But Harriman’s friends continued to push his case to the Kennedys, trying to overcome their doubts. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, pressed his case very hard, saying that they should try Harriman at State, even in a lower capacity; they would be surprised by his ability. “You’re sure you’re not just being sentimental?” Bobby Kennedy asked him.
In February 1961 Harriman was made roving ambassador, a particularly low level in the governmental hierarchy when one considers the many distinguished posts he had held in the past. But he accepted with good grace; asked how it was going, in the early months of the Administration, he answered, “Oh, you know, all these Presidents are the same. You start at the bottom and work your way up.” His stock rose steadily in the Administration. His style was more than adequate; he gave the best dinner parties in town; and in tough sessions with other Kremlinologists, he more than held his own. But he was furious at the time of the Vienna meeting because he had not been consulted on the planning. That had been left to people like Charles Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson and George Kennan, kids really, boys that he had trained, but nonetheless men very much his junior. So with the intrusive, audacious style which makes him unique in government (“What makes Averell different from other men?” a reporter once asked one of his very young aides in 1969. “Well, he’s the only ambitious seventy-seven-year-old I’ve ever met,” the aide answered), Harriman just happened to show up in Paris as Kennedy was visiting De Gaulle, and just happened to see the President’s sister Eunice Shriver to let her know that he desperately had to talk to the President. He just happened to get himself invited to a state dinner, just happened to sit one sister and one person away from the President, and just happened to hear the sister say to the President, “Look, Averell is here and I think he has something to say about Khrushchev and Vienna,” and Kennedy, well primed, said, “Yes, I hear there is something you want to say to me.” Harriman, of course, had practiced what he wanted to say. He had taught all his protégés always to be brief when talking to a President; they have so little time, everyone is always telling them things, keep it short and simple, and brevity above all. One idea, a few brief sentences. Having determined to put the lessons of his long sessions with Khrushchev and forty years together in a few sentences, the gist of what he said was: Go to Vienna. Don’t be too serious, have some fun, get to know him a little, don’t let him rattle you, he’ll try to rattle you and frighten you, but don’t pay any attention to that. Turn him aside, gently. And don’t try for too much. Remember that he’s just as scared as you are, his previous excursion to the Western world in Europe did not go too well, he is very aware of his peasant origins, of the contrast between Mrs. Khrushchev and Jackie, and there will be tension. His style will be to attack and then see if he can get away with it. Laugh about it, don’t get into a fight. Rise above it. Have some fun.
That was the sum of the Harriman advice, though the contrary advice had been just as explicit. Stand up to him, show him that you’re not young, that you’re just as tough as he is, that the Bay of Pigs was an accident and not a reflection of your will. Indeed there were those who felt that a confrontation was needed, that we had to test our will, and the sooner the better. So Kennedy had gone to Vienna, and the meeting was a disaster, harsh and tense; the tensions of the world, centering over Berlin, had seemed to intensify rather than ebb with the meeting; Khrushchev had attacked, and Kennedy, surprised, had finally rejoined. Vienna, like the Bay of Pigs, had increased the tensions in the world.
The Vienna meeting made a powerful impact on Kennedy. James Reston, the New York Times columnist and Washington bureau chief, and the most powerful and influential journalist in the capital, had asked for a private meeting with the President after the final encounter. Because of his unique position, it had been granted. Knowing that such a session would enrage his colleagues, Reston spent the day in Vienna hiding from fellow journalists and was smuggled into a special room at the embassy. The blinds were drawn lest anyone see him, he waited there for several hours in the darkness. When Kennedy finally arrived, he could not see Reston at first because of the dark. Finally he spotted Reston and as the journalist began to rise the President waved him down, came over and sat down on a couch next to him. He was wearing a hat; Reston remembered that because it was only the second time he had seen Kennedy with a hat on; the first time was at the inaugural. Kennedy sank into the couch, pushed the hat over his eyes like a beaten man, and breathed a great sigh.
“Pretty rough?” Reston asked.
“Roughest thing in my life,” the President answered. He was, Reston thought, genuinely shaken.
Kennedy told Reston that he had studied Khrushchev carefully beforehand, and he knew that the Russian had great contempt for Eisenhower; whenever they had met and a serious question was asked, Ike would turn to Dulles for the answer. So Kennedy had decided to go it alone, to show his equality with Khrushchev, to show that he had done his homework. Just the two of them would meet, and the interpreters. He had gone in and, he felt, held out his hand, saying that the two of them had very special responsibilities for peace in the world. “I propose to tell you what I can do, and what I can’t do, what my problems and possibilities are and then you can do the same.” The reaction was astonishing, a violent attack on the United States, on its international imperialism, but particularly on its presence in Berlin. As he had threatened Harriman before, he now threatened Kennedy on Berlin: the missiles would fly, the tanks would roll, they must not doubt his word. He had kept the pressure on all week, and Kennedy had finally answered in kind. So Kennedy had told Reston, “I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it. I think the first part is pretty easy to explain. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” Then he told Reston that he would increase the military budget (which he did) and send another division to Germany (which he also did). He turned to Reston and said that the only place in the world where there was a real challenge was in Vietnam, and “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” (Ironically, a year later, after the Americans had begun their limited commitment to Vietnam, Khrushchev would tell Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson that the Americans were making a major mistake in Vietnam. “In South Vietnam,” he said, according to Thompson’s cable back to Washington, “the U.S. has stumbled into a bog. It will be mired there for a long time.”)
In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year. Reston in particular would see these events as a study in irony, believing that by October 1962, after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had made good his need to show Khrushchev his fiber, but by that time it was too late as far as Southeast Asia was concerned; there were already more than 15,000 Americans in South Vietnam. For the Cold War was still quite real in 1961, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the men who had come to power in Washington were very much a part of it. They had been fashioned out of it, and now in their first year they were getting regular reminders that it had not yet crested, and their own very eagerness to be tested would in fact accelerate it.
Berlin, of course, had dominated their thoughts for some time. They believed that the hopes for war and peace somehow centered around that divided city, and its access routes. Could we maintain our access? Would the Soviets block it? They were the men in power, preoccupied with the t
iniest details; it was as if the President were the desk officer, and the Secretary of State his assistant. There was no event too small for their concern, as if one little misplay would somehow start a chain of events which they might not be able to control. When someone questioned the President about spending too much time on Berlin, he answered, better too much than too little, and he did not mind checking too closely on military convoys; he did not, after all, want the world to be blown up because some young captain had a hangover on a given morning. If Berlin had seemed central in early 1961, Vietnam had loomed somehow very distant. Around that time a knowledgeable Far Eastern correspondent named Stanley Karnow had dropped by the Justice Department to talk with the President’s brother. In the course of the conversation Karnow began to single out Vietnam as probably the most serious problem there, the one which bore the greatest long-range potential for danger. “Vietnam,” said Robert Kennedy, “Vietnam . . . We have thirty Vietnams a day here.”
Thirty Vietnams. From the beginning it had been that way, a tiny issue overclouded by the great issues. It had risen to pre-eminence partly because of neglect and omission, a policy which had evolved not because a group of Westerners had sat down years before and determined what the future should be, but precisely because they had not. Vietnam had begun as the most peripheral of problems to the United States, a new Western power sprung suddenly to superpower proportions and facing a prolonged confrontation with the Communists. There had been time only for the great decisions, and Vietnam had been part of the price, something small which grew into something large. Who, in 1945, when decisions were being made, had time for Indochina? Nineteen forty-five was a time when the problems of Europe were pre-eminent, when the question of the atomic weapon and the atomic balance with the Soviet Union was next, when even China was on the periphery; Vietnam was on the periphery of the periphery.
But it began to go sour for this country as early as July 1945, when the new and uncertain President of the United States, Harry Truman, made his first major trip abroad, to Potsdam, to come to terms with the enormous problems that seemed to come hurtling at him, great decisions which would decide the immediate wartime and postwar future. He was not particularly concerned with Indochina, as it was then called; but because some of the issues arising at Potsdam might touch on China, Truman had brought along, as part of his State Department team, a China and Asian expert, John Carter Vincent, chief of the China division of the State Department.
Because later his career, along with those of many of his colleagues, would be destroyed during the post-China Red-baiting, John Carter Vincent would gain a kind of fame that he had neither expected nor desired. And somehow, because those men were attacked for what were alleged to be left-wing sympathies, the idea would grow that John Carter Vincent was a radical. The truth could hardly have been more different. He was a charming, social, pleasant, nominally conservative man who had unusually good connections on the Hill, came from a good Georgia family and was called, in that gracious Southern tradition, John Carter by almost everyone. Having spent a large part of his career in Asia, he felt a distinct empathy for Asian nationalism, and had a rather realistic view of the future. By early 1945 he had come to the conclusion that the President in particular believed in indigenous nationalism in Asia and was moving in that direction. Those days, in fact, would be the high-water mark of American support for nationalism in Vietnam, with Roosevelt talking about a trusteeship for the area. It would end with the trip Vincent was on at that moment, the trip to Potsdam. He did not think a great deal about Vietnam at Potsdam because it was not on the agenda, and because it was not supposed to be discussed at all.
But a decision was made at Potsdam on Vietnam, without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite inconsequential at the time, but the matter of who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy. The British, uneasy about questions that Roosevelt had raised in the past about independence in Asia, worried about what it might mean for Burma and Malaya, since they were anxious to control future colonial questions in Asia; the British, after all, were not eager to see the dissolution of their empire. Truman, pushed by his military advisers who were wary of what anticolonialism might mean as far as the future of U.S. naval and air bases in Asia was concerned, urged that we go along with the British. There had been no prior discussion among the Americans (though later evidence would show that there had been a good deal of collusion beforehand between the French and the British on this issue). Having accepted the surrender, the British would permit the French to return, and all subsequent events would flow from this: the French would reassert their authority, they would smile politely at all American requests to deal with the indigenous population, but they would pay no attention; the Americans, after all, had given away the leverage, the French Indochina war would begin, and the Vietnamese would gain their freedom by force of arms.
It was, of course, a minor point clouded over by great issues at the time, and the responsible political officer, John Carter Vincent, did not participate; in fact, he learned of it after the conference was over. A fateful decision unfatefully arrived at. It was, he would acknowledge many sad years later, the turning point, the moment at which it all began to go wrong.
Vietnam up to then had only come into the public’s eye through articles in the National Geographic, or old newsreels. It was filled with exotic but dutiful natives, whom the French were helping to become modern. In Washington it was viewed as a land with vital resources—vital, but not that vital. In 1941, when the United States learned from radio intercepts that the Japanese planned to move against southern Indochina, its reaction had been modest. The military argued against any action which might take us to war with Japan, because of our lack of preparedness (General Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark noted that America should go to war “only if Japan attacked or directly threatened territories whose security to the United States is of very great importance,” which included Indonesia, and British and American possessions in Asia). What became clear as events progressed in 1941 and during the war was that Vietnam was important not in itself, but to the extent that the Japanese used it as a gateway to move toward other areas (“We must let them [the Japanese] see the seriousness of this step they have taken and let them know that such constitutes an unfriendly act because it helps Hitler to conquer Britain,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull told Sumner Welles in 1941). But at a time when resources were limited and needs were crucial, there was no arrogance of American power, every resource was carefully weighed, and a young general named Dwight Eisenhower wrote in February 1942: “We must differentiate sharply and definitely between those things whose current accomplishment in the several theaters over the world are necessary to the ultimate defeat of the Axis powers, as opposed to those which are merely desirable because of their effect in facilitating such defeat.” Thus Europe was the prime theater, Asia was the second one. It would be nice to stop Japanese expansion, but it was not that vital. “The defeat of Germany,” Roosevelt wrote to Harry Hopkins, George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King in July 1942, “means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.” So American wartime policy was set. Prime effort in Europe, little effort in Asia, as little engagement of the Japanese mainland as possible, indeed a maximum use of technology, and a war which reflected that faith in technology—island hopping, moving from island to island securing bases for American air power to be aimed at Japan, rather than the more painful (and postwar politically more profitable) crawling up the mainland.
In Indochina itself, the collapse of the French had given enormous new momentum to political stirrings among the Vietnamese, and there was a belief that somehow the great war was being fought for them as well, a view shared by some Americans, notably their President. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a man before his time: anticolonialism had no
t surfaced yet as the great global movement (though the very war which he was helping to mastermind would speed the collapse of the old order and the end of colonialism), but Roosevelt had strong ideas about colonialism that were a reflection of his own—and his wife’s—domestic political egalitarianism. He was instinctively on the side of the little man, and anticolonialism seemed consistent with his own domestic political style; indeed his national security advisers thought him very soft on the dangers of world Communism. He saw a role for the United States as a symbol of the new freedoms, and he was intuitively receptive to the idea that the many poor of the world would turn against the few rich. If Roosevelt did not like colonialism in general, he did not like French colonialism in particular. Part of this was due to his general annoyance with France as an ally during the war, part of it to his special pique with Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt’s failure to understand the unique role which that particular leader had chosen to play, grandeur in absentia. The French, Roosevelt was fond of telling people, had been in Indochina for fifty years and the people were worse off than when they had arrived. He had determined that the French would not automatically come back and reassert their control over Indochina; there would be some kind of international trusteeship, and if the French came back at all, it would be as some sort of partner in the trusteeship. But though this idea was real and he talked of it with a few close advisers, Roosevelt was, as the war progressed, an overburdened, exhausted man who was preoccupied with too many decisions of greater immediacy. There were no plans on Indochina, no inner workings of the bureaucracy set in motion on a postwar philosophy of colonial policy. On January 1, 1945, Roosevelt wrote a note to Edward Stettinius, his Secretary of State, saying: “I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war. By the same token I do not want to get mixed in any military effort towards the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese. . . .”
The Best and the Brightest Page 14