Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [167]
During that summer, as Jack had been traveling, Jackie Kennedy had remained at home pregnant, expecting to deliver her third child in September. Their second, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., born right after the 1960 election, was now twenty months old. Caroline was almost six. On August 7, Jackie gave birth, five weeks early, to a boy whom they named Patrick. Never strong to begin with, two days later he began to fail. The father held his tiny fingers for two hours as the infant tried to breathe. He was holding them when Patrick died. “He put up quite a fight.” Then, “He was a beautiful baby.”
Afterward, the president went to his room, having asked to be given time alone. Through the door, Dave Powers could hear him sobbing. Later he would kneel beside Jackie’s bed and tell her about the son he’d loved that they now, together, had lost.
There was never a good time to try to come to grips with the situation in Vietnam, and Kennedy had been delaying it. Within days of taking office, he’d signed a national security directive stating that it was our country’s policy to “defeat Communist insurgency” in South Vietnam. By 1963 there were twelve thousand U.S. “military advisors” there. However, JFK had resisted calls from South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, to send in combat troops, seeing no merit to that idea. Fully aware that there were gung ho American officers hoping he’d upgrade our status there from “advising” to actually fighting, he had no intention of letting that happen.
“I can remember one particular case,” Red Fay recalled. “We were out, I believe it was off of Newport. I think the Blue Angels had just flown over. The president was sitting in his swivel chair in the back of the Honey Fitz, and the phone rang next to him. There were some marines that wanted to lead their unit into combat. The situation, they thought, was ideal for an attack, and so, therefore, they wanted to lead it. And, evidently, the standing orders of the president at that time were that our advisors over there were not there to lead Vietnam troops into battle. Fay heard his old navy buddy make it crystal clear that he wanted that order enforced to the letter.
But he couldn’t abandon Saigon to the Communists and expect to win a second term. He couldn’t afford to be the president who “lost” South Vietnam, just as he’d accused Harry Truman of doing with China. The problem was President Diem. A Roman Catholic, Diem had enjoyed strong support from American Catholics, including Kennedy, since taking command when Vietnam was divided at the Geneva Convention in 1954. Diem was now conducting a campaign of repression against the country’s Buddhist majority. In June a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk had lit himself on fire in a main Saigon thoroughfare, having moments earlier handed a statement to reporters. “Before closing my eyes to Buddha, I have the honor of presenting my word to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality.”
President Kennedy realized he could no longer support a regime that was fighting the Communist guerrillas and Buddhist monks. Besides this, the Diem government was viewed as hopelessly corrupt, totally under the control of Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the notorious “Dragon Lady,” Madame Nhu. Feeling stymied, he had the idea to name his onetime political rival Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador. There were clear advantages to this. Lodge lacked any sentimental feelings toward Diem. He was arrogant enough to act decisively. Most important, he wanted a victory, personally as well as nationally. He had the added advantage, for Kennedy, of making the hellish situation in South Vietnam bipartisan.
Something had to be done. Diem