The fragile stability achieved after the Korean War
armistice (1953) and the Geneva settlements of
the Indo-Chinese question (1954) did not last
long. With the rise of Khrushchev, the Soviet
Union was pursuing a much more dynamic and
aggressive policy in regions from which its influence
had previously been almost wholly excluded.
The USSR had backed Nasser’s Egypt in the
Middle East; it had sought to offset American
economic pressure by purchasing Cuba’s principal
export, sugar; in civil war in the recently independent
Belgian Congo (now Zaire) it supported
the left-wing leader Lumumba (and so began
meddling in Africa); in Europe relations were
uncertain still over the issue of divided Germany
and in particular over the future of Berlin. In
south-east Asia after the defeat of the French by
Ho Chi-minh and General Giap in the summer
of 1954, there appeared to be a chance of a negotiated
solution. The Geneva Conference of that
year had resulted in a number of agreements and
compromises. The fighting was ended, and
Vietnam was divided close to the 17th parallel,
with the North Vietnamese controlling what
became the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
recognised by the communist states; in the south
arose the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam.
Vietnam, it was proposed, would be unified again
following elections in July 1956. In Laos, which
was not divided, the communist Pathet Lao had
made far less progress, though they were granted
de facto control of the two northern provinces.
The French undertook to withdraw their forces
from Laos and Vietnam, and no foreign troops
were to enter those countries or to establish bases
there; excluded from this provision were a specified
number of military advisers – thus a small
French mission continued for a time in South
Vietnam and Laos.
The two crucial features of the Geneva
Accords were thus that Vietnam and Laos were
to remain unitary states whose future would be
decided by elections, and that no foreign troops
were permitted to assist North or South Vietnam.
But, from the start, the prohibition against the
introduction of foreign ‘arms and munitions’
(Article 4) was a dead letter. Eisenhower and
Secretary of State Dulles regarded the Geneva
Accords as appeasement of communism and a
defeat for the free world. They dissociated themselves
from the agreements but promised not to
overturn them by force provided there was no
aggression from the North. They also expressed
doubts about the all-Vietnamese elections and
insisted that they be held under the auspices of
the United Nations. The South Vietnamese government,
headed by the Catholic Ngo Dinh
Diem, refused to sign any of the treaties but
carried out the military truce conditions.
Eisenhower’s conduct in 1954 marked another
turning point in the tragic history of Vietnam –
and of the US’s involvement in that tragedy, which
led to extensive sacrifices in men, material and, a
decade later, social cohesion. What Eisenhower
and Dulles refused to accept was that no firm line
had been drawn against further communist expansion,
further erosion of the Western position in
south-east Asia, though they had no wish for the
US to replace colonial France or to exploit South
Vietnam. A halt had been called in Europe and in
Korea: now it appeared that the communists were
poised to move south. Although eventually tragic
in their consequences, the Eisenhower–Dulles
reactions should not be judged as inhumane or
dominated by simplistic ideology. Indeed, it was
the communists who deserved their reputation
for cruelty. In 1955 and 1956, thousands of
Vietnamese ‘traitors’, French sympathisers and
‘landlords’, including many peasants, were killed
by the communists in the North. The entire populations
of Catholic villages fled from the North,
and altogether nearly a million refugees headed
south when the North Vietnamese state was established.
Not that Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu
were paragons of democratic virtue in the South.
They imprisoned opposition leaders, rejected any
real land reforms to aid the peasantry and allowed
corruption to run riot; even so, their authoritarian
rule did not compare with North Vietnamese
atrocities during the first years after the new
states’ foundation. Uncertain of their outcome,
Diem refused to participate in the Vietnamese
elections scheduled for July 1956 under the
Geneva Agreements. He knew that the North
would be coerced to vote solidly in favour of the
communists and that the opposition parties in the
South would join them to form what might prove
to be a majority. It was an election that would
not be free whoever supervised it. Diem’s control
of voting in the South would be far less effective
than the communist control in the North. That
view was shared by Dulles and Eisenhower. It was
Diem who refused to hold the elections, but he
knew that the American administration was no
keener to see them take place in 1956 and had
advised on ‘postponement’ to soften the breach
with Geneva.
Eisenhower and Dulles were prepared to
accept the 17th parallel as marking the new
boundary of the communist advance in south-east
Asia. They did not encourage Diem to reconquer
the North or even envisage such a conquest;
equally they were not prepared to tolerate any
communist encroachment on the territory of
South Vietnam. They were also obliged to accept
Diem’s rule – there seemed no one else who
could hold the country together. At first Diem
appeared to be mastering the situation. The year
1956 passed and, surprisingly, despite North
Vietnamese protests, there was no renewal of conflict
between the North and the South. There
were good reasons for this. Ho Chi-minh was
ruthlessly consolidating communist power in
the face of ‘traitors’, ‘landlords’ and peasants,
while ‘land reform’ was accompanied by thousands
of executions. In the south Diem likewise
moved mercilessly against remnants of the
North Vietnamese Vietminh, who had been left
behind as a nucleus around whom a communist
insurrection might be constructed. The South
Vietnamese communists, the Vietcong, began
organising in the countryside in 1957, planning
the assassinations of Diem’s village headmen and
officials. But Ho Chi-minh was still holding back.
Diem’s authoritarian rule, his ruthlessness and his
corruption aroused opposition not only among
peasants but among all those groups excluded
from power and from a share in the loot. The
Vietcong assassinations soon made themselves
felt, exciting deep unease throughout the
country. Murder of government officials increased
from 1,200 in 1959 to 4,000 a year by 1961.
Diem’s response was to drive the peasants into
fortified hamlets, but this proved both ineffective
and counter-productive, alienating the peasantry,
who objected to being placed under military commanders
and were anyway caught between
Diem’s reprisals during the day and the Vietcong
at night. The US administration failed to appreciate
that the Vietcong were not lackeys of the
communists in the North but were an expanding
and powerfully organised army of southern communists
engaged in a guerrilla civil war. Clearly
South Vietnamese stability was deteriorating,
though Diem was still in control of the cities and
much of the countryside of South Vietnam.
The position in neighbouring Laos by the
close of the Eisenhower administration (January
1961) was more immediately critical. Ostensibly
a kingdom whose unity was confirmed by the
Geneva Agreements of 1954, Laos was torn by
regional, tribal and factional strife. The communist
Pathet Lao (Lao National Movement) were
growing stronger in the north. Another army
faction, which was anti-communist, was backed
by the Americans. A third group, the so-called
neutralists, tried to maintain at least the semblance
of unity by constructing a coalition of all
parties and factions, which would each be left in
de facto control of the regions they held. That
was most unwelcome to the Americans, since the
communist regions of the country bordered on
North and South Vietnam and so acted as a
passage for supplies and men along the maze of
jungle trails known as the Ho Chi-minh trail, by
which it took two months to reach the South
from the North. The Pathet Lao were also threatening
to expand their influence into the strategic
central Plain of Jars, controlling routes between
the capital Vientiane, the royal palace at Luang
Prabang and North Vietnam. This sparsely populated
country of some 2.5 million bordered not
only on North and South Vietnam, but also on
China, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, and so
was a potential cockpit of struggle between more
powerful neighbours.
In Washington, Laos appeared to hold the key
to the defence of non-communist south-east Asia.
The Eisenhower administration was therefore
determined to maintain a Laotian government in
power untrammelled by communist or neutralist
coalition partners. In neighbouring Cambodia,
Prince Sihanouk sustained a skilful balancing act
between rival factions and no less adroitly maintained
a precarious neutrality and unity from 1954
to 1970. That was also the aim of the most durable
of the Laotian leaders, Prince Souvanna Phouma,
who tried to establish a neutralist coalition with
his brother, the red prince Souphanouvong,
who represented the Pathet Lao, and with the
American-supported General Phoumi Nosavan.
He succeeded for a time, but the US backing for
Phoumi and for the Royal Laotian Army ruined
any chances of a neutralist solution. As American
penetration increased, so did North Vietnamese
support for the Pathet Lao. But by 1961 the ineffectualness
and weakness of General Phoumi had
become painfully evident. With Soviet and North
Vietnamese support, the communists threatened
to take over the whole of Laos. Eisenhower’s and
Kennedy’s hostility to the neutralist Souvanna
Phouma had removed the one Laotian leader who,
if only for a time, might have held the Pathet Lao
in check.
SEATO, the south-east Asian collective defence
treaty, organised by Dulles in September
1954, unlike NATO had no standing armies, nor
had its signatories promised military support to
each other. So, although it was extended to cover
the defence of Cambodia and South Vietnam, it
provided no guarantees of help and proved of
limited value when the US did appeal for military
assistance. The Eisenhower administration also
sent military advisers to South Vietnam and to
Laos, yet the Laotian Royal Army never became
an effective fighting force capable of dealing with
the guerrilla tactics of the Pathet Lao. The influx
of Americans and dollars, moreover, corrupted
and undermined the South Vietnamese and the
Laotians. American advisers, in any case, suffered
from one disability they could not overcome: they
were foreigners, white outsiders. The Pathet Lao
and the Vietcong, for all the violence and disorder
they brought to their fellow countrymen,
were their own people. An enormous amount of
financial aid was poured into south-east Asia;
most of it went to the military or lined the
pockets of corrupt officials. What the pattern of
military aid reveals are the priorities of the US in
south-east Asia from the mid-1950s to the mid-
1960s. By far the largest amount of aid as calculated
per head of population was sent to Laos and
South Vietnam during the decade from 1955 to
1963. About half that amount per head went to
Cambodia and the Philippines. Thailand also
received substantial aid whereas in comparison,
Indonesia, Burma and Malaysia were granted very
little assistance.
Eisenhower was committing technical, financial
and military aid to enable the anti-communist
forces in south-east Asia to defend themselves
against the communists. But he was opposed to
using US military forces on the Asian mainland
(except in South Korea). The mighty US Seventh
Fleet with its nuclear weapons was close by. What
if the nuclear threat did not deter the Pathet Lao
or the Vietminh, while supplies continued to reach
them from China and the Soviet Union? What if,
despite US aid, the anti-communist groups were
too weak to resist effectively? That dilemma
Eisenhower bequeathed to his successors.
In November 1960 the Democratic senator from
Massachusetts won the US presidential election,
defeating the Republican contender Vice-
President Richard Nixon by the narrowest of
margins. Despite fourteen years in Congress,
John F. Kennedy had no detailed grasp of the
international situation, only general attitudes to
world problems: the futility of European colonialism,
the need to stand up to communism and
to the Soviet Union, the attractions of issuing a
call to the American people to inspire them for
the noble mission of leading the free world.
Kennedy’s electoral theme, that if elected he
would get America moving again, was clothed in
stirring rhetoric reminiscent of Roosevelt’s early
New Deal days. His own theme was the ‘New
Frontier’. But detail and concrete undertakings
on the serious issues facing the US, especially at
home, were lacking. That such vagueness overtook
the presidential campaign was hardly surprising
if Kennedy was to have any chance of beating
Nixon. Issues of civil rights and social reform did
not divide Republicans from Democrats, but cut
across party lines. Those Republicans who supported
civil rights voted in significant numbers
for the Democratic ticket; the majority of the
white Democrats in the Southern states, on
the other hand, would not all support Kennedy.
But many Southern Democrats regarded the
vice-presidential candidate, the Texan Lyndon
Johnson, as a conservative, and this helped
Kennedy to retain the Southern Democratic vote
in eight crucial states, including Texas. The
margins were narrow; indeed, without Texas and
Illinois, where the legendary political boss Mayor
Richard Daley of Chicago was able to marshal the
multi-ethnic vote – black, Polish and German –
Kennedy would have lost.
The Democrats had to court the votes of
minorities: African Americans, Jews and the disadvantaged
of all ethnic origins. Kennedy also had
to overcome the widespread prejudice against a
Catholic president. So there was not one constituency
of Democratic voters, but many separate
groups. Apart from seeking to awaken in the
country an appetite for progress after the mild
recession and the Eisenhower years of slow
reform, Kennedy turned to the political safety and
easy appeal of outdoing Eisenhower and Nixon as
guardian of the free world. He attacked their
record over Cuba; he would be tougher. And he
discovered an issue that threw the Republicans on
to the defensive, the supposed ‘missile gap’
between the Russians and the Americans. That
the notion of such a gap, greatly boosted by
Khrushchev’s boasts, turned out to be a myth, in
no way lessened its potency in 1960. In the
famous television debates watched by some 70
million Americans, Nixon and Kennedy confronted
each other. Kennedy looked fresh and
youthful, Nixon sardonic, cynical, even shifty, his
dark jowl insufficiently concealed by make-up.
Nixon attempted to contrast his own long experience
in government with Kennedy’s inexperience,
but his defence of the Eisenhower record
did not sound very inspiring and Kennedy edged
ahead to victory.
Kennedy personified in looks and vigour the
youthful drive of a new generation, and he and his
wife Jacqueline brought a new eloquence and
easy-going manners to Washington. The handicaps
arising out of the injury to his back sustained
when the torpedo boat he commanded was sunk
in the Second World War were played down. He
needed constant painkilling injections and daily
doses of cortisone to restore him to something
approaching normal health, although he continued
to suffer from the progressive anaemia of
Addison’s disease. He pursued pleasure (especially
in the form of attractive young women) but also
applied himself to the demands of the presidency;
with his unquestionable charm and glamour winning
the loyalty of his close advisers in the White
House. The Washington press was also largely on
his side. This was just as well, because Kennedy
wanted his infidelities hushed up.
Middle America before the permissiveness
endemic later in the 1960s, would have been
shocked by Kennedy’s insatiable appetite for new
sexual partners, in and out of the White House.
His marriage was inevitably placed under extreme
strain, and his liaisons with beautiful women even
brought him into contact with the underworld.
After his death, many women claimed to have been
his mistress but, as one of his genuine lovers delicately
put it, if all who said that Jack Kennedy had
made love to them had been telling the truth, he
would not have had the strength to lift a cup of tea.
In his domestic policies Kennedy was hardly audacious.
He appointed Keynesians as his economic
aides, but also invited a conservative financier,
Douglas Dillon, to be secretary of the treasury.
Kennedy was aware that his majority in the country
was small and that Congress was in no mood to
pass extensive measures involving large public
expenditure. Federal aid was provided in selected
depressed regions where unemployment was especially
high. Increased government expenditure on
defence and a liberalisation of social security benefits
provided a stimulus to the economy, but it was
anyway on a cyclical upswing in the summer of
1961. In 1962 there followed a Trade Expansion
Act to reduce tariffs, but Congress – with which he
had an unhappy relationship – severely cut
Kennedy’s proposed public works programme.
Nor were his relations with big business helped
when he put pressure on the United States Steel
Corporation to rescind a price increase. This
provoked a severe collapse of share prices on the
Stock Exchange. In 1962 Kennedy pressed forward
with more resolution on issues of social
reform. He wanted ‘Medicare’ to be granted to
retired workers over sixty-five, funded by social
security, but the powerful medical lobby, objecting
to ‘socialised medicine’, and a Congress worried
about the likely cost, defeated the measure.
In 1963 with unemployment remaining high
(5.5 per cent) by the standards of that period of
full employment, Kennedy boldly proposed a substantial
cut in income tax, only for Congress to
hold the measure up. Before the tragically premature
end of his presidency, Kennedy had
achieved little in the way of giving assistance to
the more deprived sections of American society,
but his focus on housing aid, education and
medical provision pointed to a future when all
these programmes would be enacted. The one
glaring omission was civil rights legislation. But
on this explosive question Kennedy could not
postpone decisive action by instituting modest
and well-intentioned changes by presidential
executive orders. The battle for black equality was
reaching a pitch so intense that all America
became involved.
Kennedy felt more drawn to global issues, the
great questions of war and peace and America’s
relations with the rest of the world. In the struggle
with communism, the free world seemed to be
entering a new and dangerous phase. Berlin, Cuba
and Indo-China lay at the heart of the ‘unfinished
business’ left over from the Eisenhower administration,
and all three issues came to the boil within
the first six months of 1961. A speech by
Khrushchev on 6 January 1961, declaring that the
Soviet Union would support what he called
‘national liberation movements’ in the underdeveloped
countries, turned Kennedy’s attention to
Third World issues. The ideological subtleties of
Khrushchev’s phrase, which aroused bitter debate
among communists about what exactly he meant,
were not fully grasped in Washington, though the
growing rift between the USSR and China was no
secret.
In the White House, Khrushchev’s statement
was interpreted as a challenge: that the communist
world would back insurgency in countries
that so far had resisted communist takeovers. It
was a paradox that, though the West appreciated
the significance of nationalism and those other
elements that determined international and
domestic conflicts, communism was still viewed as
a monolithic and undifferentiated threat to the
free world.
Kennedy surrounded himself at the White
House with some of the best brains in the
country, charged with helping him to formulate
an effective counter to the threat of a continuing
advance by communism, especially in the Third
World. He decided that the US did not have to
balance its budget slavishly, as Eisenhower had
tried to do, and that a boost to public expenditure
in the spirit of Keynesian orthodoxy would
help to get the sluggish economy moving, cut
unemployment and expand trade, profits and
incomes, so generating more money for the
administration to spend. Kennedy, though cautious
about creating large budget deficits,
believed that the US did not lack the necessary
resources to undertake all that was necessary for
its security and for its position as the leader of the
free world. The military budget was immediately
increased. The secretary of defence, Robert
McNamara, with his experience of running the
giant Ford Motor Company, was to apply the
latest business techniques to ensure the most
effective application of funds, both in respect of
procurement and to identify the right policies to
be pursued. Another adviser was Walt Rostow, an
economics professor who had studied the stages
of economic growth of particular importance
to underdeveloped countries. Dean Rusk was
secretary of state, and for personal military advice
Kennedy turned to General Maxwell Taylor.
Returning from a fact-finding mission to South
Vietnam, Rusk and Taylor both advocated increasing
the American commitment there. For
Kennedy, the crucial question was how much.
The military situation had not yet deteriorated to
the point where a massive infusion of American
troops seemed to be essential. Nevertheless, it was
already under discussion.
April 1961 was a critical month for the White
House. Cuba, Vietnam and Laos simultaneously
became the focus of crisis management. On 19
April the invasion by American-backed Cuban
exiles of their homeland had ignominiously failed
in the Bay of Pigs; the following day Kennedy
ordered a review of what military, political and
economic action – overt and covert – it would be
necessary for the US to undertake to prevent the
communist domination of South Vietnam. On
the 26th the American position in neighbouring
Laos seemed on the brink of disaster. There was
wild talk by the military of air strikes against
North Vietnam and southern China. On 29 April
US troop deployments to Thailand and South
Vietnam were discussed within the administration.
Kennedy kept his nerve. Alerts went out to
American bases, a modest 100-man increase in
the nearly 700-strong American advisory mission
in South Vietnam was approved and, early in
May, approval for the despatch of a further 400
special-forces troops was given. Extra military
resources were provided, enabling the Vietnamese
army to be expanded from 150,000 to 170,000
troops. Finally, US troops were stationed in
Thailand.
Later that same May the panic in the White
House over Laos subsided. America’s threatening
posture seemed to have been effective in restraining
the Chinese and North Vietnamese.
Khrushchev, too, had been alarmed and wanted
to quieten things down. The White House’s
primary concern was once again Vietnam.
Doubts had surfaced about the strongman of
South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. He and his
brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and his formidable sisterin-
law Madame Nhu, were heading a government
pervaded by corruption, and internal opposition
was growing; the lack of morale among the South
Vietnamese army was also only too evident.
Might not American training, advice and leadership
be the best way to stiffen their resolve? But
this would entail a considerable increase to the
US military presence in South Vietnam. By the
autumn of 1961 General Taylor had recommended
to the president the despatch of 8,000
US combat soldiers; in a memorandum the joint
chiefs of staff had estimated that 40,000 US
troops would ‘clean up the Vietcong threat’ and
that if the North Vietnamese and Chinese intervened
another 128,000 would be sufficient to
repel them. The idea of punishing North
Vietnamese intervention and discouraging further
incursions by bombing North Vietnam had also
been raised. All these were proposals to Americanise
the conflict in Vietnam. Vice-President
Johnson had already provided the justification
for this after returning from a fact-finding mission
the previous spring: he had advised the president
that the battle against communism had to be
taken up in south-east Asia or the US would lose
the Pacific and have to defend its own shores.
But, even faced with such exaggerated catastrophe
scenarios, Kennedy resisted sending substantial
numbers of US servicemen. He was sceptical
whether a few thousand US troops would make
the crucial difference to the military situation.
Nevertheless, by October 1963, shortly before his
assassination, his administration had already
sent more than 16,000 men to South Vietnam.
The Geneva Agreements were dead, as the US
responded militarily to increasing Vietcong activity
in the South.
More important than the numbers, which were
small compared with Johnson’s eventual decision
to fight an all-out war employing half a million
US combat troops, was the commitment the
US made to South Vietnam during the Kennedy
presidency and the decisions that were taken
about the basic strategy needed to prevent
South Vietnam from falling to the communists.
Kennedy had expressed doubts at times about the
intrinsic importance of Vietnam; on other occasions
he subscribed to the notion that its loss
would entail the loss of southern Asia.
Although Kennedy frequently showed a better
sense of proportion than some of his advisers
about the dangers of escalation following the
despatch of US troops, he never departed from
his policy of increasing the US commitment as
much as he judged necessary to defeat the
Vietcong. His reasoning was political and global:
political because after agreeing to the neutralising
of Laos and the Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster, he
could not afford to seem in retreat again; global
because he accepted what he interpreted as the
communist challenge to the free world, which
had now shifted to a struggle for the Third
World. He ignored the advice he received from
General de Gaulle in the summer of 1961 not to
get bogged down in an interminable war in Indo-
China as the French had been and he was undeterred
by the refusal of his principal ally, Britain,
to join the US military effort, as it had once done
to halt communist aggression in Korea. Vietnam
became America’s fight, with relatively little help
from America’s Pacific allies, Thailand, South
Korea, Australia and the Philippines. It was the
kind of struggle, moreover, for which the
Eisenhower military doctrine of meeting any
communist aggression with massive nuclear retaliation
against Moscow or Beijing was extraordinarily
ill-suited, as Eisenhower had already
discovered in Laos.
The new military concept suitable for Third
World struggles with communism was worked
out mainly by Walt Rostow, a professor of economics,
General Taylor and McNamara. At the
heart of it was the notion of flexible response.
Insurgency and guerrilla tactics would be met by
counter-insurgency and specially trained units –
the Green Berets. The Vietcong would be sought
out and destroyed in their hideouts in the countryside
and jungles. Combat troops would meet
the enemy troops in just sufficient strength to
defeat them. This would enable the US to resist
force by counter-force in situations and over conflicts
that, in themselves, could not possibly be
regarded as important enough to risk the destruction
of the US in a nuclear exchange with the
Soviet Union. Only in defence of Western Europe
and over the question of Berlin did the US
threaten to use nuclear missiles. But even this
determination was doubted by de Gaulle, who
developed France’s own nuclear missile capacity,
and by the British who, though they later decided
to rely on American missiles sold to Britain, also
maintained their own national deterrent.
In Vietnam, Kennedy’s acceptance of the doctrine
of flexible response meant that the US
would be drawn into an ever increasing commitment.
This was foreseen by intelligence reports
reaching Washington which pointed out that
neither bombing the North nor increasing the
level of American combat troops in Vietnam
would dissuade the North from matching every
increase. The US would be setting out on a war
of attrition without any foreseeable end. Or,
rather, it would be ended first by the US, when
the American people and Congress came to say
no to any further resources, any further loss of
American lives.
Kennedy, himself, at one time asked what was
so important about Vietnam, and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, more of a hawk than a dove,
wondered how the Americans could win a war in
South Vietnam which the South Vietnamese
themselves were mishandling and even losing. For
Kennedy the struggle was not about Vietnam
alone but about American leadership, about the
perception of America’s determination to defend
the free world, whatever the cost. This was
America’s mission in the world. In his election
campaign, in his inaugural and subsequent
addresses to the American people, Kennedy
exhorted America to live up to its ideals. But this
exhortation to play a world role had its dangers.
In his televised debate with Nixon, Kennedy
declaimed, ‘In the election of 1860, Abraham
Lincoln said the question was whether this nation
could exist half slave or half free. In the election
of 1960 . . . the question is whether the world will
exist half slave or half free’, rhetoric that raised
American expectations to such a pitch and so
over-emphasised US power that withdrawal or
defeat anywhere in the world ceased to be acceptable.
The US presidency thus became the victim
of its own projection of America invincible, of
America the righter of moral wrongs anywhere in
the world (provided they were perpetrated by
communists). If Americans could reach the
moon, they would surely be able to defeat a
second-class, Third World country. The prospective
disillusionment of the American people
should it turn out that they had been misled, and
that defeat in war had to be accepted, haunted
successive presidents. Indeed, the gap between
expectation and reality was to shatter the next
three presidents: Johnson over Vietnam, Nixon
over Watergate and Carter over the American
hostages in Iran.
In October 1963 Kennedy was optimistically
planning to begin withdrawing the 16,000
Americans from Vietnam, but he would not have
allowed a communist victory either. While brilliant
men and their theories pushed him forward,
his own steadier judgement held him back. He
was inclined to ambivalence, first going along
with the advice of experts, but then cautiously
scaling their recommendations down. The application
of this ambivalence to his dealings with
Cuba led to a humiliating defeat, an early personal
disaster puncturing his electoral rhetoric.
The Eisenhower administration had bequeathed
the ‘unfinished business’ of Cuba to the incoming
president and his advisers. Not only had
Castro nationalised American businesses and
taken over the US oil refineries but his country’s
links with the Soviet Union were becoming
closer. By 1962 he had turned Cuba into a oneparty
communist state. But, even as he accepted
Soviet help, Castro was at heart a Latin American
nationalist, unwilling simply to become a Russian
pawn in the Cold War.
The problem Kennedy faced was whether to
tolerate the continued presence of Castro or to
follow through plans initiated by Eisenhower
to use Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala for an
invasion of the island to overthrow its leader.
Kennedy was urged by some advisers to go ahead
with the invasion and to provide it with air
support. He was told that many Cubans on the
island were only waiting to be rallied against
Castro. Others, including the sagacious Senator
Fulbright, warned the president against foreign
adventures. Kennedy struck a hopeless middle
course, permitting the invasion of Cuba to proceed
while trying to disguise American involvement.
He accordingly limited the air support to
exiled pilots flying American-procured planes and
refused to sanction any direct US participation in
the air or on land.
The Bay of Pigs landing, launched on 17 April
1961 by the Cuban exiles, became for the administration
and for the president personally, a humiliating
fiasco. At least Kennedy kept his head when
on 18 and 19 April 1961 the exiles were pinned
down by Castro’s troops on the beach. By then
it was becoming clear that the invasion was failing
and that only US intervention could retrieve it.
Khrushchev, to rub salt into the wound, declared
that the Soviet Union would defend Cuba, but
Kennedy did not raise the ante further. The
Cuban exiles were left to their fate; more than a
thousand survivors were rounded up and imprisoned
by Castro.
Kennedy did not try to evade personal responsibility.
He tried all the harder now to retrieve
America’s good name by pushing ahead with the
Alliance for Progress, which he had already proclaimed
in March 1961. This represented the
positive side of US policy, an effort to transform
Latin America, to solve its serious social and political
problems, eradicating destitution over the
next decade and so heading off communist revolutions.
Covert action against Cuba meanwhile
took dark and bizarre forms, with the Central
Intelligence Agency hatching various plots to
assassinate Castro by such ingenious devices as a
poisoned cigar or dropping pills into his drink. In
October 1962 Cuba would be in the news again
in the most serious Cold War crisis since the
Berlin blockade of 1948–9.
The Alliance for Progress was the positive
aspect of America’s world mission. It promised
$20 billion of US aid for development, which
was to be matched by $80 billion from Latin
American sources over the next decade. The lever
of US partnership and of financial and technical
assistance was intended not only to develop Latin
American trade and production so that the
growth of wealth would outpace the growth of
population, but also to bring about basic political
and democratic constitutional change and desperately
necessary agrarian reform. Latin America
would be turned from the path of revolution to
one of evolution and human betterment. The
threatened advance of authoritarian socialism provided
the spur, as it had done in Europe, where
it had prompted Marshall Aid, yet the presence of
a genuinely humanitarian motivation should not
be overlooked. Although the Alliance created
some spectacular developments, it failed in its
basic purpose of transforming Latin America
socially and politically. It worsened rather than
narrowed the gap between the rich and poor, as
funds were channelled to large enterprises already
owned by foreign corporations or by wealthy
indigenous elites. Authoritarian rulers further
misappropriated large amounts of money. Vested
interests naturally resisted any transfer of their
wealth and power to the poor and, when faced
with a choice of supporting them or allowing
them to fall in the face of radical socialist revolutions,
the US provided them with military aid.
This strengthened military leaders and so weakened
further the prospects for democracy. Raised
expectations came up against corruption and
repression. Latin America was thus heading for
further instability and violent revolution, and not
for the ‘peaceful revolution’ Kennedy had envisaged
(Part XIV).
Kennedy’s failure in Cuba did not seem to
diminish his appeal at home. A Gallup poll taken
soon after the Bay of Pigs showed his popularity
soaring to an unprecedented 83 per cent approval
rating. The American people rallied to their president,
but this support even in the face of a fiasco
showed something more significant: that they
trusted their administration and were looking for
strong leadership, for government to get things
done and to solve the nation’s manifold problems.
Kennedy was not at ease when he met
Khrushchev in Vienna during the summer of
1961. It was to be a low-key meeting, each leader
gauging the mettle of the other. Kennedy had
Laos on his mind. Khrushchev wanted to restrain
the North Vietnamese and Chinese in order not
to provoke strong US reactions. For reasons of
their own the Chinese were also ready to take a
longer-term view and this made possible the convening
of a second Geneva Conference in May
1961, which, after fourteen months of tedious
negotiations, agreed in July 1962 to ‘neutralise’
Laos, with a coalition of all parties in a royal government
presided over by Prince Souvanna
Phouma. It was papering over the cracks. None
of the parties concerned in Laos or outside had
actually abandoned their ambitions to dominate
the country.
Another crisis loomed over the status of West
Berlin. The West’s determination to maintain its
position in the city deep in the Soviet orbit had
become a powerful symbol of resistance to any
attempted Russian encroachments by force or
diplomacy. Khrushchev’s threat to sign a peace
treaty with the German Democratic Republic the
Soviets had created, thus handing over control of
access to a communist regime which the West
refused to recognise, was an unacceptable solution
as far as the NATO powers, including the
US, were concerned. But Khrushchev could
create such a crisis by ostensibly giving up Soviet
responsibility for the air and land routes and
handing these to the DDR. At their Vienna
meeting on 3 and 4 June 1961, Kennedy made
it clear that the West would resist by all means at
its disposal any unilateral Soviet moves and
warned Khrushchev against ‘miscalculation’. The
two leaders also clashed on the issue of the Third
World.
Unknown to the West, Khrushchev had his
own problems with his Kremlin colleagues in the
Praesidium. No Soviet leader after Stalin’s death
had enjoyed the old dictator’s undisputed power.
For the time being Khrushchev was accepted as
primus inter pares, but Soviet leadership was ultimately
a collective affair. There were hardliners
dissatisfied with Khrushchev’s efforts to achieve
detente. Others criticised his erratic course and
his opportunism. The ideologues wanted to
pursue a ‘pure’ Marxism–Leninism believing that
the revolutionary cause could be led only by the
proletariat. Khrushchev was more of a realist,
ready to take advantage of developments that
weakened the West and which in the longer term
would further the Soviet Union’s global interests.
In the Stalin era Third World communist parties
had been instructed to take up the revolutionary
struggle not only against the colonial imperialists,
but also against the ‘national-bourgeois lackeys’.
But the anti-colonial struggle in the Third World
was fiercely nationalist, led and supported by an
indigenous, educated middle class, rather than by
peasants or workers. While Third World radicals
included active groups who believed in the need
for socialist or even communist transformations of
society and in centrally planned economies to
break existing feudal elites, they were not in
favour of exchanging a dependency on the West
for a dependency on the East. The nationalists
were in any case broad coalitions united only by
a wish to get rid of their country’s colonial status.
In Egypt, they were led by army officers; elsewhere
they were led by civilian revolutionaries.
Khrushchev had thrown Russian support
behind President Nasser of Egypt in 1955. The
Soviet Union began to dispense its own financial
and military aid programme to win friends and
influence nations. It was on a smaller scale than
the American programme, but was carefully
applied where it seemed to serve Russian interests
best. Egypt and India received most aid; regionally,
the Middle East was given priority, relatively
little going to Latin America; the sums devoted
to military aid were more than twice as large as
those earmarked for economic credits. Despite
the views of the purists, Khrushchev was prepared
to back anti-colonial movements, even if they
included bourgeois elements. This is what he
meant when he offered to help ‘national liberation
movements’.
At Vienna, Khrushchev reaffirmed his support
for ‘national liberation’ struggles, accusing the
US of representing the status quo and of intervening
to support it. Kennedy countered with the
argument that the balance of power between the
communist and non-communist worlds should be
preserved. There was thus no meeting of minds.
Kennedy returned to the US and in July that year
increased the defence budget and the strength of
the armed forces.
Khrushchev chose another method of breaking
the Berlin deadlock, which was also an infraction
of treaty agreements, but did not threaten
Western rights in West Berlin. Walter Ulbricht,
the East German communist leader, had been
pressing for effective action to stop the ever
increasing flow of East German citizens across the
open Berlin frontier to the West. The flow of
refugees had reached such proportions that the
stability of the East German state was endangered.
On 13 August 1961, barbed wire was
erected along the frontier right across Berlin, later
replaced by the Wall, complete with armed guard
towers. East Berlin and the German Democratic
Republic were turned into a gigantic prison. The
West protested but did not attempt to remove the
Wall by force. It was another compromise, but
one that was regarded as ending the Berlin crisis.
As the eventful year of 1961 drew to its close, the
conclusion of a Soviet peace treaty with the DDR
was once more postponed; no date was now set
for its conclusion.
Khrushchev’s world policies had brought the
Soviet Union few concrete benefits. The dispute
with China was growing; over Berlin, Khrushchev
had had to abandon his stand; and even the
success of Soviet missile development was clearly
being overtaken by the dynamic policies of
the Kennedy administration. Khrushchev badly
needed a dramatic coup, or at least the appearance
of one. That need probably inspired the bold
Soviet initiative that was to lead to the Cuban
missile crisis.
World History
