Russell Stevenson and Dr. Andrew Johns, Department of History
The literature on the role of Laos in the historiography on John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy is surprisingly scant. On the day prior to Kennedy’s ascendance to the presidency, Eisenhower called Laos—not Vietnam—“the keystone to Indochina.” Later, Kennedy would bemoan his lack of knowledge on the Vietnam problem due to Eisenhower’s emphasis on this land-locked, obscure country. My research sought to re-establish the center of gravity in the causation of the Vietnam War by culling the documents at John F. Kennedy library to examine why the first six months of the Kennedy administration did not ultimately escalate its commitment to Laos when the crisis posed a greater Cold War threat than Vietnam ever did or would.
Kennedy’s state papers (of which I copied over 2000 pages), which include memorandum, briefings, minutes, and even personal travel accounts, show that his administration held a self-contradictory paradigm towards the Laotian crisis. As one author, Charles Stevenson, wrote: the Laos crisis was urgent, but unimportant. Indeed, Eisenhower was reported to have said that were it not for Laos’ “neighboring countries and the effect on them, we ought to let Laos go down the drain.” Eisenhower, as Kennedy would so eloquently write in his inauguration address, had indeed “passed the torch” of a brooding quagmire in Indochina.
Kennedy immediately established a task force for re-evaluating Laos policy. At numerous times, Kennedy (and Lyndon B. Johnson) would express concern over the commitment of troops, that a war in Laos would, as Johnson would write while visiting the country in 1961, “[bog the U.S.] down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength.” As a consequence, Kennedy generally supported neutralization at a Geneva conference from 1961 to 1962.
The word generally is quite general indeed. Kennedy was quite willing to employ covert means to prop up the non-Communist (more specifically, rightist) faction of the Laotian government. Yet the moves he executed were a strange amalgam of politics and military measures. By February 4th, Kennedy had ordered the deployment of a fleet of T-6 planes to the Philippines, presumably to bolster the negotiating positions of the rightist factions. Interestingly, these planes were not allowed to carry bombs because of “a restraint placed on them for political reasons.” Furthermore, Kennedy’s arming and training of the Hmong tribe to lay siege to the Ho Chi Minh trail would further embroil the United States in a “deniable” war in Laos—all under what historian Jane Hamilton-Merritt calls, “The Façade of Neutralization.”
Kennedy’s policy in Laos would prove to be decisive in escalating the Vietnam conflict in his later years. As he mentioned later, given the covert nature of his war in Laos, he could not take credit for any victories there. Furthermore, given his Bay of Pigs failure, he saw very clearly the tenuous nature of his standing with the public. Kennedy could not take three failures in one year. Laos served as a springboard and as a guinea pig in Kennedy’s ultimate escalation of the “advisory” troops in the Vietnam conflict. Laos was indeed the “keystone” for Indochina—not that its interests were vital to U.S. interests there, but that once the U.S. failed in Laos, Kennedy believed he had no choice but to escalate in Vietnam.
References
- Timothy Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government—1955-1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 27
- Charles Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy Towards Laos Since 1954 (Beacon Press: Boston, 1972), 130
- David Kaiser, American Tragedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 32
- Geoffrey Warner, “President Kennedy and Indochina: The 1961 Decisions” International Affairs, vol. 70 (4): 695
- Memorandum for General Clifton, February 6th, JFK Library, Box 130, Folder 2/1
- Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, The Americans, and the Secret War in Laos” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 113
- Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 705 as quoted in Warner, 700.