n the five months after the death of Casey Peterson, Kennedy I chastised himself daily for bowing to political pressures and his own selfish fears. He knew even the most ambitious withdrawal plan wouldn’t have been hasty enough to save Casey, but hundreds of U.S. servicemen had died since July 30 last, and Kennedy believed his own reluctance to stand up to his military and intelligence advisors was responsible for some of those deaths. Instead of using the authority of his office to dictate policy he had attempted to engage far too many skeptics in dialog engineered to persuade through the power of logic and reason. Too many times, he had accepted false acquiescence from opponents whose only real purpose was to keep Kennedy placated and marginalized.
General Taylor, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been of enormous help to Kennedy. However, even though Taylor had become a believer that night in the Oval Office just before the election, he had allowed the hawks of war to chip away at his faith in Kennedy. He was no longer sure of anything. He sat back and watched, let Kennedy deal with the crisis. He told himself that if Kennedy persevered, he’d be all the stronger for it. He may have been right.
In early December 1965, Kennedy reached the limit. He was ready to have the showdown that had been brewing for the past two years. He knew it might get ugly, and with Christmas so near, he waited until after the holidays.
Early on the morning of January 4, 1966, Kennedy called for a 213
meeting with the Joint Chiefs, immediately, in the White House Situation Room. Four Marines stood guard outside the door to the SR, and two additional were inside. All carried sidearms.
To their credit, none of the Chiefs showed reluctance to answer Kennedy’s call. They each thought something big was brewing, and the White House needed their help. As each Chief arrived in the SR, he was told he would need to wait until the rest arrived, the door to the room was closed, and the Marine guard posted. This rather an-noyed the early arrivals, but they saw it as part of whatever crisis had brought them together.
When the last Chief arrived, Kennedy’s aid, Ken O’Donnell, stepped into the room to say the president would join them shortly, and then he left, ignoring shouted questions from several in the room. Angered now, several picked up phones in the room, only to find them disconnected.
Fifteen minutes later, at 1:30 PM, the SR doors opened and the Marines stepped aside to allow Kennedy and Ken to enter. The Marine guards closed the doors and resumed their posts. The room had been abuzz before Kennedy entered, and he took advantage of the momentary lull to begin speaking, loud and clear, as he made his way to the head of the table.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, and he remained standing. “The document Ken is distributing is Operation CP, our withdrawal plan. We’re getting out of Vietnam. We’ll be out by July 30.
That date is important to me. Don’t even think of missing it.”
The Chiefs had all been standing when Kennedy entered the SR, and they had all remained standing. After Kennedy finished speaking, the other Chiefs all looked at the one furthest from Kennedy, and he spoke up. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he said, with just enough sarcasm in his voice for it to be noticeable. “We’ll study your plan and get back to you in a couple of weeks with recommendations.” He picked up the document Ken had placed in front of him and walked to the door. The Marines blocking the exit didn’t budge.
They didn’t even acknowledge him.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, General,” Kennedy said. “The 214
plan is complete, as is. It should be easy to interpret.”
“Now see here, Mr. President,” the Chief said, even more sar-castically than before, as he turned and took a few steps toward Kennedy, “Surely you’re aware of how complicated is our position in Vietnam. Any plan will require careful study before we can agree to act upon any part of it.”
“I’m not asking for your agreement. I’m giving you a direct order: implement my plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam by July 30 of this year. Do you refuse to obey that order, General?”
The chief’s lower jaw dropped open, and he glanced sideways at the other chiefs. He—only this minute—realized Kennedy had maneuvered him into an untenable position: either disobey a direct order from the president, or back down. He stared daggers at Kennedy as he considered his next words, and he quickly decided. He had never backed down, not once in his life, and he didn’t believe this limp-wristed liberal masquerading as a president had the back-bone to follow through with his threat. “I’m afraid I must, Mr. President.”
“Thank you, General, for your candor. You are relieved of command duties, and you’ll face charges for insubordination.” Kennedy turned to the two Marines standing rigid—and wide-eyed—at the door. “Escort the general out of the White House.”
The chief finally understood the extent of his trouble. The charges were probably a bluff. He’d seen this same dance performed many times before. Faced with the charges, he’d be allowed to retire, instead. Essentially, he was a civilian, as of this minute. As the Marines led him from the room, he tried appealing to Kennedy, claiming it was a misunderstanding. Kennedy didn’t even look at him.
With one less chief in the room, Kennedy turned to those remaining and said, “Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen. No one sleeps until every detail of that plan is on an achievable timeline culminating on July 30. You’re dismissed.”
The chiefs saluted and exited the room with their copies of the withdrawal plan. Ken followed them out, but Maxwell Taylor did 215
not. As Ken pulled the door closed behind him, Max Tayler turned toward Kennedy, stood at attention and said, “Sir, my failure as your advisor, and as your… My failure made necessary the risks you took today. Please accept my deepest apology, and my immediate resignation.”
Kennedy put his hands in his jacket pockets as he turned away from Taylor and paced toward the door, his eyes staring at the floor, thinking. He stopped in front of the door, then turned toward Taylor and said, “I accept your apology, Max. I’ll accept your resignation, if you tell me you cannot tolerate working for me.”
“Sir, it has been a privilege, the highest honor of my career, to have worked for you.”
“Resignation denied. Now get out of here. We’ll not speak of this again.”
Taylor stared for a moment at Kennedy. Then he picked up his copy of the plan, said, “Sir,” as he saluted Kennedy, and left.
With only Kennedy remaining in the SR, Ken reentered, and waited for Kennedy to speak. “That went well,” he finally said.
“Yes, Sir, as well as we could have expected,” Ken replied. “I’d still like to have at least two Marines stick to you like glue for the next few weeks. Can I get an amen to that, Sir?”
“Amen to that, Ken. For now. We’ll reduce my public appearances as near to zero as we can, until the withdrawal has gone beyond the point of no return. Then we’ll hang on, and hope I’m right.”
Three years, sixteen days, remained of his Presidency.
If they gave awards for such things, the 1966 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam would have earned a big one. The JCS gave JFK his timeline, achieving every dictate of Operation CP, within forty-eight hours of the January 4 showdown in the Situation Room. Decades later, after the USSR and USA released key documents of that era, historians would dub it the President’s Gambit. Success wasn’t assured. JFK had gained insight from his legal pad only in bits and pieces. He only followed the plan a short time into the future before 216
the number of possibilities became too numerous to fathom. He felt he’d gleaned enough to give the plan better-than-even odds of success, even though China and Russia would likely suffer massive losses. He felt guilty for the deception he would impose upon them and for the deaths it would cause, but he was determined that American servicemen should not be among those deaths. That was the most important part of the plan, for Kennedy. If it failed, history would call it his failure. He thought he could live with that.
An ongoing border dispute—on the northeast border of China and the southeast of Russia—involved contested islands in the Ussuri River. The dispute had nearly come to blows in the past, and in a fortuitous turn for JFK, the dispute escalated into armed confrontation in February 1966. Within two weeks, 200 soldiers had died, and rather than pull back to negotiate, both sides began sending more conventional ground troops into the area.
During the first week of that confrontation, JFK, as he’d done several times in the past three years, sent a secret communication to Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, making an offer that sounded too good to turn down. It positioned Russia advantageously—in the short term—and future effects were unforeseeable to a mere mortal.
Khrushchev readily accepted the offer.
Only key members of JFK’s administration were privy to the agreement and they informed only key commanders on the ground in Vietnam. As a result, late in February 1966, transport planes crammed with Soviet troops and equipment, using long, circuitous routes, began landing at U.S. bases in South Vietnam. As Americans stood down from positions, Russian troops replaced them. In just under two months a quarter-million Russian troops were deployed, and all 150,000 U.S. troops had left Vietnam. They took with them U.S. aircraft, heavy tanks and small arms. They left behind armored personnel carriers, trucks and jeeps, and they left bases and infrastructure intact. Money well spent, JFK thought.
The Russian troops made no offensive maneuvers during the two-month transition. They defended, or withdrew, as the situation demanded, and therefore were largely not identified as Russian by 217
NVA or Viet Cong troops. The few Russians who were killed, and thus identified as Russian, only confused the NVA and VC. Word of the phenomenon found its way around South Vietnam locally, but never to Hanoi, and more importantly, not to China.
Meanwhile, on the Ussuri River, the battle continued unabated.
China made two attempts to deescalate the violence. Russian troops ignored them both. When the U.S./Russian transition was complete in South Vietnam, in June 1966, Russia unleashed a massive air assault on mainland China’s budding nuclear industry, destroying it entirely in one 18-hour period. Russia regretted having given nuclear technology to China in the 1950s, and they’d been looking for an excuse to undo the mistake.
China, with superior numbers of troops, and certain the USSR
would not dare to use nukes, unleashed their own well-planned attack at key points along the entire shared border. They even called home the 300,000 troops they’d sent to North Vietnam to replace NVA soldiers who’d left to fight in the south.
As soon as Russian spies in the north reported the Chinese troop withdrawal from North Vietnam, the quarter million Russian troops who had been marching in place in South Vietnam began moving quickly north. They rolled easily over the little resistance they encountered, and within a week threatened Hanoi. NVA troops who’d been attacking the South Vietnamese Army were called north, but they were too far away and too late. Russian bombers, which had hidden in Cambodian bases, began carpet-bombing the NVA migration north, and boxed them in. Some escaped into the mountain jungle, but SVA troops captured over 30,000 NVA prisoners. A few VC were included in the prisoner count, but most VC
had melted away into the SV populace.
The SVA could only stare in awe at their sudden good fortune.
SVA General Ky, the general-de-jour in power in Saigon, wasted no time taking credit for the brilliant campaign he had waged against the aggressors. No one believed him, of course, but everyone was happy to let it slide. The SVA secured the border to the north and began what would become a successful democracy. In the 218
north, Russia’s Army prevailed. North Vietnam became a Russian satellite, with Ho Chi Minh in command.
Critics, both military and civilian, credited JFK with saving American lives, but no one in that era even suggested he could have foreseen any of the aftereffects.
The Sino-Soviet War raged for over a dozen years. China gained an early advantage through massive troop deployments to key Russian cities near the border. Wherever a battle occurred, China delivered two, three, or even four times the number of fight-ers Russia supplied. Superior weaponry and air power often evened the odds for Russia, but most battles ended with no clear winner and hundreds, or even thousands dead on each side.
In 1976, with 7,000 Chinese troops threatening to overrun defenses at Uzhur missile base, in south-central Russia, Kremlin leaders decided enough was enough. They launched a 106-foot SS-18
missile from the Uzhur facility. It was armed with ten 750-kiloton nuclear warheads, pre-targeted on ten coordinates in the Gobi Desert. To their credit, the Russians chose the least populated Chinese targets. At most they would kill a few dozen nuclear researchers, working at remote desert labs. The object was not to take lives, but to send a clear message to Chinese leaders.
One of those ten warheads, however, detonated just 100 feet out of its silo. The airburst vaporized 150 square miles, including an estimated 42,000 Russian and Chinese humans, ten times as many cattle and sheep, and, fortunately, the other nine warheads.
Fighting stopped at the instant of detonation, all over, not just in areas where the mushroom cloud was visible. No one ever found an explanation for that immediate and total cessation of hostilities.
They would call it (translated to English) The Great Knowing. Russian and Chinese soldiers held their positions for a few days, until commanders finally called them home. In groups large and small, soldiers straggled toward their homes, opposing armies often passing each other for hours on the same roads.
Estimates of the war’s total death toll hovered on either side of two million. Most fighting had occurred on Russian soil, within a 219
few hundred miles of borders. Electric generating facilities there had all been destroyed. In addition, skilled Chinese sabotage teams had penetrated further north and west, where surprise raids destroyed dozens more undefended generating facilities. The Russian infrastructure and economy were in tatters. The Chinese infrastructure hadn’t been brag-worthy to begin with, and their economy, dedicated to the production of war for over ten years, was in no better shape than was Russia’s.
Aid poured into Russia, the U.S. taking the lead in donations, logistics, medical personnel and radiation monitoring. When Mao Tse-tung visited the site of the nuclear blast he was so moved by the devastation that he vowed China would no longer seek non-peaceful applications of nuclear energy. When he died that September, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, kept the policy in place. Russia allowed U.N. teams to inspect other SS-18 missiles to determine what had caused the warhead to detonate. They gave up two years later. Russians, and other peoples of the world, suddenly viewed their nukes with suspicion. In the ensuing decades, as the world became more inclusive and reasons for war fewer, nation after nation dismantled their nuclear missiles and recycled much of the material—some of which went into orbit as part of Heaven project.
Kennedy never dialed back on his security. He felt certain that those who had conspired to kill him had done so out of patriotic fervor, misguided, but genuinely felt. If he believed what he had gleaned from his pad, an unknown force he still did not understand had brought those conspirators together, and he found no reason to believe it would end with only one failed attempt. By the time the last U.S. troops returned home from Vietnam, in July 1966, he cautiously began making public appearances again, but he wouldn’t reveal the exact time and place until the last minute. The size and intensity of his security detail was unpredictable. Even after the specter of Vietnam receded from the national consciousness, he would remain convinced there would always be someone willing to kill him if he got careless. By keeping his security heavy and visible, 220
he hoped to convince his enemies it was futile to begin even planning such a thing.
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