The president’s most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi’s provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Averell Harriman told Arthur Schlesinger in May 1962 that JFK’s Laos policy was being “systematically sabotaged” from within the government by the military and the CIA. “They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible,” Harriman said, “and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”[122]
