Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy
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JFK: The only … We’re not going to settle the four hundred million this morning. I want to take a look closely at what Dave Bell …
But I do think we ought to get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top priority program of the agency and one of the two, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that’s the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good. I think we ought to know about it. We’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money, but we’re talking about fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, is to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind as we did, by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.
CALL TO MAJOR GORDON COOPER, MAY 16, 1963
Gordon Cooper (1927–2004) was one of the original Mercury astronauts and flew an important mission on May 15–16, 1963, orbiting the earth twenty-two times and guiding his craft back safely after several major navigation systems had failed. JFK called Cooper just after he was taken aboard the recovery ship. In 1965, Major Cooper commanded Gemini 5.
JFK: Hello, Major Cooper!
COOPER: Yes, sir.
OPERATOR: Can you hear the President?
COOPER: Yes, sir.
JFK: All right. Major, I just want to congratulate you. That was a great flight.
COOPER: Thank you very much, sir.
JFK: We talked to your wife, and she seemed to stand it very well.
COOPER: Oh, very good.
JFK: And we hope, we are looking forward to seeing you up here Monday, but we are very proud of you, Major.
COOPER: Thank you, sir. It was a good flight, and I enjoyed it.
JFK: Oh good, fine. Well, I look forward to seeing you Monday. Good luck.
COOPER: Thank you, sir.
JFK: Thanks, Major.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY INSPECTS ROCKET MODELS AT CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, SEPTEMBER 11, 1962
MEETING WITH JAMES WEBB, SEPTEMBER 18, 1963
This conversation, held a year later, shows considerable evolution from that of November 21, 1962; Kennedy shows more caution and Webb more boldness. Indeed, they have roughly switched roles in a dialogue that was moving very quickly.
JFK: If I get reelected, I’m not, we’re not, go to the moon in my, in our period, are we?
WEBB: No, no. We’ll have worked to fly by, though, while you’re president, but it’s going to take longer than that. This is a tough job, a real tough job. But I will tell you what will be accomplished while we’re president, and it will be one of the most important things that’s been done in this nation. A basic need to use technology for total national power. That’s going to come out of the space program more than any single thing.
JFK: What’s that again?
WEBB: A basic ability in this nation to use science and very advanced technologies to increase national power, our economy, all the way through.
JFK: Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon is a good idea?
WEBB: Yes, sir, I do.
JFK: Why?
WEBB: Because …
JFK: Could you do the same with instruments much cheaper?
WEBB: No, sir, you can’t do the same.
[break]
WEBB: While you’re president, this is going to come true in this country. So you’re going to have both science and technology appreciating your leadership in this field. Without a doubt in my mind. And the young, of course, see this much better than in my generation. The high school seniors and the college freshmen are 100 percent for man looking at three times what he’s never looked at before. He’s looking at the material of the earth, the characteristics of gravity and magnetism, and he’s looked at life on Earth. And he understands the universe just looking at those three things. All right, maybe he’s gonna have material from the moon and Mars, he’s going to have already a measurement from Venus about its gravity and its magnetic fields. And if we find some life out beyond Earth, these are going to be finite things in terms of the development of the human intellect. And I predict you are not going to be sorry, no sir, that you did this.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY TOURS THE SATURN ROCKET LAUNCH PAD, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, NOVEMBER 16, 1963
CONGRESSMAN JOHN F. KENNEDY AND ROSE F. KENNEDY DURING A VISIT TO THE BOSTON CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, FOLLOWING A SPEECH ABOUT HIS TOUR OF ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST, NOVEMBER 19, 1951
In Profiles in Courage, Kennedy wrote that politics is a field where “the choice constantly lies between two blunders.” That aphorism must have felt increasingly true to him as he contemplated his bleak options in Southeast Asia. His interest in Vietnam went back surprisingly far; he had traveled there in 1951, as the French were beginning a quite inglorious exit from their former colony. An early dictated reflection indicates Kennedy’s long-standing interest about the underdeveloped world in ways that did not fall into the dualistic framework of the Cold War.
In the early months of the Kennedy administration, Laos was far more in focus than Vietnam, and there the United States was able to engage in minor levels of support for sympathetic allies in a way that did not threaten large-scale conflict. But with Vietnam, a larger and more sophisticated country, it was very difficult to control the outcome of history, as meddling outsiders had discovered before. Under President Eisenhower, the United States had been a very interested observer as Vietnam tried to live under the 1954 Geneva Accords as an independent nation divided into two halves, one of which, South Vietnam, depended on American aid. In the summer of 1963, the options of the United States declined in both number and quality, as the administration of President Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s president, began to lose popular approval, brutally repress Buddhists, and threaten new alliances with the French and the North Vietnamese. Even if President Kennedy did not subscribe to the famous “domino theory,” he was deeply troubled by the prospect of “losing” a once-reliable ally in this part of the world. Accordingly, he increased the number of U.S. military advisors in Vietnam. At the end of 1962, there were 11,500; at the end of 1963, more than 16,000.
But as the tapes indicate, Kennedy consistently resisted pressure to send American troops into combat, and privately expressed skepticism toward the military advisors who urged that he do so. As Diem’s fortunes plummeted, Kennedy was unhappy with the increasingly drastic recommendations on the table in late 1963, including a plan to overthrow President Diem and his brother (Ngo Dinh Nhu), hatched by Vietnamese generals with the support of the CIA, the State Department, and his new ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. That plan ultimately went forward, with the result that Diem and Nhu were brutally executed on November 2, 1963, and a series of unpopular and incompetent governments installed, all of which failed, along with the United States, in the long tragedy of the Vietnam War. Kennedy’s dictated memorandum of November 4 indicates how disturbed he was by that violent result, and the knowledge that the coup had resulted from faulty communications, incomplete instructions, and a process that had spun out of control. Since then, a cottage industry has sprung up speculating on how a second term for Kennedy might have altered the calculus in Vietnam.
DICTATED MEMORANDUM ON CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD NIXON ABOUT VIETNAM, APRIL 1954
On the eve of the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, then-Senator Kennedy enjoyed a spirited conversation with the vice president, Richard Nixon, his future adversary in 1960. Given that each would encounter considerable difficulty in Vietnam as president, this early fragment offers a surprisingly early and candid assessment of the problems that would embroil Democratic and Republican administrations in Indochina.
In conversation with Nixon last night, he felt that Reston’s1 article was, in this morning’s paper about Dul
les’2 failure [unclear] was most unfair, and he added that he remembered when Reston was so wrong about Alger Hiss.3 And second, he said that Dulles told him that, no, second, he said that the French had asked for air assistance, for an air strike on Dien Bien Phu,4 that there were a lot of troops concentrated there, that it would have both the advantage of being of military assistance, and also would be a terrific morale factor. That the British, however, refused to join in the strike, and therefore nothing was done about it. The French have been digging us on it since then by saying they asked for help and we rejected them, and Nixon is very bitter against the British, saying they won’t fight except if Hong Kong and Malaya5 are involved. And they’ve been always trying to play a balance of power, and now, of course, there’s no such balance, no such thing, because it’s really 160 million Americans against 800 million Communists. He admits that the only, I asked him what united action could be taken that would be effective, he admits that there wouldn’t be any use in sending troops in there, as the Chinese would come in, and he finally admitted that the only thing that could be done would be to support the French and the Vietnamese and hope that they were going to be successful. He admits, however, he wonders sometimes [distorted] … they’re really in bad shape over there, and the forces pushing for peace are increasingly strong. [distorted] He said he’s been arguing with Republican colleagues … [distorted] Democrat now he would be attacking the [Eisenhower] administration not for doing too much, and for going too far into Indochina, but for not going [distorted]. He says neither partition nor coalitions, of course, would work. He says there’s enough manpower and materiel, but he said that, of course, that pushing this independence thing is liable to push the French out and there’s no solution there.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE CABLE 243 DISPATCHED ON AUGUST 24, 1963, TO U.S. AMBASSADOR TO VIETNAM HENRY CABOT LODGE, JR., CALLING FOR PRESIDENT DIEM TO REMOVE HIS BROTHER NGO DINH NHU FROM A POSITION OF POWER IN SOUTH VIETNAM
MEETING WITH VIETNAM ADVISORS, AUGUST 28, 1963
On the same day as the March on Washington, Kennedy convened a long meeting on Vietnam and responded to the recommendations he was receiving to support a coup by Vietnamese generals against President Diem.
JFK: I don’t think we ought to let the coup … maybe they know about it, maybe the generals are going to have to run out of the country, maybe we’re going to have to help them get out. But still it’s not a good enough reason to go ahead if we don’t think the prospects are good enough. I don’t think we’re in that deep. I am not sure the generals are, they’ve been probably bellyaching for months. So I don’t know whether they’re, how many of them are really up to here. I don’t see any reason to go ahead unless we think we have a good chance of success.
FRENCH GENERAL JEAN DE LATTRE DE TASSIGNY IN VIETNAM. CONGRESSMAN JOHN F. KENNEDY (CIRCLED) APPEARS IN THE BACK ROW. 1951
MEETING WITH ADVISORS ON VIETNAM, OCTOBER 29, 1963
The planning of the coup continued into the fall and reached a terminal phase in late October. President Kennedy sought the counsel of his advisors, who included William Colby, chief of the CIA’s Far East Division; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy; Maxwell Taylor, military advisor to the President; Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; CIA Director John McCone; and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Always quick to protect his brother, and eager to avoid the kind of ill-advised planning that had led to the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy here spoke forcefully of his reservations about the timing and benefits of a coup. His criticism of the war would only deepen as the United States escalated its involvement under President Lyndon Johnson, and led to his own candidacy for the presidency in 1968.
RFK: Could I make a suggestion?
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: I, this may be a minority, but I just don’t see that this makes any sense on the face of it, Mr. President. I mean, it’s different from a coup in Iraq or a South American country. We are so intimately involved with this. What we are doing really is what we talked about when we were sitting around this table talking about almost the same thing we talked about four weeks ago. We’re putting the whole future of the country, and really Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody that we don’t know very well, that one official of the United States government has had contact with him, and he in turn says he’s lined up some others. It’s clear from the map [math?] and from Diem,6 he’s a fighter. I mean, he’s not somebody that’s like Bosch,7 who’s just going to get out of there. He’s a determined figure who’s going to stick around and I should think go down fighting, that he’s going to have some troops there that are going to fight, too. That if it’s a failure, that we risk such a hell of a lot. Because the war, as I understood from Bob McNamara, was going reasonably well. And whether, just based on these rather flimsy reports, that a coup is going to take place in two or three days, to risk the whole future of the United States in that area on these kinds of reports, which are not extensive and which don’t go into any detail, which don’t list, I mean, the reports that come in from the ambassador don’t really list our assets or throw out or give a plan as to what’s going to occur or how it’s going to take place. I would think we have some very large stakes to balance here.
I mean, we certainly, I think, should be entitled to know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to be effective, and not just hope that the coup is going to go through and they’re going to be able to work it out satisfactorily. I would think unless we knew we were going to be involved—everybody’s going to say we did it—then if we think that’s the right thing, I think we should play a major role. I don’t think we can go halfway on it, because we’re going to get the blame for it. If it’s a failure, I would think Diem’s going to tell us to get the hell out of the country and, see, he’s going to have enough with his intelligence to know that there’s been these contacts and these conversations, and he’s going to capture these people. They’re going to say the United States is behind it. I would think then that we’re just going down the road to disaster. Now maybe this is going to be successful, but I don’t think that anybody, any reports that I’ve seen, indicate that anybody has a plan to show where this is going. And I think this cablegram, sent out like it is, indicates that we are willing to go ahead with the coup, but we think that we should have a little bit more information.
Prospect
Coup plans
8:00 P.M.
Coup
Coup
2:30
Press problem
Coup plans
Coup plans 2:30
Press problem
coup plans
2:30
2:30
Vietnamese
Constitution
Constitution
Too significant
Algeria
V.P to
Algerians
Algerians
THE WORD “VIETNAMESE” APPEARS AT THE CENTER OF THIS PAGE OF PRESIDENTIAL DOODLES FROM OCTOBER 25, 1963
MEETING WITH VIETNAM ADVISORS, SEPTEMBER 10, 1963
In the fall of 1963, President Kennedy continued to receive conflicting reports on Vietnam and whether U.S. efforts were succeeding or not. These contradictions were brought into unusual focus on September 10, when a group of top advisors gathered to hear reports from General Victor Krulak and State Department advisor Joseph Mendenhall. Krulak reported that the American military effort was proceeding well and that the growing war would be “won” if the United States remained committed. Mendenhall, reporting immediately afterward, warned of the “complete breakdown of the civil government of Saigon” and described a city riven with fear, with government agencies shuttered and a top economic minister reading detective novels in his office.
MENDENHALL: My conclusion is that, and this conclusion is shared, I might say, by Mr. Trueheart, our deputy chief of mission, who is the American with political experience who has been longer on the scene I think than anyone else, also shared
by our consul [unclear], is that Mr. Nhu must go, or we will not be able to win the war in Vietnam if he stays. Trueheart commented, at a meeting in the ambassador’s office, that he was very much afraid that the people were going to begin to move over toward the VC if the alternative was only between Nhu and the Vietcong. I found that on the part of other U.S. civilian officials in central Vietnam. That is my conclusion as well, Mr. President.
JFK: You both went to the same country? [nervous laughter]
MENDENHALL: Yes, sir.
KRULAK: One talked to military, one to civilians.
JFK: But I mean, how is it that we get this difference, this is not a new thing, this is what we’ve been dealing with for three weeks. On the one hand, you’ve got the military saying the war is going better, on the other hand you’ve got the political saying there’s a deterioration that’s affecting the military. Now, you gentlemen have a lot of experience, we’ve got a lot of confidence in both of you. What is the reason for the difference? You must have an explanation, what is the reason for the difference?