Early Decisions

Part Four

The account provided by Robert McNamara and many other participants and writers about the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 shows how President John F. Kennedy was surrounded by senior officials and advisers recommending military intervention in Cuba to force the Soviets to remove the weapons it had placed there. Instead, he chose to use a naval blockade and some secret bargaining over U.S. missiles in Turkey to end the confrontation.

On the evening of October 15, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was hosting a dinner party that was interrupted by a call from Ray Cline, the deputy director of the CIA, who said that reconnaissance photography had confirmed that the Soviet Union was deploying medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Bundy returned to the dinner party without informing the president.

He later explained to Kennedy, “I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in light of what would face you in the next days.”

At eight o’clock the next morning, with Kennedy still in his pajamas, sitting in bed reading the newspapers, Bundy informed him of the crisis.

Over the next thirteen days, Kennedy convened multiple sessions of advisers, designed the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or “ExComm,” to consider options for having the missiles removed. Among this group were the Soviet experts Charles (Chip) Bohlen, George F. Kennan, and Llewellyn Thompson, whose collective experience with the Kremlin provided a level of insight that was especially valuable.

To highlight the intensity of the moment, McNamara told us in our editorial sessions that he never went home during the entire period. He slept at the Pentagon for the next twelve nights.

“It wasn’t that I felt the military wouldn’t pursue the instructions we laid down, not at all…It was that this was a very delicate communications problem between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and we didn’t want a war and we wanted to get the goddamned missiles. How do you get the missiles out without a war? We put in the quarantine.”

The deliberations that led to the outcome have been dissected and analyzed in any number of books and studies.

In Retrospect has this account:

“By Saturday, October 27, 1962 – the height of the crisis – the majority of the president’s military and civilian advisers were prepared to recommend that if Khrushchev did not remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba (which he agreed to the following day) the United States should attack the island. But Kennedy repeatedly made the point that Saturday – both in Executive Committee sessions and later, in a small meeting with Bobby, Dean, Mac, and me -- that the United States must make every effort to avoid the risk of an unpredictable war. He appeared willing, if necessary, to trade the obsolete American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba in order to avert the risk. He knew such an action was strongly opposed by the Turks, by NATO, and by most senior U.S. State and Defense Department officials. But he was prepared to take that stand to keep us out of war.”

Ultimately, the crisis ended with the blockade and secret agreement about the missiles in Turkey but remains the closest that the United States came to a confrontation with the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons. McNamara’s view of the episode was framed around Kennedy’s rejection of the advice of his Joint Chiefs to use force in Cuba. In our discussion, he said:

“Had we invaded that island, as a majority of Kennedy’s military and civilian advisers were recommending…and they were recommending it be done three or four days later – attack and later invasion – those damn warheads would have been used, without any question.”

Kennedy’s position was:

“He didn’t believe that a president and I didn’t believe a secretary of defense should expose our nation to even a small risk of a catastrophe. That’s why I don’t think he would have moved in Cuba.”

As 1963 unfolded, the Saigon government of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had become increasingly fierce in its crackdown on the Buddhists who were critical of the Catholic-led regime. Diem held the leadership position with Nhu at his shoulder. The view in Washington was, as it so often was in similar circumstances, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” The view had been to do everything possible to support Diem. On June 11, Thich Quang Duc, a revered elder among the Buddhist monks, immolated himself in protest of the repression of the Buddhists, which Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press captured in a photograph that symbolized the scale of what was happening.

Restraining repression became a focal point of U.S. policy, along with a growing awareness of the successes in the countryside of the communist Vietcong guerrillas. How much pressure could be applied on Diem and Nhu? And there was a sense that some generals in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were moving toward a coup. The U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Frederick Nolting, got along well with Diem, but his deputy, Bill Truehart, took a much harder line with the South Vietnamese president when Nolting left Vietnam for six weeks at a moment of serious tension. Truehart had sided with those who wanted to oust Diem. Nolting wanted to continue working with him. According to his son Charles Truehart’s book Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, Nolting on his return was furious.

In Washington, officials increasingly shared the sense that Diem and Nhu were unwilling and unable to change their attitudes and actions. The more the crackdown against Buddhists went forward – and the less it seemed that U.S. influence was working, it became clear that something had to be done.

By now it was high summer, and the principal decision makers were away from Washington. Kennedy was in Hyannis Port. McNamara and Marg were in the Grand Tetons. Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and CIA Director John McCone were all away as well.

On August 24, McNamara writes, “several of the officials we left behind saw an opportunity to move against the Diem regime. Before the day was out, the United States had set in motion a military coup, which I believe was one of the truly pivotal decisions concerning Vietnam made during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.”

McNamara identifies Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, as the prime mover of this effort: “Hilsman was a smart, abrasive, talkative West Point graduate…He and his associates believed we could not win with Diem and, therefore Diem should be removed.” Hilsman then drafted a cable to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had just arrived in Saigon to replace Nolting as the new ambassador. The cable said:

“It is now clear that whether the military proposed martial law or whether Nhu tricked them into it, Nhu took advantage of its imposition to smash pagodas…Also clear that Nhu has maneuvered himself into commanding position.

“U.S. Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available.

“If, in spite of all your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.”

As the draft cable ricocheted through the vacationing officials it was finally sent to Kennedy with assurances that it had been approved by the senior cabinet members, but because of the dispersal of the participants, this was more than had actually happened. Reluctantly, Kennedy said it was okay to transmit.

Only then was the cable shared with General Maxwell Taylor, the president’s military adviser, a World War II hero “and the wisest uniformed geopolitician and security adviser I ever met” according to McNamara. Taylor had been appointed to that role because Kennedy knew that the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a group had been wrong in the Bay of Pigs and in the missile crisis, and while he trusted McNamara and Bundy, he did not trust the generals.

Taylor was shocked that the cable had already been sent. He called what the anti-Diem faction in Washington had done “an egregious end run” while high-ranking officials were away.

Cables and memoranda were the primary means of group communications in Washington and with Saigon. In meetings, differing views were shared and heard by all. But written communications increased the risks of misunderstanding – who wrote them, who received them and who did not, who read them and who did not. In our internet age, we encounter the same sort of problem -- think of a mistyped “reply all,” for example. The possibility that Diem could be removed was now in bureaucratic play. And the record indicates that Kennedy was equivocal in how own judgment on the situation – to his later chagrin.

There is no doubt that in the months of September and October the possibility of a military coup increased. But what happened on November 1 was not anticipated, at least by Kennedy. After Diem and Nhu had agreed to surrender, they were placed in an armored personnel carrier and murdered, with grisly photos of their bodies published worldwide.

Kennedy was appalled.

On Monday, November 4, he dictated this memo: “Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place, culminated three months of conversations about a coup, conversations which divided the government here and in Saigon. Opposed to a coup was General Taylor, the attorney general, Secretary McNamara….In favor of the coup was State, led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman….I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted, it should never have been sent on a Saturday.”

(Kennedy did not mention Secretary of State Dean Rusk in this dictation, which over the years to come would show that Rusk never was as much of a confidant or influence on JFK and later Lyndon Johnson as might be expected of a secretary of state. But he stayed in office until the end of Johnson’s term.)

“I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” Kennedy said, adding that Diem “was an extraordinary character and while he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period he held his country together to maintain its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now, whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government…”

They could not.

And so, on November 22, 1963, the political situation in Saigon was a mess and despite some professed claims of progress around the country, the downward trajectory was continuing. Kennedy’s advisers were addled and squabbling over who did what to whom in fomenting the coup.

McNamara, in his book discussion with his editors, made the case – stronger than he would do elsewhere – that Kennedy would have proceeded with his planned withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1964 and 1965.

“He would have, particularly, I think, recognized that the conditions we had laid down, specifically that he had stated categorically a few days before – i.e., it was a South Vietnamese war; it could only be won by them; and to do that they needed a sound political base – were not being met.

“Therefore, whatever the costs of withdrawing – and, as I say, I think he would have thought they were greater than, with hindsight, we know them to have been -- I say he would have accepted the domino theory back then…He would have accepted that cost, because he knew that the conditions necessary to avoid it weren’t there and couldn’t be met and in an attempt to meet them, we would spill our blood, and he wasn’t about to do that…”

This was also the conclusion of Clark Clifford, who knew Kennedy well and was later to be Johnson’s secretary of defense. In an interview with his editors for his memoir Counsel to the President, Clifford said that JFK was firmly set against deploying ground troops to Vietnam. “In judging matters of this kind [Kennedy] was a real cold fish,” Clifford said. “He could be totally objective…under the façade of charm and attractiveness…He was cold, calculating and penetrating.” Clifford said that he could imagine Kennedy concluding in so many words, “I’m not willing to take the chance. I don’t like what I see ahead. I’m suspicious of the people who are involved. I just don’t think I ought to accept the representations of the military with full faith and credit extended…I’m just going to get more deeply involved in what is a stinking mess.”

Nonetheless, the Kennedy presidency was unquestionably dominated by the belief – and reality – of Soviet and related communist threats in Europe and Asia. Kennedy’s responses to those reflected an instinct, shared on the whole with McNamara, to deflect confrontations rather than meet them directly with force. His terrible experience with the Bay of Pigs, events around the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Geneva conference in 1962 which ended with the neutralization of Laos, and the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated a strategy to avoid catastrophic outcomes.

McNamara believed that Kennedy had concluded that the pretext for the continuing war in Vietnam – to head off Soviet influence and Chinese participation in Asia, as had happened in Korea a decade earlier, was not worth the cost it would entail. In ways expressed by the Soviet expert George F. Kennan and politicians like Senator Fulbright (and by McNamara in the 1990s), exaggerating Soviet power and the overall communist threat was, in many ways, as bad and certainly as perilous as underestimating it.

As for Vietnam, McNamara said years later, Kennedy and his advisers, for all their pizazz, were ignorant in almost every way possible about Southeast Asia its languages, history, and culture -- and moreover, in a global battle with communism, Vietnam “was a tiny blip on the radar.” But because “we screwed up,” he said bluntly, the blip would eventually overwhelm so much else.

In discussing the Kennedy presidency, McNamara’s editors returned again and again to the matter of what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he lived. Most historians tend to believe that Kennedy would have had to reverse the withdrawal of U.S. advisers, but this was not what McNamara really believed.

Why would he make so firm a statement to the editors when he refused to make it publicly?

“I’m doing it here for only one reason. Because if I think as I do – that he would have gotten out, then it is incumbent upon me to explain why those of us who worked with him, including Johnson, didn’t get out…I don’t raise it because I’m not trying to…vindicate Kennedy or admire him or support him or whatever.

“I raise it only because the burden of proof is on those of us who stayed…why the hell…”

Kennedy had all the members of his cabinet and the National Security Council read Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August about the origins of World War I. She reports one former German chancellor asking another, “How did it happen?”

The other replies, “I wish I knew.” In other words, they bungled into war.

“I don’t ever want to be in that position,” Kennedy said. “We are not going to bungle into war.”

Next Week: Part Five: When Everything Changed

To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors on his memoir