JFK (II): He was learning, so he wouldn't have sent combat forces to Vietnam

Fred Kaplan is one of the more interesting defense
writers around,
taking a
broad approach. Here, by the way, is his review of Robert Dallek's new book
on Kennedy.

And here are two of his e-mails to me in response to my
Friday post about how I had come to think Kennedy
was a terrible president. I disagree with what he says here, but I think it
is worth considering.

By Fred Kaplan

Best Defense department of defending JFK

[E-mail 1:]

Just to state a few points on the question of whether JFK
was a terrible president:

(1) Yes, he listened to Taylor and other hawks early on, but
the Cuban missile crisis, which you glide over, was a turning point. The real
significance (which I've gleaned from a close examination of the tapes) is
that, quite early on (the 4th day), JFK was looking for how to give Khrushchev
a face-saving way out; that when Khrushchev offered the secret trade (his Cuban
missiles for our Turkish ones), JFK wanted to take it right away, while
everyone -- and I mean everyone around
the table (except, significantly, George Ball) -- was adamantly opposed. I think
that the crisis taught him that all those smart experts sitting around the
table weren't any smarter than he was. (He was beginning to see this point
during the Laos crisis, when his generals behaved like bureaucrats -- the Army
wanted to invade, the Air Force wanted to send B52s, the Navy wanted to send
carrier groups.) Another key thing: JFK told six people that he was taking the
deal and swore them to secrecy. Among the people he did not tell was LBJ. This
was a critical mistake, as it left intact a false lesson of the crisis, which
JFK's successors (including LBJ) applied to Vietnam. (McGeorge Bundy concedes
this point in his memoir.) [[BREAK]]

(2) One big difference between JFK and LBJ on Vietnam is
that JFK never sent "combat troops," in fact always drew a line on
that point. Now true, the line between "combat troops" and
"advisers" are getting a bit hazy, but there's some evidence he
wouldn't have plunged across the line so avidly. Point (1) is circumstantial
evidence. There's also the fact (I think this is in Richard Reeves) book that
Kennedy went to Vietnam in the early '50s, I'm pretty sure he went to Dien Bien
Phu, or thereabouts, where he talked with some French commanders, who told him
the United States should never get involved in this place. 

(3) Someone once asked Clark Clifford if he thought JFK
would have escalated in Vietnam. Clifford (who I'm not saying should be trusted
on all matters, by the way) thought a moment and said, "No. He was too
cold." In other words, he didn't get emotionally involved in something.
Johnson's tragedy was that, however skeptical he was of Vietnam (cf his taped
exchange in the Oval Office with his old pal Richard Russell), he was caught up
in the idea of not wanting to be the first president to lose a war, etc. I
think JFK would have addressed the matter more coolly, especially after the '64
election. 

(4) Watch the ABC
documentary Crisis, about how JFK handled the crisis down in
Alabama in 1963, when Gov George Wallace was trying to block two Negro students
from enrolling in the state university. (It's on DVD.) His resolution, in
retrospect, was very similar to the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis.

There are other points here. My bottom line is that Kennedy
changed a lot after the Bay of Pigs and Laos, and changed even more after the
Cuban missile crisis....

[And e-mail 2, in
response to my blaming JFK for getting us into the Cuban missile crisis in the
first place]

I'm not sure if
Kennedy is to blame on getting into the crisis in the first place. Yes, at
Vienna he may have let Khrushchev think he could get away with this
"harebrained scheme," but an important thing that happened after
Vienna was Kennedy's calling Khrushchev's bluff on Berlin. People don't
remember the Berlin crisis of August-September 1961. Khrushchev said he was
ripping up the treaty that divided Berlin into four zones, that West Berlin
would now be part of East German, and if we tried to prevent this, there would
be war. Kennedy confronted him (in fact, I have documentary evidence that he seriously considered
a nuclear first-strike to stop him -- though in the end, he decided the risks
and damage would be too great -- others were in favor of it, though, eg, Paul
Nitze). US and Soviet tanks faced each other along a checkpoint, within firing
range, for 25 hours, before Khrushchev backed away. It was at this point that
Khrushchev decided to send missiles to Cuba. He realized that, with the first
spy satellites, the US knew that his claims of "churning out ICBMs
like sausages" was bullshit, that the missile gap wasn't real, or rather
that it was but that it was the US that was far ahead of the USSR. (One reason
he knew this was that the deputy secretary of defense said so in a speech.) He
feared the possibility of a US strike and knew that the USSR would not be able
to retaliate in force. (This was one conclusion of Kennedy's 1st-strike study,
though, as I said, Kennedy -- and almost everyone else around him -- judged that
the damage, especially to West Europe through fallout, would be too extensive
to take the risk; the Berlin crisis was ultimately settled through back-channel
diplomacy.) So he saw the MRBMs in Cuba as a way to close the gap, at least for
a while (some MRBMs 90 miles from the US would have the same deterrent effect
as some ICBMs half a world away). And then (to continue my rebuttal of your
claim that JFK was the worst president in history), Kennedy managed that crisis
to a peaceful resolution, despite enormous pressure -- from his
civilian advisers and the chiefs -- to bomb the missiles. Read the transcript of
the last day of the ExComm session (not the one in Zelikow's book, which, he
now realizes, was based on a poor transfer of the tape) but either the one put
out by the JFK Library or the one that Zelikow published in a 3-volume set for
the Miller Center at UVA.