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YOU CAN’T TALK TO A PRESIDENT THAT WAY!
Reflections on the JFK assassination 60 years on
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Yesterday was the sixtieth anniversary of the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose legacy of glamour and success has been marred by his support, up to his death, for the war in South Vietnam that would lead to the death of 58,000 Americans and untold millions of Vietnamese.
Most of the deaths of noncombatant Vietnamese came via the air, as American B-52s and other aircraft dropped more than five million tons of bombs during the war, which did not come to an end until more than a decade after JFK’s death. The tonnage was twice as great as all the bombs America dropped in World War II.
Most of the bombs were dropped as the American war was accelerated by President Lyndon Johnson, who refused repeated entreaties to stop the bombing when there was a chance of peace talks with the North. He saw even a temporary halt as a sign of weakness. We now know that Johnson was excluded from JFK’s inner circle during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the young president’s greatest diplomatic success, in which the Soviets were seen as backing down from a planned deployment of low-yield nuclear bombs in Cuba. Kennedy was famously quoted later as declaring that America—that is he himself—went “eyeball to eyeball” with Nikita Khrushchev, and the Soviets backed down. We would learn after Johnson left office that Kennedy, aided by his younger brother Robert, the attorney general, had not stood down Khrushchev but actually made a secret commitment with him to withdraw from Turkey American nuclear missiles that were within range of Russia. President Kennedy also agreed not to invade Cuba. Once in office, Johnson, who knew nothing of such dealing, would come to believe that he, too, had to stare down the Communists—as Jack had done in the missile crisis—in the Vietnam war.
The presidential lesson that was not learned—how could it be?—was: do not get murdered in office without having told your vice president all he or she needs to know. The truth about the secret JFK concession in the missile crisis was not made public until one year after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. Johnson learned the wrong lesson in the missile crisis—you always gotta stick it to the enemy—and he put it to disastrous use in Vietnam.
None of this was known when I first began covering the Pentagon, and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara—he was appointed to the job by JFK—for the Associated Press in 1965. But it would soon be reported that there was bombing of North Vietnam, though not its extent, and that one of the targets was Hanoi, the capital. The wonderful Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times had exposed such bombing in December 1966 in a series of dispatches from Hanoi—it was rare for an American reporter to be there at the time—and I was part of very small group of Pentagon correspondents—no more than five in all—who were invited to meet with McNamara in his office about the Salisbury dispatches. He was going to deny Salisbury’s stories and wanted our help in how to make the denial authoritative, without using his name. We were told that he did not want the denials to be sourced to senior officials of the Defense Department. This was the absurd gist of our discussions. Being a newcomer to the reporting ways of Pentagon correspondents, I naively told the secretary that his denials of hitting targets in Hanoi were repeatedly being contradicted by Salisbury’s daily Times dispatches. McNamara gave me, the new kid, a wry smile and said: “Bombs never go where they are aimed.” What the hell? I thought. This was a Jack Kennedy guy. None of my colleagues said a thing.
Our meeting with McNamara was off the record, and I could not report what he said. But I went on to do more reporting and learned that the American bombers were banned by the Pentagon from bombing within a five-mile circle around the center of Hanoi, which still left a lot of military and other targets within the city limits. I wrote about it, and it ended up on the Times front page.
McNamara, who was still revered by many in Congress and the press for his closeness to Jack Kennedy and his widow, immediately denied my story and told a large group of reporters that there was no such thing as a five-mile circle off limits to American bombings. He claimed it was a fabrication.
I kept my job because my basic source, who was a three-star admiral in a vital job at the Pentagon, who could not abide the lying about the war, told me he would speak confidentially to any senior AP editor who needed assurance. I learned seven years later from the Pentagon Papers that were made public by Daniel Ellsberg that McNamara had not been far off in his lie—the five-mile circle around Hanoi primarily applied to Navy fighter bombers flying from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and it was a slightly larger five-nautical mile radius.
Ellsberg also told me another story about JFK and McNamara that’s impossible to forget. Edward Lansdale was a CIA counterinsurgency expert who had been brought in by Jack and Bobby Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion early in 1961 to run a secret White House get-Castro operation known by the code name Mongoose. Landsdale had worked during the 1950s in South Vietnam and developed a close rapport with President Ngo Dinh Diem, who, like Kennedy, was a faithful Catholic. By late 1963, with the war going badly, the eccentric Diem was beginning to talk to the North Vietnamese about a rapprochement. The Kennedy administration had increased its military activities in South Vietnam, with more bombing and more defoliation of farmland, with less and less accountability to the Saigon government, and an end-of-the-war accommodation with Ho Chi Minh in the North was seen as a far better option.
Lansdale, undercover as an Air Force general working for the Pentagon, was summoned by McNamara, his nominal boss, as he later told Ellsberg, to a meeting in late 1963 with the president. After some pleasantries, the president asked Lansdale if events did not work out with Diem and “if I changed my mind and decided that we had to get rid of Diem himself, could you go along with that?” Ellsberg quoted Lansdale as saying, ‘No, Mr President, I couldn’t do that. Diem is a friend of mine, and I couldn’t do that.” The meeting was abruptly over. On the limousine ride back to the Pentagon, McNamara berated Lansdale. His message was, as Lansdale told Elllsberg: “You can’t talk to a president that way. When a president wants you to do something, you just don’t say to him, no, you won’t do it.”
Lansdale never spoke to McNamara or Kennedy again.
It seems fair to assume today that the buck still stops with the American president. If he tells his staff and his military to keep on sending bombs to Israel and to follow the Israeli lead in terms of continuing to bomb if deemed necessary, that is the American policy. You just don’t say to him, no, you won’t do it.