Lodge reaffirmed his position the next day. The best chance of reaching American objectives in South Vietnam, he wired Washington, was “by the generals taking over the country lock, stock, and barrel.” The day after that, a Lodge cable reported that Diem was cutting his long-feared deal with the Communists and would soon order the United States to leave his country.
Diem now posed a double jeopardy to Kennedy. He might lose the war to the Communists, having already alienated the majority Buddhist population. Or he might sign a separate peace with Hanoi, making the United States look not only weak but irrelevant. Kennedy had sized up the predicament to Charles Bartlett: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give a piece of territory to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.” To ensure plausible deniability about his role, he ordered his people to destroy all records of cable traffic between Washington and Saigon, starting with the fateful August 24 order he had approved in Hyannis Port.
Kennedy needed to conduct the nasty business with Saigon personally. To the nervous generals, plotting their coup, he had to declare his dissatisfaction with Diem and the desire for a change in leadership. He accomplished this mission in a September 2 interview with CBS’s Walter Cronkite. “It is their war,” Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese government. “They are the ones who have to win it.” His second message was to those Americans worried that the Democratic president might not stick out the fight. He compared the struggle in South Vietnam to the successful U.S. effort to save Western Europe from communism after World War II. “What I am concerned about,” he told NBC’s David Brinkley a week after the Cronkite interview, “is that Americans will get impatient and say, because they don’t like events in Southeast Asia or they don’t like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. I think we should stay.” In a press conference three days later, he made the point more sharply. “We have a very simple policy. We want the war to be won, the Communists to be contained, and the Americans to go home. That is our policy. We are not there to see a war lost.”
On the morning of November 1, with the coup set for noon, a cold-blooded Lodge had breakfast with Diem. When the Vietnamese president said he sensed a plot, the American ambassador said he had nothing to fear. Hours later, with the U.S.-backed rebellion under way, Diem called the U.S. embassy asking for the American government’s position. Lodge waffled. Everyone was asleep at that hour in Washington, he said, and his only communication was from the generals, who he had heard were offering Diem safe passage out of the country if he agreed to resign. What Lodge didn’t tell Diem was that the coup leader, Duong Van Minh—“Big Minh”—had already made clear his desire to kill members of Diem’s family. And the United States had no plans to stop him from doing whatever he wanted to Diem himself. When Lodge offered to help with the threatened president’s physical safety, Diem reminded him that he was still his country’s leader. “I am trying to reestablish order; after all, I am a chief of state,” he said. “I have tried to do my duty. I believe in duty above all.”
Taken from a Catholic church, where they had gone to hear an early-morning mass, Diem and his brother Nhu were thrown into an armed personnel carrier, their hands tied behind their backs. “Big Minh” asked the CIA, at this point, to get him a plane able to take his prisoners out of the country and into exile. He was told it would take twenty-four hours. For Minh that was too long to wait. “We can’t hold them that long,” he told Lucien Conein, the CIA agent who was working with the coup leaders. Diem and Nhu were then taken from the armed personnel carrier, shot repeatedly, and stabbed to death.
The killings were useful to both coup partners. “We had no alternative,” General Minh rationalized. “They had to be killed. Diem could not be allowed to live because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside.” Henry Cabot Lodge spoke with similar contentment of the assassinations. “What would we have done with them if they had lived?” he told author David Halberstam. “Every Colonel Blimp in the world would have made use of them.” When a younger Diem brother, Ngo Dinh Can, took refuge in the U.S. consulate in Hue, Lodge tricked him out of the consulate under the pretense he would be flown to asylum in the Philippines. Instead, the American plane carrying him to promised safety stopped at Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, where Can, laden with cash, was turned over to the coup leaders, who then executed him by firing squad.
* * *
THOUGH a willing collaborator in the coup, Kennedy seemed stunned by the graphic account he received in the Cabinet Room of how Diem and Nhu had been removed from the church and killed. Military aide Maxwell Taylor recalled Kennedy rushing from the room with a pale and shocked look on his face which he had never seen before. “What did he expect?” Taylor asked the group. When Roger Hilsman, the State Department person who had plotted Diem’s demise, tried defending the coup leaders’ claim that Diem and Nhu had committed suicide, Kennedy was skeptical. He didn’t believe that the Vietnamese leaders, both Roman Catholics, would ever have considered such a course of action. Taylor dryly pointed out that it was uncommon for people to shoot and knife themselves with their hands tied behind their backs. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s representative in Saigon got nothing but praise. Kennedy sent an “Eyes Only” cable to Lodge commending his “leadership in pulling together and directing the whole American operation in South Vietnam. You should know that this achievement is recognized throughout the Government.” One person outside the Kennedy team disagreed. “The Diem murder was the most disgraceful deed to date in our mixed-up foreign policy record,” Richard Nixon wrote a Republican senator.
Yet the killing of Diem and the end of the embarrassing repression of the Buddhists were greeted as the most dramatic display yet of the young president’s ability to cut through any political obstacle that lay before him. Suddenly, he had a military government in Saigon with the clout and motive to destroy the Vietcong. What Kennedy, his agent Lodge, and their country could not see was that the last leader of South Vietnam with the independence to tell the United States to get out of his country was also the last one with the legitimacy to ask it to stay.
While Kennedy had gotten past his earlier political contests with Lodge to the point of plotting a deadly coup with him, his differences with Nixon remained personal. With the exception of their meeting after the Bay of Pigs, the ex-vice president was persona non grata. Their early friendship had been a casualty of electoral war. “I like him, too,” Kennedy said when told by author Theodore White that a prospective 1964 challenger, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, held a warm regard for him. “But that’s not important. He’ll get to hate me. That’s inevitable.”
* * *
BY November 1963, Kennedy’s 1960 rival also loomed, despite all expectations to the contrary, as a credible Republican presidential candidate the following year. General Eisenhower praised him on Face the Nation as a “courageous type of guy.” James Reston, who had penned an obituary the year before, now wrote that Nixon possessed a “ready-made strategy” for challenging Kennedy. “He lost to Kennedy by only 113,000 votes, and he could argue with considerable force that Kennedy’s performance has fallen far short of all the promises he made.” Reston reminded readers that Kennedy’s 1960 claim of a “missile gap” would allow Nixon to say in 1964 that he had lost their first contest thanks to JFK’s deception. “Richard Nixon suddenly seems to be the Republican whom everybody is talking about for his party’s 1964 Presidential nomination,” Time declared.
Jack Kennedy’s prognosis was proving correct. Dick Nixon hadn’t needed that humiliating 1962 run for governor of California to stay alive politically. He had gained enough stature from his eight years as vice president to survive even the live burial of the year before. With an election year before him, Nixon was talking very much like a partisan politician.
“Contrary to what the pundits say and write, it’s what others have do
ne which has caused this Nixon talk. The others are active and running. I am not. And it’s because there is disillusionment with Kennedy,” Nixon told Time in an extended interview. He mentioned the “increasing possibility” that Kennedy could be beaten. “As the possibility increases, so does the interest in getting a Republican who can win. I find there is a correlation between Kennedy’s failures and interest in me.”
Nixon was beginning to probe Kennedy’s moral responsibility for his role in the overthrow and death of President Diem. He told Time that the Kennedy-backed coup against Diem might take on importance in 1964 should the war against the Vietcong take a turn for the worst. “If it goes well, Vietnam won’t be an issue.” Asked to gauge his party’s chances of beating Kennedy, Nixon showed the scars of the 1960 defeat. “Running against him next time will be running against all his money, the federal Treasury, and all kinds of public relations. Kennedy will shoot the works.”
These remarks appeared in the issue of Time dated November 22, 1963.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Dallas
ON November 18, 1963, President Kennedy gave a tough anti-Castro speech in Miami. “A small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere,” he told a meeting of the Inter-American Press Association. “This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Once this barrier is removed, everything is possible.” Good relations between Cuba and the rest of the hemisphere would return when Fidel Castro was gone.
On November 20, Richard Nixon flew to Dallas, Texas, to attend a board meeting of the Pepsi Cola Bottler’s Association. He was accompanying Donald Kendall, president of the soft-drink company, a major Nixon client. The next day, November 21, he summoned a group of reporters to his hotel room. The president was coming to town, and his old rival wanted to work some mischief. Aware of the fierce anti-Kennedy sentiments in the city he had carried by over 60 percent in 1960, Nixon called on the people of Dallas to give a “courteous reception” to the president and vice president. Just days before, Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s UN ambassador, had been spit upon by an angry resident. But Nixon couldn’t resist inflaming the city’s volatile mood. He said that Kennedy might dump his Texan vice president from the 1964 ticket if it suited his purposes. “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson” was the next day’s headline in the Dallas Morning News.
Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon predicted here Thursday that President Kennedy will drop Lyndon Johnson from the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket if a close race appears likely next year.
Nixon said that Johnson is becoming a “political liability” to the Democratic party.
“President Kennedy has stated he intends to keep Lyndon as the vice-presidential nominee. The fact they are coming to Texas together, I believe, indicates the President means what he said.
“But we must remember that President Kennedy and his advisers are practical politicians. I believe that, if they think the race is a shoo-in, they will keep Lyndon. Otherwise, I think, they will choose someone who can help the Democratic ticket.”
“DAMN it!” Kennedy had told his Florida pal George Smathers as they headed up from Palm Beach that Tuesday. “I hate to go to Texas. Johnson’s got it all fouled up.” Back at the White House, he asked Tip O’Neill about the old gang back in the Eleventh Congressional District. “How’s Billy doing?” Could O’Neill make sure that he was taken care of? Charles Bartlett, the columnist-buddy who introduced him to Jackie, was on the phone chatting with the president the night before he left for Dallas. Chuck Spalding figured the calls he kept getting and missing from the White House were from Kennedy, trying to invite him for the weekend in Virginia after he returned from his Texas swing.
Kennedy had politics on his mind. To carry Texas in 1964, he needed to boost his own approval rating, which was down to 38 percent in the state. He also needed to patch up the state party, badly fractured between conservatives and liberals. Money, too, was a reelection necessity. Texas was a wealthy state, and even a moderately liberal Democratic president needed to get his share.
The president awoke that Friday morning at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. The first formal event was a chamber of commerce breakfast. At the urging of local congressman Jim Wright, Kennedy agreed to begin the day with an outdoor rally in the hotel parking lot, something for blue-collar workers headed to the 8:00 A.M. shift. Emerging into an early-morning drizzle, Kennedy succeeded in whipping up the appreciative outdoor crowd. His high spirits continued when he joined the business group inside. A local television crew caught him sitting at the head table of the chamber of commerce event, kidding back and forth with Johnson as the two endured the familiar tedium of hearing the name announced of every local dignitary with a ticket.
Mentally, Jack Kennedy was busy that morning with his accustomed exercise of trying to figure out what makes voters, in this case Texans, tick. Just as he had once checked the voting patterns of Italian, Jewish, and Armenian voters back home in Cambridge with Tip O’Neill, he was now intrigued with the difference in politics between two Texas cities. Riding to the airport, he asked Wright and Connally to account for the extreme rightward tilt in Dallas. What made it so different from the Democratic stronghold of Fort Worth? Wright chalked it up to the archconservative Dallas Morning News, which that morning carried a vicious ad accusing the president of Communist sympathies. Connally gave an economic explanation. Unlike Fort Worth, Dallas was a high-rise boomtown of banks and insurance companies, all filled with men wearing white shirts to work. Unconsciously, the Democratic governor, with an 81 percent approval rating, was divulging his own careful calculations of where the state—and John Connally—were headed. He had earlier made clear he did not want to be seen locally as a “Kennedy man.”
The forty-six-year-old president landed in Dallas at noon. His first stop was a luncheon at the Texas Trade Mart, where former vice president Nixon had spoken to the Pepsi people the day before and where twenty-five hundred people were now waiting to hear him. He was just five minutes from the mart when his limousine passed Dealey Plaza and a Manlicher-Carcano rifle, equipped with a four-powered telescope, aimed down from a window of the Texas Book Depository.
* * *
JOHN F. Kennedy died as he had lived, riding in an open convertible, a loving, beautiful woman beside him, charming everyone in sight. He died as he had told George Smathers he had wished—quickly. He was shot by a troubled loner infatuated with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, disgusted with Russia, and angry at his own country. He died his father’s son, campaigning to hold the great prize of honor he and his family had won. He was at the end what he was those first months after V-J Day: a Cold Warrior. “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight,” he had said at the Fort Worth breakfast.
* * *
AMERICAN Airlines Flight number 82, with Richard Nixon aboard, had departed Dallas’s Love Field three hours before Air Force One arrived. After speaking briefly to a group of reporters at New York’s Idlewild Airport, he took a cab into Manhattan. Stopping at a red light on the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, he saw a stranger rush from the curb. “Do you have a radio in your cab? I just heard that Kennedy was shot.” Nixon was incredulous. Maybe the guy on the curb was a nut or a prankster. Maybe Kennedy had only been wounded.
Nixon aide Stephen Hess was having lunch that day in New York with the editor of the book the former vice president and he were planning to write on the 1964 presidential campaign. As word moved through the restaurant of the grim events in Dallas, Hess telephoned Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. What should he do? Woods said Nixon would, given the dire circumstances, go home rather than to his law offices. Arriving at the Fifth Avenue apartment, Hess was stunned to see his boss himself answer the buzzer. “Nixon opens the door, he’s jacket-less, not tie-less but jacket-less, which is very informal for him. And he is reall
y shook up and he tells me that he heard the news. His reaction seemed to be ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ There is no doubt that that’s how he greeted me. What he did was open his attaché case. He quickly showed me a copy of that morning’s Dallas Morning News with Nixon’s front-page sentence urging the people of Dallas to afford Kennedy ‘a courteous reception.’ He wanted to show me that because he was worried that people would think that Kennedy was killed by a right-winger and that somehow he would be blamed for it.”
Erase the assassin image, Henry Cabot Lodge had warned him.
Soon Nixon would learn, to his relief, that police suspected someone from the other political extreme.
* * *
NIXON canceled a golf match set for that afternoon with Roger Blough, the U.S. Steel executive with whom Kennedy had suspected the former vice president had conspired to hold down steel prices during the 1960 campaign. He had also planned to attend the opera that evening with his mentor, Tom Dewey. Instead, he stayed in, watching the networks’ hastily-thrown-together profiles of John F. Kennedy’s life and career, with himself cast as the foil. Later, after Rose Mary Woods had invited Nixon’s local political allies together for a meeting with him the next morning, Nixon sat in front of his fireplace long after the ashes had cooled in the fire composing a letter to his rival’s widow:
Dear Jackie,
In this tragic hour, Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you.
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 134