Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Unfortunately, implementing the CIA’s plan was akin to attempting a half-court hook shot with a beach ball. In the early morning of April 7, 1961, approximately fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles boarded agile landing craft and moved toward Playa Girón—the Bay of Pigs. Their purpose was to establish a beachhead and foment a popular rebellion that would lead in neatly cascading stages to Castro’s removal. A tragic series of events ensued. As the boats approached the Bay of Pigs, some of their engines failed, leaving the occupants sitting ducks. Some of the other boats crashed into a coral reef that the CIA advance operation had misidentified as seaweed. Castro’s regular army had little trouble subduing this bedraggled insurgent force as it eventually made landfall. Presented with the option of deploying the Air Force to strafe Castro’s forces, Kennedy declined, deeming it wiser to cut losses and regroup than to risk a wider conflict. It was an inglorious episode for which the president accepted full responsibility—although it was CIA director Allen Dulles who lost his job. Kennedy was shocked to discover that this misadventure had not dented his high approval ratings, which remained true at 82 percent. He commented wryly, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.” It fell to Dean Acheson to capture the flawed logic undergirding the operation, observing that it did not take “Price-Waterhouse to discover that 1,500 Cubans weren’t as good as 25,000 Cubans.”112

  Nitze was torn about the merits of invading Cuba with CIA-trained exiles. Major General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency adviser based in the Pentagon, had serious doubts about the viability of the operation. He relayed them to Nitze, who also found them sobering. He confessed to his “uneasiness about the operation,” although he ultimately kept those doubts to himself, supporting the action in a meeting called by President Kennedy. “In my mind,” Nitze stated, “our moral right to try to stop the Communist menace from invading our hemisphere was not the issue. The Soviet Union had inserted itself in our backyard by stealth and deception in the form of the Castro regime in Cuba. Like a spreading cancer, it should, if possible, be excised from the Americas.”113 The logic of Kennedy’s activism did not faze Nitze—indeed, he had encouraged it. But he would increasingly find himself at odds with the administration on the best means to implement NSC-68’s precepts. Nitze liked military assertiveness in principle—his career to date had been devoted to maintaining and extending U.S. strategic dominance over the communist world. While “throw-weights”—the combined weight of each side’s ballistic missile payloads—were calculable, however, civil wars in distant theaters were unknowable, impervious to charting, a law unto themselves. And Nitze disliked uncertainty.

  In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Walt Rostow suggested that the president focus more intently on combating the fast-growing communist insurgency in South Vietnam—a crisis that had been festering for some time. After the nationalist Viet Minh had defeated France at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the contours of the newly independent nation were thrashed out at the Geneva Conference: Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel on a temporary basis. The communist Ho Chi Minh led North Vietnam while South Vietnam was governed by the pro-Western combination of President Bao Dai and his prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. The treaty stipulated that the division was temporary and that the 17th parallel should not be “interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”114 Nationwide reunification elections were scheduled to take place in 1956, but realizing that Ho Chi Minh was likely to win a national ballot, South Vietnam, with Washington’s full support, refused to participate. From that point a civil war in the weaker South Vietnam became virtually certain. In December 1960, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam, or DRV) approved the establishment of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam. Its avowed aim was “to overthrow the dictatorial … Diem clique, lackey of the U.S. imperialists, to form a … coalition government in South Vietnam, to win national independence and … to achieve national reunification.”115 In little time, the NLF insurgency began to ask hard questions of South Vietnam’s continued viability as a state. On April 21, 1961, Rostow advised Kennedy that “Viet Nam is the place where … we must prove we are not a paper tiger.”116 He believed that the conflict in South Vietnam was precisely the type of Third World crisis that the United States had to step in and resolve. Even history needed a nudge sometimes.

  Nitze had served on Truman’s Policy Planning Staff as the rebellion against French rule intensified under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership. Nitze had participated in strategic discussions through two and a half years of the Korean War. It was a conflict that had highlighted serious operational deficiencies in the U.S. military, which had struggled on alien terrain against a well-drilled opponent. Unlike Rostow, McNamara, and Bundy, Nitze had already advised a president on how to respond to conflict in Southeast Asia. The experience was not one Nitze thought warranted repeating. He had supported the Korean War because a communist nation had invaded its neighbor, crossing an internationally recognized boundary in the process. This casus belli did not apply to the conflict in Vietnam. Nitze found plenty of reasons not to stake American credibility in fighting Vietnamese communism. So when Rostow and others began recommending an escalation in the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam, Nitze generally took the opposite view.

  In October 1961, for example, Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor, a special military adviser to Kennedy based in the White House, embarked on a fact-finding tour to South Vietnam. Upon their return they submitted a report that recommended the dispatch of six to eight thousand U.S. combat troops—disguised as “flood relief workers”—to South Vietnam.117 Taylor and Rostow also pointed out that Ho Chi Minh “not only had something to gain—the South—but a base to risk—the North—if war should come.”118 They believed that the insurgency in South Vietnam might be choked off by an attack on the North, cabling Kennedy on October 23 that “NVN is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off South Vietnam.”119 Nitze’s experience with the USSBS led him to treat such claims with skepticism. He also worried about the jauntily upbeat nature of Rostow’s escalatory advice—he described him as “the most irrepressible optimist you can find any place”—which he felt was abstract and untested by hard diplomatic experience. Nitze later elaborated on this theme: “Walt and Max Taylor were more on the side of ‘let’s do it,’ and less on the side of how do we do it, can it be done, are there crevasses there, how passable are they, should we put some pitons in the mountain wall in order to make it safe to go up the goddamn thing or we’re going to fall flat on our face if we don’t put those pitons in. That wasn’t their mood.”120

  In a meeting called to discuss Taylor-Rostow, Nitze argued strongly against sending U.S. troops to South Vietnam. “There was no such thing as being a little bit pregnant,” Nitze observed, “and an open-ended commitment could well lead to American involvement in another major ground war in Asia under unfavorable political and logistical circumstances.”121 In earthier language, Nitze suggested that the dispatch of American combat troops “wouldn’t be decisive, it would just get our tit in the wringer.”122 Critically, Nitze managed to persuade Robert McNamara, an early supporter of the Taylor-Rostow report, that it was in fact based on a dangerously uncontrollable rationale. “I think I was the one who persuaded him to reverse his position,” Nitze recalled with satisfaction. “I’m sure I did. This was one of the things that really got my dander up and I was absolutely convinced that this was a bad idea so I held forth with acerbity and carried the day.”123

  While Nitze and the skeptics of escalation won this particular skirmish, the American commitment to South Vietnam increased steadily during the Kennedy years. Nitze was correct in predicting that even a modest detachment of U.S. combat troops generated an escalatory momentum that was difficult to reverse. If eight thousand troops were unable to protect South Vietnam from communists, why not double the number? In fact, why not keep
doubling until an optimum number is reached? In striving to locate an illusory tipping point—when each additional American soldier would supposedly have a decisive effect in quelling the insurgency—the United States would find itself with half a million troops stationed in South Vietnam in 1968. Nitze’s “little bit pregnant” captured an essential truth. And his anticommunist credentials meant his cautionary advice could not be dismissed as dovish irresolution. Nitze had great instincts about certain things.

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  Important as his ideas were to the administration, Nitze never hit it off with President Kennedy. He found socializing with the “Kennedy set” tiresome—the demands made on Camelot’s courtiers were unreasonable. “There was a certain difficulty with the Kennedys,” Nitze noted. “Either you became very much a part of the Kennedy set, you know, went to all their functions at Hickory Hill and played touch football … McNamara did that. He was very much part of the Kennedy set. Mrs. N[itze] and I knew them all, and from time to time went to these things, but you know we don’t like to become part of somebody else’s group.” This independent-mindedness partly explained why Nitze declined the position that McGeorge Bundy accepted. There was a constant pressure on national security advisers to “become the president’s man and not an independent soul. And I hate the business of being somebody’s man.”124 Nitze’s isolation from the Kennedy circle became more pronounced during the Cuban missile crisis and the postmortem that followed.

  In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being constructed in Cuba. Moscow had embarked on an audacious attempt to equalize the nuclear balance of power. The United States had to do something—but what exactly? The stakes were unimaginably high, with no margin for error. An American air strike could destroy the sites, but what if the missiles were operational and a zealous communist managed to fire one away? What if Moscow decided to up the ante in response to a strike on Cuba? And if the United States did nothing, would not Moscow interpret this as a sign of weakness, an invitation to future mischief?

  To coordinate the administration’s response to the Cold War’s most perilous crisis, the president convened an Executive Committee (ExComm) comprising his most significant and trusted foreign-policy advisers. Nitze was the only person authorized to take notes at the meetings, which he compared unflatteringly to “sophomoric seminar[s].” He soon grew tired of Kennedy’s glacially slow consultative approach. On October 19, three days after the crisis began, he and U. Alexis Johnson, undersecretary for political affairs, sketched a range of possible American responses moving upward in intensity from a naval blockade to an air strike to a full-blown invasion. The following day ExComm arrived at a consensus view that a blockade was the most appropriate first response. But then two days later, Nitze reneged on his earlier recommendations and advised the immediate launching of an air strike to “eliminate the main nuclear threat.”125 He believed it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would order a strike in response while the American Strategic Air Command was mobilized, primed, and geographically dispersed. A Russian retaliatory strike would merely invite its own annihilation.

  Nitze’s change of heart on the supposed necessity of destroying the missile sites led to his marginalization. Kennedy implemented the quarantine, and it worked. Meanwhile Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin worked a secret bilateral channel to thrash out a quid pro quo. President Kennedy’s public posture was one of indefatigability—nothing would be gifted to Moscow as a reward for its misdeeds—but behind the scenes his younger brother offered as bargaining chips the removal of obsolete Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey and an assurance that the United States would never invade Cuba again.

  Nitze viewed this kind of horse trading as unbecoming of a nation as powerful as the United States. He was upset that the Jupiter missiles had been traded in this fashion, observing, “Our NATO partners—Turkey, in particular—would be outraged at our weakness in the face of an immediate threat to our security.” Thanks in part to Nitze’s efforts, Washington had a far greater nuclear capability than Moscow. His retrospective assessment of the Cuban missile crisis was that it was America’s superior deterrent that allowed it to prevail—Khrushchev realized there was no point pushing on toward a war of self-immolation. Kennedy had a very strong hand and gave up too much in the process:

  I believed that we should have pushed our advantage with greater vigor. We had achieved our objective of getting offensive weapons removed from Cuba with a minimum amount of force. With the nuclear balance heavily in our favor, I believed we should have pushed the Kremlin in 1962 to give up its efforts to establish Soviet influence in this hemisphere. As it turned out, while the resolution of the crisis was seen as a triumph for the West, the Soviet Union achieved its goal of securing a guarantee from the United States to respect the territorial integrity of a socialist state in the hemisphere.126

  It is impossible to know whether Nitze’s plan to push America’s advantage “with greater vigor” would have resulted in Soviet concessions or a third world war. We do know that it was a high-risk stratagem that led Bobby Kennedy and others to view Nitze as reckless. He came out of the missile crisis badly, and in the late summer of 1963 Kennedy transferred him from the Pentagon to a position he did not want: secretary of the Navy. For Nitze, being eased out of policymaking and placed back in management was something like purgatory. Richard Nixon remarked brutally that “the service secretaries, well, they’re just warts. I like them as individuals, but they do not do important things.”127 Nitze did come to enjoy aspects of the job, but he longed to return to an advisory role. Kennedy reassured Nitze that his stint as Navy secretary would be short; within six months the president would return him to a job appropriate to his talents. But Kennedy was unable to keep his promise. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the president in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A distraught George Kennan, who admired Kennedy’s intuitive diplomatic style—if not the advisers he hired—composed a eulogy that lauded the president’s understanding of the two fundamental principles of statecraft: “First, that no political judgments must ever be final; and second, that the lack of finality must never be an excuse for inaction.” Kennan hailed the fallen president as “an extraordinarily gallant and gifted man” whose vast potential had barely been realized when “the hand of the assassin reached him.”128

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  A few weeks after assuming the presidency in those traumatic circumstances, Lyndon Baines Johnson called Nitze to a one-on-one meeting in the White House. Here was an ideal opportunity for Nitze to convince LBJ of his merits as an adviser—the first step to his coming in from the cold. Nitze prepared assiduously, anticipating a series of questions on various Cold War flashpoints. Instead, Nitze was disappointed to find that the meeting was merely a test of his endurance and loyalty. LBJ asked Nitze no questions. Instead, he went about his presidential business: he made phone calls, took notes, signed documents, dictated letters, and watched news reports on his television. “From time to time,” Nitze remembered, “he would look at me out of the corner of his eye to see whether I was duly impressed, and then would continue his work.”129 Nitze, whose presence was scarcely registered, was forced to endure this spectacle for four hours before the president dismissed him. He ruminated on Johnson’s motives: “He was trying to satisfy himself as to whether or not I was capable of being a wholly dedicated supporter, or whether I really was an incorrigibly independent man. In other words, would I become one of his boys or would I refuse to become one of his boys. And I was clear in my mind that I would never give up being an independent man.”

  Nitze attributed Johnson’s coolness toward him to his dim view of the “Eastern Establishment,” of which Nitze was assuredly a member. “He had this grave suspicion of anybody part of the Eastern Establishment. [He] felt that they looked down upon him, didn’t have a true appreciation of his merits.”130 There was truth to Nitze’s suspicions, although Johnson managed to get
over his alleged phobia in respect to McGeorge Bundy—who was as Eastern Establishment as they came. The main reason LBJ kept Nitze at the Navy Department was that he remembered his opposition to the Taylor-Rostow report and viewed him as a potential irritant on the Vietnam War. President Johnson wanted everyone on the same page—he disliked arbitrating disagreement among his advisers. But singing in harmony was not Nitze’s thing. He believed that Johnson’s insistence on unity was part of his tragedy:

  I found President Johnson, in spite of his occasional lapses into coarse behavior, to be a man with drive, humanity, and depth of sensitivity, struggling with too large an ego and too little solid confidence. He felt a need wholly to dominate those around him, but those who could really be helpful to him would not let themselves be dominated. He thus came to rely on those not worthy of his own stature.131

  This was a gracious and perceptive assessment of the Johnson presidency. Kennan failed to muster similar evenhandedness at the time. He wrote in 1965 that “what this man represents—this oily, folksy, tricky political play-acting, this hearty optimism, this self-congratulatory jingoism, all combined with the whiney, plaintive, provincial drawl and the childish antics of the grown male in modern Texas—this may be the America of the majority of the American people but it’s not my America.”132