Franco Nogueiria had concluded his talk with Rusk in Paris by warning him that the Goanese would fight to the end; they all might die in the resulting slaughter but not until each had killed ten Indians. At midnight on December 17 the invasion began. It was over in twenty-four hours. Forty-five Portuguese and twenty-two Indians were killed. The historical and political reasons for the invasion were understandable enough; but the contrast between Nehru’s incessant sanctimony on the subject of non-aggression and his brisk exercise in Machtpolitik was too comic not to cause comment. It was a little like catching the preacher in the hen-house; and it suggested that Harrow and Cambridge, in instilling the British virtues, had not neglected hypocrisy. If such judgments were unfair, it was almost too much to expect the targets of Nehru’s past sermons not to respond in kind.
In Washington Harlan Cleveland called a meeting at the State Department to consider the American reaction. Obviously we had to condemn the Indian resort to force in unequivocal language. The only issue was whether we should stop there or go on to say, as Galbraith had recommended and Stevenson now urged, that we regarded the Portuguese enclave as anachronistic and looked forward to a peaceful termination of Portuguese colonialism in India. It seemed obvious that our condemnation of aggression would have greater force if at the same time we dissociated ourselves from the Portuguese empire. But the State Department political officers resisted. It finally turned out that Salazar had requested that we keep things to the narrow issue of aggression and that the Department had assured our ambassador in Lisbon the night before that we would not raise the colonial issue. This commitment, undertaken without White House consultation, tied our hands at the United Nations. The State Department, over Stevenson’s protest, insisted that he cut out the allusions in his speech to Portuguese colonialism, and this made the speech when delivered at the Security Council seem all the more unfeeling to the Indians.
It was one of Adlai’s most effective efforts. He began with a pleasing picture of Krishna Menon, “so well known in these halls for his advice on peace and his tireless enjoinders to everyone else to seek the way of compromise,” standing on the border of Goa rallying his troops at zero hour. Stevenson then called for a withdrawal of the invading forces and concluded that, “if the United Nations is not to die as ignoble a death as the League of Nations, we cannot condone the use of force in this instance and thus pave the way for forceful solutions of other disputes.” These remarks infuriated the Indians. Indeed, Stevenson himself in a few days began to feel he might have gone a little far.
In New Delhi Galbraith called on the Foreign Secretary and observed that India had been utterly callous to American opinion from beginning to end. Stevenson’s speech, he said, was a measure of how brilliantly they could alienate a good friend. He noted his own difficulty in seeing precisely how India had advanced its position by creating more troubles for the President on foreign aid, the Congo and opposition to colonialism. It was a useful session, he informed Washington afterward, and “I greatly enjoyed hearing my points being made.”
Nehru himself sent the President a long and plaintive letter at the end of the month. “Why is it,” he asked, “that something that thrills our people should be condemned in the strongest language in the United States?” He had been “deeply hurt,” he remarked, by the “extraordinary and bitter attitude of Mr. Adlai Stevenson.” Then in an unfortunate effort at justification, well calculated to set Kennedy’s teeth on edge, he added, “You may be interested to know that even the Cardinal Archbishop of Bombay, the highest dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in India, who is himself a Goan, expresses his satisfaction with [the Goa action]. So also some other dignitaries of the Catholic Church.”
The President took his time about replying. In three weeks he wrote:
You have my sympathy on the colonial aspects of this issue. . . . Sometimes, perhaps, we are inclined to talk a little too unctuously about the colonial origins of the United States, now nearly two centuries in the past. But, like many others, I grew up in a community where the people were barely a generation away from colonial rule. And I can claim the company of many historians in saying that the colonialism to which my immediate ancestors were subject was more sterile, oppressive, and even cruel than that of India. The legacy of Clive was on the whole more tolerable than that of Cromwell.
But he was much concerned, Kennedy continued, about the possible chain reaction to Goa. “All countries, including of course the United States, have a great capacity for convincing themselves of the full righteousness of their particular cause. No country ever uses force for reasons it considers unjust. . . . I fear that the episode in Goa will make it harder to hold the line for peace in other places.” He concluded by suggesting that one difficulty was that the invasion followed so soon after Nehru’s visit to the United States. “I confess to a feeling that we should have discussed this problem.”
Nehru hastily answered that he had said nothing then because he had no intention of taking action; the Portuguese provocations at the end of November had brought the matter to a head. This seemed a little disingenuous. On October 23, a fortnight before he departed for America, he had said in Bombay that “the time has come for us to consider afresh what method should be adopted to free Goa from Portuguese rule.” The whole episode further diminished Kennedy’s hope that India had a serious role to play in the struggle for peace.
Yet, with his usual realism, he avoided recriminations; and, indeed, Indian sensitivity lasted longer than American, as I discovered myself in India in February. I had gone there on another Food for Peace mission with George McGovern. We found Goa still the compulsory subject of conversation; even the obsession with Pakistan was taking second place. When M. C. Chagla, a former Indian ambassador to Washington, presided over a meeting for us in Bombay, he began his introduction with a diatribe against the American refusal to applaud Goa and later assailed us privately for our attitude. As McGovern and I traveled around, we sought explanations for the Indian action. We were particularly pleased by the explanation offered by Frank Moraes, the talented Bombay journalist. The New Delhi government, he thought, had wished to show that, though it was doing nothing about Chinese incursions on the northern frontier, it could still be tough; “it was a little like stamping on a mouse in the kitchen when there was a tiger at the door.” G. L. Mehta, another former ambassador to Washington and considerably more thoughtful than Chagla, suggested that Nehru was acting to rehabilitate himself in the anti-colonial world; if the Africans were taking on Portugal over Angola, the least the Indians could do was to move against Goa.
Kennedy, in any case, had no desire to protract resentments. In November Nehru had invited Jacqueline to visit India, and during the winter Galbraith enthusiastically worked out a long and full schedule. The President was all for the trip in principle; but, when Galbraith’s itinerary arrived, Kennedy, after one glance, pronounced it worse than a political campaign. One day he called Ken in New Delhi from Palm Beach and told him the trip would have to be cut back: “She’s tired. I’m not going to let her do it. It’s too much for her.” Again as in a political campaign, the advance man objected: everyone was expecting the President’s wife; the children at Mysore were weaving garlands; we could not risk disappointment. But the President persisted; the itinerary was revised to his satisfaction; and Jacqueline with Lee Radziwill arrived in India in March.
It was a happy journey. Nehru was in a gentle and winning mood, much more himself than he had been in Newport or Washington. He was delighted by his guests, evidently welcomed the relief from pressure and liked to take them for strolls through his gardens. He scrupulously avoided politics and did not lobby about Goa, Kashmir or Pakistan. Jacqueline and Lee then went on to Pakistan as part of Washington’s policy of non-discrimination within the subcontinent.
On the first day of April, a few days after Jacqueline’s return, Galbraith, my wife and I went out to Glen Ora, the Kennedy weekend retreat in Virginia, to watch the NBC television report
on the trip. It was a cool, wet Sunday in early spring. As we drove through the pleasant Virginia countryside, the rain stopped; and by the time we arrived Caroline was cheerfully sloshing around in the puddles by the swimming pool. We had tea in the handsome early-nineteenth-century house and at six-thirty switched on the television set. The President said to Jacqueline, “Well, while you and Ken watch yourselves on television, Arthur can read some of his old books and I will listen to some of my old speeches.” After the show, much improved by a running commentary from Jackie and Ken, we finished our drinks and went in for dinner. Just as we sat down, Caroline appeared, her eyes filled with tears and a book clutched under her arm. Jackie said, “Oh, I promised Caroline that I would finish her story,” and disappeared for a few moments to complete her assignment.
Jacqueline’s trip had been a great success. It disposed of the lingering pique about Goa and re-established the process which was making the President so popular a figure throughout India. In this era of Nehru’s decline, with India receding from the world stage, young Indians in particular were fixing their hopes more and more on the American President. Even the communist press treated Kennedy with respect.
Then in the autumn the Chinese themselves provided valuable cooperation by invading India from the north. Nehru, forgetting the virtues of non-alignment, sent a desperate appeal for American help. With Kennedy’s strong backing, Galbraith took the opportunity to consolidate the American friendship with India. Acting with great sense and skill, and after the usual arguments with the dilatory Department, he succeeded in working out air defense arrangements and otherwise making clear that, in case the war intensified, India could expect American assistance.
Nehru, now frail and sick, was less and less in active command of his government. But, with Galbraith’s expert management, the Chinese invasion and then the soothing ministrations of Chester Bowles, his relations with Kennedy were stabilized by 1963. This became evident in the controversy over American aid to the state-owned Bokaro steel mill. Aid to India came up with awful regularity every year when the general aid bill was under consideration. In 1962 Senator Symington had tried to cut down our assistance, and Kennedy personally intervened to save the Indian appropriation. In 1963 congressional opposition centered on the Bokaro project. “The Congress may have other views,” Kennedy said in May, “but I think it would be a great mistake not to build it. India needs that steel.” Congress did have other views, and Nehru, more sensitive now to the President’s problems, withdrew the project in the summer. Kennedy wrote him an appreciative letter in early September. “I have been a strong supporter of Bokaro, and I am still,” he said, but he feared that insistence on it would have eroded support for the aid bill, and he thanked Nehru for making things easier. If India were not to be the positive international force for which Kennedy had hoped, nevertheless it had acquired a sober confidence in the American government and a tremendous admiration for the American President.
XX
Tangle in Southeast Asia
INDIA REMAINED the most reasonable of the developing nations of Asia: British imperialism had not been in vain. The Dutch and French, however, had not created political traditions or institutions calculated to smooth the transition to self-government; nor were they prepared to retreat from empire with the relative skill and tact of the British after the Second World War. The nationalist reaction in Indonesia and Indochina was in consequence fierce and angry.
Indonesia won its independence in 1949, Indochina, after an especially nasty war, in 1954. At Djakarta President Sukarno proceeded to gather the emotions of nationalism unco himself and used them without scruple to establish his power. In Indochina, Cambodia and Laos went their separate paths; and Vietnam, divided by the Geneva Agreements of 1954, now consisted of two hostile states, with North Vietnam stimulating and supporting a civil war south of the border.
In different ways, Indonesia and Vietnam presented Kennedy with problems to which there were no clear or easy answers and which harassed him throughout his administration.
1. SUKARNO
The ‘guided democracy’ which Sukarno had proclaimed in the fifties grew more and more every year into a capricious personal despotism. Sukarno was a great nationalist demagogue, adored by his people and basking in their adoration. His deep mistrust of the white west was understandably compounded in the case of the United States by his knowledge that in 1958 the CIA had participated in an effort to overthrow him. His internal problems were complex and multitudinous. He looked on them with insouciance and, in the manner familiar to despots, sought to forget them by seeking international victories. By 1961 he was threatening attack on the Dutch colony of West New Guinea, withheld when the rest of the Netherlands East Indies achieved independence.
The Indonesian legal claim was far from irresistible; it was based essentially on the fact that West New Guinea had been part of the package under the Dutch. The Papuan inhabitants of West New Guinea were barely out of the stone age and had no ethnic or cultural ties to Indonesia. There was no reason to suppose they would be better off under Djakarta than under The Hague. But Sukarno suspected that the Dutch had retained West New Guinea as a point of reentry in case his government might collapse, and, seeing the Dutch presence as an intolerable threat to Indonesian security, he was determined to force them out.
He came to Washington in the spring of 1961 and again in September after Belgrade. The meetings with Kennedy were no great success. The Indonesian leader’s vanity was unconcealed, and his interest in reasoned exchange seemed limited. He gave the impression of a clever politician who had squandered the opportunity to promote the development of his country in favor of posturing on the world scene and personal self-indulgence. For all this, though, the President regarded Indonesia, this country of a hundred million people, so rich in oil, tin and rubber, as one of the potentially significant nations of Asia. He was anxious to slow up its drift toward the communist bloc; he knew that Sukarno was already turning to Moscow to get the military equipment necessary for invasion. And he was also anxious to strengthen the anti-communist forces, especially the army, in order to make sure that, if anything happened to Sukarno, the powerful Indonesian Communist Party would not inherit the country. He was therefore immediately responsive when Robert Komer proposed that the United States take the initiative in trying to settle the West New Guinea argument before it blew up into a crisis. Settlement meant persuading the Netherlands to turn West New Guinea over to Sukarno under an appropriate face-saving formula. The only alternative to this was war, and the President was sure that the Dutch, having declined to fight over Java and Sumatra, would hardly go to war over this last barren fragment of their Pacific empire. Nor did he propose to let matters develop to the point of a great-power confrontation in the Banda Sea with Moscow and Peking backing Indonesia while America backed the Dutch; like Laos, West New Guinea did not seem to him a part of the world in which great powers should be rationally engaged.
The State Department at first was hard put to remember that the White House existed in connection with policy toward West New Guinea. The Europeanists at State saw little point in satisfying Sukarno’s imperialistic ambitions at the expense of a NATO ally; and through most of 1961 the Department kept threatening to align us with the Dutch against the Indonesians in the UN. Toward the end of the year, however, Harriman became Assistant Secretary for the Far East and began to redress the balance. In December Kennedy wrote Sukarno offering to help find a solution by direct negotiation, and soon he asked Harold Macmillan to persuade the Dutch and the Australians toward a greater flexibility on the issue.
In February Robert Kennedy went to Indonesia, bearing a presidential letter urging the Indonesians to come to the conference table without preconditions. Sukarno and the Attorney General got on surprisingly well. Robert Kennedy’s directness and candor made a distinct impression in Djakarta; and, in later years when relations between the United States and Indonesia took a bad turn, he was the American who could talk
most effectively to the Indonesian leader.
In the meantime, the Dutch, or at least the Foreign Minister, Dr. Joseph Luns, who took a crusading personal interest in West New Guinea which may have outstripped the considered concern of his government, stubbornly opposed the mediation effort. At one meeting with the President, Luns was so carried away by the injustice of it all that he waved a flabby forefinger in Kennedy’s face, a gesture which Kennedy courteously ignored. To all such manifestations Kennedy’s response was direct: “Do you want to fight a war about West New Guinea?” He made it clear that the Dutch were free to blame the United States for the outcome if only they would permit the problem to be settled.
Robert Kennedy’s pressure on Sukarno and the President’s and Harriman’s on Luns finally brought the principals reluctantly to the conference table in the spring of 1962. Ellsworth Bunker, one of the wisest of American diplomats, sat in as a third party through interminable meetings in Middleburg, Virginia. There followed five months of negotiation, accusation, interruption and provocation. “Everybody is displeased, really, with our role,” Kennedy said in April . . . The role of the mediator is not a happy one, and we’re prepared to have everybody mad, if it makes some progress.” Dean Rusk gave Luns some incautious assurances during another NATO meeting at Athens in May which stiffened the Dutch for a moment and probably resulted in worse terms for them in the end.
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