by Ted Sorensen
East-West agreement on the meaning of that phrase was advanced by the Kennedy-Khrushchev talks at Vienna in early June. Kennedy was very frank. American policy in that region has not always been wise, he said, and he wanted to change it in Laos because that country is of no strategic importance. The Pathet Lao had the advantage of being for change, he admitted, and he could not make a final judgment as to the desires of the people. But the United States nevertheless had treaty obligations under a SEATO protocol. A solution had to be found which could avoid committing the prestige of the great powers, secure and verify the cease-fire (which each side was accusing the other of violating), obtain a government acceptable to both sides and thus draw the fire out of the situation in a way that would be mutually satisfactory. He suggested the use of Burma and Cambodia as examples of “neutral and independent” countries.
At first Khrushchev seemed to brush aside Laos as an unimportant detail, preferring to talk more generally about “wars of liberation” in the old colonial areas, and ranging into a variety of other issues about China, Africa and guerrilla warfare. But patiently and persistently Kennedy brought him back to the specific question of Laos. On the second day of talks he pressed the Soviet Chairman again on both sides’ reducing their commitments. Laos, he said, is not so important as to get us as involved as we are. Khrushchev agreed, asserting that his nation had neither obligations nor vested interests in this little country far from Soviet borders. He acknowledged that the cease-fire should be verified, and promised to encourage both sides in the kingdom to get together. Rusk and Gromyko, he said, should be locked in a room and told to find a solution (at which the usually dour Gromyko interjected the point that the Palace of Nations in Geneva is a big place with a lot of rooms).
But the negotiations at Geneva dragged on. The princely leaders of the three factions of Laotians were slow to agree on specifics and quick to walk out in protest. They bogged down trying to list personnel in Souvanna Phouma’s new coalition Cabinet in which the rightists and Pathet Lao were to have appropriate representation and the neutralists were to predominate. Arguments broke out over which way various neutralists leaned. From time to time fighting broke out in violation of the cease-fire, and the Pathet Lao nibbled away at more territory. The Red Chinese and North Vietnamese delegates were not only less open to reason than the Russians but more prone to rudeness. Nevertheless, “We will stay at the Conference,” said the President patiently, “for as long as we feel there is some hope of success.”
Finally on May 15, 1962, after a major Pathet Lao attack across the Mekong Valley on the town of Nam Tha had threatened both the Conference and the Thai border, Kennedy moved once again. He had to show that his March, 1961, talk was no bluff—that he would not permit Laos to be taken into the Communist orbit through military action. On the basis of a decision quickly made and quickly executed, barely going through the formality of asking the Thais to “request” our help under the SEATO Treaty, U.S. Naval forces and two air squadrons were moved to the area. More than five thousand marines and Army combat personnel were put ashore in Thailand and moved up to the Laos border. Australia, New Zealand and Britain sent units as well. At the same time concentrated diplomatic pressure was put on the Soviets, making clear that we still favored a negotiated neutral settlement but wondered if they still controlled events on their side.
The Pathet Lao stopped, convinced that the United States meant business. General Phoumi also stopped, in doubt perhaps after his defeat at Nam Tha that he could ever win the country with his anti-Communist (and apparently antibloodshed) army. The negotiating atmosphere quickly improved. In June a shaky coalition “government of national union” was glued together with its tripartite Cabinet. And in July, after fifteen months of persistence by America’s chief negotiator, Averell Harriman, a new Geneva Accord on Laos was signed by fourteen governments—including those of Red China and North Vietnam, whom this country did not officially recognize but who were indispensable to any agreement. Kennedy shortly thereafter recalled the American troops in Thailand, leaving behind the logistic facilities needed for their rapid reintroduction, and resumed economic aid to Souvanna.
The new Accord reflected the preference of all the major powers that Laos should be left to work out its own destiny geographically undivided, politically unaligned, militarily unoffensive and generally unimportant except as a buffer state. It was a precarious agreement, never entirely fulfilled by the Communists. Western military advisers were withdrawn and the Soviet airlift stopped; but North Vietnam continued to provide military support to the Pathet Lao and to use Laotian corridors into South Vietnam. The Pathet Lao, unwilling to meet in a capital patrolled by Phoumi’s troops, finally withdrew from Souvanna’s government, attacked their former ally, Kong Le, and prevented the International Control Commission from inspecting possible Geneva violations in the areas they controlled. The rightists, resisting Kennedy’s suggestions to reduce their troop strength, constantly agitated against Souvanna’s inclusion of Communists; Souvanna constantly threatened to quit the government; and Kennedy was constantly calling upon the International Control Commission or the Soviet Union directly to carry out the Geneva mandate. Harriman, talking to Khrushchev twice in 1963, found him less interested in Southeast Asia than previously, possibly reflecting the rise of Red Chinese influence in the area. In the spring of that year it was once again necessary for Kennedy to alert the Seventh Fleet and to stage “war games” in Thailand as a warning against a Communist takeover. Nevertheless, none of the parties involved in Laos, including Red China, seemed willing to push the fighting to a decisive point or to seek control of the country through a violent coup, apparently for fear that such an attempt might bring in the other side.
The Geneva agreement was imperfect and untidy, but it was better than no agreement at all, better than a major military confrontation and better than a Communist conquest. It was more consistent, in short, with this nation’s capabilities and interests than the untenable position in which Kennedy found himself wedged in January, 1961. Contrary to the public predictions of many “experts,” Souvanna Phouma did not turn out to be a Communist in disguise and his country did not slip quickly behind the Iron Curtain. “We have never suggested that there was a final easy answer in Laos,” said the President. “It is a situation which is uncertain and full of hazard…. [But so] is life in much of the world.”
VIETNAM
Life was certainly uncertain and full of hazard next door to Laos in South Vietnam. There the prospects of a final, easy answer were even more remote. Unlike Laos, Vietnam was a highly populated and productive country ruled by a central government determined to oppose all Communist aggression and subversion. Unlike the often farcical battles in Laos, the war in Vietnam was brutal on both sides, and the government forces—despite a lack of imaginative and energetic leadership—were sizable, engaged in actual combat and dying in large numbers for their country. Unlike their situation in Laos, the great powers were more firmly committed on both sides in Vietnam, and the struggle was over not merely control of the government but the survival of the nation.
Kennedy’s basic objective in Vietnam, however, was essentially the same as in Laos and the rest of Southeast Asia. He sought neither a cold war pawn nor a hot war battleground. He did not insist that South Vietnam maintain Western bases or membership in a Western alliance. As in Laos, his desire was to halt a Communist-sponsored guerrilla war and to permit the local population peacefully to choose its own future. But South Vietnam was too weak to stand alone; and any attempt to neutralize that nation in 1961 like Laos, at a time when the Communists had the upper hand in the fighting and were the most forceful element in the South as well as the North, would have left the South Vietnamese defenseless against externally supported Communist domination. The neutralization of both North and South Vietnam had been envisioned by the 1954 Geneva Accords. But when a return to that solution was proposed by Rusk to Gromyko, the latter not surprisingly replied that the North was ir
revocably a part of the “socialist camp.”
We would not stay in Southeast Asia against the wishes of any local government, the President often said. But apart from that local government’s interest, free world security also had a stake in our staying there. A major goal of Red China’s policy was to drive from Southeast Asia—indeed, from all Asia—the last vestiges of Western power and influence, the only effective counter to her own hegemony. Southeast Asia, with its vast population, resources and strategic location,1 would be a rich prize for the hungry Chinese. Kennedy, as shown by his reversal of our policy in Laos, saw no need to maintain American outposts in the area. The Kennedy Southeast Asia policy respected the neutrality of all who wished to be neutral. But it also insisted that other nations similarly respect that neutrality, withdraw their troops and abide by negotiated settlements and boundaries, thus leaving each neutral free to choose and fulfill its own future within the framework of its own culture and traditions. To the extent that this required a temporary U.S. military presence, American and Communist objectives conflicted. The cockpit in which that conflict was principally tested was hapless South Vietnam, but neither Kennedy nor the Communists believed that the consequences of success or failure in that country would be confined to Vietnam alone.
This nation’s pledge to assist and defend the integrity of South Vietnam was first made in 1954. In that year the Geneva Accords divided the country at the 17th Parallel into Communist and non-Communist territories, both sides promising (but neither expecting) an election to reunify the country. The new Republic of South Vietnam, attempting to build a nation on the ruins of nearly a hundred years of colonial rule, Japanese occupation and war with France, faced seemingly insurmountable difficulties. With the majority of the population and industry in the North, with no core of trained or well-known administrators, with four-fifths of its population in a virtually inaccessible and ungovernable countryside, with one million hungry refugees fleeing south from Communist repression, its early collapse was expected. Communists moving north after the Geneva Conference secretly left cadres and arms caches behind to prepare for that eventuality. But American aid, Vietnamese energy and the vigorous administrative talents of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem prevented that collapse and in fact produced more economic and educational gains than the North.
Unfortunately, Diem also purged his political opposition, causing many dissidents to go underground, into exile or to the Communists, and causing the local Communists to turn for support to Vietnam’s traditional enemies, the Chinese. During the first few years following the Geneva Conference, North Vietnam’s leader Ho Chi Minh was content to consolidate his position. But as his own economy faltered in comparison with Diem’s, as the latter’s political repressions warmed the water in which guerrilla fish could swim, as the militancy of Red China gained ascendancy in his own camp, the “struggle for national reunification,” as Ho called it—“to liberate the South from the atrocious rule of the U.S. imperialists and their henchmen“—began in earnest: assassinations in 1957, the training and increased reinfiltration of South Vietnamese insurgents in 1958, the announcement of a planned campaign of “liberation” in 1959 and the formation in December, 1960, of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.
In 1961 all the evidence was not yet in on the extent to which the antigovernment forces in the South were the creatures of the Communist North. But it was reasonably clear that many of them were trained in the North, armed and supplied by the North, and infiltrated from the North through the Laotian corridors, across the densely wooded frontier and by sea. The North supplied them with backing, brains and a considerable degree of coordination and control. Their food and shelter were largely provided at night by South Vietnamese villagers, who were sometimes wooed—with promises of land, unification and an end to political corruption, repression and foreign troops—and sometimes terrorized, with demonstrations of kidnaping, murder and plunder, before the guerrillas vanished back into the jungle at daybreak. A considerable portion of the insurgents’ arms, American-made, were captured from the South Vietnamese forces.
By early 1961 these “Vietcong” guerrillas, as they were labeled by the government in Saigon, were gradually bleeding South Vietnam to death, destroying its will to resist, eroding its faith in the future, and paralyzing its progress through systematic terror against the already limited number of local officials, teachers, health workers, agricultural agents, rural police, priests, village elders and even ordinary villagers who refused to cooperate. Favorite targets for destruction included schools, hospitals, agricultural research stations and malaria control centers.
The Eisenhower administration—in the creation of SEATO, in statements to President Diem and in commenting on the 1954 Geneva Accords—had pledged in 1954 and again in 1957 to help resist any “aggression or subversion threatening the political independence of the Republic of Vietnam.” Military as well as economic assistance had begun in 1954. This country in that year drew the line against Communist expansion at the border of South Vietnam. Whether or not it would have been wiser to draw it in a more stable and defensible area in the first place, this nation’s commitment in January, 1961—although it had assumed far larger proportions than when it was made nearly seven years earlier—was not one that President Kennedy felt he could abandon without undesirable consequences throughout Asia and the world.
Unfortunately he inherited in Vietnam more than a commitment and a growing conflict. He also inherited a foreign policy which had identified America in the eyes of Asia with dictators, CIA intrigue and a largely military response to revolution. He inherited a military policy which had left us wholly unprepared to fight—or even to train others to fight—a war against local guerrillas. Our military mission had prepared South Vietnam’s very sizable army for a Korean-type invasion, training it to move in division or battalion strength by highways instead of jungle trails. Nor had the United States encouraged a build-up in the local Civil Guard and Self-defense Corps which bore the brunt of the guerrilla attacks.
Under Kennedy the earlier commitment to South Vietnam was not only carried out but, as noted below, reinforced by a vast expansion of effort. The principal responsibility for that expansion belongs not with Kennedy but with the Communists, who, beginning in the late 1950’s, vastly expanded their efforts to take over the country. The dimensions of our effort also had to be increased, unfortunately, to compensate for the political weaknesses of the Diem regime.
In that sense, Eisenhower, Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem all helped to shape John Kennedy’s choices in Vietnam. His essential contribution—which is reviewed here as the situation then appeared, not to pass judgment on subsequent developments—was both to raise our commitment and to keep it limited. He neither permitted the war’s escalation into a general war nor bargained away Vietnam’s security at the conference table, despite being pressed along both lines by those impatient to win or withdraw. His strategy essentially was to avoid escalation, retreat or a choice limited to those two, while seeking to buy time—time to make the policies and programs of both the American and Vietnamese governments more appealing to the villagers—time to build an antiguerrilla capability sufficient to convince the Communists that they could not seize the country militarily—and time to put the Vietnamese themselves in a position to achieve the settlement only they could achieve by bringing terrorism under control.
That it would be a long, bitter and frustrating interval he had no doubt. Ultimately a negotiated settlement would be required. But the whole fight was essentially over a return to the basic principles (if not the letter) of an earlier negotiated settlement, the Geneva Accords of 1954. The North Vietnamese and Chinese showed no interest in any fair and enforceable settlement they did not dictate; and they would show no interest, the President was convinced, until they were persuaded that continued aggression would be frustrated and unprofitable. Any other settlement would merely serve as a confirmation of the benefits of aggression and as a cover
for American withdrawal. It would cause the world to wonder about the reliability of this nation’s pledges, expose to vengeance all South Vietnamese (and particularly those the U.S. had persuaded to stand by their country) and encourage the Communists to repeat the same tactics against the “paper tiger” Americans in Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia—until finally Kennedy or some successor would be unalterably faced with the choice he hoped to avoid: withdrawal or all-out war.
Almost immediately upon his assumption of office, Kennedy created a State-Defense-CIA-USIA-White House task force to prepare detailed recommendations on Vietnam. Those recommendations were considered in late April and early May of 1961 simultaneously with the Joint Chiefs’ recommendations for intervening in Laos. The two reports, in fact, resembled and were related to each other. Both called for a commitment of American combat troops to Vietnam.
The President—his skepticism deepened by the Bay of Pigs experience and the holes in the Laos report—once again wanted more questions answered and more alternatives presented. The military proposals for Vietnam, he said, were based on assumptions and predictions that could not be verified—on help from Laos and Cambodia to halt infiltration from the North, on agreement by Diem to reorganizations in his army and government, on more popular support for Diem in the countryside and on sealing off Communist supply routes. Estimates of both time and cost were either absent or wholly unrealistic.