The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

The hardest thing I had to do at the start was to take leave of my byline for the next four years. Ours is a profession built upon the immediacy of reward: We graduate from college, and our peers go off to law school and graduate school and medical school. They have barely started their first-year classes, and our names are bannered across the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. They get their medical or law degrees, and start out in their residencies or as the lowest hirelings in a law office, and we are old-timers, covering the statehouse, or on our way to Washington, by now, we believe, the possessors of a well-known brand name. The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. It was hard enough to give so much of it up when I went to Harper’s, where I would get only five or six bylines a year. But to go from the world of easy recognition, from the world of the Times and Harper’s, to a world where I might get only one byline in four years, was a great risk. A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

At the time it was somewhat fashionable to compare this Administration with its lineal predecessors, those who had served under Truman and who had fashioned the basic elements of the Containment policy. But even here the comparisons were hardly flattering. The men who had made those early hard decisions of the Cold War had served a much longer, much more complete apprenticeship in their professions. The decisions on how to handle the Soviet Union were made as a result of carefully weighing the advice of accomplished men like Kennan, Bohlen, and Harriman, who had in different ways devoted much of their lives to the study of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the new terms of apprenticeship in modern America as the nation ascended so quickly to superpower status were to be much briefer. On the issue which was to prove so critical to them, Vietnam, and which so greatly undermined any positive accomplishments of the Administration, and to the question of extending the logic of the Cold War in Europe to the underdeveloped world, and to a spot where nationalism was clearly at stake, they brought no comparable expertise at all. There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the r...

The other thing I learned about the Kennedy-Johnson team was that for all their considerable reputations as brilliant, rational managers they were in fact very poor managers. They thought they were very good, and they were always talking about keeping their options open, even as, day by day and week by week, events closed off those options.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. The people comprising the body politic of America might not in general, particularly if things were honestly explained to them, be that frightened of the Communists (making legitimate claims to nationalism) taking over a small country some 12,000 miles away, or for that matter frightened or very impressed by Joe McCarthy himself. But among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition.

If the Kennedy people privately mocked the bombast and rigidity of the Eisenhower and Dulles years (years in which Dulles had made his own separate peace with the Republican right) they did not lightly reverse Dulles’s policies, particularly where they were most irrational and dangerous, in an emerging post-colonial Asia. McCarthyism still lingered: a McCarthyism that was broader than the wild outrages of the Senator himself, something that even men as fine as Bob Taft were caught up in. The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit: it was an odd amalgam of the traditional isolationism of the Midwest (cheered on greatly by Colonel McCormick of Chicago); McCarthy’s own personal recklessness and cruelty; the anxiety of a nation living in a period of new and edgy atomic tensions and no longer protected from adversaries by the buffer of its two adjoining oceans; and the fact that the Republican party had been out of power for so long—twenty years, until Dwight Eisenhower, a kind of hired Republican, was finally elected. The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office, accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was go...

The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the o...

Nor did the men who made the policy have any regional expertise as they made their estimates about what the other side would do if we escalated and sent American combat troops. All of the China experts, the Asia hands who were the counterparts of Bohlen and Kennan, had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China. The men who gave advice on Asia were either Europeanists or men transferred from the Pentagon.

In 1972, as I was finishing the book, I became unusually nervous. I kept a duplicate set of notes and a duplicate manuscript outside my apartment. (These were, after all, days when strange things were taking place on orders from the White House.)

It was a very good liberal name to have, Chester Bowles. In the eyes of the liberals, he was one of the few who was without a stain. He was, in fact, the definitive liberal-humanist at a time when those particular values had been on the defensive and had been made to seem naÏve. Politicians who professed the old liberalism of the thirties in this harsher postwar era were considered too trusting and unrealistic, men who did not understand the dangers of the contemporary world, where Communists constantly lurked to exploit any and all do-good organizations and intentions. This Cold War realism had touched many of the liberal politicians, who had been put on the defensive about their past, but it had not necessarily touched the liberal voters, and in 1960 Bowles was unique among politicians in that he refused to adapt to contemporary pressures. To him, it was as if the Cold War had never taken place. He was markedly untouched by it; he believed that the problems America encountered were its own, what it did at home and in the world, not what the Soviet Union did. He was, it seemed at the moment, somewhat behind the times; a few long years later it would seem that he had been ahead of them.

Replacing Bowles during the Wisconsin primary, Wofford had said in Madison, a hotbed of liberalism, “There is a Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles view of the world, and Jack Kennedy is the most likely man to carry it out.” Later, when Kennedy was elected and his first two announcements were the reappointment of the heads of both the FBI and the CIA, Hughes sent Wofford a postcard saying: “I want you to know that I finally voted for your Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles-Kennedy-Hoover-Allen Dulles view of the world .

Part of this was Bowles’s own fault; he was marvelous at long-range thinking, at seeing the dangers inherent in policies, but he was a weak infighter. He lacked an ability to dissemble, he had no instinct for the jugular, he did not maneuver well at close hand. Thus, while Averell Harriman might stand for the same policy as Bowles, Harriman was not a good target; he was a vicious, almost joyous, brutal infighter, and anyone who tangled with him would do so in the full knowledge that Harriman would remember and strike back, and for a hard-line columnist like Joe Alsop, who had more than a little of a bully in him, Bowles made a much better target.

This wing had called for greater defense spending, and in the fifties and in general, the Democratic party espoused that cause, with only Hubert Humphrey of its congressional leaders speaking for disarmament. In fact, the Democratic party had been more committed to military spending than the Republicans. It was the Democrats who wanted a larger and larger defense establishment, and although Kennedy was not one of the great leaders at the time, he had been a part of it. (In 1960, at the start of the campaign, slightly worried about Kennedy’s lack of credentials in this area, a young Kennedy staff member named Deirdre Henderson had called one of the Defense intellectuals to summon his help on the problem. Kennedy, she said, needed a weapon. Everyone else had a weapon: Scoop Jackson had the Polaris, and Lyndon had Space, and Symington had the B-52. What could they get for a weapon for Kennedy? Well, said the young Defense intellectual, whose name was Daniel Ellsberg, “What about the infantryman?”)

Yet, for all this, Kennedy was inclined toward him. He was anxious to have a Democratic Secretary of State, and Fulbright seemed to be the ablest man around. His problem, finally, was similar to that of Bowles: he made too many speeches, had too many public positions and eventually too many enemies. He had signed the Southern Manifesto, an antidesegregation statement by Southern congressmen, he had voted against civil rights bills (indeed, elevating him to State would open a seat in Arkansas, and wasn’t Orval Faubus, the man who had become nationally known with his defiance at Little Rock, the likely candidate for his seat? Would a new Administration want that on its hands?). He had made speeches which the Jews, well organized, vocal, influential, regarded as suspiciously pro-Arab. In fact, when Harris Wofford, who was a liaison man with liberal groups during the talent-search period, heard that it might be Fulbright, he got on the phone and called Negro and Jewish groups imploring them to send telegrams criticizing Fulbright. Their wires made a profound impression on Robert Kennedy, who was already uneasy about how the underdeveloped world would regard a new Administration with a Secretary of State from Arkansas. Thus was Bill Fulbright vetoed by the left as Bowles had been from the right. (Later, when Fulbright visited Palm Beach, Joe Kennedy took him aside and said it was a great shame about his not becoming Secretary of State, but the NAACP, the Zionists and the libera...

What it came down to was a search not for the most talent, the greatest brilliance, but for the fewest black marks, the fewest objections. The man who had made the fewest enemies in an era when forceful men espousing good causes had made many enemies: the Kennedys were looking for someone who made very small waves. They were looking for a man to fill the most important Cabinet post, a job requiring infinite qualities of intelligence, wisdom and sophistication, a knowledge of both this country and the world, and they were going at it as presidential candidates had often filled that other most crucial post, the Vice-Presidency, by choosing someone who had offended the fewest people. Everybody’s number-two choice. Thus their choice would be determined by neither talent nor brilliance, but to a degree by mediocrity. It was a sign of the extent to which the power of the Presidency had grown that this was applauded in many quarters. That the man they turned to was virtually unknown was revealing in itself, for if he had really done anything significant in his career, then he would have a record, for better or for worse.

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

Golf had long symbolized the Eisenhower years—played by soft, boring men with ample waistlines who went around rich men’s country-club courses in the company of wealthy businessmen and were tended by white-haired, dutiful Negroes. (Although almost everything John Kennedy did, thought, read, believed, liked was described and examined in minute detail by the public, one thing which was little known and deliberately obscured about the new President was that he was an excellent golfer, a far better player than the outgoing General.)

If there was a lack of modesty in the Kennedy beginnings, there were intellectuals who felt a more modest, limited sense about their own nation and its possibilities. In 1957, at a special symposium of American scholars, Walt Rostow, who would come to symbolize during both the Kennedy and the Johnson years the aggressive, combative liberal nationalism of the era, had made his case for an American national interest earlier in the symposium. Then David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, quietly warned against the dangers implicit in much of what Rostow had suggested (the Rostow idea that the American perspective of the world had not kept pace with American power in it and over it), which struck Riesman as jingoism. The Civil War, Riesman said, was “deadly serious as an omen of bellicosity and bigotry,” and he thought a humbler and more modest view of American society and its potential role in a diverse world was called for, as well as recognition of the failure of American culture here at home, the failure of the quality of American life, an understanding that not all indices of American life could be found in the booming statistics of the GNP. He felt that something was desperately missing. Commenting on “a kind of blandness that I somehow see as inhuman,” he noted that “when I see a French or Italian movie, the faces seem more alive and expressive than American faces in equivalent films. The very rich are perhaps unhappy in all countries. Their faces are often sour, fearful...

It would not be the last time Riesman was prophetic: in 1961, when the Kennedy team was already on board and there was great enthusiasm over the new theories of counterinsurgency (Rostow, his antagonist in the 1957 symposium, became one of the great propagators of antiguerrilla warfare) and Vietnam had been chosen as a testing ground, Riesman remained uneasy. In mid-1961 he had lunch with two of the more distinguished social scientists in the Kennedy government. On the subject of Vietnam the others talked about limited war with the combativeness which marked that particular era, about the possibilities of it, about the American right to practice it, about the very excitement of participating in it. All of this smacked strongly of the arrogance and hubris of the era, and Riesman became more and more upset with the tone and the direction of the conversation, until finally he stopped them and asked if they had ever been to Utah. Utah! No, they said, not Utah, but why Utah, had Riesman ever been there? No, Riesman answered, but he had read a great deal about the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and it occurred to him that his friends did not know much about America, about how deep the evangelical streak was. “You all think you can manage limited wars and that you’re dealing with an elite society which is just waiting for your leadership. It’s not that way at all,” he said. “It’s not an Eastern elite society run for Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.” He left them af...

Bundy is from Boston. The rest of the world which is not from Boston thinks of him as being very Boston and the name as being very Boston. This is not true, since the Bundys are from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the name by itself means very little in Boston history, a view corroborated by Shreve’s, a famous jewelry store in Boston. In 1966, when Bundy was leaving government, a group of his aides in the White House decided to give him something better than the traditional silver ashtray and came up with the idea of silver dice on a silver tray, something to roll as a means of determining foreign policy. In Washington several jewelry stores said it couldn’t be done, but since most of his people were from Cambridge in the first place, they remembered Shreve’s, and one of them was dispatched to arrange it. Silver dice on a silver tray? Yes, said a proper old gentleman at the shop. He thought it could be done. And what name would go on it? “McGeorge Bundy,” said the White House aide. “McGeorge Bundy . . . McGeorge Bundy . . . Bundy . . . oh, yes, isn’t he the boy who married Mary Lothrop?” Bundy is by Boston standards not a Bundy but a Lowell (on his mother’s side. “His father is from Michigan someplace,” a Bostonian noted). Katharine Bundy is also a Putnam, which by Boston standards is very good too, but the pedigree is on the Lowell side, as is much of the determination and the drive. The family descended from Percival Lowle, who came to America in 1639 and sired a great fami...

Stimson was firmly linked to the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt: an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. The suggestion that this also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service, though in fact this was typical of an era when many of the great rich families withdrew from the new restless grab for money of a modernizing America, and having already made their particular fortunes, turned to the public arena as a means of exercising power. They were viewed as reformers, though the reforms would be aimed more at the newer seekers of wealth than at those who already held it. (“First-generation millionaires,” Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, “give us libraries, second-generation millionaires give us themselves.”)

Cui servire est regnare is Groton’s motto. “To serve is to rule.” The overt teaching was that the finest life is service to God, your family and your state, but the covert teaching, far more subtle and insidious, was somewhat different: ultimately, strength is more important; there is a ruling clique; there is a thing called privilege and you might as well use it. That is the real world and it is going to remain that way, so you might as well get used to it. If not, you can rebel, but only within the prescribed rules. Groton is a school more than a little short on Catholics, Negroes, Jews and hyphenated Americans, and it reflected in its real values what some students there called “a muscular Christianity.” Bundy was of course part of this and has always accepted the special privilege that his advantages offered, working perhaps discreetly to change it from within (but never so much as to be tabbed as something odd, like a reformer), but accepting it nonetheless, an acceptance which has made some outsiders a little suspicious. If he is really that egalitarian, what is he doing in all those clubs? At Yale, for instance, where his friend Kingman Brewster turned down the secret societies, Bundy joined (the best, naturally) Skull and Bones, and later, in Washington, he would similarly resist requests from friends that he resign from the Metropolitan Club, which ten years after the great storm about its membership in 1961 was not noticeably more egalitarian.

The important thing is how easy it all was for him; very few young men in their twenties, with no previous literary credentials, are offered the job to share in the writing of the memoirs of such a distinguished public servant. He was bright, but he was also so incredibly well connected that things came to him much more readily than to his contemporaries (like a girl who is both prettier than the other bright girls and brighter than the other pretty girls, it was almost unfair), and along the way he picked up less wisdom, less scar tissue than other men.

He spent the fifties at Harvard and they were happy years for him. He was immensely popular with the undergraduates, he was very accessible and not at all pompous; rather, he was considered open and challenging. In an atmosphere sometimes distinguished by the narrowness of professional discipline, Bundy was a generalist, in touch with the world at large, and he brought a sense of engagement of energy and vitality to his work. He loved taking on students, combating them and their ideas, challenging them, bright wits flashing back and forth, debate almost an end in itself. In the world of the Harvard government department, where towering figures like Carl Friedrich and William Yandell Elliott seemed distant and unapproachable, men who belonged more to the graduate students than the undergraduates, Bundy was quite a contrast. He particularly liked teaching freshmen, he was a spectacularly good Government 1 section man, a role that few other bright instructors cherished, and he held on to his freshman sections as long as he could. His major undergraduate course, Government 180: The U.S. in World Affairs (his successor in teaching it was, fittingly enough, a young German émigré intellectual named Henry Kissinger), was taught with great style and enthusiasm. His Munich lecture was legendary at Harvard, and when word got out that it was on the day’s schedule, he played to standing room only. It was done with great verve, Bundy imitating the various participants, his voice crackin...

Bundy took the complex Harvard faculty—diverse, egomaniacal—and played with it, in the words of a critic, like a cat with mice. This feat was partly due to the very structure of his mind. Although he was not a great reader (there were a surprising number of books one would have imagined that he had read which he had not), he was brilliant at learning things in conversation, in absorbing. The great skill of his mind, the training in classics and math, allowed him to see and understand how other people’s intellectual processes work; he was considered better at understanding how the minds of the scientists worked than any nonscientist in Cambridge. He was a deft bureaucratic politician; he knew the men around him, whom to flatter, whom not to. Later his successor, Franklin Ford, gave long statistic-crammed reports to the faculty, which would not be impressed, whereas Bundy had told very little in his reports, but deftly, with the Bundy style. He used such understated eloquence that if the performance was not satisfactory, there was a lingering feeling that it was somehow the fault of the listener rather than Bundy. “He was so good,” said one of his friends who knew his strengths as well as his weaknesses, “that when he left I grieved for Harvard and grieved for the nation; for Harvard because he was the perfect dean, for the nation because I thought that very same arrogance and hubris might be very dangerous.”

To an uncommon degree, Bundy possessed that capacity to sense what others wanted and what they were thinking, and it would serve him well.

He was bright and he was quick, but even this bothered people around him. They seemed to sense a lack of reflection, a lack of depth, a tendency to look at things tactically, functionally and operationally rather than intellectually; they believed Bundy thought that there was always a straight line between two points. He carried with himself not so much an intellectual tradition as a blood-intellectual tradition, a self-confirming belief in his origins and thus himself, all of this above partisanship. “I was brought up in a home where the American Secretary of State is not the subject of partisan debate,” he once said during the McCarthy period when Acheson was under attack. It was the Establishment’s conviction that it knew what was right and what was wrong for the country. In Bundy this was a particularly strong strain, as if his own talent and the nation’s talent were all wrapped up together, producing a curious amalgam of public interest and self-interest, his destiny and the nation’s destiny; a strong conscious moral sense of propriety, which he was not adverse to flashing at others, and a driving, almost naked thrust for power all at once. Partly as a result, he had what one friend called a “pugnacious morality.” McGeorge Bundy, then, was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country; in their minds they become responsible for the country but not responsive...

“Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people,” Galbraith would recall years later. “We knew that their expertise was nothing, and that it was mostly a product of social background and a certain kind of education, and that they were men who had not traveled around the world and knew nothing of this country and the world. All they knew was the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist. But that made no difference; they had this mystique and it still worked and those of us who doubted it, Goodwin, Schlesinger, myself and a few others, were like Indians firing occasional arrows into the campsite from the outside.”

Being above the petty factional and emotional fights of the bureaucracy, being of course neither a man of the right or of the left but disinterested and realistic, which meant that all things being equal, he was more a man of the status quo than anything else.

Mac was a terrific memo writer, facile, brief and incisive. It was not, as publication of documents would later prove, exactly something which would make the literary world envious, but to be a good memo writer in government was a very real form of power. Suddenly everyone would be working off Bundy’s memos, and thus his memos guided the action, guided what the President would see. For example, friends think that he killed the ill-conceived, ill-fated plan for a multilateral nuclear force, first by determining the crucial bit of evidence, and then by a memo. It was a major policy decision and it was done in typical Bundy fashion. He was against the MLF from the start, it jarred the cleanliness of his mind, and he bided his time as the evidence on the proposal came in; then he dispatched Richard Neustadt of Columbia to make a special investigation, knowing that Neustadt, a specialist in operational procedure, would be appalled by it, which Neustadt was, and thus Bundy summed up the case pro-MLF and anti-MLF, which left the MLF bleeding to death on the floor, speared, as it were, by a memo.

The early White House years were golden years for Bundy. He seemed to gloss over the problems of the world, it was a dream realized, the better for him, the better for the nation. Some of those who knew him felt that although he was not a negative figure, there was something lacking: his thinking and performance were too functional and operational, he was not considering the proper long-range perspective, instead he was too much the problem solver, the man who did not want to wait, who believed in action. He always had a single pragmatic answer to a single question, and he was wary of philosophies, almost too wary (during the great Vietnam debates of 1965 he would call George Ball, a more philosophic man, “the theologian”). But pragmatic thinking is also short-range thinking, and too often panic thinking. A government is collapsing. How do we prop it up? Something is happening; therefore we must move. Thus, in 1965 Bundy was for getting the country into the Dominican mess, because something had to be done, and then very good at extricating us when he realized that extrication had become the problem, though as he and the men around him would learn, not all countries were as easy to get out of as the Dominican Republic.

His nomination, his campaign, his election had meant many things to many people; now they waited, and many would find themselves disappointed in that first year. He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people. It had all been deliberately done; he had understood television and used it well, knowing that it was his medium, but it was done at a price. Millions of people watching this driving, handsome young man believed that he could change things, move things, that their personal problems would somehow be different, lighter, easier with his election. As President, Kennedy was faced with that great gap of any modern politician, but perhaps greatest in contemporary America: the gap between the new unbelievable velocity of modern life which can send information and images hurtling through the air onto the television screen, exciting desires and appetites, changing mores almost overnight, and the slowness of traditional governmental institutions produced by ideas and laws of another era, bound in normal bureaucratic red tape and traditional seniority. After all, although he had said in his campaign that he wanted to get America moving again, he had not mentioned that the people must allow for the conservatism of Judge Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee; he had implied that he could do it, it would move. In many ways ...

But the component parts were there: serious misreading of aspirations of a nonwhite nation; bringing Western, Caucasian anti-Communism to a place where it was less applicable; institutions pushing forward with their own momentum, ideas and programs which tended to justify and advance the cause of the institution at the expense of the nation; too much secrecy with too many experts who knew remarkably little either about the country involved or about their own country; too many decisions by the private men of the Administration as opposed to the public ones; and too little moral reference. And finally, too little common sense. How a President who seemed so contemporary could agree to a plan so obviously doomed to failure, a plan based on so little understanding of the situation, was astounding.

There were men who opposed the invasion or at the very least were uneasy with it, and to a degree, they were the same men who would later oppose the Vietnam commitment. One was General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. When talk about invading Cuba was becoming fashionable, General Shoup did a remarkable display with maps. First he took an overlay of Cuba and placed it over the map of the United States. To everybody’s surprise, Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best. It was about 800 miles long and seemed to stretch from New York to Chicago. Then he took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba. “What’s that?” someone asked him. “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take it.” He eventually became Kennedy’s favorite general.

(In secret organizations, a subordinate’s failure reflects badly upon his superior as well, so there is a very strong instinct on the part of both to cover it up; it is only when knowledge about such failure is out in the open that a superior himself becomes responsible.)

In the aftermath, the crux of the matter was not whether the United States should have provided the counterinsurgents with air power or not (the air cover would only have prolonged and deepened the tragedy without changing its outcome); the crux was how the U.S. government could have so misread the Cuban people. Had there been even the beginning of serious anti-Castro feeling in the country, nothing would have rallied the average Cuban more quickly to the cause of Fidel than to have an invasion sponsored by the United States. The least of the mistakes were the ones most frequently commented on, the tactical ones, the question of the air power (attaching the United States in the eyes of the world to a slow death of a terrible political mistake instead of, happily, a quick one). But these were the mistakes which were fastened on. General Maxwell D. Taylor was called in to conduct a special review which centered on the tactical faults (too few men in the Brigade assembled in Guatemala, too few pilots in the air arm, too few men prepared and ready to relieve commanders, too few reserves, too little knowledge about uncharted reefs). There was far too little questioning of the moral right to launch the attack: after all, the Communists did things like this all the time, that was the way it was, the way power was used. A vast number of people felt it had failed because too little force had been used (this indeed appeared to be the problem for the President; the right was noisier ...

In May, a month after the Bay of Pigs, when a variety of lessons might have been sinking in, Bowles, who was considered so good at spotting long-range problems and so bad at handling immediate ones, wrote one of the most prophetic analyses of the new Administration in his private diary: The question which concerns me most about this new Administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong. I realize in posing the question I am raising an extremely serious point. Nevertheless I feel it must be faced. Anyone in public life who has strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of public morality, both domestic and international, has a very great advantage in times of strain, since his instincts on what to do are clear and immediate. Lacking such a framework of moral conviction or sense of what is right and what is wrong, he is forced to lean almost entirely upon his mental processes; he adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion. Under normal conditions, when he is not tired or frustrated, this pragmatic approach should successfully bring him out on the right side of the question. What worries me are the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry, frustrated, or emotionally affected. The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.

There were others in the Kennedy circle uneasy with the direction of the Administration and particularly with the decision-making processes used in the Bay of Pigs. Shortly afterward Arthur Goldberg, the new Secretary of Labor (a labor negotiator who had been a particular favorite of the Kennedy people, having worked for them when much of labor’s hierarchy was anti-Kennedy because of the rackets committee investigation), asked the President why he hadn’t consulted more widely, why he had taken such a narrow spectrum of advice, much of it so predictable. Kennedy said that he meant no offense, but although Goldberg was a good man, a friend, he was in labor, not in foreign policy. “You’re wrong,” Goldberg replied, “you’re making the mistake of compartmentalizing your Cabinet. There are two people in the Cabinet you should have consulted on this one, men who know some things, and who are loyal to you and your interests.” “Who?” Kennedy asked. “Orville Freeman and me.” “Why Orville?” “Because he’s been a Marine, because he’s made amphibious landings and because he knows how tough they can be even under the very best circumstances. He could have helped you.” “And why you?” “Because I was in OSS during the war and I ran guerrilla operations and I know something about guerrillas. That they’re terrific at certain things. Sabotage and intelligence, nothing like them at that. But they’re no good at all in confronting regular units. Whenever we used them like that, we’d always lose al...

He had a serious hearing problem, which would not have been a problem except that he also had a serious vanity problem, which precluded a hearing aid. At the first meeting with Kennedy after November 1960, he had been at his worst; asked what he thought about a complicated question of Soviet intentions, he had answered “Yes.” Later Kennedy had taken Michael Forrestal, Harriman’s protégé, aside and asked if there was someplace they might talk privately. Forrestal suggested the bathroom, and they went in there, locking the door, Forrestal delighted, sure that his own big job was coming, at State. Or perhaps, like his father, at Defense. At least an Assistant Secretaryship. “Do you think,” asked Kennedy, “that you can get Averell to wear a hearing aid?”

Averell harriman

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year. Reston in particular would see these events as a study in irony, believing that by October 1962, after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had made good his need to show Khrushchev his fiber, but by that time it was too late as far as Southeast Asia was concerned; there were already more than 15,000 Americans in South Vietnam. For the Cold War was still quite real in 1961, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the men who had come to power in Washington were very much a part of it. They had been fashioned out of it, and now in their first year they were getting regular reminders that it had not yet crested, and their own very eagerness to be tested would in fact accelerate it.

Berlin, of course, had dominated their thoughts for some time. They believed that the hopes for war and peace somehow centered around that divided city, and its access routes. Could we maintain our access? Would the Soviets block it? They were the men in power, preoccupied with the tiniest details; it was as if the President were the desk officer, and the Secretary of State his assistant. There was no event too small for their concern, as if one little misplay would somehow start a chain of events which they might not be able to control. When someone questioned the President about spending too much time on Berlin, he answered, better too much than too little, and he did not mind checking too closely on military convoys; he did not, after all, want the world to be blown up because some young captain had a hangover on a given morning. If Berlin had seemed central in early 1961, Vietnam had loomed somehow very distant. Around that time a knowledgeable Far Eastern correspondent named Stanley Karnow had dropped by the Justice Department to talk with the President’s brother. In the course of the conversation Karnow began to single out Vietnam as probably the most serious problem there, the one which bore the greatest long-range potential for danger. “Vietnam,” said Robert Kennedy, “Vietnam . . . We have thirty Vietnams a day here.” Thirty Vietnams. From the beginning it had been that way, a tiny issue overclouded by the great issues. It had risen to pre-eminence partly because...

Those days, in fact, would be the high-water mark of American support for nationalism in Vietnam, with Roosevelt talking about a trusteeship for the area. It would end with the trip Vincent was on at that moment, the trip to Potsdam. He did not think a great deal about Vietnam at Potsdam because it was not on the agenda, and because it was not supposed to be discussed at all. But a decision was made at Potsdam on Vietnam, without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite inconsequential at the time, but the matter of who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy. The British, uneasy about questions that Roosevelt had raised in the past about independence in Asia, worried about what it might mean for Burma and Malaya, since they were anxious to control future colonial questions in Asia; the British, after all, were not eager to see the dissolution of their empire. Truman, pushed by his military advisers who were wary of what anticolonialism might mean as far as the future of U.S. naval and air bases in Asia was concerned, urged that we go along with the British. There had been no prior discussion among the Americans (though later evidence would show that there had been a good deal of collusion beforehand between the French and the British on this issue). Having accepted the surrender...

The very organization of the Department in those days was the basic problem for the Asian officers. Asia was not a separate area; instead the colonies were handled through the European nations, and concurrent jurisdiction was required for policy changes. That meant that on any serious question involving a territory supposedly emerging from colonialism, both the European and Asian divisions had to agree before the question could go to a higher official. Effectively this meant that the French people would concur with the French policy of returning to Indochina, the Asian people would oppose it vigorously and the question would go to the next level, where officials would bounce it back down, suggesting that everyone get together on this. The result, of course, was that this favored the status quo, and the European division. A neutral policy was no policy: the French would do as they pleased. They were important, Asians were not. France was weak, its pride hurt; it had to be coddled. American policy in Indochina would begin, rooted not so much in anti-Communism—that was secondary—as in indifference. John Carter Vincent, then Director of Far Eastern Affairs (comparable to the later Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs), would recall fighting for a different policy, warning what so indifferent an attitude would mean in the long run, and being told by George Kennan: “John Carter, your views on Asian policy are quite sound from the traditional U.S. standpoint, but ...

The intelligence people at State were not the only ones who knew the French would have trouble. In Vietnam, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, De Gaulle’s favorite general, landed to take charge of French forces. After a tour of the country he was fully aware of the political-military problems that lay ahead. Turning to his political adviser, Paul Mus, he said, “It would take five hundred thousand men to do it, and even then, it could not be done.” In France no one listened to either Leclerc or Mus, and in Washington no one listened to the young American political officers warning of the coming struggle. The idea of Asian rebels standing up to a powerful Western army was preposterous at the time. No one had yet heard of political war, of Mao’s concept of fish swimming in the ocean of the people, of Asian guerrillas giving the European country the cities and strangling them by holding the countryside; of an army losing battle after battle but winning the people and thus the war. Instead the important thing in Washington was to strengthen France, and in Paris the important thing was to regain France’s tarnished greatness. One did not restore greatness by giving in to Asian bandits. One restored greatness by force. And so in 1945 and 1946 it became increasingly clear that negotiations between France and the Vietminh would fail; France was too proud to deal with these little yellow men. The Asian-oriented officers in the State Department desperately pleaded with their superiors...

But the policy began in indifference, and even in the early years Lauriston Sharpe, a Cornell anthropologist who had served in the area during the war and who remained to work for the State Department, would complain bitterly about the lack of American leadership, about the vacuum which the United States had helped create. One telegram from the United States, he told Ogburn, and it could all have been avoided, all this bloodshed. If in March 1946, when the French had signed a preliminary accord with the Vietminh recognizing them as a legitimate authority—an agreement from which they quickly reneged—if then the United States had been wise enough to send a telegram congratulating Paris on its forward-looking leadership and announcing that the United States was sending a minister to Hanoi, all this could have been avoided, all the heartache erased. Perhaps that was too strong, one telegram would have meant little, but the truth was that during the crucial months and years, the U.S. policy, despite all its commitments to freedom, independence and anticolonialism, had permitted an ally to start a bitter and foolish colonial war. Without raising a finger or sending any real telegrams.

Since there was neither a hot nor a cold war in Laos, the problem fell between State and Defense—the very small war, semi-covert—and thus it was a CIA show, the country perilously close to being a CIA colony (in the sense that the local airline was run by the CIA, and a good many of the bureaucratic jobs were financed by the CIA).

During the Dulles years, when neutralism was considered somewhat sinful, the Americans had deliberately sabotaged indigenous Laotian attempts, led by their ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, at neutralism and a coalition government between the various factions. Graham Parsons, ambassador to Laos during the latter Dulles years, when American ambassadors in Asia were particularly rigid in their anti-Communism, later testified before a congressional committee: “I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition.” With our money, our CIA men and our control of the Royal Laotian Army, we had in fact systematically destroyed the neutralist government of Souvanna, eventually forcing the neutralists to the side of the Communist Pathet Lao (though in 1962 we would spend millions and millions of dollars to re-create the very neutralist government we had toppled).

At the first meeting McNamara forcefully advocated arming half a dozen AT6s (obsolete World War II fighter planes) with 100-lb. bombs, and letting them go after the bad Laotians. It was a strong advocacy; the other side had no air power. Thus we would certainly win; technology and power could do it all. (“When a newcomer enters the field [of foreign policy],” Chester Bowles wrote in a note to himself at the time, “and finds himself confronted by the nuances of international questions he becomes an easy target for the military-CIA-paramilitary-type answers which can be added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. . . .”)

What really saved the United States from confrontation in Laos was not the Bay of Pigs, or even Harriman, but the Laotians themselves. For the Pathet Lao were not a classic guerrilla force. If Phoumi was a foolish figure, Souphanuvong, leader of the Pathet Lao, was a Communist counterpart. Neither he nor his people had invested the kind of sacrifice and commitment to the struggle that the Vietcong had in South Vietnam; the force and dynamism of the Indochinese guerrilla movement had never really touched Laos. A major Communist power, such as the Soviet Union, could in fact serve as a broker for an agreement, which it could not do in Vietnam, where the indigenous Communist force was all that mattered. (This led to a misconception in Washington: a belief that the Russians, if they wanted to, could control and negotiate events in Vietnam as they did in Laos, and that eventually the Russians would help us out.)

There was one small footnote to the Geneva agreement, and though it did not seem important at the time, in retrospect it would take on considerable significance. After the agreement had been reached, Kennedy assigned his own liaison man with Harriman, the young Wall Street lawyer Michael Forrestal, to brief Lyndon Johnson on the settlement. Johnson, of course, already knew of the accords, and Forrestal arrived to find that the meeting had been arranged so that Forrestal would get there about ten minutes after Johnson’s masseur had arrived. Forrestal began to discuss the accords, only to find himself blocked again and again by the masseur. Forrestal spoke, the masseur chopped, Forrestal spoke, the masseur rubbed. For ten minutes Forrestal tried to explain the agreement and found no way of getting Johnson’s attention; it was, Forrestal thought at the time, and even more so later, Johnson’s way of showing contempt for the Laotian accords.

Yet if there was a problem with the pragmatism of the period, it was that there were simply too many foreign policy problems, too many crises, each crowding the others, demanding to be taken care of in that instant. There was too little time to plan, to think; one could only confront the most immediate problems and get rid of them piecemeal but as quickly as possible, or at least postpone any action. Long-range solutions, thoughtful changes, would have to wait, at least until the second term. And thus it was the irony of the Kennedy Administration that John Kennedy, rationalist, pledged above all to rationality, should continue the most irrational of all major American foreign policies, that policy toward China and the rest of Asia. He was aware of the change in the Communist world, he was aware of the split between the Chinese and the Russians; it was, he realized, something very important. But he would deal with it later.