Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  “I don’t agree,” one Peruvian reportedly had told Kennedy. “What does indigenous mean? Has this word any pejorative meaning?”

  Peruvians were proud of their Indian ancestry.

  “The problem lays in the need of change or the structure of the government. As things are in this moment, decisions are not truly taken by the [Belaúnde] government.… The power lays, at least for the most important decisions, in the oligarchy of the exporter groups, which in the last instance are representatives of foreign economic powers of the large enterprises and companies.”

  Kennedy’s belief that in the United States democratic government already prevailed over privilege was unshaken. “Do you really believe,” he asked, “that the enterprises and companies have so large a political influence here and so much political influence over the U.S. Government? During President Kennedy’s administration, businessmen did not enter the White House. My trip to Latin America was certainly not looked on with favor by the State Department. But from what you people tell me, I can say again that it is up to you to change things if they are as you said.”

  “And how about the Marines?” asked one man, referring to the recent Dominican intervention.

  “Surely you are not aware, Mr. Kennedy,” said another, “that not long ago Mr. Rockefeller said in Lima that future financing is conditional to the favorable solution to the problems of the IPC and the International Telephone Company.”8

  Kennedy’s face tensed. “And what importance do you give to this kind of threat? We Kennedys, we eat Rockefellers for breakfast.”9

  The U.S. Embassy in Lima asked Kennedy “for a statement clarifying” his view. Kennedy refused either to denounce the Peruvians or to retract his statements. “Someone at the gathering leaked the incident to the press,” Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin later told Rockefeller family historians Peter Collier and David Horowitz, “and it got around. When we stopped in Argentina, a reporter rushed up to Bobby and said [in a mistranslation that nonetheless managed to capture a sense of the way Latin American policy was made in the Johnson administration]: ‘Senator, is it true that you have breakfast with Rockefeller every morning?’”10

  The Johnson White House was not amused. “The stories have him in effect saying: ‘Go ahead and nationalize. Others (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) have done this. In the end, things work out,’” William Bowdler reported to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. “I don’t see that there is anything that we can do about the episode,” Bowdler concluded.11

  Lyndon Johnson disagreed. Something could be done.

  Kennedy’s views on the Dominican Republic and on Peru won him no praise in Room 5600. Neither did his damning of apartheid in South Africa as an evil comparable to “discrimination in New York, serfdom in Peru, starvation in India, mass slaughter in Indonesia, and the jailing of intellectuals in the Soviet Union.”12 David Rockefeller was the most active American banker promoting financial ties with South Africa.*

  The summer of 1966, Kennedy locked horns with the Rockefellers over Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. Moved by the riots there and in Los Angeles’s Watts district, Kennedy had decided to address the despair in the ghettos with a demonstration project. While his staff walked the streets to interest community leaders, he approached a number of corporate leaders to join in a nonprofit community development corporation in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Despite an exodus of whites encouraged by real estate speculators and declining essential services, a stable home-owning middle class still existed to offer leadership for reforms. Rockefeller had done little to help them. He had cut funds for the community’s Youth-in-Action programs and, as a result, job training and college preparatory courses suffered.

  Of all the business leaders Kennedy approached, only one refused to join his board: David Rockefeller.13

  The list of conflicts continued to grow, ranging from preserving the Hudson River Valley from Rockefeller’s energy and highway schemes to Kennedy’s aborted effort to form a Democratic reform coalition to rob Rockefeller of his favorite campaign target, Tammany Hall “bossism.” More than anything he did in New York, however, Kennedy’s attack on Rockefeller’s mental health care system hit a raw nerve. Senator Kennedy was especially critical of Rockefeller’s draconian Addict Treatment Act, which considered addiction a crime to be punished, not an illness to be treated. He conducted an unannounced inspection of Rockland State Hospital.

  At this institution, Kennedy protested that children were kept tranquilized and ignored. Patients were put in “cells,” he charged, where, “amidst brutality and human excrement and intestinal disease,” they were forced to live in conditions “worse off than in a zoo.”14

  Nelson was furious. He countered that New York’s programs had been “the blueprint for the federal program presented to the Congress by the late President Kennedy.” When it was revealed that the New York legislature had received similar critical reports, Nelson turned on the legislators. They had not appropriated the funds he wanted, he insisted.

  Kennedy acted as if Rockefeller simply was not informed by the state bureaucracy, which itself was a subtle condemnation of the Rockefeller administration. “I am sure that when you are aware of the extent of unused federal assistance available, you will wish to make the appropriate changes in the relevant state machinery to insure that you will be properly informed in the future.”15

  Nelson turned defensive, which only made matters worse. “I trust that … the obtaining of assistance for the mentally retarded,” he wired back, “will not depend on your acting as the political broker.”

  “He is jeopardizing the future of children and others for the benefit of his own political administration,” Kennedy told reporters at a press conference. “Evidently, he … doesn’t want to cooperate at all in any matter in which I am involved.”16

  Kennedy also requested a state investigation of the deplorable health conditions at camps set up for migrant workers, most of whom were Hispanic, African American, and Native American. He urged trade unions to organize the migrants. “I guess I’m very gloomy about things,” he once told journalist Jack Newfield. “I don’t expect much anymore. But you have to make yourself keep trying. Whenever I see a Cesar Chavez, or a Marian Wright, or a VISTA volunteer, then I get reconvinced that maybe one person can actually make some difference. But mostly I expect the worst.”17

  For Kennedy, “the worst” had already begun to reveal itself abroad, in “the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have been not perpetrators, but victims,” and where “the New Order” of CIA-backed generals granted huge oil concessions to Standard Oil of New York (Mobil) and offered the copper of Irian Jaya, the former Dutch New Guinea, to another Rockefeller family holding, Freeport Sulphur.

  But the very worst was Vietnam. And it was over this issue that Robert Kennedy engaged in his greatest confrontation with Lyndon Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller.

  SHOWDOWN OVER VIETNAM

  A true believer in counterinsurgency, Bobby Kennedy had agreed with his brother’s deployment of U.S. Marines to back the Saigon regime. Yet by July 1965, he had noted with dismay the ascendancy of Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow, both advocates of escalation and both veterans of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project that had called for increased arms spending for counterinsurgency warfare.

  That month Kennedy released to the press a speech he planned to deliver to the CIA’s International Police Academy. “Victory in a revolutionary war is not won by escalation, but by de-escalation.… Air attacks by a government of its own villages are likely to be far more dangerous and costly to the people than is the individual and selective terrorism of an insurgent movement.”18 He did not include these words when he actually gave the speech, although they were widely quoted. He simply was not yet ready to break with Johnson. But he was convinced that conventional warfare and indiscriminate carpet bombing would not win the hearts and minds of anyone. “If we regard bombing as the answer to Vietnam, we are headed for d
isaster,” he finally said in January 1966.

  Kennedy was moved further against the president’s policy by Johnson’s subsequent renewal of the bombing of North Vietnam; by Johnson’s snubs of the Senate’s constitutional right to advise on foreign affairs; and, finally, by the February 1966 televised debate at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings between its chairman, Senator William Fulbright, and Dean Rusk. Thinking that Fulbright was too intellectual to be effective, Kennedy answered with his own proposal for a negotiated compromise with Ho Chi Minh.

  The attacks on him were immediate, from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, from McGeorge Bundy, and, behind the scenes, from Johnson. Stunned, Kennedy remained silent for almost a year. “I’m afraid that by speaking out I just make Lyndon do the opposite, out of spite. He hates me so much that if I asked for snow, he would make rain, just because it was me. But, maybe I will have to say something. The bombing is getting worse all the time now,”19 he said in December.

  On March 2, 1967, Kennedy broke his silence. A week earlier, U.S. artillery had shelled across the Demilitarized Zone into North Vietnam for the first time. Then U.S. warships initiated twenty-four-hour firing on sea routes into North Vietnam, and warplanes began indiscriminately mining North Vietnam’s rivers.

  Kennedy delivered a 6,000-word speech on the Senate floor. By most accounts, it was a remarkable moment in American history. Kennedy accepted part of the blame for how far things had gotten out of control. “Three Presidents have taken action in Vietnam. As one who was involved in those decisions, I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go round for all—including myself.” Then he urged Americans to accept their own responsibility as citizens for the actions of their government. “All we say and do must be informed by our awareness that this horror is partly our responsibility.… It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants … we must also feel as men the anguish of what it is we are doing.”20

  Then, after transparently hollow praise for Johnson’s “restraint,” he called on the president to accept Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin’s recent assertion that a halt to bombing would allow negotiations to begin.

  Johnson reacted quickly. He invited all fifty governors to the White House for consultations. He had Secretary of State Rusk and General William Westmoreland announce their disagreement with Kennedy. Both actions paved the way for Johnson’s formal rejection of Kennedy’s proposal on March 9.

  For all his posturing, however, Johnson fretted that peace—in Vietnam or the United States—was not in sight. So, like most men of rural America, Johnson turned to the God of his Texas forebears or, at least, to God’s self-appointed spokesmen.

  BLESSINGS FROM BILLY

  The Fundamentalists gave Johnson their support without hesitation. This battle was part of God’s test of Americans as the Chosen People of this age, destined to defeat Satan’s godless legions and lead the world into a holy new order.

  Billy Graham was the most visible Protestant preacher who rallied to Johnson’s side. Between patriotic exhortations at crusades in cities across the Sunbelt, he held formal prayer breakfasts at the White House, offered reports from crusades overseas, and generally tried to soothe the president’s worried brow. He had been doing so since the first frightening days after John Kennedy’s death, when he compared Johnson’s task to that of Joshua after Moses’ death. Such assertions, in the light of hindsight on Vietnam, should have been a testament to Graham’s gift of prophecy, considering Joshua’s own scorched-earth policy when he led the host of Israel down the hills to conquer the people living in the land of Canaan. But Graham could not contain himself to that vision; he moved rapidly to more American, democratic examples: “As God was with Washington at Valley Forge and with Lincoln in the darkest hours of the Civil War, so God will be with you.”21

  Johnson loved the analogy, asking Graham to keep writing him letters like that one. Graham obliged. Johnson became “not only the choice of the American people, but of God. You are as truly a servant of God as was your great grandfather Baines when he preached the gospel.”22 No one was surprised when the Grahams stood beside Johnson in the president’s reviewing stand for the inaugural parade or when Johnson had Graham lead an interfaith service or when Johnson presented Graham with the Big Brothers of America Man of the Year Award, a prestigious recognition usually bestowed on corporate liberals like Nelson Rockefeller.

  Finally, as he had done with so many before, Johnson called in his IOUs. He wanted Graham to visit Vietnam for Christmas.23 No one knew of the president’s request for this command performance; Graham sent out Christmas cards that year, saying that the invitation came from General Westmoreland. Almost half a million American GIs were in Vietnam by then, and thousands more would follow. Graham spoke glowingly of his trip to Vietnam and of Johnson as a “deeply religious” man. He called for the “success of soldiers in the pacification program.” Vietnam, he explained, was “wealthy enough to feed all of India and China.”24

  Shortly afterward, the White House received an unusual request from one of Graham’s fellow preachers in his hometown, Montreat, North Carolina. The preacher had joined the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps and served a stint as a White House chaplain. Rev. Calvin Thielman, an enthusiastic supporter of the president and Presbyterian pastor to Graham’s wife, wanted to go to Vietnam.

  “He wants to observe the effectiveness of civic action in which the military is involved, with special attention and emphasis on the Montagnard tribes,” a White House aide noted. “Wishes to study literacy work by AID. To assist, he wants to take with him William Cameron Townsend.”25

  *An earlier U.S. Marine intervention had given Berle his start as a lawyer for sugar interests represented by the law firm of Nelson’s father’s legal counsel, Thomas Debevoise. He had opposed the marines’ occupation. Now, as chairman of one of the largest importers of black-strap molasses from the Dominican Republic, the American Molasses Company, he supported it.

  *Chase had recently purchased a major holding of South Africa’s second biggest bank, Standard Banks, Ltd.

  35

  APOCALYPSE NOW: THE TRIBES OF INDOCHINA

  BATTLING THE HORDES OF SATAN

  Vietnam begins with a blast of hot air. The land takes your breath away as soon as you step out of the air-conditioned jet, as if already demanding your surrender to its climate, its ways, its ancient national will.

  Calvin Thielman could not see the mountains from Saigon’s airport, but he knew that a hundred or so miles away were the Central Highlands where missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) did most of their work. There, surrounded by tropical forest that hid the enemy, SIL translators labored over the linguistic secrets of some dozen hill tribes. Every time Thielman came to Vietnam, he made a point of visiting these brave bearers of the Word. He could not, however, see the full scope of the impact of Bible translation work, which extended to tribes farther north, in the highlands of Laos and Thailand. For Thielman, as for most Americans in those years, it was quite enough to see Vietnam.

  This land was the front line of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Beyond the flatlands of coastal Vietnam, the Central Highlands climbed up to the steep Annam mountain chain that divided Vietnam from the Asian interior. Here tribal peoples, who centuries before had been pushed out of the fertile flatlands by the Vietnamese, scratched a living out of stony soil and hunted the great forests. They lived without regard for the legal formalities of borders that obsessed the Vietnamese authorities. They crossed at will into the hills of Cambodia and Laos, where poppies had been grown since the previous century, when the British used gunboats and modern armies to force its lucrative opium trade upon a resistant but weak China; now, thanks to the CIA’s secret war, opium bound for the European and U.S. markets was becoming the major cash crop.

  Cambodia and Laos were both officially neutral in this war, Cambodia by the design of its ruler, Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, and Laos by the 1962 Geneva Accord negotiated by Averell Harriman with China and the Soviet Union. But Laos’s neutrality was fiction, and not just legally, as in the case of Cambodia (whose territory was also used as a supply line to the Communist-led National Liberation Front [NLF] in South Vietnam), but militarily as well. Caught between efforts of North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to ship supplies and reinforcements to his NLF allies in the south, and U.S. determination to stop this aid while it armed its own client regime in Saigon, Laos for a time would become the target for more U.S. bombs than North Vietnam. Most of these bombs were dropped by U.S. planes flying from bases in neighboring Thailand, the projected industrial heartland of the subcontinent and inspiration of the most grandiose of dreams of Western investors for Southeast Asia.

  During this period, Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers had invested in a number of companies through IBEC in Thailand: Siam Fibrecement, one of Thailand’s major industries; Thai Coconut Industries, which used coconut husks to manufacture upholstery fiber for European markets; Thai Celadon, Ltd., which produced high-fired stoneware for American and European markets; and the Thai Industrial Development Corporation, a joint venture with Denmark’s East Asiatic Company. In addition, John D. Rockefeller 3rd’s importing firm, Products of Asia, had led IBEC into Bangkok Industries and his Design Thai operations, which provided Thai textiles for Lord and Taylor’s racks of expensive clothes in Manhattan.1