You're right,Chet. You're right. And you're fired.
Wofford, Harris
You're right,Chet. You're right. And you're fired. Why read about Chester Bowles? Because he was right most of the time and he was ignored most of the time, with tragic results for his...
...Alsop added that...
...Stevenson, by telephone, and others of us close to Bowles in Washington, urged Bowles to stand and fight and not quietly resign and take an ambassadorship...
...admired his efforts...
...You know, they are 80-percent right in their facts," Bowles mustered the strength to whisper to his daughter Sally, "but in the end they're wrong...
...While he knew the shortcomings of the department could not reasonably be blamed on Bowles, the Undersecretary was the logical target...
...On the ground that the timing seemed "inopportune," Rusk decided to delay the Bowles mission from September to October...
...In November, the future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, General Earle Wheeler, declared that "the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military," and furtherescalation was under way...
...In the 20 years after World War II, half the people of the world had changed their form of government even though the conventional forms of power-weapons, troops, industrial production, technology, communications, and the political apparatus-were on the side of the status quo...
...Bowles said there had been no such physical assault but that Bob's anger had been made very clear...
...Hapless Victim During those days, newspapers carried front-page stories about Bowles's impending resignation...
...In Kennedy, Sorensen describes how late that Sunday afternoon he found Bowles alone in the all-but-empty State Department building, determined to "resign and speak his mind...
...Kennedy was not motivated by any criticisms that Bowles was too 'soft,' or too naive, or had attempted to clear himself of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure...
...Of all the ambassadors America will ever send, you are the best...
...But that did not fully explain the tendency of the Democratic administration to reach for military answers to political problems...
...The pendulum swung back and forth between military intervention in Laos and a political solution...
...When he had the chance, in a critical National Security Council meeting on the Bay of Pigs, he didn't speak up and fight...
...I do not know of any national leader who has come to Washington and asked for arms who has not gone home with more than he expected to get, regardless of the legitimacy of his claim...
...Facing Fidel The militant "get Castro" mood alarmed Bowles, who noted that Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as newcomers to the foreign field, were easy targets for the "military-CIA-paramilitary type answers" that predominated in the discussion...
...The President's close friend, columnist Charles Bartlett, asserted that numerous foreign service officers were angry at Bowles because so many senior men had been asked to retire, and that they were "after his scalp...
...Joseph Alsop and Rowland Evans joined the fray: "highly placed White House spokesmen" were said to charge that Bowles was at home only with "big thoughts," and "members of Kennedy's political staff' were said to carry ~ grudge against him because of his refusal in 1960 to campaign against Humphrey in Wisconsin...
...Under heavy medication, he had two recurring hallucinations...
...force...
...During the 1950s, Bowles had developed a surprising accord with MacArthur on Asian policies, and he was hopeful that the General's visits with Kennedy in 1961 would strengthen the President's resistance to further military involvement in Vietnam...
...Lacking such a framework of moral conviction or sense of what is right and what is wrong, he is forced to lean almost entirely on his mental processes...
...He pleaded with Kennedy to spell out in a major address a comprehensive proposal for peace, independence, neutralization, and economic development of the whole region...
...In response, while persuading Bowles to become once again ambassador to India, Kennedy said the record would show that he had come down on Bowles's side of the intra-administration debates more often than not...
...After Nixon's election, Bowles resigned, and, in his last months of good health, wrote his memoirs...
...However, a larger reason for the narrow escapes, he began to fear, was the new administration's- and Kennedy's-lack of "a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and wrong...
...In response, he was shown a study that concluded the Chinese could be kept out of Southeast Asia by 300,000 U.S...
...The President's attitude toward Bowles's old foe was ambivalent...
...On his return they would continue their discussions about the department...
...In December 1962 Bowles had written the President that he wanted to resign his post because of the continued domination of foreign policy by European-oriented peo' pie who gave no priority to "outlying areas" where most of the human race lives, "Over and over again," Bowles said, "we have passed up opportunities to take the initiative and to help shape the course of events-rather than be controlled by them...
...the President could not have refused him a hearing, if he had used his polItical capital for the purpose, instead of sending Rusk into battle armed with' a memorandum...
...Kennedy could not stand hearing something he thought he already knew...
...Bowles thought "militarized liberals" were in part a reaction to years of being charged with softness .on communism...
...And now, as in 1954, many able U.S...
...In 1962 and early 1963, as the President's Special Representative and Adviser on Asian, African, and Latin American Affairs, Bowles tried to challenge the shared assumptions of the set around Kennedy and lift sights from short-range expediencies...
...Bowles was ever an optimistic Unitarian and liberal humanist...
...He proposed that John Connally become the assistant secretary for Latin America: "Not an expert in the field, but at least he is a man of action...
...Under normal conditions, when he is not tired or frustrated, this pragmatic approach should successfully bririg him out on the right side of the question...
...Although he was phenomenally successful, he was always embarrassed about his business background...
...took as their basic premise that "there can be no longterm living with Castro as a neighbor," Bowles was an obvious dissenter...
...The White House nickname for Harriman was "the crocodile...
...In June the Attorney General had still not discarded the idea of sending in troops...
...Later that day Bowles found that the State Department cable drafted for the guidance of all U.S...
...You can't wait...
...Instead of going to graduate or professional school, he went into the advertising business, aiming to make a million dollars and enter public service...
...Bowles agreed that "when forced to !lct in response to specific crises, we have often ended up at the last minute doing the right thing-thanks largely to your own pers'onal insights...
...e had gone to the former Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and always regretted not having taken the full liberal arts program...
...Any thought that this Administration is tough-minded in the administration of our military assistance program is a serious mistake," Bowles wrote...
...After Bowles, as acting secretary of state, in Rusk's and the President's absence in Europe, blocked a plan the Attorney General favored for an immediate, limited military intervention in the Dominican Republic to assure a friendly regime there, Robert Kennedy called Bowles a gutless bastard...
...This account omits the role of Robert Kennedy...
...Kennedy' skimmed through the memorandum, nodded, said he would read it...
...At the third meeting, however, the invasion was dropped...
...When Bowles spoke with the President, he expressed his concern whether there was enough personal rapport to make the new post worthwhile...
...Last Hallucinations In the 1970s, Bowles became increasingly disabled with Parkinson's disease...
...When he heard his sons talking about their plans for its reform, Joseph Kennedy told them he had heard much the same kind of talk from Franklin Roosevelt...
...There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one 12-month period," the President explained to Galbraith, who also opposed escalation...
...The dominant view was that "the Communists must be taught a lesson...
...The President promptly invited Bowles to lunch, took him for a swim in the White House pool and then upstairs to the family quarters, and outlined his thinking...
...But in the summer of 1963 he sent Bowles into exile, as ambassador to India...
...Taylor and Rostow returned with recommendations for the immediate dispatch of American helicopters, B-26s, military advisers, training experts, and some 8,000 regular ground troops, and accepted the possi bility that as many as six full divisions, or 200,000 men, might eventually be required...
...After the debacle, Bowles presented to the National Security Council a restrained department paper on Cuba that Bob Kennedy called "a disgrace...
...Robert Kennedy, who heard the General, seemed to take seriously MacArthur's warning that "we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table...
...Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India, thought that Bowles's trouble was his "uncontrollable" instinct for persuasion, which he brings to bear on the persuaded, the unpersuaded, and the totally irredeemable alike...
...troops in Laos if we couldn't do so in Cuba...
...With admiration, Schlesinger described how the wise old man would seize those split seconds, and if he dissented, would say so in a few blunt sentences...
...As the Defense chiefs pressed for more in the fall of 1961, the President sent Taylor and Walt Rostow, both known to be strong advocates of counter-insurgency, on an investigating mission to Vietnam...
...Bowles got Secretary of State Dean Rusk to change the wording to reflect the President's more moderate views...
...He asked Bowles whether he would like to be ambassador to Chile~Bowles said he wasn't interested in an embassy, but would like to come back and tell the President in detail what he had been tryi~g to do in the State Department and what he thought the problems were...
...Highlevel meetings were held on Bowles's cable, but nothing came of it...
...Bowles said he could only consider that if he had specific responsibilities for the formulation of foreign policy, working directly with the President...
...in two·days he was to see Bowles again and decide what to do...
...The President expressed interest, and for a time supported the idea of offering to sell wheat to China...
...troops, plus assistance from our allies-but added that at some stage nuclear weapons would probably be required...
...He recalled the costly, losing French effort to defeat Ho Chi Minh in the early 1950s, opposition to which had first brought Kennedy and Bowles together, and said: "Nine years have passed and now it is we who appear to be striving, in defiance of powerful indigenous political and military forces, to insure the survival of an unpopular Vietnamese regime with inadequate roots among the people...
...that left Bowles the natural one to go...
...From years of working with B'owles, I believe he had an unwarranted inferiority complex about his own education that inhibited him in dealing with the besteducated and brightest of the Kennedy circle...
...After receiving a glowing account of Bowles's performance at the conference of American ambassadors in Africa, the Attorney General wrote his brother that "this is the kind of thing Bowles should be doing all the time...
...Kennedy "liked Bowles, liked most of his ideas, and liked most of his personnel recommendations," and "felt the men recommended by Bowles had done better than Rusk's," wrote Ted Sorensen later...
...Then, shortly before Bowles was to depart for Asia, a State Department memorandum directly attacked the new approach as "unrealistic, impractical and premature...
...In his notebook, Bowles predicted that for our failure in Vietnam we would "pay a heavy price...
...The other was thatlawyersand experts, like those who had dominated the State Department, were surrou~ding him and driving him into a corner in his own living room...
...Harriman was sent to Geneva with instructions not to come back without a settlement...
...For many of them, as for me, Bowles's standing within the administration was a test of the President's intentions in foreign policy...
...Reading it nearly 20 years later in Bowles's book, Promises to Keep, I feel as I did when he showed it to me in draft form: What a different history there might be if American foreign policy would ever really go in the direction he pointed...
...Another was that the President was so preoccupied with short-gap expedients that his longer~range policy line was not very clear...
...By October, the Cuban missile crisis prevented its consideration...
...Such an invasion, he contended, would "compound the disaster," and "even if it succeeded, Castro would emerge as the hero in what would surely be viewed throughout the world as a struggle between David and Goliath...
...military advisers and the counter-insurgent Green Berets, but not, for the present, introduce regular combat troops...
...Chef Bowles," said Rusk, "has contributed many ideas which are now an integral part of American foreign policy...
...Bowles renewed his proposal for an internationally guaranteed neutralization...
...One bright spot emerged: Averell Harriman...
...he decided to wait...
...I added: "You need someone who, from the time he wakes up in the morning until he goes to sleep, knows that the Cuban invasion is wrong and that our new position on Angola is right...
...Unlike most of the witty people around Kennedy, Bowles did not cover his convictions with a veneer of cynicism...
...They agreed to meet again the following week...
...The President, however, was not prepared to take on the· CIA in a major political battle, and since he was no more affirmative toward the State Department than toward the CIA, he was unlikely to see their combination as any gain...
...What worries me are the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry, frustrated or emotionally affected...
...He was concerned about the narrow perspectives of the "military leaders had on political questions...
...so that whenever he'd get this military advice from the Joint Chiefs or from me or anyone else, he'd say, 'Well, now, you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I'll be convinced.'" But in fact it was Maxwell Taylor who was in the ascendancy, due in large part to Robert Kennedy's enthusiasm for the former war hero, after whom he named his newborn son...
...Between Kennedy's election and his inauguration, the Far Eastern Bureau of the State Department and the CIA helped to engineer a rightist coup against the neutralist regime of Prince Souvanna Phouma...
...But on Bowles's return in late August, he found Kennedy warm, friendly, and full of good questions...
...Encouraged by the President's attitude, Bowles recommended a drastic reform: the dismantling of the CIA and absorption of its non-covert functions by offices directly responsible to the State Department...
...No one enjoys a Cassandra, and it became clear that Kennedy did not welcome Bowles's voice in his inner councils...
...According to Bowles·, Kennedy said that he might have made a mistake in not making Bowles Secretary of State, and that if he had done so, things might have been different...
...Lights Ouf Bowles's first reaction was that he should leave the administration...
...On Thanksgiving weekend, 1961, the President made his move...
...However, it became clear that any relaxation of the policy of hostility toward the Peking government would have to await a resounding reelection victory in 1964...
...The President's and the department's leadership were on trial throughout the spring of 1961 on the issue of Laos, where another Cuban situation, or worse, was developing...
...Maybe that is the answer," he wrote...
...The President seemed to agree with Bowles, but the flow of arms was not checked...
...Arthur Schlesinger was to write that Bowles was "the hapless victim of the conditions which he had diagnosed better than anybody else...
...Kennedy discounted that problem, assuring Bowles that he was the strongest asset the administration had in those three crucial regions of the world and that he was indispensable...
...Complex Hero Bowles does not emerge as a pure hero...
...The accords finaily reached bought time for the people of Laos, but before long the growing war in South Vietnam spilled over, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos became a major military problem...
...After one particularly disturbing White House session, Bowles wrote in his journal: "Anyone in public life who has strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of public morality, both domestic and international, has a very great advantage in times of strain, since his instincts on what to do are clear and immediate...
...meanwhile, the President said· he would make a public statement confirming that Bowles -was staying on as undersecretary...
...Deaf and in his 71 st year, he was nevertheless able to work with Kennedy better than anyone else in the Department, and was more successful than any other Kennedy man in changing department policy...
...Born with the idea bf a republic in his head, Bowles was one of Mark Twain's true Connecticut Yankees...
...When a new Cuba task force, led by Maxwell Taylor and Robert Kennedy...
...Kennedy was said to have wryly asked hciw we could expect to stop communism with U.S...
...1980 by Harris Wofford...
...When Bowles returned to Kennedy on July 17, he showed the President several basic foreign policy memoranda he had written, including his warning against the Cuban landing...
...A few hours before Salinger was to announce sweeping changes in the State Department, Bowles was informed by Rusk that George Ball would taKe his place, and he would be offered an ambassadorship...
...The "Thanksgiving Massacre" occurred swiftly...
...When he learned that Bowles had agreed to the shift, the President (who, Sorensen says, "looked with some amusement on my assignments as a missionary to liberals,") congratulated him: "Good job, Ted-that was your best work since the Michigan delegation...
...This called for sqme changes...
...When the President didn't remove Bowles in July, Robert Kennedy (unknown to any of us at the time) kept pressing the point...
...John and Robert Kennedy had been brought up by their father to look down on these aspects of the department...
...That he could not get the benefit of such a mind, that it took man-eating sharks and crocodiles to get through to him, demonstrated a flaw in the president's own intelligence at least as great as the failure of the outside intelligence provided him by the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department...
...In 1978 Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai went to Bowles's home on the banks of the Connecticut River to pay a special tribute...
...However, Rusk was Secretary, and the department had not come throllgh with the new policy changes the President had wanted...
...To show that his restraint in Cuba during the invasion did not mean the United States was going to abandon its friends in "Laos, the President, over Bowles's opposition, ordered American military advisers in Laos to wear military uniforms instead of their previous inconspicuous civilian clothes...
...In a blow-by-blow account to Adlai Stevenson (then in Italy), Bowles wrote of the luncheon with Kennedy, "I have never heard the President talk as thoughtfully and passionately on foreign affairs...
...And he did not later demand to see Kennedy to make his case...
...He found the 30 highest officials ofthe government "emotional, almost savage...
...I wonder if these assurances are not based on a dangerously false premise, i.e., that the Communists will not embarrass us by upping the military ante...
...In response, Bowles predicted that if we did nothing to achieve a negotiated peace, "we may be forced within the next year or so to choose between committing more and more American troops and material...
...Saying that none of these had reached him, Kennedy read them, conveyed a strong interest, and said that Bowles should proceed with his plans for a series of meetings with American ambassadors in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia...
...With the State Department shake-up, Joe Kennedy's sons thought they were finally taking control...
...In contrast to Harriman, Bowles was not only prone to longer exploration of issues, but to long explanations...
...With his Irish and Catholic roots, Kennedy saw the world as tragic and comic...
...by Harris Wofford A generation later, it is difficult to recall what Chester Bowles represented to many Americans...
...Raze the Titanic The record shows that most of the thinking about changes in the State Department focused on how to get "action," not on what the action should be...
...As for Bowles, the Attorney General concluded that he must be removed from his key post...
...He was never at his best with Kennedy and his men...
...One is to find out where we think he is going and to help him get there...
...In regard to the many more ideas of his which were not accepted -only the historians can determine who was right and who was wrong...
...To prevent it, the President asked Sorensen to stand by with a political fire extinguisher and "hold his hand a little, as one 'liberal' to another...
...The inertia, the almost feudal division of power among the regional bureaus, the tendency to support the status quo were indeed built-in, long-standing problems...
...For a while there was no further talk of his displacement as undersecretary...
...military authorities are convinced that the situation is moving in our favor and that victory can be foreseen within two to three years...
...I've learned," he said later, "that you have a split second" when the President is looking around the room at a time of decision...
...Bowles urged a "two nation" policy for China and Taiwan...
...He lamented the State Department...
...The emphasis was on clandestine harassment and possibly economic sanctions against nations such as Mexico and Brazil, which had voted in the U.N...
...Bowles warned Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs, Indochina and . Berlin...
...Along with Justice Douglas, Bowles had opposed the CIA intervention in Iran to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh and bring back the Shah...
...However, the Pentagon continued to offer them planes and guns...
...Chet, you are the best," he said...
...On Vietnam, for a while, Bowles thought his influence-along with that of the more commanding General Douglas MacArthur, whose support he had enlisted- might count with the President...
...During this period there were other pressures for U.S...
...He felt his argument was brushed aside...
...Not only had he been right about the Bay of Pigs, for more than a decade he had been laying foundations among the public for a new foreign policy that would point in the opposite direction from the CIA's action in Cuba...
...The President probably agreed more with Bowles than with Rusk, which is what Alsop feared...
...Sorensen telephoned Kennedy and a proposal was made which Bowles finally accepted: he would become the President's Special Representative and Adviser for Asian, African, and Latin American Affairs...
...To fire Rusk after only six months would reflect on the President's judgment in piCking him...
...In early July, Rusk told his undersecretary: "Last night, I was tpinking of the frustrating job you have and how unijappy it must make you...
...Mouth open, and I bite," said Harriman...
...Bowles expected opposition from the military, CIA, and parts of the State Department, but thought the President was finally committed to the peace effort...
...His success threw light on Bowles's failure...
...The alternatives were actively argued within the State Department and the White House...
...In May 1962, as American casualties began to mount, Bowles returned from a visit to Southeast Asia and urged the President to undertake an "agonizing reappraisal...
...Knowing Alsop's influence with both John and Robert Kennedy, I feared the column's effect...
...It seemed to be the kind of case Bowles had rightly feared: in the aftermath of a humiliating defeat, tired, angry, frustrated peopIe, without a basic moral reference point, were striking out at the wrong target...
...quiet British-Soviet negotiation produced an agreement on a cease-fire and the convening of a 14-nation conference at Geneva to ,seek a political settlement...
...The President decided to go the military route, but only partway: he would increase the number of U.S...
...But he asked why it had to be like a Western movie in which the b~d guys seemed to be winning until the last moment, when the tables suddenly turned and the President saved the day...
...Citing Gandhi's India, Mao's China, and Castro's Cuba, Bowles argued that material power was likely to come out second-best in a contest with ideas which move men to great efforts and sacrifice...
...Militarized Liberals' Looking back on the first six months of the Kennedy administration, Bowles was uneasy...
...I do not mean that you should always take Bowles's advicebut it needs to be there steadily, and to be heard...
...But, as Schlesinger notes, they were soon complaining that "nothing improved...
...the President asked him for a private memorandum outlining the changes he would recommend in the de": partment...
...The week after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs early in 1961, Bowles attended a meeting of the National Security Council at the President's request...
...He saio precisely the things you and I have been advocatingfor years, and he said them well...
...The President vetoed the sanctions, saying that we had no alternative but to live with the humiliation our error had created and respect tl"!e attitudes of other nations who had disagreed with our actions...
...At a second National Security Council meeting three days later, Bowles argued against proposals that the United States move directly against Castro...
...Bowles's effort boomeranged...
...Maxwell Taylor noted that it made "a hell of an impression on the President...
...From Bowles's standpoint, Kennedy was soon to go further astray...
...Put him down in Cuba or Indochina and his moral compass would swing around and say no to military intervention...
...He urged Kennedy to resist the pressure to retaliate and not to let the situation "deteriorate into a head-to-head personal contest between the President of the United States and Fidel Castro...
...Because his convictions led him to focus on what people thought and felt, he had the ability that Castro said was missing in "imperialists": Bowles was able to assess more accurately the prospects for a revolution against Castro and the power of nationalism than those who concentrated mainly on military factors...
...Hard-liners conterided that the Soviets had agreed to compromise because of the threat of U.S...
...American armed forces had not been sent into action in Cuba, Indochina, the Dominican Republic, or on the Autobahn, but all of these affairs were cliffhangers...
...In contrast, Bowles was impatient witp the career staffs endemic caution, and confident of "the power of talented men to make a real imprint on the tides of history if they boldly strike out to do so...
...In the spring of 1963, Bowles wrote Kennedy on Vietnam once more, saying he hesitated "to play the role of Cassandra again," but "if this course is pursued, the Southeast Asia situation will ultimately have a serious impact on the Administration's position at home and abroad...
...At a State Department ceremony in July 1969, he was given the Award for Distinguished Service, and the former Secretary of State gave the last toast...
...he adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion...
...Pierre Salinger's press briefing, however, was far from reassuring...
...The undersecretary had amassed a powerful coalition of determined opponents, but "the foreign service cliques, the CIA professionals, the Pentagon generals and the right-wing editorials were all opposed to Bowles for the wrong reasons...
...It was a course that Rusk was probably constitutionally unable to take...
...or withdrawing in embarrassed frustration...
...One reason was that neither the Secretary nor, with Bowles gone, the undersecretary was deeply committed to what the President probably meant by his "policy line...
...Sorensen convinced Bowles that in spite of everything, the President genuinely wanted him to stay on as a roving ambassador...
...I wrote and hand-delivered to the President a memorandum arguing that firing Bowles would be a serious mistake-a setback to the United States in the world (because Bowles was the most positive symbol of American support for developing nations), at home (because it would signal that the administration was rejecting progressive thinking), and within the State Department (where Bowles deserved .credit for trying to introduce new people and new ideas...
...I knew this was not a memorandum the President would like...
...Because he was right most of the time and he was ignored most of the time, with tragic results for his country-results we might avoid in the future by understanding why he was right and why he was ignored...
...This latter approach is, I believe, the only responsible course...
...A complete break would set me free to spell out publicly the weaknesses in our foreign policy and in our State Department organization, the dangers of our increasingly military-oriented approach," he wrote...
...It grew darker and darker, but neither of us moved to turn on the lights...
...Afterwards," as a friend," Bowles asked to speak to the President, who had appeared to be the calmest man in the meeting...
...Although Rusk may not have disagreed with Bowles's specific prescriptions for China, Southeast Asia, southern Africa, or Latin America, the whole approach was the antithesis of how the Secretary operated...
...This time, the President not only agreed that the time was ripe for such a move, but seemed enthusiastic...
...He badly needed someone close to him who had "a basic moral reference point...
...That was exactly what Kennedy feared...
...Bowles was asked to draft a "Peace Charter for Southeast Asia" and to visit capitals in the region to secure advance support...
...Then in May...
...Robert Kennedy seemed particularly drawn to Alsop's approach...
...Nevertheless, Kennedy's inability to bring out the best and draw on the wisdom of Bowles was the President's loss...
...Vividly remembering Pierre Salinger's fury against Bowles at the time of the Cuban invasion, I could not help thinking that Bowles's opposition then was a major factor behind this action ten weeks later...
...By then Bowles was barely able to speak audibly, an ironic fate for someone so often criticized for talking too much...
...Yet on issue after issue Bowles turned out to have been more realistic than the realists...
...Harris Wofford, a Philadelphia lawyer who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has known Chester Bowles for almost 30 years, and is the author of Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, from which this article is adapted...
...The President's emissary "shared his grief...
...Chet,' he asked, 'how would you like to be ambassador to Chile?' In his memorandum to Rusk, Bowles had said that "there are two ways Jor the State Department to deal with the President...
...That he should be the scapegoat for the dep!lrtment's weaknesses, which he was trying more than anyone else to overcome, seem~d too absurd to believe...
...According to Samuel Lewis, a perceptive young foreign service officer, Rusk was an orderly "staff man" who believed in the organization over which he presided, trusted the experts who made it up, and was conscious "of the limited power of men to alter broad courses of events...
...The President seemed to consider neutralization a good goal, but one for which the time was not ripe...
...At a Georgetown dinner, McGeorge Bundy said to the State Departmenfs legal adviser (and fellow Harvard faculty colleague), Abram Chayes, that no one in the White House knew precisely who was responsible for the lack of direction and initiative in the State Department but that changes would have to be made, and "you can't change Rusk...
...One day Kennedy invited him over for a swim in the White House pool...
...He also disliked discussion of principles and morality, which he considered appropriate for the public platform, not for the inner councils of state...
...It was "the grimmest gathering iQ my experience in government," Bowles said afterwards...
...Although the Kennedys tended to view the former governor, ambassador, congressman, and OPA chief as a liberal ideologue, in his talks around the country and through his writings, Bowles had been able to reach beyond the liberal Democratic constituency to appeal to a wide cross-section of Democrats, Republicans, and independents...
...In late June, Bowles gave Rusk a detailed, well-argued memorandum reviewing their first six months arid proposing new directions for American foreign policy...
...The other is to determine what we think is right for him to do, and then vigorously and thoughtfully to present our case, even though he may disagree with it" and even though our views may on occasion bring us into cQnflict with the Pentagon and other agencies...
...One was that dark-skinned Third World people were chasing him because their revolution had gone wrong...
...He talked about razing the whole thing and starting from scratch...
...Kennedy was skeptical of such a compass...
...When Bowles described these conversa~ tions to me, I was astounded...
...Soon after the inauguration, he had proposed a more limited reorganization of the CIA, but the Bay of Pigs experience convinced him that a complete change was required...
...Kennedyand Rusk were ridiculed for allowing themselves to be manipulated by Bowles and a lot of "wild liberals...
...to condemn the United States...
...Saying that Bowles's resignation was "not currently expected/' Salinger muttered off-therecord to at least one newsman that he might not be around for very long...
...Bowles complained, 'I don't know of anyone who has come to Washington asking for arms who didn't go home with more than he expected to get.'On military aid, Bowles sought to persuade the Shah of Iran and Emperor Haile Selassie to cease their military buildup and concentrate resources on economic and social development...
...On the more critical military front in Europe, Khrushchev began challenging Kennedy in Berlin, and the case was made in high policy-planning circles that ·to underline American firmness (especially after Cuba) the President should send heavily armored convoys up the Autobahn to Berlin...
...Only time will tell...
...What· made it so confounding was the President's own strong and convincing statements agreeing with Bowles's basic approach...
...On May 30, 1961, the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, was ass-assimited with U. S. assistance (which Bowles approved) to those planning the coup, and there was fear that if the United States didn't move in to establish a pto-American regime Castro would take over...
...There was hardly any discrepancy between what he said in public and what he said in private...
...Instead of responding to tile memorandum on hew directions, Rusk asked, "Why don't you free yourself from the department and take on the job of roving ambassador...
...the President "would have made no audible protest if Bowles had suddenly decided to join a community of Indian swamis on his recent visit to his favorite subcontinent...
...In the National Security Council, under Kennedy as under Eisenhower, the dominant voices seemed always to be asking cynically, like Stalin, "But how many divisions has the Pope...
...Political Pendulum The thought that America should attempt to "save Laos" by a nuclear attack struck Bowles as preposterous...
...Bowles attacked this as a provocative game of Russian roulette...
...embassies misrepresented the President's decision and seemed to instruct American envoys to bring pressure on their host governments to cut relations with Castro and sever trade with Cuba...
...The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and wellintentioned as President Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point...
...For the President, according to Sorensen, it was just a matter of "better matching men and jobs...
...From the time he entered the White House discussions on the second day of the Cuban invasion, he was infuriatedby Bowles's lack of anti-Castro militancy...
...Press accounts had described Robert Kennedy as angrily accosting Bowles at a White Hous~ meeting, jamming his fingers into Bowles's stomach, and saying that Bowles may have been against the landing once but he better damn well be for it now...
...He was not "the tough, terse, yes-or-no type" that the President apparently found it easiest to work with, he said, and there was nothing he could do to become one...
...I've had the Bay of Pigs and pulling out of Laos, and I can't accept a third...
...Bowles believed that their readiness to negotiate more likely arose from Moscow's and Hanoi's unwillingness to see Laos "saved" by Chinese intervention...
...Dean Rusk spoke graciously of the freshness of Bowles's mind and the fact that he had more ideas in a day than most people have in a year...
...When Bowles asked him to say frankly whether this was his or the President's idea, Rusk said it was Kennedy's...
...Visiting Vietnam again in the summer of 1963, Bowles was so disturbed by what he saw that he sent a private cable to the President urging him to send someone in whom he had personal confidence to make a fresh and independent analysis...
...In April 1961, when the Pentagon had wanted to send 3,600 combat troops to Vietnam, the President had compromised on 100 military advisers and 400 Green Berets...
...Then a widely syndicated column by Joseph Alsop stirred the issue again...
...In the first discussions of Laos within the new administration Bowles urged steps toward neutralization but found a surprising consensus in favor of military intervention if necessary to save the American-backed regime...
...For those of a tragic persuasion, it was easy to smile at Bowles's unshakable faith in democracy and progress...
...With them, as David Halberstam put it, he became "a curiously heavy figure," and knowing that he was not as facile as the lean, swift men around Kennedy, he "became even more awkward...
...It closed with the proposition that was to become the official American dogma for the next six years: 'The primary problem we must recognize is that the Hanoi Government has not yet been given adequate reason to call off its aggression in South Vietnam...
...military intervention, which Bowles helped to resist...
...At a White House meeting in midMarch, Bowles pressed the Pentagon for its contingency plans in case the Chinese came in to prevent an American military presence just south of their border...
...Sorensen conceded that "even after the personnel changes" it was never clear to the President "who was in charge, who was clearly delegated to do what, and why his own policy seemed consistently to be altered or evaded...
...someone who, if given a chance, will argue strongly from this special view of the world...
...He didn't do a damn thing about it, and neither are you...
...With the support of Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman, he pushed hard for an alternative: American support for the neutralist Souvanna Phouma...
Vol. 12 • July 1980 • No. 5
