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55 chapter four “To pour money, materiel and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive.” —Senator John F. Kennedy, 1954 KENNEDY The Coup That Failed On January 19, 1961, when Dwight D. Eisenhower, the last of the presidents born in the nineteenth- entury, was preparing to yield power to John F. Kennedy, the first of the twentieth-century presidents, he spoke a language both used and understood. It was the language of the cold war. For more than an hour, Eisenhower shared the secrets of presidential power with Kennedy, who, in one day, at age 43, would become the second youngest president in American history. When they were finished, trade secrets disclosed and presumably absorbed, the two men walked from the Oval Office into the Cabinet Room, where senior advisers from the outgoing and incoming administrations waited for them to lead the careful choreography of political transition in a democracy. Whether of the old guard or the new, all of the advisers shared essentially the same view of the world and of America’s place in it. The cold war dominated their calculations. The Soviet Union led an empire of communist countries, all dedicated to an ideological doctrine aimed at global conquest. The United States had a solemn obligation—indeed, a commitment—to meet this existential challenge and defeat it, even in such faraway places as Southeast Asia. Freedom itself depended on American resolve, on America’s word. If there was a difference between the old and the new, it was that the outgoing officials were tired—some had been in office for eight years and desperately needed a break—and the incoming officials were bursting with vigor and enthusiasm: “action intellectuals,” as they were called, ready for any challenge . One of them, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., later remembered: “Euphoria reigned; we thought for a moment that the world was plastic and the future unlimited.”1 Journalist David Halberstam described them, in a 56 Kennedy: The Coup That Failed book, as “the Best and the Brightest.” “A remarkable hubris permeated the entire time,” he wrote. At the very top of their list of foreign policy problems, composed by two staffers representing the two sides, was not Berlin, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev described as “a bone in my throat;” not Cuba, ninety miles off the Florida coast; not the celebrated “missile gap,” a major topic in the presidential debates of 1960; not the dangerous contest for power in the Congo—at the very top of their list was the “deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia.” And, interestingly, the focus was not on Vietnam but on Laos. According to notes taken by Clark Clifford, who had been an aide to President Harry Truman and served as an adviser to Kennedy: “President Eisenhower said, with considerable emotion, that Laos was the key to the entire area. He said that if we permitted Laos to fall, then we would have to write off all of the area. He stated that we must not permit a communist takeover. . . . It was imperative that Laos be defended. He said that the United States should accept this task with our allies, if we could persuade them, and alone if we could not.”2 When Eisenhower and Kennedy met earlier on December 6, 1960, to discuss the transition, they “hit the high spots,” as Eisenhower noted in his official account: “Berlin, the Far East and Cuba,” but he never specifically mentioned Laos.3 Why in one meeting he did not mention Laos and why in the follow-up meeting six weeks later he spoke of it as Kennedy’s most urgent task has never been explained. Nothing of significance happened in Laos from December 6 to January 19. “Alone if we could not.” In 1954, Eisenhower had promised economic and military aid to Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, on the assumption that it would be properly administered and the communist challenge would be met and defeated. In 1959, Eisenhower had gone considerably further, stating in a public address that the “national interests” of the United States were linked to the survival of a free and independent South Vietnam. Now, in an amazing escalation of the rhetoric of commitment, though conveyed confidentially, he informed the new president that the United States should “defend” Laos, a neighbor of Vietnam in what used to be French Indochina, and, if necessary, do it “alone.” Kennedy asked how...

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