The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  While American policy might have worked to diminish international tensions, and indeed the very importance of Laos, it had done quite the opposite. During the Dulles years, when neutralism was considered somewhat sinful, the Americans had deliberately sabotaged indigenous Laotian attempts, led by their ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, at neutralism and a coalition government between the various factions. Graham Parsons, ambassador to Laos during the latter Dulles years, when American ambassadors in Asia were particularly rigid in their anti-Communism, later testified before a congressional committee: “I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition.” With our money, our CIA men and our control of the Royal Laotian Army, we had in fact systematically destroyed the neutralist government of Souvanna, eventually forcing the neutralists to the side of the Communist Pathet Lao (though in 1962 we would spend millions and millions of dollars to re-create the very neutralist government we had toppled). One month before Kennedy entered office in 1961 Souvanna had fled to Thailand, and Kong Le, the military leader of the neutralist forces who wanted above all to be left alone, had joined the Pathet Lao to fight against General Phoumi’s army. In the next two months, skirmishes took place (the Laotian civil war, which flared up periodically, was distinguished by considerable journalistic coverage, troops moving through on sweeps, maps on the front pages of American newspapers, and the fact that there were almost never any casualties). When the two sides finally met in early February on the strategically important Plain of Jars, General Phoumi’s army, better equipped, better paid, predictably broke and ran. As they ran, the Kennedy Administration had its first Asian crisis.

  It was the classic crisis, the kind that the policy makers of the Kennedy era enjoyed, taking an event and making it greater by their determination to handle it, the attention focused on the White House. During the next two months, officials were photographed briskly walking (almost trotting) as they came and went with their attaché cases, giving their No comment’s, the blending of drama and power, everything made a little bigger and more important by their very touching it. Power and excitement come to Washington. There were intense conferences, great tensions, chances for grace under pressure. Being in on the action. At the first meeting McNamara forcefully advocated arming half a dozen AT6s (obsolete World War II fighter planes) with 100-lb. bombs, and letting them go after the bad Laotians. It was a strong advocacy; the other side had no air power. Thus we would certainly win; technology and power could do it all. (“When a newcomer enters the field [of foreign policy],” Chester Bowles wrote in a note to himself at the time, “and finds himself confronted by the nuances of international questions he becomes an easy target for the military-CIA-paramilitary-type answers which can be added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. . . .”) Rusk, who had seen the considerable limits of air power in jungle terrain when he was in the China-Burma-India theater during the war, gently dampened the idea; in addition, given the size of the Plain of Jars, the effectiveness of six small fighter-bombers was bound to be limited.

  There were other ideas; some of the civilians were interested in the possibility of a quick strike at the Plain of Jars, an airborne landing. Could we get them in there? Kennedy asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “We can get them in there, all right,” General Lemnitzer answered. “It’s getting them out that worries me.” What quickly became clear was that the military, particularly the Army, were in no rush to fight a ground war in Laos. The Army still felt itself badly burned by its experience in Korea, where it had fought a war which was immensely frustrating for commanders who felt they were sacrificing their men for limited political objectives, a kind of rationing of men for politics, which was difficult for officers to come to terms with. In addition, the impact of the Eisenhower years on the Army, years of cutback and depletion, had left the strategic reserve seriously reduced. “If we put as many as one hundred and twenty-five thousand into Southeast Asia, we wouldn’t be able to fight a war in Florida,” one general told the President. Yet the Chiefs of Staff did not recommend against the Laotian commitment; rather, they said that if we were to get involved, we should go in with a large force, and the use of force should be open-ended—thus the possible use of nuclear weapons was implicit. They wanted 250,000 men for the invasion. At one of the National Security Council meetings someone asked what would happen if the Chinese came in—in that case a quarter of a million Americans would not be enough. “We’ll take care of that,” Lemnitzer answered somewhat vaguely. But when the civilians pursued the questioning, it became clear that if the Chinese or the Soviets moved in combat troops, the main military contingency plan would be the use of nuclear weapons.

  Kennedy in particular was annoyed because he felt the Chiefs were not being candid; that they were building a record against him, covering themselves against an invasion and putting the onus on him; that they were hiding behind the nuclear weapons, and yet not stating the case explicitly. (The same ambiguity would recur without fail as the Laotian crisis resurfaced from time to time, usually in the rainy seasons, when the Pathet Lao could move with greater protection. A year later there was a new Laotian crisis, and after a NATO conference in Europe, McNamara went back via Saigon to meet with top U.S. officials. He asked each one in turn what the United States should do. First was Admiral Harry Felt, commander of all American forces in the Pacific. “We have the Seventh Fleet and we have the planes to wipe Tchepone off the face of the earth.” Then McNamara turned to Lemnitzer. “Well, Lem, what do you think?” “I don’t think air power alone will do it. We need to challenge them on the ground. Secure the Mekong. Use SEATO Plan Five . . . Put some men in there.” Then to General Paul Harkins, commander of Military Assistance in Vietnam: “Paul, you’re the theater commander, what do you think?” “I think the situation is very serious. Naturally we have to respond. We have to impress the Communists with the seriousness of our intention. And yet we must act within our capabilities.” McNamara then turned to Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who replied, “I look upon our Asian policy having two pillars, South Vietnam and Thailand. Laos is the keystone supporting them. If the keystone falls, the pillars will collapse.” It was all fairly chilling, and McNamara, a little better informed than the year before when he lived in a world of AT6s, said, “Let me play the devil’s advocate: if we intervene in Laos, if we overfly North Vietnam, will the Chinese let us do it? Lem, you want to use the SEATO plan. What will Hanoi do? Will they just sit there or will they come in?” Then he leaned back. “Now let us get down to it.” He waited. Their staffs had long since left the room. What ensued was one of the longest and most appalling silences McNamara had ever sat through. They had all been pushing hard, willing to commit troops, in effect go to war if necessary, but they had given little or no thought to what the other side might do. Now they had no answers, nothing to say.)

  It was at this point in the first Laotian crisis that Harriman entered the picture, in April 1961. He was a man who had lived through most of the past Cold War policies and had helped create them, but he was not tied to them; above all, he was not an ideologue. He was a man of power, but he knew that power was always changing, also that the most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable, and he had serious doubts about the value of an American commitment to Laos. He differed from the other high officials in understanding that the pluralism of the Communist world was a real thing, that it had changed, that the Communist world was in flux. As it was changing, genuine new opportunities would present themselves and he was determined that this Administration take advantage of them, and that he play a part. It was something in the darker days of 1961 that he never lost sight of and he would see to it that the chance for progress was interrupted as little as possible. As roving ambassador he had talked with Khrushchev, who had not thought Laos was worth war (“Why take the risk?” Khrushchev told Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson. “It will fall into our lap like a rotten apple”). In March, Harriman had arranged to see Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist leader the United S
tates had succeeded in ousting. They met at an airport in New Delhi, and although they shared no common language, Harriman had broken through. He came away convinced that this was a man you could deal with, that he represented something viable in Laos.

  He had returned to Washington, and knowing the importance of repetition within a government, he had started repeating a litany whenever he could at Washington meetings, at dinner parties—Souvanna Phouma, Souvanna Phouma, Souvanna Phouma—until at a certain point close friends were somewhat alarmed; perhaps this time Averell really was showing his age. It was not long after that Kennedy assigned him the job of getting a Laotian settlement at the conference in Geneva in May; it was not something he particularly wanted, and it was distant from the area of his prime concern. He did not think a decent settlement was really possible, but it was a job; he was underemployed and he needed to show these young people that he could run with them. He was willing to work for an accord, however, not just because he had a high opinion of Souvanna but because he had also formed a low opinion of the right-wing forces there (arriving in Vientiane, he sensed that the right-wing forces had no legitimacy, were an American creation; when CIA agents gave him carefully prepared briefings on the Laotian desires for freedom, they were annoyed to find Harriman simply turning off his hearing aid. They had no answers he was interested in). Indeed, the way he carried out what he himself would describe as a “good bad deal” so impressed the President that Harriman started an upward journey which might have brought him the Secretary’s job itself were it not for the assassination.

  Harriman himself did not have great hopes for the mission, but he went at it doggedly. At one point a friend asked how it was going, and he answered, “Just about as unsatisfactorily as we expected.” He was appalled by the size of the mission he took over in Geneva, and by the amount of deadwood. He did, however, like one member of the staff, Bill Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old officer way down the list in seniority. Bill Sullivan had served in Asia as a young man and did not seem to spout the clichés of most of the mission, and Harriman immediately offered him a job as his deputy. Sullivan declined, noting there were a dozen people senior to himself in the mission. Several days later Harriman called Sullivan in again and offered him the same job; by this time he had sent home everyone senior to Sullivan. This did not endear him to some of the departed who were connected with the Department’s traditionalists, and as he continued to negotiate with the Soviet delegate, G. M. Pushkin, there were mutterings that he was giving away too much of Laos, that great bastion. “I think the next cable will be signed 'Pushkin,’ ” said one high-level official. Harriman’s reaction when he heard of the remark was swift and devastating (he was not called “The Crocodile” for nothing), he decided that the man be transferred to . . . he thought for a minute and then chose . . . Afghanistan.

  In Geneva he worked single-handedly toward the neutral settlement, trying to convince the Soviets that they had little to lose, that the real problem for them was the Chinese, and that neutralism was more of a problem for the Chinese than for the Russians. At one point during the negotiations Pat Moynihan, who had worked for him during the Albany days, ran into him in Geneva.

  “What are you doing now?” he asked Harriman.

  “Oh, I’m just waiting. We’ve done all the talking we can do. And the Russians are making up their minds and I’m waiting for them. That’s all, waiting.”

  Eventually a neutralist agreement met with all the delegates’ approval, much to the anger of the hard-liners such as Alsop, who said it reminded him of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland teaching herself to believe six impossible things before breakfast. So the Kennedy Administration had moved away from force in Laos, but not without first a show of force, by stationing U.S. Marines on Okinawa and in Japan for possible forays into the Mekong Valley, and not without a grand son et lumière show, a television spectacular starring Kennedy himself, with maps, charts, clichés about Laotian freedom being tied to American freedom. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all. I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved,” he said on television, while telling Arthur Schlesinger at lunch of the discrepancy between what he thought he could say and what he believed: “We cannot accept a visible humiliation.” The opposition to the use of force at the high levels of the U.S. government was remarkably frail; the President himself, wiser now (he would say later that the Bay of Pigs had saved us from going to war in Laos), still felt that he could not be candid about the stakes or lack thereof in Laos.

  So the Laotian crisis had been brought to a successful negotiated settlement, but it was an eerie and unsettling experience to the men in Washington, for they had come far too close to involvement within a country where the faction they supported lacked any chance of success. What really saved the United States from confrontation in Laos was not the Bay of Pigs, or even Harriman, but the Laotians themselves. For the Pathet Lao were not a classic guerrilla force. If Phoumi was a foolish figure, Souphanuvong, leader of the Pathet Lao, was a Communist counterpart. Neither he nor his people had invested the kind of sacrifice and commitment to the struggle that the Vietcong had in South Vietnam; the force and dynamism of the Indochinese guerrilla movement had never really touched Laos. A major Communist power, such as the Soviet Union, could in fact serve as a broker for an agreement, which it could not do in Vietnam, where the indigenous Communist force was all that mattered. (This led to a misconception in Washington: a belief that the Russians, if they wanted to, could control and negotiate events in Vietnam as they did in Laos, and that eventually the Russians would help us out.) In Vietnam, however, the Americans would learn that the indigenous force was far more real, far tougher (the very quality of the fiber of the Vietnamese people which encouraged Washington to make a stand in Vietnam instead of in Laos would work against us there as well). In Vietnam a dynamic, relentless guerrilla movement was in the fifteenth year of an endless struggle to take over and unify the whole country, and for the leaders of that movement what the United States did or did not do was irrelevant. They would continue at their own pace. In addition, if the Communist investment in Laos was marginal, so was the American one, compared to Vietnam. Phoumi may have been a strong man, but no one would ever accuse him of being a Miracle Man, as Diem was called, for in Vietnam we had committed more, made more speeches, trained more troops. There was the beginning of a Vietnam lobby in the United States, and in fact both the President and his father had in some way been part of it.

  With luck the United States had managed to stay out of Laos, and though there were protests from the hard-liners, most of the country greeted the decision not to fight either with boredom and indifference or with relief. There was one small footnote to the Geneva agreement, and though it did not seem important at the time, in retrospect it would take on considerable significance. After the agreement had been reached, Kennedy assigned his own liaison man with Harriman, the young Wall Street lawyer Michael Forrestal, to brief Lyndon Johnson on the settlement. Johnson, of course, already knew of the accords, and Forrestal arrived to find that the meeting had been arranged so that Forrestal would get there about ten minutes after Johnson’s masseur had arrived. Forrestal began to discuss the accords, only to find himself blocked again and again by the masseur. Forrestal spoke, the masseur chopped, Forrestal spoke, the masseur rubbed. For ten minutes Forrestal tried to explain the agreement and found no way of getting Johnson’s attention; it was, Forrestal thought at the time, and even more so later, Johnson’s way of showing contempt for the Laotian accords.

  Of all the members of the new Administration only one man besides Bowles had ever shown much interest in the underdeveloped world, or much feel for it. It was not McNamara, for whom it might have factored in as a potential future market for the 1980s, or Rusk, who felt himself more sympathet
ic to the colored of the world than Acheson, but had managed to deliver some of the State Department’s best speeches in defense of the French position in Indochina; nor Bundy, who was classically a man of the Atlantic. It was, oddly enough, John F. Kennedy. He had been to Indochina twice, in 1951 and 1953, once as a congressman and once as a senator: the first time he was met at the airport by half the French army ready to brief him, to convince him of victory, to introduce him to a few Vietnamese officers bursting from their paratroop uniforms to prove to him how committed the natives were to a French type of freedom. He went to the official briefings, but he also jumped the traces, got the names of the best reporters in town and showed up unannounced at their apartments, looking so young and innocent that they had trouble believing that he was really a member of the Congress of the United States. There he asked his own questions and got very different briefings from the official ones: the pessimism was considerable, the Vietminh were winning the war, and the French were not giving any real form of independence to the Vietnamese (ironically, a dozen years later in exactly the same situation, on the same soil, Kennedy would rage at the reporters for their pessimism, while at the same time occasionally confiding in Schlesinger that he learned more from their dispatches than he could from his generals and ambassadors. In 1952 he was particularly impressed with the work of one reporter, Homer Bigart, then of the New York Herald Tribune, and wrote him a personal letter of congratulation, while a decade later his embassy in Saigon singled out the same skeptical and pessimistic Bigart, by then with the New York Times, as the major problem in winning the war). He also met at length with Edmund A. Gullion, a young foreign service officer who was the leader of the dissenters at the mission (starting a friendship which would continue for ten years, with Gullion eventually becoming his ambassador to the Congo). He finally told Gullion that he was right, there had to be more pressure on the French to give independence (“This is going to cost me some votes with my French Catholic constituents, but it seems like the right thing to do”).