The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [468]
In August the president scribbled notes to himself for a speech he was to make to a White House seminar. “To govern is to choose,” he wrote, quoting the French leader Pierre Mendes France. That was precisely the nature of presidential power, expressed as succinctly as possible. The implacable riddles of policy reached his desk, issues on which knowledgeable advisers disagreed, decisions fraught with negative side effects. He looked at each matter like an assayer, weighing all the possibilities, observing the subtleties. Knowing the danger that Vietnam represented politically, he would have delightedly willed it to lie dormant until after his reelection. He was trying not to be sucked into the swamp of Vietnam while not abandoning the beleaguered country in such a way that shouts of betrayal and curses of recrimination would sound through the rest of his presidency.
That summer the president apparently suggested to several people, including Larry Newman, a Hyannis Port neighbor, and Dave Powers, that he planned to withdraw from Vietnam after his 1964 reelection. As much as his auditors thought otherwise, this plan hardly presented as flattering a portrait of their hero as they imagined. If true, Kennedy was willing to let American soldiers die needlessly for over a year because the delay would help his campaign. In all likelihood, Kennedy told his neighbor and Powers what flattered their own desires, and part of his own instincts. The president understood, however, that history can’t be stopped and started at will. Wide and treacherous water may lie between what one hopes to do and what one can do when time and circumstances allow.
Kennedy faced crucial choices now, and he faced them as he had all the major decisions in the White House, parsing the issue back and forth half a dozen ways. He took a few tentative steps one way and then back the other. On September 2, Kennedy gave a lengthy interview on the first half-hour-long CBS evening news program. The journalist Walter Cronkite quizzed the president about “the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment.” In full public view, Kennedy walked backward and forward at the same time. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there,” he said. “In the final analysis, it is their war.” This was Kennedy’s philosophical underpinning. In Vietnam as elsewhere, a man who lets others fight for his own liberty often ends up being shackled anew, and the man who fights for him risks becoming not his liberator but his keeper.
Then, after stepping back from involvement, Kennedy moved forward. “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw,” he told the CBS anchor. “That would be a grave mistake…. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away.” There was his political underpinning. After all these years, the domino effect was not just a geopolitical theory but a fundamental axiom of American political life. An American leader who lost even a small, distant, corrupt, tortured land to a regime that carried the banner of communism risked losing his own political head as well. This was the President Kennedy who Bobby said in 1964 “felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.”
In October, Kennedy performed the same dance as he had in the CBS interview. In signing on to national security action memorandum no. 263, he agreed to “plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” There was the step backward. But he did so only because Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor had assured him that “the military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought,” and that “by the end of this year, the