WASHINGTON, Jan. 21, 1965--
President Kennedy today announced plans to withdraw all U.S. military personnel from Vietnam over the next six months as South Vietnamese government and Vietcong officials form a coalition regime in Saigon.
"In the final analysis," Mr. Kennedy said, "it is up to the Vietnamese themselves to resolve their own problems without outside interference. We hope that, with good will on both sides, they can succeed."
The president's decision, his first major foreign policy intiative as he starts his second term, reportedly reflects his view that the only alternative to withdrawal would have been deeper American involvement in Southeast Asia -- a course he is anxious to avoid...
How I would loved to have written -- or even read -- that news story. And, looking back on one of the most crucial "what-might- have-beens" of modern history, I would still like to believe that John F. Kennedy might have contrived an early exit from Vietnam had he lived. But unless some startling piece of evidence has eluded me, I can only conclude after considerable research on the subject that Kennedy would have probably pursued the same route taken by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who committed more than a half million American soldiers to Vietnam.
Former Kennedy aides like Kenneth O'Donnell, David Powers and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have argued to the contrary. They contend that Kennedy was essentially a pragmatist who would have foreseen the folly of escalating the war. O'Donnell and Powers recall in their memoir that Kennedy had a formula for pulling out of Vietnam without damaging America's reputation. "Easy," Kennedy explained to them. "Put a government in there that will ask us to leave."
Kennedy was certainly reluctant to send U.S. combat units to Vietnam during his first year in office. Late in 1961, he rebuffed Gen. Maxwell Taylor, his special military adviser, who urged the deployment of 8,000 Americans in the Mekong delta on the pretext of fighting a flood in the area. He also rejected a proposal from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the joint chiefs of staff, who regarded Taylor's recommendation as inadequate and favored the expedition of some 200,000 men to Vietnam to show that "we mean business." Explaining his retraint, Kennedy confided to Schlesinger:
"The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told that we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another."
Kennedy had voiced a similar view to George Ball, then an undersecretary of state, who conservatively predicted at the time that Vietnam might eventually demand as many as 300,000 American soldiers unless a way out were found. Laughing off the estimate, Kennedy said: "Well, George, you're supposed to be one of the smartest guys in town, but you're crazier than hell. That will never happen."
But despite these and other expressions of prudence, Kennedy did in fact increase America's investment in Vietnam. By the end of 1961, he had boosted the number of U.S. military advisers there from fewer than 700 to roughly 3,000, and the figure was to climb to 16,000 during the two years to come. He furnished the South Vietnamese government with helicopters and fighter aircraft, and the pilots to fly them. At his death, annual U.S. aid to the Saigon regime was running at $500 million.
Former members of Kennedy's staff cite a Pentagon plan for a phased withdrawal of American advisers as proof that he would have disengaged from Vietnam. They point out that 1,000 advisers did in fact depart in late 1963. But as the anonymous authors of the "Pentagon Papers" note, the reduction was "essentially an accounting exercise," partly calculated to demonstrate that progress was being made in the war. Many of the men were pulled out under routine rotation procedures, or for medical or administrative reasons. They were replaced by others, so that the force ceiling had hardly changed by the end of the year.
Nevertheless, it could be speculated that Kennedy might have drawn the line at full combat intervention -- especially if a landslide victory in the 1964 election gave him a solid new mandate. After all, he had promoted a neutralist settlement in nearby Laos that could have served as a model for Vietnam. Why, then, do I doubt that he would have gone in that direction?
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam was not the inevitable consequence of some cosmic force, as if history is a predetermined process. Starting with Harry Truman, who chose to finance the French colonial conflict there, presidents always had other options. Yet there was an inexorable quality in their decisions, since they all proceeded from the assumption that America's global role in the period after World War II was to defend the "free world" against the onslaught of communism directed from Moscow. Kennedy shared that assumption.
Truman had enunciated America's obligation as far back as March 1947, when he called for aid to Greece and Turkey on the grounds that "it might be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Kennedy echoed the line more eloquently in his inaugural address, pledging to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." Well before attaining the presidency, Kennedy had perceived Vietnam to be a decisive arena.
As a young congressman he had voted to fund the French in their war, asserting that the United States had to block "the onrushing tide of communism from engulfing Asia." He later described U.S. backing for the anti- communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon as a "test of American responsibility and determination." His disciples contend that he afterward become more sophisticated and less dogmatic. But not long before his assassination, he still clung to the "domino theory," which envisioned communism toppling one region after another, like a row of dominoes. Or as he told a television interviewer in September 1963: "If South Vietnam went, it would give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the communists. . . . We must persist."
To Kennedy, Vietnam came to symbolize a challenge to his resolve. Behind the facade of his New Frontier, with its brash bouyancy, he was far from self-confident during his first year in office. He had scored an uncomfortably thin margin of victory over Richard Nixon, who had assailed him during the election campaign for being "soft" on communism. He was shattered at the Bay of Pigs, where his Cuban exile surrogates were defeated by Fidel Castro, and he confronted the Kremlin over a divided Berlin. He was further shaken by Nikita Khrushchev's bullying tactics at their summit meeting in Vienna in late 1961. Emerging from that encounter, he said to James Reston of the New York Times: "Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place."
President Eisenhower had urged him to make a stand in Laos, but that landlocked little kingdom was too rugged a battlefield, and Kennedy acquiesced to a compromise with the communists there. He initially moved cautiously on Vietnam, preferring inexpensive counter-insurgency programs that he held up as the ideal response to communist- sponsored "national liberation wars." But the approach fell short, largely because the United States was trying to operate through an inept and inflexible government headed by Diem. On Nov. 2, 1963, spurred by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, a group of mutinous South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem, murdering him and his brother in the coup.
Kennedy had wavered as the conspiracy againstat pro Diem developed -- more because he feared it would abort than out of any ethical concern. But he sanctioned the plot because he felt that the war could not be won with Diem. Had he been searching to escape from Vietnam -- if "winning" hadn't been his goal -- he might have adopted a different strategy.
It could have been no secret to Kennedy that Diem's devious brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was making overtures to the communists through a Polish diplomat with access to the North Vietnamese. The contact had been arranged by Roger Lalouette, the French ambassador in Saigon, on instructions from France's President Charles de Gaulle, who had consistently warned Kennedy that Vietnam was a losing proposition. Hoang Tung, the Vietnamese Communist Party propaganda chief, confirmed to me in Hanoi in 1981 that the exploration had indeed been going on. Nhu's wife also disclosed the existence of the covert talks years later, even revealing that she was prepared to send her two oldest children to North Vietnam as a "fraternal gesture."
Conjectural as it sounds, Kennedy could have encouraged the maneuver in the expectation that a deal between Diem and the communists would have gotten America off the hook. But by approving Diem's ouster, he did just the opposite. His hope was that the generals who eliminated Diem would wage the conflict more effectively.
Three weeks after Diem's death, Kennedy was himself killed. But had Oswald's bullet missed him, he would have faced the same dilemma that nagged Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson entered the White House without any intention of sacrificing his administration to Vietnam. His priority was the Great Society, the package of progressive social and economic legislation that was to surpass the New Deal and lift him higher in public esteem than his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he could not permit himself to become the first president to lose a war, and soon Vietnam topped his agenda.
In the wake of Diem's collapse, Saigon exploded in convulsions as rival South Vietnamese factions struggled against each other to gain power. The North Vietnamese, taking advantage of the turmoil, strengthened their units in the South. By the spring of 1965, they had chewed up the best elements of the Saigon government army. Johnson reacted by bombing North Vietnam and intervening with American combat troops. How would Kennedy have replied?
Interestingly, there was virtually no change in the key Vietnam advisers as authority passed from Kennedy to Johnson. And there was no change in the advice they had given Kennedy and afterward gave Johnson -- except to intensify the war. Kennedy's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, continued in the same post under Johnson, continuing to utter such phrases as, "We shall stay for as long as it takes" to win. Similarly, Dean Rusk, secretary of state to both presidents, maintained his tough stance. McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both, also favored firmer action, as did other holdovers like Maxwell Taylor, Walt Rostow, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Bundy. For Kennedy to have backtracked drastically would have entailed either a complete reversal by his aides or the president's willingness to overrule them all.
Nobody was closer to Jack Kennedy than his brother Robert. At a White House meeting in September 1963, he had wondered aloud whether a communist takeover "could be successfully resisted with any government" in Saigon, and he went on to muse that perhaps "now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely." But as Arthur Schlesinger recalled, the notion "hovered for a moment, then died away, a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexamined assumptions and entrenched convictions."
The idea was probably alien to Bobby Knnedy as well. He ruled out retreat from Vietnam until well into 1967, when his switch to an antiwar position coincided with his presidential aspirations. By them, as every candidate recognized, Vietnam had become a political liability.
So it is difficult to imagine that Kennedy would have "abandoned" South Vietnam had he been reelected. He did not believe in failure, and even some sort of cosmetic arrangment to cover the U.S. withdrawal would have been more of an admission of failure than he might have been ready to accept. His brief term was a shining hour, but it seemed destined to be dimmed by the filthy faraway war in which all the participants were victims.