To Move A Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy

by Roger Hilsman

Genres: American History

602 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Roger Hilsman was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author. He graduated from West Point in 1943. He served with the U.S. Army unit 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), more popularly known as Merrill's Marauders. He participated in infantry operations during the battle for Myitkyina in May 1944 and suffered multiple stomach wounds from a Japanese machine gun while on a reconnaissance patrol. After recovering in army field hospitals, Hilsman joined the Office of Strategic Services. By now a captain, he at first served as a liaison officer to the British Army in Burma. Then he volunteered to be put in command of a guerrilla warfare battalion, organized and supplied by OSS Detachment 101, comprised of some three hundred local partisans, mercenaries, and irregulars of varying ethnicities, operating behind the lines of the Japanese in Burma.Soon after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Hilsman was part of an OSS group that staged a parachute mission into Manchuria to liberate American prisoners held in a Japanese POW camp near Mukden. There found his father, who became one of the first prisoners to be freed. His father asked as they hugged, "What took you so long?" (Decades later, Hilsman related his wartime experiences in his 1990 memoir American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines.) He later was an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy and, briefly, to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department, serving as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research during 1961–63 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during 1963–64. There Hilsman was a key and controversial figure in the development of U.S. policies in South Vietnam during the early stages of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He left government in 1964 to teach at Columbia University, retiring in 1990. He was a Democratic Party nominee for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 but lost in the general election. He was the author of many books about American foreign policy and international relations.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton named Hilsman to the National Security Education Board, where he served until his term expired in 1999.

Hilsman remained active in local politics, where he was a member of the Democratic Town Committee in Lyme for over two decades. During the 1990s he led a letter-writing campaign to the Connecticut State Police on behalf of safer street speeds in Lyme. He continued to publish books on a variety of subjects into his eighties. He and his wife later lived in Chester, Connecticut, and Ithaca, New York. Through 2014, Hilsman was still listed as a professor emeritus at Columbia University.

Hilsman died at the age of 94 on February 23, 2014, at his home in Ithaca, New York due to complications from several strokes. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on August 28, 2014, with full honors.

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roger Hilsman, a White House adviser to President John F. Kennedy, offers us his perspective of an insider and contemporary in order to present some of the foreign-policy problems Kennedy had to confront throughout his unfinished term.

I agree with Hilsman's opinion that JFK did not make many serious mistakes in foreign policy. However, as the former adviser himself acknowledges, he undeniably made some. A glaring example is, of course, the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion because while the CIA did sell the President on its flawed plan, he could not be fully excused for his failing to see what a disaster that would be.

Kennedy's complex Vietnam policy, which is the focus of this work, demands a more in-depth analysis. Hilsman disagrees with the idea that Eisenhower's initial commitment to South Vietnam and Kennedy's subsequent renewal of it were the crucial errors that led to US military involvement in Vietnam. The two presidents had committed themselves to supporting the South Vietnamese with economic aid, training personnel, auxiliary units such as helicopter squadrons, and military and civilian advisers. This was indeed a large and serious commitment, but it was still a far cry from an engagement in war using US troops. "And one step need not necessarily make the next inevitable," argues Hilsman. Had the Vietnamese struggle remained mainly Vietnamese, even if South Vietnam had failed to win the villagers over and the Viet Minh had prevailed, neither American prestige nor the strategic position of the United States in Asia would have been affected. 

Hilsman refutes Secretary of State Dean Rusk's claim that Kennedy should have put up more "blue chips" from the beginning and that the initial goal of the United States should have been victory at all costs. According to Rusk, the American  government should have made it clear to Hanoi that the United States was ready to turn the conflict into an all-out American war rather than suffer defeat, but as Hilsman points out, JFK had a much more limited view of Amerian role in Vietnam. The President understood that the only way Southeast Asian countries could have a brighter future was for them to achieve true independence mainly through their own efforts. "In the final analysis," he said at a news conference on September 2, 1963, "it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them; we can give them equipment; we can send our men out there as advisers; but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists." Although no force could prevent Hanoi from infiltrating a few thousand communists (formerly southern) into the south, if the people themselves turned against Communism and toward the government in Saigon, these thousands would not matter. Kennedy wanted to channel US power into helping the South Vietnamese government earn the allegiance of the people and preventing the north from further infiltrating South Vietnam, thus stopping the communists from escalating the conflict into a larger war. And as Hilsman points out, this policy seems to have been quite effective, for North Vietnam did not send any regular units south until 1965, after the United States aggravated the war by bombing the north. This suggests that Kennedy was actually able to both use enough "blue chips" to achieve his goals and avoid deepening American involvement. 

"If Vietnam did represent a failure in the Kennedy administration, it was a failure in implementation," asserts Hilsman. The President had developed a sound strategy for dealing with Communist guerrilla warfare – a strategy that looked more and more workable with each subsequent event. Yet, while many in the Pentagon, in the Special Forces, and elsewhere in the army services were enthusiastic supporters of JFK's plan, whose effectiveness was proved by their own experiences, Secretary of State Robert McNamara, the ever-militant Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many generals remained indifferent. For instance, General Harkins, the commander in Vietnam, understood how crucial it was to win the Vietnamese population's allegiance, but never realized that to win it Americans had to focus on a political and social program, not on military activities. He must have believed that this program could be implemented while a regular war was being fought, which was a mistake, and he preferred to leave it to someone else to deal with the political and social side of the issue. Consequently, military measures were constantly chosen over political. 

Furthermore, as Hilsman observes, Secretary of State Rusk should also be held responsible for this state of affairs. Just like with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Rusk's Department failed to defend the political side of the problem with the same vigor, zest, and determination with which the able, self-confident, and dominant Secretary of Defense McNamara was making the case for the military side.

All was not as bad as it could have been because President Kennedy was still alive. His freedom of choice was narrowed, but he labored persistently to keep the "Americanization" and the "militarization" of the civil war in Vietnam within reasonable limits. What's even more impressive: he did this virtually on his own. The top-ranking military people constantly pressured him into escalating the conflict; McNamara, despite resisting their most extreme proposals, was generally in favor of escalation. So was Dean Rusk. 

Kennedy was aware of the fact that the implementation of his strategy would fully depend on the men he chose to carry it out. He knew he could not overrule the JCS nomination of General Harkins, so he started looking for a civilian public figure of great enough stature to be ambassador and lead the whole American effort in Vietnam. He ended up with Henry Cabot Lodge.

That these two appointments were a recipe for disaster cannot be denied. A younger general with a special background in guerrilla warfare would have done a much better job carrying out Kennedy's strategy than Harkins, and although Lodge was highly skillful in dealing with Diem and Nhu, in general he surrendered leadership to military commanders. Nevertheless, the President should not be judged too harshly for his decision because had he overruled the Joint Chiefs' nomination and chosen a younger man, there would have been no love lost between him and the JSC, which would have further hindered his effort in Vietnam. "President Kennedy was betting on a long, slowly paced effort in Vietnam, and no one will ever know if he was right in his judgement on this and on the people he chose to carry out the program," writes Hilsman. 

During Diem's corrupt rule, Kennedy's strategy was impossible to implement. The downfall of the Diem regime gave Vietnam and the United States another opportunity to carry out a workable program to defeat the Communist guerrillas and win the Vietnamese people over. Hilsman supposes that Lodge and whoever Kennedy would have chosen to replace General Harkins, whose term of duty was ending, might well have succeeded – if the President had not been assassinated, that is. 


Overall, with the definite exception of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the partial exception of Vietnam, JFK's decision-making regarding foreign policy was wise and effective. The neutralization of Laos – that impossible combination of rival factions, difficult terrain, and wrong power – the prevention of a major confrontation there required both wisdom and courage from the President. The Cuban Missile Crisis, a brilliant success, and its follow-up, the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, further proved that Kennedy had the ability to analyse, to question his and others' decisions, to find ways to adjust to some events and to influence others. Despite his restraint and pragmatism, he was capable of attracting talented men to work with him and of winning their loyalty to his noble goals. As Hilsman concludes, foreign policy is politics, where to achieve the possible, man has to reach out for the impossible. To do this, he has to be a leader, as well as a hero. John F. Kennedy was a leader. And he was a hero too. 

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hilsman was a character and that comes across loud and clear in this account of his time serving in the Kennedy administration. Definitely a man of his era - this description of Madame Nhu, for example, is surely a product of its time and place. The "acid-tounged, flamboyant, man-hating, termagant of a wife, the beautiful but vicious Madame Nhu." Understand better the aims and desires of the State Department in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. Take away a sense of just how complicated and contentious foreign policy making can be.

[Bnjmn Mich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly important firsthand account of history.

10/10 recommend.