The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  During this time, both Senator Kennedy and fellow Democrat, Senator Mike Mansfield, pushed the Eisenhower administration to support the new Diem regime.“If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents,” Kennedy declared in his 1956 speech.“We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future. . . . This is our offspring—we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs.”

  JOHN KENNEDY didn’t always feel this way about Vietnam. In 1951, then- Congressman Kennedy, accompanied by his brother Bobby, spent a day in Saigon during a round-the-world junket. He listened to a French military commander confidently tell him how his troops would defeat the local Viet Minh guerillas in the countryside. Later that night, however,Kennedy chatted at the Caravelle Hotel with a young American consular officer,Edmund Gullion, who, when asked warned the future president about the quagmire of a Vietnam engagement. Gullion was apparently convincing enough so that Kennedy, when he returned to the States, openly questioned the $50 million in U.S. aid to the French in their jungle war. “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere,” Kennedy declared.

  Equally elusive, however, was Kennedy’s own change of heart about Vietnam. By the mid–1950s, the Massachusetts senator no longer had doubts. His support for Diem’s new regime was strong and unequivocal. Fears of Communist subversion spreading throughout Southeast Asia convinced Kennedy to become Diem’s outspoken ally in Washington. Decades later,Roger Hilsman, assistant undersecretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, suggested that Kennedy’s religion had played a major role in this turnabout. “The long answer is that Kennedy was a Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem was a Catholic, and when Diem became president of Vietnam, American Catholics generally thought that this was a wonderful hero and should be backed,” recalled Hilsman.

  Diem was an unlikely hero. He became the first president of South Vietnam, a nation formed by international arrangement, after the colonial French were defeated in 1954 by Communist revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh. The partition of Vietnam left the Communists in the north, and Diem in the south. A devout Catholic and lay celibate, Diem spent much of the early 1950s in exile in the United States to protest the French occupation. The church became a not-so-hidden factor in Diem’s rise to power. During this time, his brother,Ngo Dinh Thuc, who was a Catholic bishop, arranged for Diem to stay at the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining, New York. Diem soon came to the attention of Cardinal Spellman and other Americans looking for a strong Vietnamese leader to fend off the Red advance of Ho Chi Minh. As it turned out, the pontiff in Rome didn’t want Vietnam to turn Communist any more than those policymakers in Washington.

  Diem’s rise began when Dean Rusk, then heading the State Department’s Asian section in the early 1950s, suggested through an intermediary priest that Cardinal Spellman confer with the visiting Bishop Thuc. A meeting eventually took place at the cardinal’s New York residence that was also attended by the bishop’s exiled brother,Diem. Spellman was impressed by Diem’s ardent anti-communism and religious faith. At the same time, Bishop Ngo Dinh Thuc’s influence with the Vatican had its own effect. After receiving a papal directive, Spellman promoted Diem as a viable leader to the Eisenhower administration. In the church’s secret campaign to prop up Diem, the American cardinal also turned to the Kennedys for help. Spellman directed one of Diem’s key supporters in the United States to approach Joe Kennedy about gaining publicity for their cause in newspapers and magazines. Joe Kennedy and his cardinal lobbied hard for Diem among U.S. foreign policymaking experts, stressing his ardent Catholicism as a sure cure for socialism in the region. The two also helped create a private committee to promote Vietnam, with a list of prominent members that included Joe Kennedy’s eldest son. Jack Kennedy’s 1956 speech to the American Friends of Vietnam was one by-product of this alliance.

  BY THE TIME Kennedy became president, Diem’s troubles were very apparent in South Vietnam. Catholics accounted for only 10 percent of his country’s population, and Diem’s ties to both the church and the United States were resented by his countrymen, particularly the majority Buddhists. Many Vietnamese remembered how Catholic priests had helped perpetuate the oppressive French colonial rule. Ho Chi Minh’s own writings popularized the charge that church authorities had massacred farmers and grabbed their land. Although he turned increasingly nationalist and resentful of U.S. interference, Diem was perceived as an American puppet.

  When Cardinal Spellman, dressed in his army khakis, visited Vietnam in the mid–1950s at the Pope’s instruction, he praised Diem and presented a $100,000 relief check to aid the refugees, many of them Catholic, fleeing from the north. Rather than rally the country against the Communists,Spellman’s visit provoked more bitterness toward Diem’s dictatorial government.“ It is Catholicism which has helped ruin the government of Mr. Diem, for his genuine piety . . . has been exploited by his American advisers until the Church is in danger of sharing the unpopularity of the United States,” wrote Graham Greene, himself a Catholic, in London’s Sunday Times. To Greene, the Vietnamese leader appeared “obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confessions, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle.”

  American foreign aid greased the corruption seeping throughout the country. The political problems encircling Diem—a religious mystic who was exquisitely ill-equipped to run his own government and who often remained oblivious to his surroundings—only became worse. As historian and former war correspondent Neil Sheehan later observed, Diem “lived in a mental cocoon spun out of nostalgic reveries for Vietnam’s imperial past.” Diem embraced Catholicism as, in effect, the state religion. It became another instrument used to maintain political control and brutally repress Buddhists and other religious groups. Conversion to Catholicism became, at least in Diem’s mind, a remedy to subversion by the Communists. In early 1963, when his older brother,Thuc, celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as bishop, Catholics placed blue-and-white Vatican flags all around Thuc’s home city of Hue, once the capital of a united Vietnam. Yet the same Diem government soon afterward deeply offended many Vietnamese when it prohibited the Buddhist flag to fly on the 2,587th birthday celebration of Buddha. On May 8, 1963, a crowd of Buddhists protesting that ban were fired upon by Diem’s Civil Guards. Led by a Catholic officer, they killed nine people, including several children, and injured more than a dozen.

  In response, Diem’s government cracked down harder, prompting even more unrest. The following month, to protest the outrages against his religion, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk, sitting in a lotus position on a Saigon street corner, was immersed in gasoline, and then set himself aflame. A photograph of the Buddhist monk’s self-immolation was printed around the world. The incident shocked and embarrassed the Kennedy administration, underlining the desperation within a divided Vietnam. Diem’s abuses were so stark that a Buddhist delegation went to Rome and, against the advice of Spellman, received an audience with the new pontiff, Pope John XXIII. Soon the Catholic Church took steps to distance itself from Diem’s government, including the decision to recall Archbishop Thuc to Rome. (Thuc was later excommunicated in the 1980s by Pope John Paul II for his extremely unorthodox views.) Even the hard-liner Spellman backed away reluctantly from Diem’s government.

  The Kennedys never seemed to recognize the historical ironies for them in Vietnam. Here was a nation of Buddhists who suffered abuse and faced religious discrimination by a government leader of a different faith, imposed upon them by a foreign power, a situation that split their nation into partitions in the north and south. America became as resented in this Vietnamese civil war as much as the British once occupying Eire were resented. Yet their own anti-Communist faith seemed to prevent the Kennedy brothers from accurately recognizing Diem’s weaknesses and understanding the reasons for Ho Chi Minh’s appeal in the countryside. Instead, Jack Kennedy maint
ained his support for Diem’s despotic regime. He appeared inspired by such tales as that of a Catholic priest named Father Hoa who managed to flee the Communists in China and round up enough followers in Vietnam to fight the Communist guerillas there. Though focused on other matters such as civil rights and Cuba, Bobby Kennedy clearly agreed with his older brother who “felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam. . . . If you lost Vietnam, I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.”The domino theory became a sacred tenet of U.S. foreign policy, not to be violated. The Kennedys, as executors of American power, sided with the tyrants.

  Another tragic irony was in the men Kennedy entrusted to enact his Southeast Asia policy. As his eyes and ears in Vietnam, Kennedy dispatched Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.—the old-school Brahmin Republican whom JFK beat in the 1952 Senate race and who ran as Nixon’s vice-presidential choice in 1960—to serve as U.S. ambassador. During his time in Saigon, Lodge did little to solve the underlying problems of that small poor nation, and quite arguably made them worse. His selection was a curious choice. Given the Kennedy family’s history with Brahmins, and specifically with Lodge himself, the presidential appointment seemed destined for failure. Lodge appeared ill-suited for dealing with the intricacies of an embattled and increasingly despotic Catholic ruler of a Buddhist nation in the midst of a civil war.

  There was more than a little irony that foreign policy experts such as Lodge and special assistant McGeorge Bundy, complete with their Harvard connections and Brahmin-like pedigrees, became architects and prosecutors of this disastrous war. (Bundy, a former Harvard dean, was related to A. Lawrence Lowell, the former Harvard president who once preached that the duty of the Brahmins was to “Americanize” the incoming Irish immigrants.) Bobby Kennedy, who thought Lodge was terribly lazy, opposed his selection, but Jack felt it would be good to have a Republican in this trou bled spot. In Vietnam, Lodge accurately assessed Diem’s ineptitude and held him in disdain. “As U.S. ambassador, Lodge showed almost as much disrespect for Diem as his grandfather had for Kennedy’s grandfather,” wrote Ken Hughes in the Boston Globe after reviewing the White House documents and tape recordings made by Kennedy (declassified in 1999) and documents that captured much of these deliberations. Lodge’s actions opened the door for a coup and the eventual murder of Diem at the behest of his own generals.

  Kennedy’s vacillation about Diem, including whether to support a coup, sealed his fate. On November 1, 1963, Kennedy appeared vexed about the issue as he left the Cabinet Room during the middle of a meeting so that he could celebrate Mass for All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation in the Roman Catholic Church. “I think we have to make it clear this is not an American coup,” he insisted on the way out. Meanwhile, in South Vietnam—where All Saints’ Day was celebrated officially by the government— the generals staged their revolt. Assassins pulled Diem from a Catholic church in Cholon, where he’d taken refuge, and put him in an armored passenger vehicle alongside his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Both brothers were shot in the back of the head.

  Inside the White House, when he heard the news of Diem’s death, Kennedy appeared visibly shaken. The initial reports about Diem suggested suicide.

  “It’s hard to believe he’d commit suicide given his strong religious career,” exclaimed Kennedy, who had helped project Diem’s image as a trustworthy, devout Catholic leader capable of resisting the Communist onslaught from the north.

  “He’s Catholic, but he’s an Asian Catholic,” said Hilsman, the assistant undersecretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who was strongly for the coup against Diem’s regime.

  “What?” Kennedy asked, not sure what he meant.

  “He’s an Asian Catholic,” Hilsman repeated. “And not only that, he’s a mandarin. It seems to me not at all inconsistent with Armageddon.”

  Hilsman’s odd comments hung in the air while Jack Kennedy seemed lost in thought about what had happened in Vietnam. As the evidence became clear concerning Diem’s assassination, Kennedy expressed “shock” and private remorse that he might have been responsible for Diem’s assassination. Another senior aide, Mike Forrestal, later described Kennedy’s reaction as “both personal and religious,” and indicated to historian Herbert S. Parmet that Kennedy was, in Parmet’s words, “especially troubled by the implication that a Catholic President had participated in a plot to assassinate a co-religionist.” Some Kennedy-era historians have repeated Cardinal Spellman’s claim that the president knew in advance Diem was going to be removed, probably by assassination, but was powerless to do anything about it. Given the estrangement between the cardinal and Jack Kennedy, the veracity of this supposed candid confession seems far-fetched. A more likely scenario is that Spellman made such a claim only after Kennedy’s death for what appears the cardinal’s own hawkish political purposes in support of America’s escalating war in Vietnam. Although there is no evidence suggesting that Kennedy personally approved Diem’s killing, the available records show he did little to stop it.

  IN THE LAST MONTHS of his presidency,Kennedy began privately reconsidering America’s commitment to the Vietnam conflict, even though his public rhetoric remained vintage New Frontier, ready to fight the Communists at any turn. After several aides expressed their dismay about the war’s outcome, the president sent a trusted Senate ally, Mike Mansfield, to Vietnam on his own fact-finding trip. Mansfield, himself a Catholic, had supported Diem’s government since the early 1950s. In his 1956 speech about Vietnam, Kennedy quoted a letter that Diem wrote to Mansfield, his long-time supporter: “It is only in winter that you can tell which trees are evergreen.”When Mansfield returned from his mission, however, he advised Kennedy to stop increasing the number of U.S. military advisers to Vietnam and think about a gradual pullout. The president seemed angry as he listened to Mansfield’s pessimistic assessment.“If I tried to pull out completely from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m re-elected,”Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell after Mansfield left.“So we better make damn sure that I am re-elected.”

  The president’s partisans—O’Donnell, Mansfield and others such as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—later suggested that Kennedy planned to leave Vietnam after the 1964 election. Hilsman said Kennedy became convinced after the Buddhist protests that Diem’s regime was doomed to fail and was beginning to prepare for American withdrawal. “He [Diem] surrounded himself with Catholics, but also they happened to be northerners who had fled the north when the Communists took over,” Hilsman explained. “So he was surrounding himself with zealots, you see, anti- Communist Catholic zealots. . . . So it was a hopeless situation and Kennedy came to this conclusion.”

  Nevertheless, Kennedy provided the philosophical framework for what was to become America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. The elements of geopolitical containment often came wrapped in the rhetoric of a crusade,a distinctly religious one, in which the enemies were godless socialists and the heroes were blessed by their priests. During the Kennedy years, the moral consequences of this crusade went largely ignored. The legitimacy of America’s role in Vietnam’s civil war, the conspiracies of torture, suppression and, ultimately, government-sanctioned assassination that surrounded the Diem regime were not examined fully until many years later.

  In their words and actions, Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s holy war reflected the Catholic Church’s own obsessive battle against the Communist threat growing out of the post–World War II era. On their watch, they insisted that neither Cuba nor Vietnam would be “lost,” spoken in the same way the church might refer to an apostate soul. The Kennedys came to modify their position as hard-line anti-Communists with great reluctance, and only when the realities of these jungle conflicts forced them to reexamine their policies and perhaps their own consciences. They were unflinching supporters of the church’s struggles against international communism throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. But by 1963, a new
Pope had changed the course of many church policies, including its often confrontational approach with the Soviets. The new Pope would want peace and world harmony, not a human race nearing nuclear destruction. And once again, the Kennedys proved an integral part of this new era.

  Chaper Twenty-Nine

  The Two Johns

  ACCOMPANIED BY THE PAPARAZZI and worldwide attention, Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the Vatican in March 1962 with a distinct air of apprehension. Little more than a year had transpired since her husband had won the American presidency in an election overflowing with anti-Catholic bigotry and talks of papist conspiracies. In his first year in the White House, John Kennedy bent over backwards to appear neither parochial nor deferential to the church. His wife’s official visit to the Throne of St. Peter threatened to enflame these passions once again.

  When the young and beautiful first lady walked through the second-floor library entrance for a papal audience, no one was sure how Pope John XXIII would greet her. His coterie of advisers suggested calling her “Mrs. Kennedy,” or thought “Madame” might be appropriate since they would both speak fluent French to each other. Instead, the eighty-year-old Pope welcomed her with the first name that popped into his head.

  “Jac-que-line!” he exclaimed, très familiar.

  Photographs sent around the world pictured the rotund pontiff, resplendent in white and gold and smiling gregariously, standing next to a bevy of red-robed cardinals and the thin, elegant first lady, whose sense of style made her reverential black dress and black lace mantilla seem chic. In thoughts and deeds, this Pope acted very differently from his predecessor, the austere diplomat Pius XII. He made small talk with Jackie and gave her rosaries for herself, her two children and the president. The son of Italian peasants, John XXIII didn’t stand on formality.