by Ted Sorensen
There were bitter disputes, with each side often trying to commit the President in the other’s absence. As a result recommendations to the President differed sharply regarding the continuing or conditioning of our aid and what changes should be sought in the regime. Whichever way he turned—continuing to support Diem or interfering in his internal affairs—Kennedy foresaw the United States losing respect in the eyes of many Vietnamese. Through a series of meetings (and missions to Saigon) in September and October, he hoped to move the administration away from its total dependence on Diem without causing South Vietnam to fall or his own, team to split wide open.
Finally, on November 1, 1963, as corruption, repression and disorder increased, a new effort by the Vietnamese military to take command of the government was launched and succeeded. It received no assistance from the United States, nor did this country do anything to prevent or defeat it. While all the reports of all the various plots and proposed coups had regularly reached American ears, neither the timing nor the scale of this one was known in the U.S. when it was launched (much less to Kennedy, who had previously planned for Lodge to be out of Saigon at that time reporting to Washington). The generals seized control of the government and assassinated Diem and Nhu, who had refused the offer of sanctuary in the American Embassy.
Kennedy was shaken that Diem should come to such an end after his long devotion to his country, whatever his other deficiencies, remarking that Diem’s bitterest foes, the Communists, had never gone that far. An uncertain military junta took over in Saigon. The new leaders had no more deep-rooted popularity or administrative skill than their predecessors. Constant top-to-bottom changes in personnel, to be succeeded in time by still more changes, further impaired whatever momentum and morale were left in the war effort, and permitted still further Communist gains.
Obviously, then, in November, 1963, no early end to the Vietnam war was in sight. The President, while eager to make clear that our aim was to get out of Vietnam, had always been doubtful about the optimistic reports constantly filed by the military on the progress of the war. In his Senate floor speech of 1954, he had criticized French and American generals for similar “predictions of confidence which have lulled the American people.” The Communists, he knew, would have no difficulty recruiting enough guerrillas to prolong the fighting for many years. The struggle could well be, he thought, this nation’s severest test of endurance and patience. At times he compared it to the long struggles against Communist guerrillas in Greece, Malaya and the Phillippines. Yet at least he had a major counterguerrilla effort under way, with a comparatively small commitment of American manpower. He was simply going to weather it out, a nasty, untidy mess to which there was no other acceptable solution. Talk of abandoning so unstable an ally and so costly a commitment “only makes it easy for the Communists,” said the President. “I think we should stay.”
He could show little gain in that situation to pass on to his successor, either in the military outlook or the progress toward reform. His own errors had not helped. But if asked why he had increased this nation’s commitment, he might have summed up his stand with the words used by William Pitt when asked in the House of Commons in 1805 what was gained by the war against France: “We have gained everything that we would have lost if we had not fought this war.” In the case of Vietnam, that was a lot.
RED CHINA AND INDIA
Behind both the Laotian and Vietnamese crises loomed the larger menace of Communist China. That nation’s unconcealed, unswerving ambition to impose upon the Asian Continent a system bitterly hostile to our fundamental values and interests imposed in turn upon John Kennedy an obligation not to desert any independent government desiring our protection. In the absence of American combat troops, China’s role in Laos and Vietnam seemed indirect at most. But there was nothing indirect about Red China’s announced intention to take Formosa by force or—equally dangerous to the peace of the area—about Chiang Kai-shek’s announced intention to reconquer the mainland from Formosa.
Chiang was often vexed with Kennedy—over the UN admission of Outer Mongolia, over the granting of a visa to an anti-Chiang lecturer, over our quiet pressure for the removal of his foraging force from Burma and over other issues. But their alliance was most severely strained in mid-1962. Chiang and most of his cohorts, with advancing age increasing their sense of urgency, observed the growing rift between the Soviets and Red Chinese, observed the mounting farm and economic difficulties on the mainland, and decided that 1962 looked like their last best chance for an invasion.
To Kennedy it looked more like the Bay of Pigs all over again. That, too, was supposed to be the last best chance to topple a Communist dictator. There, too, native discontent was supposed to have made the country ripe for an exile takeover. But there, too, the exile force was too small, its appeal to the native population was too limited, the police state control was too entrenched and the whole operation was doomed to failure unless the United States launched an all-out attack in support and thereby risked a world-wide war. This time Kennedy was not tempted for even a moment. He had no confidence in Chiang’s ability to regain control of the mainland, even with American assistance. He had no desire to expand this nation’s commitment beyond the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores Islands. Without giving Chiang the kind of flat rejection the Generalissimo might exploit politically, he politely informed him that the time was not ripe and that unlimited American backing would not be forthcoming.
Chiang, however, began talking freely about an invasion, hoping to embarrass the United States into action. The Communist Chinese simultaneously deployed large numbers of troops in the key coastal sectors. Whether their purposes were defensive or a new attack on Quemoy and Matsu could not be ascertained. The President, deciding once again to use his news conference for a policy declaration, asked me to excerpt from his campaign speeches those statements making clear his determination to defend Formosa and the Pescadores against attack, including any attack on the offshore islands if it threatened Formosa. His news conference statement was addressed to Chiang as well as the Communists, underlining the fact that “we are opposed to the use of force in this area…. The purposes of the United States in this area are peaceful and defensive.” A similar message was delivered to the Chinese Communists through the ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, and tensions on both sides of the Formosan Straits soon subsided.
Within a few months, however, a new outbreak of Chinese Communist aggression caused the President new concern. Persistent Chinese incursions on India’s northwestern and northeastern Himalayan frontiers reached invasion proportions on October 20, 1962, just as the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba reached the crisis peak in Washington. The President, despite his preoccupation with the more direct threat to this nation and hemisphere, wondered aloud which crisis would be the more significant in the long run. It was not merely because soldiers were being killed in India, as large numbers of Chinese advanced almost at will into some twelve thousand square miles of Indian territory, going beyond even the disputed areas they had long claimed. It was because India—one of the largest nations on earth, with a population greater than that of all Latin America and Africa combined—was widely admired by her fellow neutrals, substantially aided by the Soviet Union, and the only country on the Asian mainland capable of competing for political and economic leadership with the Chinese. An all-out war between the two most populous nations on earth might well rival the confrontation in the Caribbean in long-run implications.
But it was not an all-out war. The Chinese, having obtained a favorable mountain position for future aggressions, cleverly called for a cease-fire in which they would neither withdraw from the territory seized nor give a guarantee against future attacks. Khrushchev, whom Nehru had regarded as a friend and backer, informed the Prime Minister that he could not intercede for him and that the Chinese offer should be accepted. Nehru’s fellow neutral Nasser suggested the Afro-Asians mediate the dispute. The Indian Prime Minister was stung. Rej
ecting the advice of both men, he admitted that India had been living in a dream world; and on October 26 he turned for help to the United States and John Kennedy.
His letter, the first of some fifteen which he and Kennedy exchanged over the next six months, asked for “sympathy” and “support.” His kinsman and Ambassador to Washington, B. K. Nehru, explained to the President when delivering it in person that afternoon that the Prime Minister, after all these years in the neutralist pacifist camp, found it difficult to make a direct request for armaments from the United States. He was hoping, instead, that the President in his reply would offer “support” instead of “military assistance” on the basis of “sympathy” instead of an “alliance.” I understand, replied the President, adding that he had no wish to take advantage of India’s misfortune to coerce her into a pact. The United States would offer support out of sympathy—and our representatives could translate those terms into the military specifics. (Speaking unofficially, he added, Nehru ought to make Khrushchev “put up or shut up” on an earlier promise of MIGs and military equipment.)
Nehru’s reluctance to mention military specifics was only temporary. Pleas for a vast arsenal of American armaments began to pour in. Kennedy, although not coming close to fulfilling all these unrealistic requests, promptly responded with substantial amounts of light weapons, mortars, ammunition and other items. Within a few days he dispatched a high-level survey team under Averell Harriman to report precisely how we could be most useful without driving Pakistan into Red China’s arms. To the President’s great satisfaction, and as the inadequacies of India’s Army became apparent, the acidly anti-American Krishna Menon was out as Nehru’s Minister of Defense. As younger and more pro-Western men gained strength in his government, Nehru’s policy of nonalignment became at least temporarily more realistic. The United States and Great Britain (who also sent military aid) were his true friends, he said. The Chinese were never to be trusted again. The Indian people cheered all signs of U.S. aid.
As was true in the Congo, Kennedy’s success in the Cuban missile crisis encouraged some to urge more direct or extensive American action. This is the place to stand against Chinese expansion in Asia, they said, with the Soviets caught in the middle and world opinion sympathetic to Nehru. But Kennedy saw no gains for India, for the United States or for the free world in making this fight our fight in the Himalayas. In an emergency meeting at midnight, in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, he quietly interred one excited recommendation that would have involved us directly in a war with China and never embarrassed the proposal’s authors by mentioning it again.
Moreover, the improvement in America’s relations with India had been accompanied by a deterioration in our relations with her neighbor and bitter rival, Pakistan. The President, in a correspondence with Pakistan President Ayub Khan that paralleled his exchange with Nehru, took pains to assure him that our military aid to India was conditioned upon its immediate use against the Chinese, that it would not be used against Pakistan and that it would not diminish the even more substantial military aid Ayub regularly received from this country. His letter suggested that Ayub privately reassure Nehru that he could safely withdraw the troops stationed at the Kashmir border—site of the most bitter dispute between the two countries—and employ them against the Communists. This might be an opportunity, the President stressed, to put the Indians in their most agreeable frame of mind for a Kashmir settlement.
Although Ayub told our Ambassador that he would be unavailable for a week to read the President’s letter—simultaneously complaining that he had not been consulted—the prospects for a Kashmir settlement at first appeared better than at any previous time in the long history of that dispute. Nehru and Ayub issued a joint statement of harmonious intent, and a round of negotiations began. But progress was nil, and Pakistan’s complaints about American arms in India continued to rise.
Perhaps the Pakistanis never understood, commented the President in a Cabinet Room meeting, that our alliance with them was aimed at the Communists, not at the Indians. Perhaps Ayub preferred for political reasons to have the issue of Kashmir rather than a settlement. But Galbraith’s suggestion of forcing the Indians to make a generous Kashmir offer by conditioning a large aid offer upon it would not work, he said. It might only produce such violent anti-American sentiment in Pakistan that Ayub would be brought down—and his successor would surely be even more difficult to deal with. Nor were the Indians, he noticed, willing to take troops from the Pakistan border to strengthen their defenses against the Chinese. Both sides, he said, regarded the Kashmir dispute as “more important…than the struggle against the Communists.” Indeed, the Pakistani Ambassador on a visit to the President’s office launched into such an undiplomatic tirade that Kennedy coldly stood up and terminated the conversation. (His replacement brought a stunning pin for Jacqueline as a “peace offering,” and the President asked her to paint Ayub a picture in return.)
The emergency phase of the Indian military aid program having ended with a cease-fire, Kennedy still faced the problem of Nehru’s equally unrealistic request for long-range help. Neither full resistance to an all-out Chinese attack nor reconquest of the areas seized by the Chinese was realistically possible for the Indian Army, his special mission told him. Air defense, however, was a unique problem where we could be of help. Fear of retaliatory Chinese bomber attacks on their defenseless cities had caused the Indians to withhold the air support their army needed. Carefully and in low key—to reduce to the extent possible any adverse reactions from the Pakistanis, the Chinese, the Soviets and the sensitive Indians themselves—the President worked out with the British a joint agreement to provide air defense.
He knew the Chinese would soon threaten again, in India or elsewhere. “These Chinese are tough,” he remarked in one off-the-record session. “It isn’t just what they say about us but what they say about the Russians. They are in the Stalinist phase, believe in class war and the use of force, and seem prepared to sacrifice 300 million people if necessary to dominate Asia.” He read all he could about the Chinese (at times enjoying streaks of quoting pertinent and impertinent ancient Chinese maxims). But since the day of his inauguration the Red Chinese—unlike the Soviets—had spewed unremitting vituperation upon him. He saw no way of persuading them to abandon their aggressive design short of a patient, persistent American presence in Asia and the Pacific. Consequently, even if Red China had not become an emotional and political issue in the United States, he said, any American initiative now toward negotiations, diplomatic recognition or UN admission would be regarded as rewarding aggression. He was prepared to use whatever means were available to prevent the seating of Red China in Nationalist China’s seat at the UN.
Nevertheless he felt dissatisfied with his administration’s failure to break new ground in this area, asked the State Department to consider possible new steps and did not regard as magical or permanent this country’s long-standing policy of rigidity. “We are not wedded to a policy of hostility to Red China,” he said.
I would hope that… the normalization of relations…peaceful relations…between China and the West…would be brought about. We desire peace and we desire to live in amity with the Chinese people…. But it takes two to make peace, and I am hopeful that the Chinese will be persuaded that a peaceful existence with its neighbors represents the best hope for us all.
His efforts in Southeast Asia and his approach to the Soviets were designed to aid that persuasion. He hoped that the passage of time, an evolution among Red China’s leaders, their isolation from the rest of the world, their mounting internal problems and their inability to gain through aggression would be persuasive as well. But the bulk of any new effort on his part, he thought, would require a friendlier Congress and more public understanding. In the meantime, an “open door” was to be maintained on the possibilities of improved relations. The success of his wheat sales to Russia caused him to speculate whether grain or food donations to the Chinese might be a
possibility. “If it would lessen their malevolence, I’d be for it,” he had said earlier. But he was persuaded that no guarantees could be obtained to prevent the reshipment of that food or grain, to assure its reaching those most in need or to enable the Chinese people to know who had sent it. “And let’s face it,” he said to me half in humor and half in despair, “that’s a subject for the second term.”
1 Lying across the air and sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian oceans, it had served as a staging area in World War II for Japanese attacks on the Philippines.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE CONFRONTATION IN CUBA
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1962, in response to his urgent telephone request and after checking with President Kennedy, I met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin at the Russian Embassy. Two weeks earlier, in one of a series of get-acquainted luncheons Dobrynin held for administration officials, I had sought to dispel any Soviet assumption that the upcoming Congressional campaign would inhibit the President’s response to any new pressures on Berlin. His report of that conversation, the Ambassador now told me, had resulted in a personal message from Chairman Khrushchev on which he suggested I take notes as he read in order to convey it precisely to the President:
Nothing will be undertaken before the American Congressional elections that could complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries…provided there are no actions taken on the other side which would change the situation. This includes a German peace settlement and West Berlin…. If the necessity arises for [the Chairman to address the United Nations], this would be possible only in the second half of November. The Chairman does not wish to become Involved in your internal political affairs.