The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [473]
“What happens if Conein asks to see the bodies and discovers there were a couple of bullets in the back of the … in the back, of this kind?” said Bundy. “We don’t gain much by that.” The former Harvard dean could hardly get a straight sentence out of his cultured mouth.
“I don’t think we gain anything by it,” McCone said, trying to push the men away from this deadly scene.
“It would look like a planned design to remain uninformed under the circumstances,” Rusk said, not optimistic about the administration’s chances of pleading ignorance.
“I think we’re going to hear about it in the next twenty-four hours,” Kennedy said. Although the president apparently knew less about what had happened than several of his advisers, he realized that the press was onto the story. He had his own curiosity about the details of the murders.
“If Big Minh ordered the execution, then, then, uh, I don’t know,” Kennedy mused. “Do we know that? Do we think he meant to?”
“Some suspect that,” said Hilsman.
“Some think he did,” said Bundy.
“He’s stupid then,” said Kennedy, half under his breath. No one would be able definitely to link the president to the assassination attempts against Castro, and there would always be uncertainty concerning exactly what he knew.
“I don’t think we should be informed in advance of everyone else on this so that the story gets to be our story,” Rusk said, seeking to push the deed further away from the door of the White House.
“I don’t know why they did that,” Kennedy said quietly, once again returning to the act.
Hilsman was a man who always had a ready answer. “Well, some of the reports show that the only time Minh got emotional was when Diem slammed the phone [down] on him.” It was a curious justification for murder, and the silence in the room signaled Hilsman to move on to a different subject.
“Sir,” Hilsman said, “this morning … this morning there was a discussion of a cable to go out tonight, getting on with the war.” The Americans had a war to fight, and they could not indulge in this speculation any longer.
Two days later Kennedy sat in the Oval Office. “One two three four five,” he said into a Dictaphone. “Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place.”
For a man who stood at the epicenter of power, the president was extraordinarily dispassionate, not only in the decisions he made but equally in how he viewed them afterward. In this private moment he did not attempt to polish his image. He was his own best historian, treating himself as but another player in the complex tragicomedy of life.
Kennedy went through the major players one by one, accurately outlining where each man had stood on the coup. At times great events were determined not by principles or ideologies but by nothing greater than personal pique. In Kennedy’s assessment, McCone had opposed the coup “partly because of an old hostility to Lodge, which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge’s judgment, partly as a result of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his station chief.”
If Kennedy ever wrote this history, he would have first filled his pen with irony. He saw his own culpability not in any strong, willful action he had taken but in nothing more dramatic than the sloppy drafting of a cable at the outset. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup…. That wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent…. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.”
Kennedy went on to talk