THINKING
THINGS OVER
By ROBERT L.
BARTLEY
Kennedy's
Vietnam
The Vietnam War haunted the American political psyche for three decades,
until the ghost was exorcised on September 11, 2001. The other bookend of
the era, at least in my mind, is November 1963, a month that opened with
the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and closed
with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
Those of us who think this way, and I am by no means the only one,
naturally looked forward to a new biography of the martyred president,
Robert Dallek's "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." As it
turns out, Mr. Dallek asserts that JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam if
he had served a second term. This notion has been assiduously spread by
Kennedy acolytes for three decades now, and Mr. Dallek's uncritical
acceptance of it raises again the issue of why he was selected for
privileged access to the Kennedy papers.
Mr. Dallek has already had an exchange in our columns on this issue with
Thomas C. Reeves, a Kennedy skeptic in his own book, "A Question of
Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy" (Macmillan 1991). Mr. Reeves pointed
out that the Kennedy Library is the only tax-supported presidential library
that has a system of "donor committees" controlling access to materials,
and that Ted Sorensen, chief guardian of Kennedy mythology, was
instrumental in the selection of Mr. Dallek to be the first historian to
see a wide range of materials. Mr. Dallek replied that his "understanding"
was that the materials would also be released to other scholars, but Mr.
Reeves, who has sought the records for years, has heard nothing to
date.
Nothing here should be taken as any suggestion of a quid pro quo, or as
questioning Mr. Dallek's standing as an outstanding biographer. "An
Unfinished Life" is unquestionably an important book, and provides a trove
of information for future scholars. Yet in approaching the book, one needs
to remember that the author's attitudes were evident in his previous work,
and Mr. Sorensen must be pleased with the two points made in Mr. Dallek's
excerpts in The Atlantic.
The first article detailed President Kennedy's extensive health
problems. The spin was that they demonstrated bravery, and did not affect
the president's performance in office. Mr. Dallek has said he was surprised
to find the records uncensored, but he also reports they include nothing
about Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous "Dr. Feelgood," a specialist in
amphetamine cocktails.
Yet Dr. Jacobson was seeing the president about weekly, according to
bills reviewed by Laurence Leamer, author of "The Kennedy Men" and "The
Kennedy Women." In a Boston Globe article (see the History News Network
http://hnn.us/1), he says he had access to records secreted by the president's
secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, including letters from other physicians warning
against Dr. Jacobson's treatments, which included providing drugs for
favored patients to inject themselves. Mr. Leamer concludes, "it is absurd
to suggest that his illnesses and amphetamine use had no impact on his
presidency."
My own preoccupation, Vietnam, was the subject of the second article.
Mr. Dallek discusses the long debate within the administration over whether
to sanction the coup that ultimately resulted in Diem's murder. In contrast
with his clarity during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president is
conflicted and indecisive. Immediately after the coup, he taped a memo,
particularly regretting an August cable that first suggested a coup. "I
should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at
which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views."
In fact, the key Aug. 24 cable was approved by the president after a
briefing by George Ball, who interrupted his shower on a Hyannis weekend.
At least, this was the contemporary report of Marguerite Higgins in "Our
Vietnam Nightmare" (Harper & Row, 1965). But this is missing from Mr.
Dallek's bibliography, as is Ellen Hammer's "A Death in November" (Dutton,
1987). These anti-coup books are essential balance to the acolytes.
President Eisenhower briefed the incoming president the day before the
inaugural. The principal subjects included Laos and, we know from other
sources, the balance of payments, which unwound as a crisis during the
Nixon administration. The outgoing president favored American intervention
in Laos, predicting that unless the U.S. resisted there South Vietnam and
Cambodia would also fall.
In the event, President Kennedy negotiated the Laos accords, a coalition
arrangement that gave the Communists de facto control of the Ho Chi Minh
trail vital to infiltration into South Vietnam. By 1963 the South erupted
in crisis, with conflicting battlefield reports and political turmoil in
the Buddhist crisis and burning bonzes. The notion spread in the Saigon
press corps and a Kennedy administration faction that Diem, an inflexible
Catholic, had to go in order to win the war. After the coup, the military
situation deteriorated rapidly.
Mr. Dallek lists the reasons JFK was reluctant to withdraw from Vietnam:
failure at the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, defending
Laos, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. He feared
the international and domestic reaction to another defeat. By November,
sanctioning a coup against an ally in the name of winning the war had been
added.
Then withdraw? Joe Kennedy's competitive kid? The "green berets" guy?
The "bear any burden" guy? Give me a break.
Acolytes love this myth dearly, of course, and Mr. Dallek was writing
not a focused examination of it but a broad portrait valuable in its own
right. But he need not adopt the withdrawal notion so uncritically or
champion it in magazines. For the purpose of the myth is to obscure a
salient truth. To wit, Vietnam was John F. Kennedy's war.
