Foreign Relations: The Safety of Us All

The jet-loaded U.S. carrier Midway and two destroyers steamed out of Hong Kong one golden dawn last week to show the blue of Navy airpower in the South China Sea. Two thousand U.S. marines pulled out of Japan—where all they had been shooting was a Hollywood potboiler aptly titled Marines, Let’s Go!—and headed for an undisclosed destination.

The 1st Marine Brigade, aboard a U.S. Navy transport bound for maneuvers off the U.S. West Coast, was ordered to wheel around and return to station in Okinawa. The U.S. lifted 16 helicopters to the Laotian forces, deposited some 400 marines, many of them veterans of the 1958 Lebanon landings, at a base just across the border at Udon, Thailand. Around the clock, U.S. C-130 cargo transports lumbered into Bangkok, disgorging guns and ammunition for transfer to the anti-Communist Laotian troops.

Thus the Kennedy Administration responded to its first grave cold war challenge. Though most of the U.S. thought that Laos was infinitely remote, Kennedy knew that if the Communist invasion was victorious, the other fragile republics of Southeast Asia would tremble like aspens.

On the Escalator. Laos had been a prime Kennedy concern since he met with Dwight Eisenhower the day before the inauguration. “This is one of the problems I’m leaving you that I’m not happy about,” said Ike. “We may have to fight.” Twice daily, and sometimes oftener, Kennedy has had briefings on the Laotian situation. Wandering restlessly through the White House one day, Kennedy muttered: “This is the worst mess the Eisenhower Administration left me.” Three weeks ago, Kennedy asked his military chiefs: “Who runs this area for us?” Days later, the U.S.’s Pacific commander, Admiral Harry Felt, flew in from Pearl Harbor by presidential request, accompanied by two high-ranking U.S. military advisers to the Laotians. “Mr. President,” said Felt, pointing to pock-marked flip maps, “the rebels are spreading just like measles.” Supplied by Soviet airdrops averaging 45 tons daily, guided and cadred by the leathery Communist North Vietnamese, the rebels were rapidly escalating upward from a guerrilla band to a well-equipped, highly purposeful army. At the end of the two-hour meeting, Kennedy prepared a ly-point course of action, aimed at propping the flagging morale and military strength of the Laotians. But soon it became clear that they were more interested in festivals than fighting (see THE WORLD). “What kind of soldiers are they?” asked Kennedy in frustration. “Will they fight for their country?”

“Absolutely Serious.” Behind the veil of quiet diplomacy, the President opened a second front—trying to talk sense to the Soviets. At U.S. request, India’s Nehru passed the word along to Moscow that the U.S. was “absolutely serious” about preserving Laotian freedom. U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson pursued Nikita Khrushchev to Novosibirsk, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk called Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to Washington. They both conveyed Kennedy’s personal message: the U.S. viewed Laos as a test of the Kremlin’s ultimate intentions, and would not attempt to settle any other cold war issues until the Russians called off the invasion.

Convinced that the Russians would not and the Laotians could not stop the Red rebels, Kennedy appealed to the British to present a joint diplomatic front. London agreed. At midweek in Moscow, Britain’s dapper Ambassador Sir Frank Roberts presented a joint Anglo-U.S. offer to the Kremlin. If the Russians would order a ceasefire, then the West would agree to convene the ineffectual three-nation International Control Commission for Laos —consisting of Canada, India and Communist Poland—to certify the truce. Furthermore, the West was willing to scuttle the present pro-Western Laotian government in favor of a truly neutralist one.

Conspicuously missing was a Western demand that the Russians halt their airdrops to Laos. Conspicuously present was an Anglo-U.S. offer to submit to the incessant Soviet demand to call a conference of 14 nations, including Red China, to seal the fate of Laos. The Russians said blandly that they would study the offer, but the invasion picked up strength.

“The World Is Small.” “All right,” said Kennedy to a meeting of his top policy framers. “We must tell the congressional leaders and the people.” He postponed his press conference one day to get a statement drafted. Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy and Soviet Expert Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen drafted the first version, and Kennedy rejected it. Right up to press conference time he penciled away at the second draft in the anteroom of the new State Department auditorium. He was on the fourth page of the seven-page statement when he was told that the TV cameras were on. He coolly continued to read through to the end before he rose and pushed open the door. It was a worn and somber-looking John Kennedy who stepped before the record crowd (426) for a press conference.

“If these attacks do not stop,” said he in a fireside-chat manner, “those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response . . . My fellow Americans, Laos is far away from America, but the world is small. Its 2,000,000 people live in a country three times the size of Austria. The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all, in real neutrality observed by all … I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved.”

Kennedy stopped short of issuing an ultimatum. In the questioning that followed, he deftly parried newsmen’s persistent attempts to find out just how big a stick he was willing to wield to back up his soft words. The Pentagon’s lip was zipped, but word began to percolate from across the Pacific of the major military movements.

Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen and House Leader Charles Halleek promptly applauded the President’s position. Republican Barry Goldwater announced that he was praying “that the President will have the courage to follow through.” Dwight Eisenhower, holding his first press conference since vacating the White House, told reporters on the putting green of the Tamarisk Country Club near Palm Springs that he had received a phone call from Kennedy just that morning. Said Ike: “He outlined his ideas, and they seem to conform exactly with what we have been trying to do for years. So I went straight down the line with him.”

“Paper Tiger?” With a plan for action in his dispatch case. Secretary of State Dean Rusk emplaned for the SEATO ministers’ meeting in Bangkok to make his international debut. His task: to put spine into the eight disparate member states* in a pact that the Communists mock as “the Paper Tiger.” Early in the week some of the members were wary indeed. The very idea of SEATO intervention in Laos, sniffed one French official, was “deplorable.” Said a top Philippine government official: “Laos must be written off to Communism.” But Kennedy’s firm statement, and Rusk’s visit, galvanized the will to resist the Reds with force. The once reluctant British, Pakistanis, Australians and New Zealanders were ready to support force, and even the French were expected to come around. If Kennedy and Rusk could fashion a united front, they would prove that SEATO had matured into what Founder John Foster Dulles had intended it to be: a pact whose function “is not merely one of deterring open armed aggression but of preventing Communist subversion.”

*The U.S., Britain, France, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.