It Won't Rewrite History

The 100,000 papers from the office files of John F. Kennedy '40, which were opened to the public January 29, won't necessitate rewriting the history books. But they do throw some interesting light on what Kennedy and the New Frontiersmen around him thought about.

For example, Kennedy was evidently considering basing American war planes in Laos as early as 1961, three years before the first large-scale American attacks on insurgent areas of Laos, and almost nine years before stepped-up systematic bombing of the Laotian Plaine des Jarres made refugees of 600,000 people.

The Seno airport near Savannakhet could handle 60 stories by C-124 and C-130 aircraft daily, the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Kennedy in August 1961, in response to his "expressed interest in the current status" of two Laotian fields.

Kennedy also expressed concern about the effect on public opinion of Vietnamese incursions into Laos--incursions minor compared to later ones by American-financed armies of Thai mercenaries and Meo tribesmen, but still hot stuff for 1961.

"Can you find out where the newspaper stories came this weekend on the Vietnam military intervention into Southern Laos," Kennedy wrote foreign policy adviser McGeorge Bundy a week after the Joint Chiefs' memo. "Those stories were harmful to us. Probably exaggerated. Makes it difficult for us now to attack the Vietminh for its intervention into Laos."

Some presidential correspondents held out for a softer line on Indochina and other issues from the beginning. In 1961 letters to Kennedy, John Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India and now Warburg Professor of Economics, advocated reassessing American interests in Laos, as well as Vietnam.

"As a military ally," Galbraith wrote, "the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I. We get nothing from their support and I must say I wonder what the Communists get."

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) was another softliner on a number of issues. The day after Kennedy's inauguration, Mansfield relayed to him Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma's complaints about U.S. overreaction to Laotian communists and obstruction of Phouma's neutralist policy. "These shortcomings, in my opinion, exist not only in Laos but elsewhere in comparable situations around the world," Mansfield added.

After the Bay of Pigs invasion, similarly, Mansfield wrote that "our sensitivity to this personality [Fidel Castro] and to the Cuban people is not what it ought to be." He recommended "seriously re-evaluating our own base policies on the rim of the Soviet Union" if there was to be forceful opposition to "the establishment of Soviet missiles or any other kind of base for Russian forces in Cuba."

Kennedy disregarded this advice, and two years later Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was warning--in an October 23, 1963 letter--that there might be "catastrophic consequences for world peace."