by Ted Sorensen
The United Nations, he strongly believed, should remain “to preserve the gains already made,” as he said in his September, 1963, address to the General Assembly.
Let us complete what we have started, for “No man who puts his hand to the plow and looks back,” as the Scriptures tell us, “… is fit for the Kingdom of God.”
LAOS
On the Indochinese peninsula in Southeast Asia, the United States in the 1950’s had put its hand to the plow of national independence. President Kennedy, skeptical of the extent of our involvement but unwilling to abandon his predecessor’s pledge or permit a Communist conquest, would not turn back from that commitment.
But Kennedy did reverse the policy by which our commitment was met in the tiny kingdom of Laos, which occupied the northwest portion of that peninsula. Here, as in the Congo, the chaos would have reached comic opera proportions but for the tragedy which came with it. The tragedy in Laos, unlike the Congo, was not the excessive loss of human life. Despite constant revolts and civil war, the Laotians were a peaceful people, their many generals commanded few troops and their headlined battles shed little blood. The tragedy of the Laotian conflict was its diversion of money and effort away from the desperate economic problems of Indochina’s least developed area. In the years preceding Kennedy’s inauguration both American and Soviet funds had been manipulated by rival and unstable factions to serve their own political ends with very little improvement in the lot of the Laotian people.
Wholly uninterested in the cold war, the vast majority of Laotians wanted only to be left alone, as the 1954 Geneva Accords had promised. The United States refused to sign the Accords, but agreed to abide by them. The neutral coalition government in Laos envisioned by those Accords, however, was “immoral” under the Dulles doctrine. The Communists having clearly violated them in both Laos and Vietnam, the United States felt free to do so also. Consequently, the Eisenhower administration spent some $300 million and five years in the hopeless effort to convert Laos into a clearly pro-Western, formally anti-Communist military outpost on the borders of Red China and North Vietnam. Its concentration of support on the nation’s right-wing military strong man, General Phoumi Nosavan, helped bring about a series of largely bloodless coups and countercoups which late in 1960 drove neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma into working with the Soviets and drove the neutralist portion of the army, under Captain Kong Le, into an accommodation with the Communist-led Pathet Lao who controlled the northern sectors of the kingdom. American influence, incompetence and intrigue—including the support of different rival leaders by State, Defense and CIA operatives—only weakened the standing of General Phoumi and his associates among their placid countrymen; and discord between the anti-Communist rightists and the non-Communist neutrals encouraged the Communists to push even further.
As the Kennedy administration prepared to assume office, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. The Soviet Union was airlifting an estimated forty-five tons of arms and ammunition out of Hanoi every day to the Pathet Lao and Kong Le forces, steadily expanding their positions in northeast Laos and on the strategic Plaine des Jarres. The United States was airlifting supplies to General Phoumi’s forces further south in the Mekong Valley (the Pathet Lao also held pockets throughout the southern half of the country). The British and French still favored Souvanna Phouma, but he had fled to Cambodia. General Phoumi had committed himself to a new offensive into Pathet Lao territory. His troops, though superior in numbers, American trained and American equipped, gave way to panic upon hearing that the more toughened North Vietnamese might be fighting on the other side.
In short, a Communist conquest of almost every key city in the entire kingdom was an imminent danger. “Whatever’s going to happen in Laos,” the President-elect said to me in Palm Beach, “an American invasion, a Communist victory or whatever, I wish it would happen before we take over and get blamed for it.” In his January 19 conference with President Eisenhower, he asked more questions on this than any other subject. Eisenhower acknowledged that it was the most immediately dangerous “mess” he was passing on. “You might have to go in there and fight it out,” he said.
In a round of conferences with his own advisers during his first two months in office, Kennedy devoted more time and task force studies to this subject than to any other. But neither Eisenhower nor the Kennedy advisers had any “right” answers. One early effort was to obtain a guarantee of Laotian security by three neutral neighbors—but they refused to take on the job. Early in March Phoumi’s forces were easily driven out of their one forward position—and the moment of decision was at hand.
Essentially, Kennedy decided, he had four choices. One was to do nothing and let the Pathet Lao overrun the country. That he regarded as unacceptable. It would shake the faith of every small nation we were pledged to protect, particularly in Asia, and particularly South Vietnam and Thailand, who bordered Laos on either side. As elaborated below with respect to Vietnam, abandoning one nation to the Communists seemed almost certain to lead to a more costly stand against them somewhere else in Asia.
A second possible course was to provide whatever military backing was necessary to enable the pro-Western forces to prevail. This was in effect the policy he had inherited—and he had also inherited most of the military and intelligence advisers who had formed it. But this course struck Kennedy as contrary to common sense as well as to the wishes of our chief allies. A bastion of Western strength on China’s border could not be created by a people quite unwilling to be a bastion for anyone. Even if no other Communist forces intervened, it appeared to require the prolonged deployment of a large American expeditionary force to the mountains and rain forests of the Asian mainland in defense of an unpopular government whose own troops had little will for battle. It had all the worst aspects of another Korean War—the kind of war many Army commanders had vowed they would never fight again without nuclear arms—in a country with no seaports, no railroads, only two mountain “highways” (on dry days) and almost no communications. General Douglas MacArthur, in an April, 1961, meeting with the President, warned him against the commitment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice.
This led to Kennedy’s third choice: accepting a division of the country. But the division of Vietnam and Korea had pointed up the difficulties of defending a long frontier without a large and indefinite commitment of U.S. ground forces. It would bring down upon the President all the cries about turning an area over to the Communists without solving the existing military problem. Moreover, a division would leave the royal capital of Luang Prabang in the north; and the King of Laos would never be willing to abandon the royal palace, which contained the sacred solid-gold palatine of the Laotian people, the Prabang image, regarded as the nation’s only true defense. (When captured by the Thais in 1878, the only time it had ever left Laos, the image according to legend brought them such bad luck that it was hastened back to Luang Prabang.)
Kennedy’s fourth choice, which he ultimately adopted, was to seek peaceful negotiations to restore a neutral coalition government. There was no need for a military solution. The vital interests of neither the Soviet Union nor the United States would be impaired by a neutralist government, and neither the Red Chinese nor the North Vietnamese were ready to fight a major war against it. Clearly the gentle Laotians themselves, if left alone, showed little interest in fighting. At times both sides would leave the field for a week-long festival, and then return to take up their same positions.
While a negotiated neutral coalition was the only feasible alternative, the President knew it would not be the most popular one. It meant sitting at the conference table with Red China. It meant abandoning not Laos but the previous policy of tying our position to the right-wing forces only. It meant in time supporting as Premier the same Souvanna Phouma, the symbol of neutralism, whom this country had previously condemned. It meant withdrawal of the American military mission, one of a world-wide network whic
h was regarded as almost permanent. It meant, finally, accepting a government with Communist participation, with all the dangers he knew that entailed since the coup in postwar Czechoslovakia.
“I can assure you,” the President would say later on this last point, “that I recognize the risks that are involved. But I also think we should consider the risks if we fail…what our alternatives are, and what the prospects for war are in that area…. There is no easy, sure answer for Laos.”
In March, 1961, the fourth choice outlined above certainly provided no easy, sure answer. The President was determined not to start negotiations until the fighting stopped, given our difficult position. In 1954 the Geneva Conference on Indochina had been called while the fighting continued; and the subsequent French defeat at Dienbienphu had made inevitable the Communist gains at that Conference. The Pathet Lao and its backers now favored a repeat performance in 1961, agreeing to a new Geneva Conference but without an end to hostilities. Kennedy insisted that a cease-fire precede negotiations. He warned that the United States would otherwise, however unwillingly, be required to intervene militarily on the ground to prevent the takeover of Laos by force. He saw to it that this message was conveyed to the Red Chinese through the ambassadorial channel in Warsaw; that it was conveyed by the British—after he personally saw Macmillan at Key West—to their Soviet co-chairman of the Geneva Conference; and that it was conveyed by Nehru and Ambassador Thompson to Khrushchev. He conveyed it himself to Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in their first meeting at the White House.
To back up the message, preparations were initiated for a seventeen-part, step-by-step plan of increasing military action, moving from military advisers to a token unit to all-out force. The President ordered the loading of Marines in Japan and Okinawa to prepare to move to positions in the Mekong Valley section of Thailand. One unit, complete with helicopters and guerrilla experts, was landed. The Seventh Fleet was alerted. Congressional leaders were briefed. When word of the military planning leaked, Kennedy was unperturbed, believing that it was just as well the Communists knew his intentions.
On the evening of March 23 he opened his news conference with a long and strongly worded statement on our Laotian policy. A large map had been brought in at his suggestion to show the extent of the Communist threat. It is commonly said that that statement was designed to prepare the American people for an invasion of Laos. The President, if not all his advisers, had no such intent. To make this clear, he had carefully reworded the statement first drafted by the departments. His intention was to warn the Communists in unmistakable terms that a cease-fire must precede negotiations (“No one should doubt our resolution on this point”)—to alert the American public to the facts of the crisis (“Laos is far away from America, but the world is small…. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all”)—and to make clear the new American policy of supporting “a truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn; a settlement concluded at the conference table, not on the battlefield…. We will not be provoked, trapped or drawn into this or any other situation; but I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations.” He spoke coolly, quietly, without bombast. Refusing to refer to Laos as a small country, he termed it “three times the size of Austria.” In answer to questions he indicated that, far from regarding neutralism as immoral, he would be prepared to continue economic aid to a neutral Laos.
No deadline was set for a cease-fire, though he indicated that “every day is important.” In the weeks that followed, the prospects for a ceasefire rose and fell as sporadic fighting continued. The President, in the key strategy meeting of March 9, had agreed to preparations for a military build-up. But he had not agreed, he had emphasized at the time to all present, to giving the final “go” signal. Throughout March and April he calmly withstood pressures to launch the new military effort, believing that Khrushchev might still agree to a cease-fire. The Pathet Lao, shrewdly avoiding any all-out assault, continued to expand and consolidate their position. “With a few more weeks of fighting,” the President would admit privately later, “the Communists had every military prospect of picking up the entire country.”
A new round of White House talks on Laos took place around the first of May. But these talks had a different ring, due to two intervening factors or events. One was the growing evidence that this nation would be largely alone if we intervened in Laos. The Pentagon talked of landing a SEATO force in which U.S. troops would play only their part. But upon pressing the other SEATO nations hard about the actual extent of their help, the President found the French strongly opposed, the British dragging their feet and most of the others willing to give only token forces, if any. The Laotian people themselves were wholly unenthusiastic, and the Phoumi forces were unwilling to fight very hard for their homeland. Phoumi himself still talked tough, but he and his men seemed both unable and unwilling to engage in many actual exchanges of gunfire.
Second, the Bay of Pigs fiasco had its influence. That operation had been recommended principally by the same set of advisers who favored intervention in Laos. But now the President was far more skeptical of the experts, their reputations, their recommendations, their promises, premises and facts. He relied more on his White House staff and his own common sense; and he asked the Attorney General and me to attend all NSC meetings. He began asking questions he had not asked before about military operations in Laos. He requested each member of the Chiefs of Staff to give him in writing his detailed views on where our intervention would lead, who would join us, how we would react to a massive Red Chinese response and where it would all end. Their answers, considered in an NSC meeting on May I, looked very different from the operation originally envisioned; and the closer he looked, the less justifiable and definable those answers became. “Thank God the Bay of Pigs happened when it did,” he would say to me in September, as we chatted about foreign policy in his New York hotel room on the eve of his UN address. “Otherwise we’d be in Laos by now—and that would be a hundred times worse.”
In general, the Joint Chiefs (and most other advisers) accepted without reservation the “falling domino” theory—the premise that an absence of American military intervention would lose Laos, which would move Thailand toward the Communist orbit, which would jeopardize SEATO, which in five or six years would lose all Southeast Asia, and so on down a trail of disaster. But their individual written views revealed all kinds of splits not previously made known to the President. Those whose troops would have to do the fighting were dubious, pointing out the difficulties the Army would encounter in supplying its troops and clearing guerrillas out of the rugged mountains, and warning (somewhat inaccurately, the President later learned) of the crippling effects of dysenteric and other diseases native to the area. The President was also warned that the Communists had the manpower to open another front against us elsewhere in Asia. The majority, however, appeared to favor the landing of American troops in Thailand, South Vietnam and the government-held portions of the Laotian panhandle. If that did not produce a cease-fire, they recommended an air attack on Pathet Lao positions and tactical nuclear weapons on the ground. If North Vietnamese or Chinese then moved in, their homelands would be bombed. If massive Red troops were then mobilized, nuclear bombings would be threatened and, if necessary, carried out. If the Soviets then intervened, we should “be prepared to accept the possibility of general war.” But the Soviet Union, they assured the President, “can hardly wish to see an uncontrollable situation develop.” At least that was their judgment—and the President had relied on their judgment at the Bay of Pigs.
Earlier the Chiefs had talked of landing and supplying American combat forces through Laotian airports (inasmuch as the kingdom is landlocked). Questioning now disclosed that there were only two usable airstrips even in good weather, that Pathet Lao control of the nearby countryside could make initial landings difficult, and that a Communist bombing of these airstrips would leave us with no alternative but to bomb Communist territory.
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p; If we used nuclear bombs, the President asked, where would it stop, how many other Communist movements would we have to attack, what kind of world would it be? No one knew. If we didn’t use nuclear weapons, he asked, would we have to retreat or surrender in the face of an all-out Chinese intervention? That answer was affirmative. If we put more forces in Laos, he asked the Chiefs, would that weaken our reserves for action in Berlin or elsewhere? The answer was again in the affirmative. If neither the royal nor the administrative capital cities fell, and the cease-fire squabble was merely over where the truce was to be signed, would these risks be worthwhile? No one was sure.
Once in, how and when do we get out? he asked. Why cannot air and Naval power suffice? Do we want an indefinite occupation of an unenthusiastic, dark-skinned population, tying up our forces and not those of the Communists? Is this our best bet for a confrontation with Red China—in the mountains and jungles of its landlocked neighbor? Would forces landing in Vietnam and Thailand end up defending those regimes also? Above all, he asked, why were the Laotian forces unwilling to fight for their own freedom? “Experience has taught us,” the President said later that May in his second State of the Union,
that no one nation has the power or the wisdom to solve all the problems of the world or manage its revolutionary tides; that extending our commitments does not always increase our security—…that nuclear weapons cannot prevent subversion; and that no free peoples can be kept free without will and energy of their own….
He spoke of the world in general but he was thinking of Laos in particular.
Nevertheless he did not alter his posture (which combined bluff with real determination in proportions he made known to no one) that the United States would have to intervene in Laos if it could not otherwise be saved. That posture, as communicated by his March 23 news conference, by an order for American military advisers in Laos to don their uniforms and by further preparations to send a contingent to Thailand, helped persuade Khrushchev not to overplay his hand. A military solution—risking a big-power confrontation and the danger of “escalation”—was not in the Soviets’ interest either. Moreover, the monsoon season had halted most major military movements. In the late spring of 1961 the crisis eased. A military cease-fire was effected, and a new Geneva Conference began, with the West once again united on the goal of a “neutral and independent” Laos.