(1) National Security Archive (24th November, 2003)
On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a US official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official US involvement could be plausibly denied.
The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called "an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is very interested in (the prospect for negotiations)." Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.
(2) James C. Thompson, A Memory of Mcgeorge Bundy, New York Times (22nd September, 1996)
Probably the brightest of the lot, McGeorge Bundy, died suddenly of a heart attack last week at the age of 77. Most of the obituaries stressed his role as a Vietnam War hawk when he was national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and (especially) Johnson.
In my view, the obit writers got it wrong. The man, and the circumstances, were a lot more complex.
I was a callow 33-year-old when he summoned me from the State Department to join his National Security Council staff in July 1964. But I watched him up close in those critical two years of decisions about Vietnam, before we both left Washington in 1966.
Mac Bundy was one of the few Kennedy loyalists to stay on under Lyndon Johnson and adjust to the formidable and volatile new boss. Mac's job was to evaluate, compress and clarify the avalanche of foreign affairs information in the White House.
He was a skilled adjudicator, not an advocate -- especially on Vietnam. He tolerated and even encouraged dissent from conventional wisdom, as long as it was expressed with brevity and evidence. He seemed to have no firm convictions on the inherited Vietnam mess. His loyalty was to the president and to our nation's security.
When I reported that the 1964 turmoil in Saigon might result in a Buddhist-neutralist coup and a polite invitation to the United States to withdraw, Mac would nod and smile almost hopefully. When I would express doubts about the whole Vietnam intervention, he would ask me to put them very privately on paper.
In December, after the LBJ landslide, he called me into his office to read the chosen interagency option for dealing with Vietnam now that the election was over. Out of three grossly oversimplified options -- the first being, roughly, turn tail and run, the second, blow up the world -- the third, a gradual and sustained bombing of North Vietnam until Hanoi cried uncle, seemed moderate.
I told Mac that although I was an ignoramus on weaponry, I had learned quite a bit about the history of Vietnam's struggles against foreign powers. I thought we might bomb them back to the Stone Age, but that Ho Chi Minh's deeply rooted Vietnamese revolutionaries knew that if they retreated we would eventually go home. Mac nodded and sighed. "Well," he said, "you may very well be right."
What happened two months later was the critical turning point. Lyndon Johnson wanted to make sure that South Vietnam would (italics)not(end italics) be lost to communism. But he was uneasy about escalating the war. So he delayed, and finally sent to Vietnam his one detached and trusted adviser, Mac, to make a recommendation.
Mac arrived in Saigon just before the Vietcong blew up the American barracks at Pleiku. Much has been written about how the visual horror of dead and wounded young Americans affected his judgment.
And, indeed, it was only then that Mac wrote his famous message urging Johnson to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam. Mac, the dispassionate man, became, for a while, ardent.
But Mac, the skeptic, was still alive, if hobbled by the suspicious, tyrannical LBJ. After the February escalation in 1965, Mac told one of my senior NSC colleagues to explore the possibility of negotiating with Hanoi, but demanded that the suggestions be written out longhand, for Mac alone, lest LBJ or the Senate hawks find out.
On June 30, 1965, Mac sent a one-page memo to the arch-escalator, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, suggesting, with amazing prescience, that the Pentagon's plan was "rash to the point of folly."
There is no indication that Mac shared that memo with LBJ. In any case, the US ground forces were augmented.
Perhaps Mac should have quit on principle. But in December 1965, he announced that he would leave the following March to become the president of the Ford Foundation.
In February, he and I overlapped briefly in Saigon, and we had one quiet talk. On my return to Washington, I learned that Mac had told the NSC staff he was optimistic about the war, but, much to my astonishment, that they they should wait to hear my very different views.
In 1968, after I wrote a critique of Vietnam policy in The Atlantic, Mac chastised me for betraying LBJ's trust. We didn't make up for eight years. By then I was running Harvard's Nieman Fellowships for journalists, and Mac came to talk to the fellows.
