Khrushchev’s January speech made emphatic the point often expressed by Eisenhower during his Presidency—the impossibility of total nuclear war as an instrument of rational policy. But Eisenhower allowed himself for political and fiscal reasons to remain the prisoner of the doctrine of strategic monism. When McNamara called for the basic defense plans, he found that they still rested on the assumption of total nuclear war. “The Pentagon is full of papers talking about the preservation of a ‘viable society’ after nuclear conflict,” he once said. “That ‘viable society’ phrase drives me mad. I keep trying to comb it out, but it keeps coming back.” Kennedy now charged McNamara with the problem of devising strategies to deal with a world in which total nuclear war was no longer conceivable. This called for a shift from massive retaliation to a capability for controlled and flexible response, graduated to meet a variety of levels and forms of aggression.
The legacy of armed force bequeathed by the Eisenhower administration followed from the belief that the all-out nuclear response was all that mattered. McNamara found a total of fourteen Army divisions, of which only eleven were ready for combat. Of the eleven, only three were deployed in the United States. Kennedy was appalled to discover a few weeks after the inauguration that, if he sent 10,000 men to southeast Asia, he would deplete the strategic reserve and have virtually nothing left for emergencies elsewhere. Indeed, the United States could not even have invaded Cuba after the Bay of Pigs without drawing troops from other parts of the world and thereby inviting communist moves on other fronts. Equipment was so low that, when Kennedy inspected the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg in October, the division had to borrow men and materiel to bring itself up to complement. The Army could hardly fight longer than a few weeks before running short on ammunition, nor was new production set to remedy the deficiencies. The supply of armored personnel carriers, self-propelled howitzers and recoilless rifles fell far below the required number (and, at the same time, as evidence of the procurement mess, there were three times the required number of 105 mm. cartridges and twice the required number of 81 mm. and 4.2" mortar shells). The airlift capacity consisted largely of obsolescent aircraft designed for civilian transportation; it would have taken nearly two months to carry an infantry division and its equipment to southeast Asia. And, if such a division had found itself in the jungles of Laos or Vietnam, it would have been like Braddock’s army at the Battle of the Wilderness, since counter-insurgency forces hardly existed.
Tactical air power was also grievously weak. Of the sixteen wings of fighter bombers in the Air Force, over three-quarters were F-100s, a 1955 plane with no all-weather capability. Only about 10 per cent were Mach 2 all-weather fighters. In addition, the planes had very little in the way of modern non-nuclear ordnance; the Air Force had only about one-fourth the desired number of Sidewinder missiles; and air-to-ground weapons were mostly of the kind used in the Korean War. When McNamara demanded a demonstration of tactical air support of ground troops, the Air Force actually had to borrow certain types of ordnance from the Navy.
Even the nuclear striking power hardly constituted an invulnerable deterrent. The Strategic Air Command was almost entirely concentrated on about sixty bases, of which only a few were ‘hardened’ (i.e., capable of surviving nuclear attack) and only a third were on alert. They were, in other words, highly vulnerable to a surprise missile strike.
4. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL STRATEGY
These discoveries shocked McNamara. The United States, for all its splendid capacity to blow up the world, had, it was obvious, an entirely inadequate amount of what McNamara called “usable power”—military force capable of serving reasonable ends. The President, who was perhaps less surprised, directed him to begin the work of building a military establishment versatile enough to meet the full spectrum of possible threats from guerrilla infiltration to nuclear holocaust. Only such a force, Kennedy believed, could give his foreign policy a solid foundation and liberate diplomacy from the constraints imposed by a rigid military strategy.
As McNamara began his review, one fear which had affected the polemics, though not the essence, of the party debate on defense policy now dropped out of the picture. The idea of a ‘missile gap’ had been first set forth publicly by Eisenhower’s second Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, who forecast in 1959 that the Soviet Union would probably have a 3–1 superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles by the early sixties. This estimate rested on the best intelligence then available and was shared by General James Gavin, who conveyed it to Stuart Symington, Kennedy and other Senators. By 1960 it was a staple of Democratic oratory. But new intelligence methods and sources cast doubt on the estimate in the winter of 1960–61; Jerome Wiesner had long been skeptical, and in February McNamara, in a candid background talk to newspapermen, was ready to dismiss the gap as an illusion.*
On March 1, McNamara mounted his first major assault on the Pentagon, firing a fusillade of ninety-six questions, each aimed at a specific area, directed to a specific man and requiring a specific answer by a specific time. He wanted to know what the military were doing, why they thought they were doing it and whether there was not a more economical and efficient way of achieving the same result. No one had asked such questions before; and McNamara’s memoranda grew sharp asi his patience grew short. “A Japanese general who got a query like this,” a recipient observed of one McNamara message, “would commit harakiri.” While McNamara was pressing his review, Kennedy in the State of the Union message moved to repair the more obvious defects in America’s defenses. He called for an increase in airlift capacity to strengthen conventional power, an acceleration of the nuclear missile program and an expansion of the Polaris submarine program to extend the invulnerability of the American deterrent. “The greater our variety of weapons,” he later said, “the more political choices we can make in any given situation.”
By March 28 the review had advanced sufficiently for Kennedy to send a special message asking Congress for an additional $650 million for the defense budget. Here he restated the familiar themes. Our objective must be “to increase our ability to confine our response to non-nuclear weapons. . . . Any potential aggressor contemplating an attack on any part of the Free World with any kind of weapons, conventional or nuclear, must know that our response will be suitable, selective, swift and effective.” He then proposed a series of measures to improve the national ability to deter or restrict limited wars, including the expansion of guerrilla warfare units, as well as other measures to improve and protect the strategic deterrent and defenses. A third message “on urgent national needs,” delivered in late May, a month after the Bay of Pigs and responding to Soviet success in space—Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight around the planet in early April—called for a vastly enlarged effort in space, including landing a man on the moon by 1970. Kennedy also requested “a further reinforcement of our own capacity to deter or resist non-nuclear aggression”—greater modernization of conventional forces, greater mobility and more training in paramilitary warfare.
The work of reconstructing American defense strategy had only begun. Difficult problems of doctrine remained—the proper composition and function of the nuclear deterrent, for example. Difficult problems of command and control were yet to be solved. Morale in the Pentagon itself was also shaken by the new approach. McNamara was well served at the top civilian level, especially by Roswell Gilpatric, who, in spite of his Air Force background, became an able partner in the reorganization. But the Secretary, well aware that he was cutting his way through a thicket of traditional prides and vested interests, came to recognize what he called the “wrenching strains in the Department as new thought patterns have been substituted for old.’’ General Thomas D. White, a former Chief of Staff for the Air Force, wrote bitterly in 1963: “In common with many other military men, active and retired, I am profoundly apprehensive of the pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls type of so-called professional defense intellectuals who have been brought into this Nation’s Capital. I
don’t believe a lot of these often over-confident, sometimes arrogant young professors, mathematicians and other theorists have sufficient worldliness or motivation to stand up to the kind of enemy we face.” Congressman F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana took his stand “with the professional military man who has had years of experience, who has faced the enemy on the battlefield . . . in preference to the striplings who are the geniuses in the intellectual community but have never heard a shot fired in anger.” There was a good deal of this also in the press, but McNamara nevertheless enjoyed strong political and public support.
Within the White House his directness, intelligence and decisiveness immediately won the complete and lasting confidence of the President. The Secretary also quickly achieved an effective relationship with Jerome Wiesner who had fought hard through the fifties to improve the state of American defense and whose work on the Gaither committee of 1957 had prepared the ground for McNamara’s reconstruction of strategy now. McGeorge Bundy also kept an alert eye on the evolution of defense policy; and both Bundy’s and Wiesner’s hands were strengthened when Carl Kaysen, a Harvard economist who united cogency as a debater and intrepidity as an operator, joined the National Security Council staff. McNamara, Wiesner, Bundy and Kaysen worked well together (three were old friends from Cambridge). They gave the President confidence that he was in a position to control national strategy.
XIII
Legacy in Southeast Asia
THE REORGANIZATION OF national defense was not merely a theoretical issue. For the communist challenge was already taking acute form in Southeast Asia. Communist guerrillas—the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, the Pathet Lao in Laos—were conducting savage and elusive warfare against pro-western regimes. When Kennedy had met with Eisenhower just before the inauguration, they spent more time talking about Laos than anything else. The situation in Vietnam was almost as bad. On February 2, Walt Rostow gave the President a memorandum about Vietnam written by Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, an imaginative officer who had worked with Magsaysay in ending the guerrilla action of the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines. Kennedy read it in Rostow’s presence and said, “This is the worst yet.” Then he added, “You know, Ike never briefed me about Vietnam.”
1. KENNEDY AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
He was not unfamiliar with the territory. He had gone to Southeast Asia in 1951 when Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were all part of French Indochina. In Saigon he discovered an acquaintance in the counselor of the American legation—a Foreign Service officer named Edmund Gullion. They had met four years before in Washington when Kennedy, then a young Congressman, had asked Dean Acheson for someone with whom to discuss foreign policy in preparation for a speech, and Acheson had sent over Gullion, his special assistant. Gullion, though a professional, had managed to preserve a private wryness and independence of mind which appealed to Kennedy, and they now resumed their friendship.
The official United States line was uncritical support for the French in their struggle against the Vietnamese nationalists. The Saigon legation, however, was bitterly split about the wisdom of this policy. Gullion and the political section, backed by the economic aid people and the CIA, argued that the French could not organize successful resistance on the basis either of military plans calling for conventional assault or of political plans retaining Indochina as part of France. When Kennedy arrived, fresh from his sickness in Okinawa, looking, Gullion recalls, like a plucked chicken with thin neck and jaundiced color under a tousle of uncut hair, he bridled under the routine embassy briefing and asked sharply why the Vietnamese should be expected to fight to keep their country part of France. This viewpoint irritated the American Minister, and, when they met, it irritated General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the war hero in command of the French forces, even more. After an animated argument, de Lattre sent the Minister a formal letter of complaint about the young Congressman.
“In Indochina,” Kennedy said on his return to Washington, “we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire. . . . To check the southern drive of communism makes sense but not only through reliance on the force of arms. The task is rather to build strong native non-Communist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense rather than upon the legions of General de Lattre. To do this apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.” The trip gave Kennedy both a new sympathy for the problems of Asia and a new understanding of the power of nationalism in the underdeveloped world. “Without the support of the native population,” he said on Meet the Press, “there is no hope of success in any of the countries of Southeast Asia.” He dropped his doubts about Point Four and economic aid and set Jacqueline Bouvier to translating French books about Indochina for him. When Justice William O. Douglas invited Senators interested in the Far East to a luncheon in 1953 for an Indochinese political exile named Ngo Dinh Diem, Kennedy was present. Diem, who had been living in a retreat with the Mary knoll Fathers, made a favorable impression. Senator Mike Mansfield wrote later about his “nationalism, his personal incorruptibility and courage, and his idealistic determination.”*
Ed Gullion, now back in Washington, was also present at the luncheon, and from time to time he and Kennedy discussed developments in Southeast Asia. (Gullion was suspected in the Department of contributing to Kennedy’s foreign policy speeches. One friend warned him not to risk his career; “if you are going to establish a relationship with a Senator, at least pick one who has a future.”) By early 1954 the French, who had persisted in their effort to fight a European war in the jungle, found themselves under siege in the fortress of Dien Bien Phu. When the French commander at Dien Bien Phu pleaded for American support, Dulles, forgetting massive retaliation, proposed an allied air strike at Dien Bien Phu to Sir Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Minister. “I am fairly hardened to crises,” Eden wrote later, “but I went to bed that night a troubled man. I did not believe that anything less than intervention on a Korean scale, if that, would have any effect in Indochina.” In Washington Vice-President Nixon suggested the possibility of “putting American boys in.”
On April 6 Kennedy observed in the Senate that, if thp American people were to go to war for the fourth time in the century, “particularly a war which we now realize would threaten the survival of civilization,” they had a right to inquire in detail into the nature of the struggle and the possible alternatives. He offered a garland of optimistic statements about Indochina—Acheson in 1952 (“the military situation appears to be developing favorably”). Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson in 1953 (“in Indochina we believe the tide now is turning”), Secretary of Defense Wilson (French victory is “both possible and probable”) and Admiral Radford (“the French are going to win”) in 1954—and contrasted this gush of official optimism with the grim actuality. “I am frankly of the belief,” Kennedy said, “that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer . . . ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people. . . . For the United States to intervene unilaterally and to send troops into the most difficult terrain in the world, with the Chinese able to pour in unlimited manpower, would mean that we would face a situation which would be far more difficult than even that we encountered in Korea.” He saw no hope for Indochina until the French granted the Vietnamese their independence.
The opposition of the congressional leaders, of General Ridgway, of the British and eventually of President Eisenhower himself forced Dulles to drop the plan of intervention. “I trust,” Kennedy said later, “the United States has learned that it cannot ignore the moral and ideological principles at the root of today’s struggles.” The French abandoned the fight after the surrender of Dien Bien Phu; and negotiations in Geneva, in which the United States ostentatiously took no part, soon resulted in an agreement to divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel and to ratify the independence of Laos and Cambodia.
Diem returned to Saigon in Ju
ne as prime minister and within eighteen months was president. The French were skeptical about Diem, nor was he precisely, as Justice Douglas suggested, “revered” by the Vietnamese people. But he was remembered and respected as one of the first Indochinese nationalists. His resignation as Chief Minister of Annam in 1933 had been early challenge to French rule. After the war both Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader, and Bao Dai, the French puppet emperor, sought his endorsement. He refused them both. The United States now offered his government substantial economic assistance, and for the next few years South Vietnam enjoyed a significant measure of growth and reform. Then in the late fifties the guerrilla war began again. In spite of his economic successes, Diem, a man of austere and authoritarian temperament who preferred to govern through his immediate family, had failed to develop a solid basis of popular support. By 1961 the Viet Cong guerrillas, backed by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh in the north, roamed through large areas of the countryside, sometimes very near Saigon itself, murdering local officials, harassing government troops and placing the Diem regime in jeopardy.
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