The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [469]
The immediate problem was Diem and his brother Nhu, who had proved so ineffectual at leading their war-torn nation. And here too Kennedy walked in both directions. In this crisis, Kennedy did not have many advisers who made articulate, spirited presentations based on the knowledge of their agency or institution. Instead, he was overseeing a petty, preening bureaucratic warfare in which egos and personal ambitions outweighed the crucial issues that his administration faced. He had sent Henry Cabot Lodge as ambassador to Vietnam, hoping that the former senator would show the acumen of a professional politician. Instead, Nixon’s vice presidential running mate became so alienated from the American military that he hardly spoke to them and secretly backstabbed his colleagues in Vietnam. Lodge had a savage realism when he talked of Diem, speaking a language rare to diplomatic discourse. “Viet-Nam is not a thoroughly strong police state (much as the ‘family’ would like to make it one),” he cabled Washington on October 26, “because, unlike Hitler’s Germany, it is not efficient and it has in the Viet Cong a large and well-organized underground opponent strongly and ever-freshly motivated by vigorous hatred. And its numbers never diminish.”
Lodge made sure that his own stories got into American papers, but he was appalled at the way Diem, and especially his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, gnawed publicly at the hand that fed them. “The United States can get along with corrupt dictators who manage to stay out of the newspapers,” Lodge wrote later. “But an inefficient Hitlerism, the leaders of which make fantastic statements to the press, is the hardest thing on earth for the U.S. Government to support.”
Lodge called for a coup, as did several of his colleagues at the State Department, including Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman. CIA Director McCone would probably have supported the move as well, but in Bobby’s words, “McCone hated Henry Cabot Lodge, and so he became an ally of McNamara,” who opposed the coup. In essence, the government was split into two unlikely divisions: the State Department favoring the coup, and the CIA and the military leadership opposing it. Those who favored the coup, like Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, tried to convince the president that the die had been cast and Kennedy had no choice but to go along. On August 28, Hilsman told the president that “Diem and Nhu were undoubtedly aware that coup plotting was going on and that the generals probably now had no alternative to going ahead except that of fleeing the country.” Kennedy, for his part, said he “was not sure that we were in that deep.”
Kennedy was infuriated that he was losing the control of government, and he suspected Harriman of leaking stories of this schism. “You’d better get Averell in, for Christ sake,” Kennedy told Undersecretary George Ball. “The fact of the matter is that Averell was wrong on the coup. We fucked that up. Even though it may have been desirable, so that the Pentagon can go on saying the State Department fucked it up, got us into a lot of trouble, so I think there’s nobody in the position to be pointing the finger at anybody else.”
On October 29, Lodge told the White House that a coup was in place, to be led by dissident generals, and that the United States should do nothing to prevent it. That day in the counsels of government, Kennedy and his associates discussed a possible coup with the hard-edged logic of those serving an imperial power. No one uttered any bromides about trying to help their Asian brothers find the true light of democracy. Nor did they trouble themselves over the question of whether there was a capable leader to replace Diem. Instead, they counted potential