Part 11 (1/2)

Kennedy, who had little facility for foreign languages or much talent for p.r.o.nouncing them (his struggles with high school Latin and French are well doc.u.mented), had spent part of the afternoon before giving his speech practicing his Spanish. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had drafted the address, tried to help him, but it was pretty useless. Amused at his own imperfect p.r.o.nunciations, Kennedy asked Goodwin later, ”How was my Spanish?” ”Perfect,” Goodwin lied. ”I thought you'd say that,” Kennedy said with a grin.

Although everyone in the room understood that Kennedy was launching a memorable program and that he sincerely wanted to achieve a dramatic change in relations with the southern republics and in their national lives, the president's rhetoric did not dispel all doubts. One speech, however sincerely delivered, was not enough to convince the audience that traditional U.S. neglect of the region-the conviction, as Henry Kissinger later facetiously put it, that Latin America is a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica-was at an end. Latin American representatives to the United States also believed that American idealism was little more than a tool for combating the communist challenge. Some derisively called the Alliance for Progress the Fidel Castro Plan.

There was some justification in the Latin American dismissal of the Alliance. Kennedy and the great majority of Americans could not ignore Soviet rhetoric and actions, which demonstrated a determination to undermine U.S. power and influence by propaganda, subversion, and communist revolutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. True, Khrushchev ruled out a nuclear war as madness, a prescription for destroying hundreds of millions of lives and civilization. But his a.s.sertions about Soviet missile superiority and predictions that communism would win control of Third World countries made it impossible for Kennedy or any American president to set Khrushchev's challenge aside.

In private, Kennedy was never a knee-jerk anticommunist. In a meeting with a group of Soviet experts on February 11, he displayed ”a mentality extraordinarily free of preconceived prejudices, inherited or otherwise ... almost as though he had thrown aside the normal prejudices that beset human mentality,” State Department Soviet expert Charles Bohlen said. ”He saw Russia as a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.”

Kennedy friend and British economist Lady Barbara Ward Jackson urged Kennedy to mount ”a sustained offensive on current cliches” in a speech she proposed he give before the United Nations General a.s.sembly. ”The animosities, the festering fears of the Cold War so cloud our minds and our actions that we no longer see reality save through the distorting mirrors of malevolent ill-will.” She paraphrased W. H. Auden, ”We must love each other or/ We must die.” Kennedy, who had promised to ”pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hards.h.i.+p,” was sympathetic to Jackson's appeal. But he saw no way to go before the U.N., or, more to the point, before the country's many cold warriors, and quote Auden about the choice between love and death. Perhaps he might eventually ”find another forum,” he told Jackson, ”in which to present your thoughts, which are important.”

NUCLEAR WAR was Kennedy's ”greatest nightmare,” Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, ”I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election.” He had a.s.sured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would ”help you to proceed-unhindered by thoughts of the coming election-with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace.” was Kennedy's ”greatest nightmare,” Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, ”I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election.” He had a.s.sured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would ”help you to proceed-unhindered by thoughts of the coming election-with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace.”

Once in office, Kennedy made clear to his subordinates that he was eager to sign a test ban treaty. He saw it as ”in the overall interest of the national security of the United States to make a renewed and vigorous attempt to negotiate a test ban agreement.” But the Soviets, whose nuclear inferiority to the United States made them reluctant to conclude a treaty, showed little inclination in talks at Geneva to sustain a current informal ban on testing. The Soviet ”stand at Geneva,” Kennedy told British prime minister Harold Macmillan in April, ”raises the question of whether to break off the talks and under what conditions. There is a great deal of pressure here to renew tests,” Kennedy added. Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric remembers that ”every approach toward arms control” agitated opposition among some in the White House, the State Department, and especially the military. ”They felt this was as much of a foe or a threat as the Soviet Union or Red China. They had just a built-in, negative ... knee-jerk reaction to anything like this.” If it became necessary for the United States to resume testing, JFK told West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it must be clear to the world that this was done ”only in the light of our national responsibility.”

However strong his determination to avoid a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, Kennedy could not rule out the possibility. The Soviet acquisition of a nuclear a.r.s.enal had provoked American military planners into advocacy of a ma.s.sive first-strike stockpile, or what they called ”a war-fighting capability over a finite deterrent [or] (retaliatory) posture.” They believed that the more p.r.o.nounced the United States' nuclear advantage over Moscow was, the more likely it would be ”to stem Soviet cold war advances.” But such a strategy would also mean an arms race, which seemed likely to heighten the danger of a war. It was a miserable contradiction from which Kennedy was never able entirely to escape.

The possibility, under ”command control” rules he had inherited from Eisenhower, that ”a subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” added to JFK's worries about the inadvertent outbreak of a nuclear conflict. When Henry Brandon asked Strategic Air commander General Thomas Powers ”whether he was not worried by the fearful power he had at his fingertips, he said he was more worried by the civilian control over him and equally frightened by both.” Gilpatric said later, ”We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the President really had over the use of this great a.r.s.enal of [thousands of] nuclear weapons.” A February 15 report from a subcommittee of the Atomic Energy Commission reviewing NATO procedures deepened Kennedy's concern that accidental use of a nuclear weapon ”might trigger a world war.” In response, Kennedy tried to guard against a mishap and to a.s.sure himself of exclusive control over the nuclear option. But even with this greater authority, the conviction of the military chiefs that in any Soviet-American war we would have to resort to nuclear force made Kennedy feel that he might be pressured into using these weapons against his better judgment.

Perhaps not surprisingly, from the start of his term, Kennedy felt little rapport with the military chiefs. His World War II memories of uninspiring commanders with poor judgment, military miscalculations in the Korean fighting, and the Eisenhower policy of ma.s.sive retaliation made him distrustful of the U.S. defense establishment. Specifically, neither Kennedy nor McNamara saw Lyman Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, taking ”the lead in bringing the military along to a new doctrine such as flexible response,” the freedom to choose from a wider array of military responses in a conflict with the Soviet Union. And of course Burke had already fallen out of favor.

Kennedy's greatest tensions, however, were with NATO commander General Lauris Norstad and air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay. Harvard's dean of faculty McGeorge Bundy, whom Kennedy had brought to Was.h.i.+ngton as national security adviser, told the president that Norstad ”is a nuclear war man,” meaning that he believed any war with the Soviet Union would quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange if the United States were to have any hope of emerging victorious. Bundy urged Kennedy to make clear to Norstad that ”you are in charge and that your views will govern... . If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss.” are in charge and that your views will govern... . If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss.”

LeMay was even more of a problem. In charge of firebombings on j.a.pan during World War II and the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, he enjoyed widespread public support. A gruff, cigar-chewing, outspoken advocate of air power who wanted to bomb enemies back to the Stone Age and complained of America's phobia about nuclear weapons, he became the model for the air force general Jack D. Ripper in the 1963 movie Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove. After McNamara opposed some of his demands for additional air forces, LeMay privately complained, ”Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?” Gilpatric described LeMay as ”unreconstructable.” Every time the president ”had to see LeMay,” Gilpatric said, ”he ended up in a fit. I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay because, you know, LeMay couldn't listen or wouldn't take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered ... outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the president never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay... . And he had to sit there. I saw the president right afterwards. He was just choleric. He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got ... ” Gilpatric said without concluding the sentence.

Paul Nitze, who had worked with Acheson at the State Department on defense issues and had become McNamara's a.s.sistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, believed that Kennedy ”was always troubled with ... how do you obtain military advice; how do you check into it; how do you have an independent view as to its accuracy and relevance?” Kennedy saw the decision to make the ”transition from the use of conventional weapons to nuclear weapons” in a conflict as his responsibility, not that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ”I don't think he ever really satisfied himself that he had found a way to get the best possible military help on such matters,” Nitze said.

”The plan that he inherited,” Rostow said, ”was, 'Mr. President, you just tell us to go to nuclear war, and we'll deal with the rest.' And the plan called for devastating, indiscriminately, China, Russia, Eastern Europe-it was an orgiastic, Wagnerian plan, and he was determined, from that moment, to get the plan changed so he would have total control of it.” It was clear to Kennedy that an all-out nuclear conflict would be ”a truly monstrous event in the U.S.-let alone in world history.” Despite the understanding that the United States had a large advantage over the Soviets in nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them, it was a.s.sumed that a nuclear exchange would bring ”virtual incineration” to all of Europe and the United States. Kennedy staff members attending the briefing by the Joint Chiefs remembered how tense the president was listening to Lemnitzer, who used thirty-eight flip charts sitting on easels to describe targets, the deployment of forces, and the number of weapons available to strike the enemy. There could be no half measures once the war plan was set in motion, Lemnitzer explained. Even if the United States faced altered conditions than those antic.i.p.ated, he warned that any ”rapid rework of the plan” would entail ”grave risks.” Kennedy sat tapping his front teeth with his thumb and running his hand through his hair, indications to those who knew him well of his irritation with what was being said. Lemnitzer's performance made him ”furious.” As he left the room, he said to Dean Rusk, ”And we call ourselves the human race.”

The pressure wasn't just from the Pentagon; America's European allies also expected Kennedy to answer a Soviet attack with nuclear weapons. But the president preferred a strategy of ”flexible response” to the current plan of ”ma.s.sive retaliation.” He told Adenauer that he was ”not so happy ... with having ballistic missiles driven all over Europe. Too many hazards were involved in this enterprise and this aspect therefore required careful examination.” In order to raise ”the threshold for the use of atomic weapons,” Kennedy proposed that the United States and NATO increase their conventional armies to levels that could ”stop Soviet forces now stationed in Eastern Germany.” Because the West Germans feared that ”these plans might lessen the prospects for the use of atomic weapons in defense of Western Germany,” Kennedy ”made it clear” that the United States was as much committed to their use as before. Kennedy would have been happier if he could have disavowed a first-strike strategy, Nitze said, but without a continuing commitment to ”first strike,” Was.h.i.+ngton feared Franco-German abandonment of NATO, a negotiated compromise with the Soviet Union, and the neutralization of Europe, which would ”have left the United States alone to face the whole communist problem.” Nevertheless, Kennedy urged McNamara publicly to ”'repeat to the point of boredom' that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the U.S. or the allies; that we were not contemplating preventive war; and the Europeans should not believe that by firing off their own nuclear weapons they would drag the United States into a war, that we would withdraw our commitment to NATO first.”

For all his anxiety about nuclear war, Kennedy, supported by McNamara, kept LeMay in place. It would be good to have a Curtis LeMay commanding U.S. air forces if the country ever went to war, Kennedy explained. And the reality of Soviet weakness, which became increasingly clear to Kennedy and American military planners in the first months of 1961, did not deter the president and the Pentagon from an expansion of nuclear weapons. Instead, Kennedy feared that Khrushchev still might push the United States into an all-out conflict and he saw no alternative to expanded preparedness. ”That son of a b.i.t.c.h Khrushchev,” he told Rostow, ”he won't stop until we actually take a step that might lead to nuclear war... . There's no way you can talk that fella into stopping, until you take some really credible step, which opens up that range of possibilities” for improved relations. A meeting with Khrushchev in June only confirmed JFK's view that he might have to fight a nuclear war and that the United States had no choice but to continue building its a.r.s.enal and even consider a first strike as an option against an aggressive Soviet Union. ”I never met a man like this,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. ”[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, 'So what?' My impression was that he just didn't give a d.a.m.n if it came to that.”

At the end of March 1961, Kennedy announced increases in the defense budget that would expand the number of invulnerable Polaris submarines from 6 to 29 and their nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Soviet targets from 96 to 464. He also ordered a doubling of total Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles from 300 to 600 and a 50 percent increase in B-52 strategic bombers on fifteen-minute ground alert.

In Kennedy's judgment, there was nothing strictly rational about the expansion of forces. Would it deter the Soviet Union from aggression? How much of a buildup was necessary to keep Moscow in check? Could Khrushchev's aggressive Cold War rhetoric be ignored or discounted? Could the Soviets, despite their inferiority to the United States in missile, bomber, and submarine forces, get some of their nuclear bombs past U.S. defenses? How much of a defense expansion would be enough to satisfy the Congress, the public, and the press that America was safe from a devastating attack? When a reporter at a news conference repeated ”charges that we have not adequately maintained the strength or credibility of our nuclear deterrent and that we also have not fully convinced the leaders of the Soviet Union that we are determined to meet force with force,” Kennedy systematically described his administration's defense increases. Afterward, his frustration with the pressure to meet the Soviet threat with ever stronger words and actions registered on Pierre Salinger. ”They don't get it,” Kennedy said to him about critics of his defense policies. Khrushchev's bl.u.s.ter combined with U.S. fears left Kennedy unable to stand down from the maddening arms race.

Kennedy biographer Herbert S. Parmet said that JFK ”would have been profoundly disturbed to know that so many historians would later stress that his contribution to human existence was the extension of the cold war and the escalation of the arms race.” Such distress would have been understandable. Despite irresistible pressures to add to American military power and overreact to communist ”dangers,” Kennedy ensured that a decision for nuclear war would be his alone, which meant that he could avert an unprecedented disaster for all humankind-which he did. His management of one international crisis after another to avert what he described as ”the ultimate failure” was the greatest overall achievement of his presidency.

AS A SENATOR who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was ”brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder.” Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country's richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The a.s.sa.s.sination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to a.s.sert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba's followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, ”I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.” He felt ”it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality.” He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to ”ma.s.sive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring.” As he said repeatedly in private, ”The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart.” who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was ”brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder.” Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country's richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The a.s.sa.s.sination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to a.s.sert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba's followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, ”I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.” He felt ”it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality.” He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to ”ma.s.sive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring.” As he said repeatedly in private, ”The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart.”

At every turn, Kennedy emphasized American backing for the U.N. as the only appropriate agency for ending the civil strife, and he sent messages to Khrushchev urging that the Congo not become an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. But a conversation between Amba.s.sador Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev in March gave little hope that Moscow would show any give on the Congo. Khrushchev claimed that U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold had connived to kill Lumumba, and that the U.N. was being ”used to oppress peoples and help colonialists retain colonies.” Thompson's reply that it would be ”wise to keep [the] cold war out of Africa” moved Khrushchev to ask ”how socialist states could support a policy of a.s.sistance to those who betray their own people.” He promised that the Soviet Union ”would struggle against this policy with all its means.”

Although, as events made clear in the coming months, Khrushchev was more interested in scoring propaganda points with Africans than in risking a Soviet-American confrontation, Kennedy, taking Khrushchev at his word, sent Johnson to Africa to counter Soviet initiatives. Johnson left a strong impression on everyone he met in Senegal, an East-West battleground. He insisted that a seven-foot bed, a special showerhead that emitted a needlepoint spray, cases of Cutty Sark, and boxes of ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with L.B.J. inscribed on them accompany him to Dakar. Against the advice of the amba.s.sador, who urged him to shun contact with villagers he described as dirty and diseased, Johnson visited a fis.h.i.+ng village, where he handed out pens and lighters, shook hands with everyone, including some fingerless lepers, and urged the uncomprehending natives to be like Texans, who had increased their annual income tenfold in forty years. The contrast with what Johnson called ”Cadillac diplomacy,” the failure of U.S. representatives to get out of their limos and meet the people, was, however much professional foreign service officers saw it as cornball diplomacy, just what Kennedy wanted from his vice president.

Kennedy had seen the Khrushchev speech in January promising to support ”wars of liberation or popular uprisings” of ”colonial peoples against their oppressors” as a direct challenge to Western influence in developing areas. Kennedy, who took the speech ”as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions,” read it ”time and again-in his office, at Cabinet meetings, at dinners with friends, alone. At times he read it aloud and urged his colleagues to comment.” Perhaps with the speech in mind, he ordered the Defense Department to place ”more emphasis on the development of counter-guerrilla forces.” Because this was not a high priority with the army and because he believed it would encourage views of his administration as receptive to fresh thinking about military threats, he suggested that a paper by General Edward Lansdale on special forces be converted into a popular magazine article. Lansdale's reputation for successful counterinsurgency in the Philippines against communist subversion seemed likely to excite public interest in antiguerrilla warfare. But Kennedy saw more at work here than good public relations. He believed that training and deploying such forces would prove to be a valuable tool in ”the subterranean” or ”twilight” war with communism. He instructed the National Security Council to distribute Lansdale's study to the CIA and to U.S. amba.s.sadors in Africa and Asia. He also endorsed a $19 million allocation to support a three-thousand-man special forces group, which promised to give the United States ”a counter-guerrilla capability” in meeting insurgencies in future limited wars. The Green Berets, a name and appearance that set these special forces apart from regular army troops, would become a receptacle for fantasies and illusions about America's ability to overcome threats in physically and politically inhospitable places around the world. Although Kennedy a.s.sumed that the effectiveness of these units would largely depend on joining their military actions to backing for indigenous progressive reforms, he could not entirely rein in wishful thinking about how much counterinsurgency units or ”freedom fighters” alone could achieve at relatively small cost in blood and treasure.

The first test in the contest for the ”periphery,” as Kennedy had feared, came in Laos. He was not happy about it. No foreign policy issue commanded as much attention during the first two months of his presidency as this tiny, impoverished, landlocked country's civil war. ”It is, I think, important for all Americans to understand this difficult and potentially dangerous problem,” he declared at a March 23 news conference. He explained that during his conversation with Eisenhower on January 19, ”we spent more time on this hard matter than on any other thing.” A constant stream of questions about Laos had come up at press conferences, and numerous private discussions with American military and diplomatic officials paralleled exchanges with British and French leaders about how to prevent a communist takeover, which could make the country a staging ground for a.s.saults on South Vietnam and Thailand. On March 21, the New York Times New York Times carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration's determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O'Donnell, ”I don't think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I'm embarked on a military venture” would jeopardize the future of the administration. carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration's determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O'Donnell, ”I don't think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I'm embarked on a military venture” would jeopardize the future of the administration.

Winthrop Brown, the U.S. amba.s.sador to Laos, told Kennedy during a meeting at the White House on February 3 that it was unrealistic to expect that ”any satisfactory solution of the problem in the country could be found by purely military means.” Brown believed that ”Laos was hopeless ... a cla.s.sic example of a political and economic vacuum. It had no national ident.i.ty. It was just a series of lines drawn on a map.” The people were ”charming, indolent, enchanting ... but they're just not very vigorous, nor are they very numerous, nor are they very well organized.” Galbraith, who had become JFK's amba.s.sador to India and was helping to bring the Indians into a diplomatic solution to the Laos conflict, wrote from New Delhi, ”These jungle regimes, where the writ of government runs only as far as the airport, are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead... . The rulers do not control or particularly influence their own people... . As a military ally the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.” a.s.sistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman told Brown, ”We must never face the President with the choice of abandoning Laos or sending in troops.”

Publicly Kennedy made loud noises about preserving Laos's independence. He stated at the March 23 news conference, ”Laos is far away from America, but the world is small... . 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.” Shortly after, he privately told Chalmers Roberts of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He ”said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner.” At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard s.h.i.+ps in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that ”the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means.” that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He ”said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner.” At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard s.h.i.+ps in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that ”the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means.”

It was all a bluff. At the same time Kennedy was talking a hard line, he asked Harold Macmillan to convince Eisenhower that military intervention in Laos was a poor idea. Eisenhower's opinion would be influential in how the public gauged Kennedy's Laos policy, and Macmillan was happy to help. We all feel strongly about keeping Laos out of communist hands, Macmillan wrote Ike. ”But I need not tell you what a bad country this is for military operations... . President Kennedy is under considerable pressure about 'appeas.e.m.e.nt' in Laos.” Macmillan said that he understood the impulse not to forget the lessons of history, but he believed it a poor idea to ”become involved in an open-ended commitment on this dangerous and unprofitable terrain. So I would hope that in anything which you felt it necessary to say about Laos you would not encourage those who think that a military solution in Laos is the only way of stopping the Communists in that area.”

Happily for Kennedy, neither Eisenhower nor the Russians saw fighting in Laos as a good idea. Despite urging Kennedy in their second transition meeting not to let Laos fall under communist control, Ike told journalist Earl Mazo after JFK's March press conference, ”That boy doesn't know what the h.e.l.l he's doing. He doesn't even know where Laos is. You mean have Americans fight in that G.o.dd.a.m.ned place?” The Soviets, likewise, had no appet.i.te for a punis.h.i.+ng conflict in so remote a place, especially since it might provoke Chinese intervention and a wider conflict between the United States and China.

But the Russians had little control over events, as renewed fighting at the end of April in a civil war demonstrated. On April 26, Amba.s.sador Brown reported the likelihood that communist forces would gain control in Laos unless the president authorized the use of U.S. air and land forces. At a National Security Council meeting the next day, members of the Joint Chiefs urged just that. Kennedy wanted to know what they intended if such an operation failed. They answered, ”You start using atomic weapons!” Lemnitzer promised that ”if we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” Someone suggested that the president might want to ask the general ”what he means by victory.” Kennedy, who had been ”glumly rubbing his upper molar, only grunted and ended the meeting.” He saw Lemnitzer's guarantee as absurd: ”Since he couldn't think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy, his princ.i.p.al advisers, and congressional leaders vetoed the military's recommendations. Although he left open the possibility that he might later use force in Laos, Kennedy accepted the ”general agreement among his advisers that such a conflict would be unjustified, even if the loss of Laos must be accepted.” Democratic and Republican congressional leaders unanimously confirmed the feeling that despite concern about the rest of Southeast Asia, it would be unwise to become a party to the Laotian civil war. When Kennedy visited Douglas MacArthur at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York the weekend of this crisis, the general told him, ”It would be a mistake to fight in Laos. It would suit the Chinese Communists.”

The Laotian crisis extended into the fall of 1961, when the exhausted opponents agreed to establish a neutral coalition government. Although critics complained about Kennedy's irresolute response to a communist threat, more compelling concerns pushed Laos aside and the issue temporarily ”dribbled to a conclusion.” One of these more urgent concerns was South Vietnam. In the early fifties, Kennedy had seen the area as a testing ground for innovative U.S. policies toward a colony struggling to establish autonomy without communist control. By the late fifties, however, he had s.h.i.+fted his attention to Algeria as the latest Soviet-American battleground for Third World influence. But South Vietnam, where an insurgency supported by North Vietnam's communist regime threatened Diem's pro-Western government, reclaimed Kennedy's attention after he became president.

In January, Lansdale, who had made a fact-finding mission to Vietnam for the Pentagon, described the country as in ”critical condition and ... a combat area of the cold war ... needing emergency treatment.” In a meeting with Lansdale and other national security advisers, Kennedy told the general that his report ”for the first time, gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem.” It is ”the worst one we've got,” Kennedy told Rostow about Vietnam. Commitments by Eisenhower of military supplies, financial aid, and some six hundred military advisers had made the United States an interested party in Vietnam's six-year-old civil war. To deal with the mounting danger, Kennedy authorized funding for an increase of twenty thousand additional South Vietnamese troops and the creation of a task force to help avert a South Vietnamese collapse.

The Laotian crisis added to worries about Vietnam. A possible communist victory in Laos threatened cross-border attacks on ”the entire western flank of South Vietnam.” To bolster the South Vietnamese, Kennedy decided to send Johnson on ”a special fact-finding mission to Asia.” When asked whether he was ”prepared to send American forces into South Viet-Nam if that became necessary to prevent Communist domination,” Kennedy evaded the question. Sending troops, he said, ”is a matter still under consideration.” Although he had great doubts about making such a commitment, it made sense to keep the communists guessing as to what the United States might do if Vietnam seemed about to collapse. In the meantime, as he had done in Africa, Johnson could show the flag and quiet fears that Kennedy's refusal to send troops into Laos implied that he was abandoning Southeast Asia.