The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Read online

  Kennedy increased the American commitment to Vietnam—there were now 15,000 advisers as opposed to 600 and Americans were now flying dangerous combat missions in helicopters and old World War II fighter bombers. The flag was planted just that much more (Eisenhower, despite all the Dulles bombast, or perhaps precisely because of it, had never bothered to plant the flag; coming back from World War II he had never felt the political pressure to be a hero or to prove his anti-communism that his two successors might feel). The Kennedy escalation was an action taken out of weakness more than anything else. We had escalated to keep from being driven out of Indochina, and at a price—we had involved ourselves that much deeper; it was no longer a highly avoidable war. We had gone in on the recommendation of Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s special envoy in Vietnam. Galbraith, Kennedy’s all-purpose critic, had read the Taylor report at the time, in 1961, and had told the President that it was “a most curious document. It calls for certain changes and aids to the government but notes that given the nature of the government these changes cannot be achieved.” Robert Kennedy was always to have ambivalent opinions about the origins of the war in which he was involved, and particularly the role of Taylor who had become a close family friend. In 1964, while covering his campaign for the Senate, I remember Maxwell Taylor’s name having come up in conversation. Ethel Kennedy asked, with her usual enthusiasm, “Don’t you just love Max Taylor?” I said rather bitterly that I did not, that I thought him one of the most overrated men in American life and that I thought he was one of the men most responsible for a growing tragedy. Ethel turned white, hurt and offended, and moved away. Ed Guthman, the normally good-natured press secretary, grabbed me angrily and said “Goddamit, don’t you know better than to criticize Max Taylor to her. What the hell’s wrong with you?” We argued sharply and it was a chilly evening the rest of the way. Even in 1968, when Robert Kennedy was one of the major critics of the war, some of the ambivalence remained. When asked about Taylor, he would say with a certain sadness, “Well he was very helpful to President Kennedy. ...”

  There is a particular quality about this war, a quality which was to have a very considerable political effect, albeit a delayed one. For this is a war in which you can fake it. It is not like dessert warfare where if one side is stronger than the other, it is painfully apparent the very next day; nor even like conventional war where the evidence is slower to come, but comes nevertheless—an army inching ahead, holding terrain, a mile or two a day. But in guerrilla warfare, military-political warfare, the stronger side, in military-political terms, does not hold terrain, it lacks airpower and heavy artillery and thus does not produce statistics which can match those of the weaker side. Indeed most of what it does best is invisible to the Western eye, and particularly to the Western military eye, which is accustomed and trained to look for something entirely different—in this case, something highly misleading. Thus the weaker side can and did, in Vietnam, delude itself into believing that its charts and predictions were true, and that it was winning. Powerful men with powerful vanities were sucked deeper into avoidable mistakes.

  This happened in 1962 and 1963 in Vietnam. Slowly in this proxy war our proxies began to lose and lose badly at an ever intensifying rate; the Vietcong becoming more audacious by the day. Thus the booster-shot commitment had, in late 1963 and 1964, come to an end. Very soon a president would have to make the most basic decision of all; a decision which had been postponed through four administrations—all the way in, or all the way out. But this was a subsurface dilemma, it was still not evident to the American public. Nor was it evident to the American politicians—whether by August of 1964 the White House realized it or wanted to realize it is a matter for conjecture; people at a certain point believe what they want to believe. There was a handful of reporters in Vietnam in 1964 and, though the best of them were pessimistic, they hardly represented a major political voice. On the theory that any news was bad news, the administration had long ago decided to tell the public as little as possible about Vietnam. Any candid admission about where the U.S. stood would point to the fact that all previous predictions had been highly fallacious and would be highly embarrassing to the men already in power. An administration can talk candidly about the errors of American foreign policy only if those errors were made by a previous administration. So, in 1964, the administration kept the reality of the war hidden. What should have been the dominant issue of the 1964 campaign was shelved. Johnson was the peace candidate, peace being but a general thing, and Goldwater was the war candidate. Had he known of the onrushing dilemma in Vietnam, Goldwater might have campaigned vigorously for escalation and Johnson might have moved to the left. Had it been as such, he would have entered the presidency with Vietnam an issue, with himself a partial dove, and would have still been elected by a landslide. He had no such luck.

  Thus Johnson was elected by a landslide, but on the key issue of the time he had gotten a free ride, and now he was afraid of his own mandate. He had postponed the decision, and he had postponed it at the price of his own credibility. From the very moment he escalated, his credibility was to be put seriously in doubt, particularly within his own party. He was to start his first full term by creating an issue which would eventually cost him his second term. He had not trusted the American people, and this set a pattern which was to haunt him. Now, newly elected, he had to deal with the immensity of the problem. He was elected a peace candidate and yet he had a special vision of himself; he saw himself somehow as a figure in High Noon. “Sell the Johnson image as one of a big tall tough Texan,” he told Pierre Salinger in 1960. In truth he was not a particularly good rider, and his World War II Silver Star was a bogus one. As for the war, he did not see it in terms of the modern world, as a struggle in an underdeveloped country in which Communists had taken over the nationalism and where the arrival of Caucasian soldiers might aid the enemy politically, but rather in terms of his own reckoning of the domino theory. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went,” he said. In military terms, he saw the war not as an extension of the French war—what one reporter later described as dreaming different dreams than the French, but walking in the same footsteps—but as an extension of the Alamo. He told the National Security Council: “Hell, Vietnam is just like the Alamo. Hell, it’s just like if you were down at that gate and you were surrounded and you damn well needed somebody. Well by God, I’m going to go—and I thank the Lord that I’ve got men who want to go with me, from McNamara right on down to the littlest private who’s carrying a gun.” Tom Wicker, of The New York Times, quotes Johnson talking about his Mexican neighbors in his excellent book on Johnson and Kennedy. “They’ll come right in your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right on your porch barefoot, and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds, and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ’em, ‘hold on, wait just a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with someone who’ll stand up. And after that, you can get along fine.” “The enemy in Vietnam,” noted Wicker, “was barefoot and weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. He was the kind of man who might be fine in his place, who could be a useful citizen and a good friend if he let you train him right and help him a little, but who would take over your front porch if you didn’t stand up to him. Lyndon Johnson was not about to let little brown men who skulked in the jungle do that to him and the United States of America. ...”

  Badly advised by his immediate aides, most of whom were Kennedy men, Lyndon Johnson, who had helped deny John Foster Dulles the air strikes he had sought for Dienbienphu in 1954, now plunged the country into what would be a major, useless, tragic and divisive war. He did it with a totally unnecessary miscalculation of the nature of the war, of the enemy, and of his own popular mandate. He did it at a time when America’s domestic problems were in desperate need of a solution, or at least the beginning of a solution. He listened to the military whom he had traditionally mistrusted, and who had already been proven consistently wr
ong on Vietnam. He had entered the office with an extraordinary mandate for social progress in America, intent on going down as a great president. Now the war was to destroy his presidency, destroy his hopes for social reform, cloud his chances for any serious historical recognition and, perhaps most bitter of all, the divisions and unrest the war was to create would rebound to the political advantage of the Democratic politician he disliked the most, Robert Kennedy. The Johnson years would look like a terrible Greek tragedy; both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would have their Bay of Pigs—but one would last for several days and the other, for several years.

  Normally this country supports its wars. They are not things to be sought after; but if unavoidable, and all other things being equal, the people will rally around—for a limited period of time, perhaps because this is a democracy—and give the administration the benefit of the doubt. But this war very quickly became different. Its historical roots were questionable; it was very far away and not noticeably connected to American security; it inflicted a particularly high price on noncombatants, something abhorrent to the American mind; and it had already been surrounded by a very considerable amount of disingenuousness. The more scrutiny the war received, the more the public would not like it. This was not because Americans were too soft and too unwilling to take on a difficult, complicated challenge, but because it was only with time that they would find the war not only untidy, but unworthy and unwinnable. And this, the long-range public distaste for the war, was, like the bogging down of American forces, entirely predictable.

  Almost from the start the war was questioned. The major columnists of the country sensed that the more the country committed itself to Vietnam, the deeper it seemed to get, yet without getting any closer to victory. There was growing distrust of the President, who was, to use James Reston’s phrase, escalating by stealth. Step by step the Americans were drawn in deeper and deeper. Now there were 500,000 in Vietnam, but even that many seemed to be sucked in by the lush countryside. The most powerful nation in the world, one which had brought tangible physical power to an awesome new degree, appeared to be using that power against a people who seemed, at best, to be mounted on water buffalo. Hawks and doves were named, and for a time it was fashionable to be a hawk. Hawks were tough and respectable; there was nothing queer about hawks. Doves were soft, dubious, perhaps unpatriotic; they might, under certain conditions, give away most of Southeast Asia. For a time doves would dress in hawks’ clothing, keeping their dark secret as hidden as possible. But as the nation learned more and more about the war, the migration went in only one direction—from hawk to dove. The more that was perceived, the more respectable it became to be a dove. The real opposition began on the campuses. A new generation with a vast untapped political potential of its own felt particularly strongly about the war, and felt itself basically unrepresented in America. It had felt itself represented when Kennedy was alive; Johnson it regarded as much older, both because of years and because of style. As for the House of Representatives, it wrote it off as a citadel of old men in their fifties and sixties. This generation was a potent political force; for a politician in his late thirties or early forties not to deal with it, not to sense its moods and priorities, would have been like a politician in the late 1930s not taking into account the preferences of blue-collar workers. Twelve and a half million Americans had come of voting age since the 1964 election, and while they would not be a lifetime political force for the Lyndon Johnsons of America, they would for the Robert Kennedys and John Lindsays—a politician who neglected them on the war might never get them back. Political authorities noting these statistics have always pointed out that traditionally the young do not vote; but, as Kennedy aide Fred Dutton pointed out, the poor never voted either, until Roosevelt came along, and then they had a reason; and perhaps, in 1968, this would also be true of the young. (Not all politicians sensed this. Much later in the year a former Kennedy man was called in by Humphrey to discuss ways in which he might attract the youth. “Young people,” said Humphrey, “they don’t vote.” Yes, said his assistant Bill Connell, “all they do is smoke pot.”) To the young the war was regarded as their work, the work of old men wallowing in the past, repeating the old mistakes of American life. The college students felt the war intensely; it was not a vague issue, but indeed one that might take their lives. In home after home, their influence on their parents would be spectacular—this was to be one reason why the upper-middle class suburbs would be so dovish in 1968.

  There developed a certain rhythm to the opposition to the war; it increased in multiples. The longer the war went on, the more people learned about it, and the more they were driven into opposition, thus encouraging others to dissent. The longer the war went on, the more it was not just a little war, but rather a war which began to dominate American life. Men who had formerly kept their doubts private were now moved to express them. Now it was affecting not just the automatic doves, the people whose opposition was easily predictable, but more conservative establishment figures—men who watched carefully and were worried not so much about the war itself but about what it was doing to America. Gradually they came in; and as establishment figures came in, the opposition became more respectable, and thus even more doves surfaced. By 1967 the opposition to the war was at least as respectable as that in support of it, and it was growing all the time. The war was now backfiring; all the promises of Johnson and Westmoreland were being undermined daily. The doubters were beginning to look increasingly prophetic. Day by day, starting in late 1966, opposition to the war was becoming increasingly centralized; it was hard to gauge electorally, but it was there and growing.

  The American public thinks of Lyndon Johnson as being too much of a politician. Poll after poll shows this, and as such the myth has grown that Johnson, whatever else, is a master politician. Curiously, Johnson is not a particularly good politician at all. He understands the Senate, how to maneuver and how to manipulate and overpower men there—how to deal with their weaknesses and strengths at close quarters—but he does not understand national politics, the delicate and complex balance of a country, particularly well. He tried to play Senate politics at the Democratic Convention in 1960, and was destroyed. Now in the White House he proved himself a bad politician again. He was unwilling to trust the public, but tried instead to outsmart it—in doing so, becoming increasingly a prisoner of his massive vanity. He was unable to confess error to a population remarkably tolerant of error, particularly if it is self-confessed. Of course a man who confesses to error is ipso facto not a politician; he is an honest man. The more opposition mounted, the more Johnson responded to it; but he responded with temporary measures: tricks, gimmicks, peace feelers, flying trips to Hawaii, trips to Vietnam, the bringing home of Westmoreland of course every time he did something, every time there was a trip or a gimmick, there would be a positive response—the nation would be pleased, the polls would show an increase in his popularity, and the doves would be on the defensive. But the war was not just a temporary thing. Though it was pleasant and colloquial to talk about bringing back coonskins, the war was, in reality, a cruel hopeless conflict which could not be won, which would not go away, and in which the balance had not been altered. Very powerful forces were at work there, and they would not be gimmicked. What Lyndon Johnson was doing all those years, starting in 1965, was buying time for his war; but again, he was doing so at the price of his own credibility, and again, it was a very high price indeed. Each time the cry against the war rose, he would fend off the critics, but he would use up a little more of his credibility. Thus he was buying temporary success but creating long-term problems. A smart politician doesn’t do that. Instead, he suffers immediate problems and takes the long-range gain—he is willing to let the polls be low early in the administration if he is accruing gains which will help him at election time.

  Moreover Lyndon Johnson was mistaken in his ideas about consensus opinion and his own position within the Democratic party. The consensus he was after was a
national one, half Republican and half Democratic, but the dissent happened to be in the Democratic party which might block his chance to run again. One had only to look at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where almost all of the Democrats dissented and many of the Republicans assented, to understand the curious political split Johnson was taking his own normal constituency for granted, counting on the traditional mythology, and concentrating instead on taking over what he believed was the middle. This might seem like a smart strategy, but in the process his natural base, the liberal wing of his own party—a faction of great influence and vocal power in this country—had almost completely turned on him. Thus the people who should have normally been most devotedly for him, willing to work for him, to contribute to his campaign, to publicize his many virtues, were most devotedly and passionately against him.

  In this period of growing social and political dissatisfaction, the role of Robert Kennedy was crucial He was at the exact median point of American idealism and American power. He understood the potency of America’s idealism, as a domestic if not an international force, and yet he had also exercised American power. The correlation was such that his speeches could be written by young radicals like Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman, and yet his children named after Douglas Dillon and Maxwell Taylor. Though Kennedy was part of the politics of the past, and had dealt skillfully, if at times somewhat roughly, with the old bosses, he understood the mandate of the new politics and the importance of keeping up with the kids. If he had been a partner, and for a long time an enthusiastic one, to early decisions in Vietnam, by the end of his brother’s presidency he had been one of the first to sense that things were not working out. In 1968 reporters traveling with him, or with one of his aides, like Kenny O’Donnell, would hear again and again the lament about those days: They kept promising us, they kept misleading us. From the start Kennedy had doubted the validity of the American commitment of combat troops, sensing that the war was unwinnable. He went out of his way to keep himself informed on Vietnam, talking to all the dissenters, to people who had visited Hanoi. At a time when the administration was carefully screening itself from any informed doubter, making sure that no criticism reached the President’s ears, Kennedy was talking to all the people who were voicing their private and public doubts about the war. He knew also what the war was doing to the country, that it was sharpening the existing divisions, making the thin fabric which bound American life that much thinner.