four years later, while serving as Johnson’s de facto campaign manager, he had initiated a whispering campaign about his health. He redeemed himself by working hard for the ticket, and Kennedy made him secretary of the Navy, a post he held for only a year before resigning to run for governor. Once Connally moved into the governor’s mansion, Kennedy began badgering him to arrange a presidential trip to the state. Connally faced reelection in two years and was afraid that being seen as close to the president would be a liability. He stalled before finally proposing a low-key, nonpolitical trip that skipped Dallas, where he feared embarrassing signs and noisy pickets. Kennedy agreed to the plan but insisted on including Dallas.
Connally stopped in Dallas on his way to Washington to confer with its civic leaders and apologize for inflicting the president on them. He compared himself to a ship’s captain faced with an admiral demanding to come aboard, and promised not to become “Kennedy’s errand boy.” Like him, they feared an incident similar to the infamous attack on Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson during the 1960 campaign that had besmirched their city’s reputation. Connally went to the Capitol before coming to the White House and told the Texas congressional delegation that he thought the president’s visit was a mistake. He was coming to Texas to raise money, he said, yet his strength lay among people without any money, “Negroes and brass collar [working-class] Democrats.”
“How about those fund-raising affairs in Texas, John?” Kennedy asked as soon as Connally sat down in the Oval Office.
Holding four would be a mistake, he said, and would not raise any more money than a single properly managed dinner. Because the president had not made a “real visit” to Texas since taking office, if he held multiple events during his first trip he might be seen as “trying to financially rape the state.”
Kennedy was taken aback by the strong language and protested that he was coming more to win over the business community than to raise money. Connally argued that the place to do that was a nonpolitical event, not a fund-raiser that his enemies were sure to boycott. Texans were a courteous and hospitable people, he said, and more likely to honor him as their president instead of as a politician hunting for donations. He proposed nonpartisan speeches in Houston and San Antonio, then a luncheon in Dallas followed by a political fund-raiser in Austin. Kennedy capitulated, and Connally magnanimously said that he believed he would win Texas, although it might be close.
“We shouldn’t have a hard race in Texas,” Kennedy complained, irked by the notion of struggling to win his vice president’s native state.
Connally implored him to bring the First Lady. “The women want to see her. They want to see what her hairdo looks like and what her clothes look like. It’s important to them.”
“I would hope that she would come,” he said wistfully.
• • •
KENNEDY MET with his Vietnam advisers again on Saturday morning for a further discussion of the McNamara-Taylor report. The report had presented him with three options: apply selective pressures such as withholding U.S. subsidies for commodity imports and suspending aid to the South Vietnamese Special Forces, reconcile with Diem, or encourage a coup. McNamara and Taylor dismissed reconciliation as an ineffective strategy, saying it would indicate to Diem that the United States “would sit still for just about anything he did.” They rated the prospects for a successful coup as low because Diem and Nhu had established a “praetorian guard” to protect themselves, while the generals appeared to have little stomach for a coup.
Kennedy approved “selective pressures.” He understood that the generals would view the pressures as endorsing a coup, and Bundy sent Lodge a cable instructing him to pursue an “urgent covert effort . . . to identify and build contacts with alternative leadership.”
The White House had announced on Wednesday that Taylor and McNamara had proposed a withdrawal schedule, and that the president had approved making their recommendation public. Kennedy formally approved their recommendations on Saturday, but according to a National Security Action memorandum, “directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.”
He concluded the Saturday meeting by saying, “Our decision to remove a thousand U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed.” In other words, the withdrawal would occur whether or not Diem made any reforms.
Before flying to Camp David to spend the weekend with Caroline and John, he tried on a selection of hats from the desperate hatters of Danbury, Connecticut. His refusal to hide his thick chestnut hair under a hat had been a catastrophe for this important Connecticut industry. (Dave Powers had once joked that “if you put a hat on a Kennedy, you lose three quarters of the head, all of the charisma.”) To placate Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Ribicoff, a former Connecticut governor, he had agreed to wear a hat from time to time. He lined up the candidates from Danbury and ask
ed his aides to choose their favorites. After each picked out a different one, he told them, “You remind me of my Vietnam advisors.”
Monday, October 7
WASHINGTON
Kennedy signed the instruments of ratification for the Limited Test Ban Treaty in the White House Treaty Room, a small and once neglected space in the second-floor family quarters that Jackie had redecorated in high Victorian style with deep green walls, floor-to-ceiling burgundy drapes, furniture from the Grant administration, and a painting of the signing of the Peace Protocols ending the Spanish-American War. He orchestrated the signing as if arranging its participants for another historic portrait, placing himself in the center of the room, sitting behind a handsome antique table he had ordered brought in for the occasion. Resting on it were four leather-bound copies of the instruments of ratification and a holder with pens standing upright like arrows in a quiver. Sixteen government officials and congressional leaders who had been instrumental in negotiating the treaty and shepherding it through the Senate stood in a semicircle behind him, hands clasped in front of sober suits, their expressions grave.
He used sixteen pens to sign four copies. He handed the first pen to Senator Fulbright, the next to Mansfield, the third to Dirksen. After passing out the rest to Harriman, Rusk, Johnson, and others, he realized that he had neglected to keep one for himself. He reopened one of the folders and added a flourish to his signature. As he slipped the pen into his breast pocket he smiled and said, “This one is mine.” He gave it to Jackie.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 26