interview with roger hilsman on vietnam

7/29/2019 Interview With Roger Hilsman on Vietnam

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INTERVIEW WITH ROGER HILSMAN on Vietnam

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/

George Washington University

The National Security Archiveis a non-governmental, non-profit organization

founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who sought a centralized

home for formerly secret U.S. government documentation obtained under the

Freedom of Information Act. The National Security Archive is proud to have

had the opportunity to make a substantial contribution to the Cold War series.

For each episode, we have prepared transcripts of some of the interviews used

in each episode.

INTERVIEW WITH ROGER HILSMANhttp://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/hilsman1.html

INT: It's June the eighth and I'm interviewing Roger Hilsman, for the Cold War series,

first of all the program about Vietnam. So, if we can start off, can I ask you first, whatwas President Kennedy's attitude to Vietnam? Why did he choose Vietnam as a place to

make a stand?

ROGER HILSMAN: He did not choose to make Vietnam a stand, that's the whole point.

The long answer is that Kennedy was a Catholic, Ngu Dinh Diem was a Catholic, the

President of Vietnam and when Ngu Dinh Diem became President of Vietnam, American

Catholics generally thought that this was a wonderful hero and should be backed. He came

out there... Kennedy went out to Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer and met as a

young congressman, I should say, and met a young Foreign Service officer who was the head

of their action section in the embassy. And this guy said that he didn't believe that a Catholic,

surrounded by Catholics in a country that was ninety five per cent Bhuddist was goingto make it, and this shook Kennedy, as a very young congressman, a great deal. And many
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years later when he had decided... I mean, he used to say to me - I was Assistant Secretary for

the Far East, so I was in charge of Vietnam - and he used to say to me, we'll do everything we

can to help them, but we will not fight, we will not send an Americansoldier to fight. And I said, well, you know, I said, I agree with you, but why did you

reach this conclusion, 'cos he knew nothing about (unintelligible), he told me this story thathe'd been out in Vietnam as a young congressman and the man who influenced him became a

great friend, but he said, I've thought about that very deeply and we'll give 'em all the help

we can, all the aid, all the arms, but we won't fight there.

INT: So presumably he was torn against making an anti-Communist stand...

RH: (Interrupts) Well, what I'm trying to suggest is that Kennedy started off as a young man,

a young congressman, very pro-Ngu Dinh Diem, shaken as a young congressman in this

belief that Ngu Dinh Diem could win and then the whole business of the Bay of Pigs, if that

had not happened first, it might have been different. But Kennedy kept saying, you know,

how can I ask the American people to fight in Vietnam, nine thousand miles away andnot fight in Cuba ninety miles away? So he was determined to give all the help he could,

but not to fight. And as I say, he learned. The one thing about Jack Kennedy, all the

Kennedys, were that they learned. He started off being kind of a Hawk on Vietnam. He

then decided that it wasn't a go, you know, that it was a morass and a swamp, he decided

then to gi... but he made it clear to me - I was Assistant Secretary, so I was in charge of Asia,

including Vietnam - and he made it very clear to me that your job is to do everything you can

to help the Vietnamese, but not get us into a war and some of the worst situations that I had

with him were just because of that. One day, for example, the New York Times, with malice

aforethought, had two little boxes on the front page, one of them - this was before there were

any American troops there, you know, - one of them says 'American general visits Vietnam'

some brigadier general, and the other little box says, 'South Vietnamese forces lose the battleat Upok '. Well, Kennedy called me up and just screamed, before breakfast he called me,

when he was reading the paper and he could be quite profane and he was quite profane over

this and he said, why did you let that blankety blank blank blank general go out there, don't

you know we want to keep as low a profile as we can, why did you allow that? And when he

paused for breath, I said, look, Mr. President, I'm Assistant Secretary of State, not Defense, I

didn't know there was any general going out there, nobody told me this. And he said, oh, and

bam went the phone. Well, that afternoon, a National Security memorandum came out and

it's very straightforward. It said, no officer of general or flag rank will visit Vietnam

without the written permission of the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern

Affairs, which was me.

INT: What sort of conflict did he envisage it was going to be, was this...

RH: Did what?

INT: What sort of conflict did Kennedy envisage it was going to be? There was this

counter-insurgency idea.

RH: Well, as I say, he went through several stages on Vietnam, you know, I mean he...

originally what... you must remember that the very first thing that happened, Ngu Dinh Diem

asks for help and so Kennedy sends out General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to visitthe country. They come back and in their recommendation, top secret, is not only do we give


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them a lot ofaid, but we sent ten thousand American troops out there to form a fence,

you see, between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. and Kennedy had that stricken from

their cable and tried to prevent it from being circulated within the government, American

government. I had a fight about that, because I was Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and I

was cut out, I wasn't allowed to see it and when I heard about it, I yelled bloody murder but

he was determined not to get involved with American troops. No bombing, no groundforces, and so long as he was alive, that was the policy. Then, towards the end of his life,

in the fall of '63, he beat McNamara to beat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a

withdrawal plan. At that time, we had only sixteen thousand five hundred Americans in

the country, they were not troops, they were advisers and the plan, which was finally

approved in the fall of '63, was to withdraw those, all of them. And the only troops... only

people we'd have had there would be marine guards, ten of them, for the embassy. Before

Kennedy was killed, the first thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn.

IfKennedy had lived, the othersixteen thousand five hundred or fifteen thousand five

hundred would have been withdrawn within three or four months.

INT: So you're pretty convinced then that Kennedy wanted to end the war?

RH: It's not that I'm convinced. This was... the documents are there, you see, and I didn't say

he wanted to end the war, he said he wanted to withdraw from it. First of all, from the

beginning, he was determined that it not be an American war, that he would not bomb

the North, he would not send troops. But then after you remember the Buddhist crisis in

the spring of '63, this convinced Kennedy that Ngu Dinh Diem had no chance of winning

and that we best we get out. So, he used that as an excuse, beat on McNamara to beat on the

JCS to develop a withdrawal plan. The plan was made, he approved the plan and the first

one thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn before Kennedy was

killed. If he had lived, the other sixteen thousand would have been out of there within three or

four months.

(INTERRUPTION)

INT: Still in the Kennedys, if I can ask about your... You made a visit in 1962 to

Vietnam and one of the things you say in your book is that you thought that at that time

the strategic hamlet idea might be viable. What did you think about it?

RH: Well, if you could remember that in Malaya, the British tried all sorts of things against

the Communist insurgency, jungle based Communist insurgency, and failed over and over

again. Finally, under a man named R.K.G. Thompson, they hit upon what they called astrategic hamlet program. In a sense what they did was, they took villages and fortified

them, and then controlled the flow of rice and food and ammunition and so on and so forth.

And it took a long time, this so-called strategy, but it worked. Now what happened in

Vietnam was that R.K.G. Thompson was the liaison officer from the British and after his

experience in Malaya, why he was absolute wonderful choice, he tried to persuade Ngu

Dinh Diem and company to adopt a strategic hamlet program. It would have taken twenty

years, but it would have worked. Instead of chasing Communist troops all over the jungles,

you would have slowly enlarged the secure areas, like an oil block with strategic hamlets

moving out. It would have taken twenty years, but it was an oil block approach, na killing

approach, you see. And when I went out there in this time, this idea had been sold to Ngu

Dinh Diem, we thought. but what happened was that his brother Nu, took over and thestrategic hamlet program and what we discovered shortly afterwards... I mean, at that first


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visit, was a time when R.K.G. Thompson had just persuaded Diem to adopt the program. My

second visit, a year later we found that brother Nu had taken over and had just corrupted it

entirely. Instead of an oil block, he was putting these hamlets right out at the Cambodian

border the most vulnerable place... When the helicopter visited one of these strategic

hamlets, people from the village clung on to the landing gear of the helicopter and were

falling off at a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet, trying to get out of there. So thesecond visit, we became convinced that the idea, the concept was great and had worked in

Malaya and if it had been carried out, it would have worked in Vietnam, I believe, or if

anything would have worked, that had a better chance. But brotherNu so corrupted it, you

see, that it was useless, worse than useless, it hastened the end.

INT: Can you just explain what he did and what he...

RH: (Interrupts) Well he gave... what he did was, instead of an oil block approach where

you start at the sea from very secure areas and you move out fortifying villages and doing all

sorts of intelligence work...

INT: Can you explain what Nu did, you say he corrupted the policy, what did he

actually do?

RH: Well, he took the name strategic hamlet program, but instead of building strategic

hamlets as an oil block with a twenty year program of gradually extending the secure areas,

he put them all over the map and it became clear that his reasons were ideological. He was

using the strategic hamlet name to further his own political party and his own political

ambitions.

INT: Why were people so frightened of being in these hamlets?

RH: Because they were in exposed positions. I mean, if you build your hamlets at the edge of

the secure area and gradually make your secure go out, that's one thing. But if, this being the

secure area, you put it over here on the Cambodian border you know, where you're within

walking distance of Vietcong battalions, you're very exposed. These are not regular troops,

they're just villagers and he put these strategic hamlets in strategic military places where

they had no defenses and no regular troops to defend them. See, a strategic hamlet was

designed to prevent a five man Vietcong patrol from coming and getting food, you see. But it

couldn't do anything against a battalion of Vietcong regulars and he put them in the midst of

areas where the Vietcong battalions were permanently stationed.

INT: In one book I read, I'm not sure if it was yours, you said that one of the things that

President Kennedy did was to repeatedly send Robert McNamara to Vietnam...

RH: Repeatedly what?

INT: Send Robert McNamara to Vietnam to...

RH: (Interrupts) Well, you have to understand Robert McNamara. We were going to an NSC

meeting... Well, first of all I think you must understand that as far as Kennedy was

concerned, Robert McNamara had... as doing something, we believed, that no President and

no Secretary of Defense had succeeded in doing, that is to give civilian presidential controlover war plans. I mean, nuclear war plans. Up to that time, the Pentagon had succeeded in


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preventing any President from knowing what was going on, you see, and actually during the

latter part of the Eisenhower administration, the SIOP, the Strategic Integrated Operations

Plan, before that time, if there had been a war, navy planes would have been over Moscow at

the same time as air force planes were, shooting each other as much as the Russians, you see.

But under Eisenhower that was changed and we had an integrated plan. Kennedy was the

first President where the plan was effected and McNamara actually got enough controlover the Pentagon so that the President knew what the strategic plans were. So President

was going to forgive McNamara a great deal because of that, it was a great accomplishment.

but what happened was that McNamara, we would have a National Security Council meeting

and the State Department would be, say, taking one position, and he would take some other

usually a war-mongering position, you know, something that would increase our

involvement, send more ammunition, send more advisers, whatever increase our

commitment. And the State Department and the White House would be opposed to it. And

McNamara would say, I'll go to Vietnam and see for myself. Well, and you know, what he

would do, what he would then turn to an aide and say, have an airplane on the strip to leave in

half an hour, the trouble was we'd say, but Bob, you know, you're going to go out there,

you're going to talk to the same people that are writing the cables we've just beenreading, what (unintelligible) new, you know, I mean, you're not going to be able to talk to

anybody that you haven't already talked to. Well, I got to see for myself. So, he'd fly out there

and I'd be hard pressed to get one of my people to go, you know, a State Department

representative, but we managed it. Then he would come back, after having talked to the

people out there, and adopt the position we'd been arguing for all the time. He had this kind

of idea that he had to go talk to people face to face himself. So all these trips were

McNamara's idea, not Kennedy's idea. Kennedy sent Max Taylor and Walt Rostow out there

at the very beginning and Kennedy sent Mike Forestall and me out there twice, but all the

other trips were McNamara's idea.

INT: He had a special airplane, didn't he?

RH: Well, they called it a McNamara Special. Previous Secretaries of Defense had borrowed

Air Force 1, which was the presidential plane, but he had this idea that he was going to save

money, so he would have a tanker you know outfitted with bunks and those fellows had no

insulation you see, so you couldn't hear each other think on a thing and you're screaming at

each other. It was very interesting, Averill Harriman, who was very deaf, somehow the

background noise he didn't hear, but he could hear your voice, so he'd say, quit shouting, quit

shouting! The rest of us couldn't hear anything!

INT: In 1963 you commissioned a report on the Diem and the Diem regime and theBuddhist problem from Lewis Savice . Do you recall that?

RH: Well, Lewis Savice was the desk officer for Vietnam for the Bureau of Intelligence and

Research, yes.

INT: Why did you actually commission that report?

RH: You're misunderstanding. I was head of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, it

had offices of African affairs, Asian affairs and so on. Each of these offices had desk officers.

Lewis Savice was the desk officer in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for Vietnam, so

all he did was write reports on Vietnam and this particular one you're thinking about was anassessment of the progress of the war and he and I and the others who - it was a joint effort,


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instruct me to do and ask him to remove his brother Nu, he will immediately arrest the

generals and execute them. So, Monday morning, there was a meeting of the NSC and

Kennedy came in, rather upset, and what he's upset about became very quickly known,

because John McCone, head of CIA, and Bob McNamara, both of whom were out of town,

you see, when this was done and their deputies had signed the cable, were upset and were sort

of leading a rebellion. So Kennedy came in upset, because his government was split and whathe said was, all right, nothing has happened, Lodge has not carried out the instructions of the

cable, so we have three choices. We can go with the cable as written, the August twenty

fourth cable, we can... withdraw it, nothing has happened at all, or we can modify it as Lodge

recommends, which is that he do everything except see Ngu Dinh Diem, not visit him. Well,

Kennedy then did something I have never seen him do before or since, and that is he then

INT: They presumably took that as a sort of green light from Kennedy to...

RH: (Interrupts) Well, nothing happened as a matter of fact, so it wasn't a green light, because

we later discovered, many, many months later that one of the generals or two or three of

them, I don't know, refused to go along with it, so nothing happened, there was no coup. Thecoup that finally occurred was a quite different one with different people, some of the

same generals, but not some of the same generals and in that case, on November first, they

did not tell the United States government anything, the did not consult us in any way. The

first we heard about it was the liaison officer from CIA to the military, the Vietnamese

military, was a man named Koneen and on November first, Koneen got a call and said come

to the Vietnamese military headquarters and he arrived there and they said, the coup is in

progress, the troops are on the march, they're going... this was about eleven o'clock, the

troops had started at nine and they were due to arrive at twelve or shortly thereafter. Well,

one of the things that was... So, the two, the August twenty fourth cable and the November

first coup were totally unrelated. Nothing happened in August. But once there's a kind of

funny story about this, which is... and if you have any doubt that the United States

government didn't know about this, I will tell you the following story.... the Sinkpak Admiral

- Jeez, I've forgotten his name now...... well the Commander in Chief of the Pacific fleet was

an admiral based in Hawaii and he had an annoying habit of surveying his domain without

notice. He would arrive in Saigon without any notice and depart and so but you see when the

Commander in Chief of the American Pacific forces visits Saigon or any other country, he at

least has the sense to offer to make a courtesy call on the Chief of State. Well, the problem

was that... and so the ambassador has to accompany him, you see. Well, the problem is that

Ngu Dinh Diem was a talker and you would have a fifteen-minute courtesy call and you

might have to be there four hours as he delivers his monologue. So it's standard practice in

the American embassy that anybody that had any reason to call on Ngu Dinh Diem alwaysrefrained from drinking anything, any liquid for several hours in advance andevacuated before he went, because he's liable to be there four or five hours, you see. Well,

they arrived there and the... here you have the President of the country, the American

ambassador and the American Commander of the Pacific in Ngu Dinh Diem's office and in

fact there are battalions converging on the palace, due to arrive within the hour. Now if we

had known anything about this, we'd have never allowed those people to be at target zero,

you see. And when they got out the airport... the admiral said to the ambassador, he said, you

know, I've never seen as a (unintelligible) General Don, the Commanding General of the

Vietnamese forces, was there, he said, I've never seen him so nervous, he was sweating like a

pig and he's chewing gum and everything else and we later learned why he was sweating like

a pig, because here he had the American ambassador and... in Sinkpak in PresidentDiem's office when the troops were already on the move.


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INT: Afterwards, was it felt that the Diem coup was a good thing or a bad thing?

RH: I would say that among the military, American military, where they had no sense of the

politics of the country... (unintelligible) an illustration. One of the times that McNamara sentpeople out there, he sent out General Cruak and so I sent one of my fellows out there,

Mendelhome and the General Cruak visited the military, Vietnamese military and the State

Department fellow visited the civilian leaders. And when they came back, they reported to

Kennedy and one of them said the war is going well, General Cruak, and the other one said

that the civilians are collapsing and the war won't last more than a couple of

months. And it's a little... you know, it was that, that the last to know that you're beatenare the people in the field, the military, they're always the last to know. When a country

collapses in let's say, World War One when Germany collapsed or when Hitler collapsed, the

generals are the last to realize what's happening and that was the case here. so you had a split

in the American government, where the people who really were military and only military,very narrow focused, they thought we could win eventually, where the political people

and the State Department and everybody politically, thought it was impossible, we'd never

win. We... it was perfectly true, you know, that if, you know, you could atomic bomb

Vietnam and kill every Vietnamese North and South, that would not be a very big

problem. you could occupy the country, both countries, North and South, with American

troops. The minute you turned your back, ten years, twenty years, fifty years, you know,

it would have been gone and that was the situation. Sure, you could win a battle, but

that's not winning a war.

INT: When Johnson came in, he expanded the war really. What's your view on why hedid that?

RH: Well, what Johnson did was, he did one thing before he expanded the war and that is he

got rid of one way or another all the people who had opposed making it an American

war. Averill Harriman, he was Under Secretary of State, he made him roving ambassador

for Africa so he'd have nothing to do with Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy, he you know, he told

Bobby Kennedy that he ought to run for governor of Massachusetts, you see. Bobby

confounded him by running for the Senate but Averill Harriman and in may case, he wanted

to get rid of me, Lyndon Johnson did. Well, Johnson's a very clever man. when he wanted to

get rid of Grenowski, who was the Post-Master General, he offered him the chance of being

the first American ambassador to Poland. he offered me... he found out that I'd spent part of

my childhood in the Philippines, and he tried to persuade me to become ambassador to the

Philippines, but that was just to keep me quiet, you see and so instead I went to

Columbia University, where I could criticize the war from outside.Johnson was a very clever man, so the first thing he did was he nullified or got rid of all the

people - and he knew as well, he knew who were the hawks and who were the doves. He

systematically rid the top layers of the American government ofthe doves and interesting

enough, by the way, Bob McNamara's book, he accuses Harriman Lodge, meetcetera, etcetera oflosing the Vietnam War, he never mentions that we were opposed to...

we were doves you see...


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INT: Could the war in Vietnam have every been won? What was your experience from

your time in Burma, for instance?

RH: Well, I'll tell you. I kept hoping that if we could persuade Ngu Dinh Diem to adopt astrategic hamlet program, not to try to just kill Vietcong, but to you know have an oil

block of secure areas, I always hoped that it might some day be possible. the (unintelligible)

was though that I think that Diem was a ardent Catholic in a country that's ninety five per

cent Buddhist. He surrounded himself with Catholics, but also they happened to be

northerners who had fled the North when the Communists took over. So he was

surrounding himself by zealots, you see, anti-Communist Catholic zealots. He was out

of touch with his own... with the people of Vietnam and youknow maybe if there had been a guy like Max Isai in the Philippines, he was killed, but he

defeated the Communist (unintelligible) by a sort of strategic hamlets sort of program beforehe was killed, it's conceivable. But the one thing that I realized and hoped against hope that it

wasn't true was that Ngu Dinh Diem and the then leaders of Vietnam just could not possibly

win, no matter you know... they were so cut themselves off from the... the mass of the

people they were... At the end, Ngu Dinh Diem was talking to nobody but his brother Nu,

he wasn't consulting anybody except the people he knew would say yes to him. So it was a

hopeless situation and Kennedy came to this conclusion and, you know, as I said, andhis decision was to get the American advisers out, there were only sixteen thousand five

hundred there and he removed the first one thousand and had an approved plan for removing

the rest within a matter of two or three months. it was hopeless.

INT: Before we started this interview, you said - I think you said, that your advice toJohnson which he didn't like, was something like, yes we have to occupy the country for

a hundred years. Is that right, could you elaborate on that or...

RH: Well, what I said was that if you... Of course the United States is the greatest military

power in the world. If you went in there with, you know, five hundred thousand men and

atomic bombs and all the rest, of course you could conquer the country, You'd kill an

awful lot of people, we did kill a lot of people to no avail, but sure, I mean, you know, if you

put the whole of the American military and industrial might into the struggle we could have

won, of course we could have won. But it would have done no good. Every time an

American walked by an alleyway he'd get a knife in his back. if we'd stayed ten years, we

could probably by police work and military work keep it from going Communist, but sooner

or later we would turn our back or withdraw or reduce and it would immediately go

Communist. It was a hopeless situation.

INT: Let me just ask you a question on the China side of things. When Kennedy was

elected and he realized that China was now a Communist country and was going to stay

that way, it's often said that in the Vietnam War or at that time the Chinese wanted

better relations with the United States. Why did the United States not do anything about

that?

RH: Well, the United States did do something about it. what happened was when Kennedyfirst came in, he decided to recognize Communist Mongolia. Now this was a ploy, by


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recognizing Communist Mongolia you recognized the Communist regime. then you can work

your way up to recognizing Red China, Communist China. This was what his intention... Of

course the situation was you see you had Taiwan, a non-Communist, anti-Communist former

government of that and a lot of American supporters for the Taiwan government. So his first

steps was to recognize Communist Mongolia and then follow this by recognizing China.

What happened was that the anti-Communist factions in the Congress immediately in effectsaid, you recognize Mongolia, we can't prevent you from doing that, but all your cherished

aid to Africa and aid to South America... we will cut it off, there will be no aid. So he backed

down. Now, what then happened was, in the summer of '62, John Vasheur in Formosa, said,

this is the year of the tiger this is the year when we ought to invade and with American help

invade China. Well, what we did was Eisenhower had given John Vasheur two U-2s, but

we'd not given him permission to use them. Well, (unintelligible) said all right, use them and

see what you find out. Well, what they found out of course was that they landed some

parachute teams there too, they were rolled up within a matter forty eight hours and by the

end of the summer of '62, John Vasheur decided that they could not invade, that there was no

sympathy for them on the mainland. And he sent his son, John Gajeur to America and we

talked with Kennedy and so on and so forth and they said, OK, we're not going to invade. Theyear of the tiger is over. So I said to Kennedy, his Assistant Secretary for Far East, now is the

time to make an attempt to normalize relations with Red China. So I made a speech, which

was called the Open Door Speech in San Francisco. there's a tragedy here. With Kennedy's

approval, I made it at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, which is the traditional

place for China speeches, and it called for a normalization of relations with China.

unfortunately Kennedy was killed about a week before that, so I said to Johnson, President

Johnson, look, let me make the speech. If the right wing and the isolationists jump all over

me, you csay, well, he's a Kennedy man and he's leaving anyway or somethilike that. But if

you don't get much reaction, why this will give you an opportunity of more freedom. So

Lyndon Johnson said, go ahead and make the speech. Well, I made the speech and it got

favorable newspaper comment, not only in all American newspapers, but in most world press,

with sole exception of Taiwan and Red China. And so, you know, this was the opportunity

and if we had normalized relations with China there wouldn't have been no Vietnam War,

we'd have stopped that. But Johnson was so enamoured with the war that he didn't do

anything about this, you see, he didn't follow up with recognition, it took Nixon to do that,

but Nixon finally followed up with Kissinger.INT: So that was perhaps a serious error by Johnson not following up on the China...

RH: (Interrupts) Oh, I think so. But his most serious error was making

Vietnam an American war.

INT: Yet, one of the things that I think is said often, and McNamara certainly said it is

that the United States didn't know enough about South East Asia, didn't knowanything about Vietnam, didn't know anything about China. What you're suggesting is

that it did.

RH: Of course it did... That's very self-serving of McNamara as is many things in his book.

You know, he says that we didn't have any experts on Vietnam. Well, Lew Savice who'd

been desk officer for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for Vietnam for twenty someodd years knew a great deal about Vietnam and he wrote a memo and McNamara got so


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angry that he called Rusk and said, don't permit that man to write any more memos. In other

words, he didn't want to hear from the experts, he killed the experts.Jack Kennedy, since Jack Kennedy didn't know anything about, Jack Kennedy visited

Vietnam as a young congressman, knew a lot more about Vietnam than McNamara did.

McNamara's talking really about himself, but we had lots of experts on Vietnam. The

problem was that McNamara wouldn't listen to them, he refused to read the stuff they wrote

and everything else, he...

INT: So between them, McNamara and Johnson really froze out people who did know

about...

RH: ... and Johnson literally transferred, fired, drove out of government all the people that

were really knew something about Vietnam and were opposed to the war. Harriman, me.

INT: Just going back to the beginning, to what extent was the attitude towards Vietnam

a consequence of the domino theory and just how isolated was the United States inviewing Vietnam that way?

RH: Well, first of all the domino theory is a newspaper clich and it had no bearing

whatsoever on anything. Kennedy once used it, but he was using it in terms of foreign aid and

you know, if you think about it for a minute, it was an Eisenhower expression. If Vietnam

goes, you know the domino theory is that Thailand goes, Indonesia goes and they're barking

on the shores of California. Bull. If Vietnam goes, Thailand is going to make every possible

effort you know, including inviting American troops in, so that's just nonsense.

INT: How much do you think the United States was isolated in prosecuting the conflict

with Vietnam?

RH: Well, it isolated itself. It persisted under Johnson in making it an American war when the

French had withdrawn, the British said they wanted nothing to do with it. the

Australians, Clark Clifford who replaced McNamara, came... Johnson picked him because he

was a hawk, so Clark Clifford comes in as Secretary of Defense and decides that he's going

to get the Australians to bear a bigger part of the burden. So he goes out there to Australia

and they had one battalion, you know, in Vietnam and they give him every excuse in the

world and Clark Clifford says, well, look, you know, here you're sitting on the doorstep of

South East Asia and you don't seem to be worried about a Communist Vietnam, what the hell

are we doing there, you know? And he came back and decided that it was all a terrible

mistake and so the great hawk that Lyndon Johnson thought he was buying turned out to be abig dove after he learned a little bit about it. And then Johnson did something that... you

know, when McNamarafinally decided the war was a mistake, which was two years

after they bombed the North, you see, took him a long time, when he finally decided it was

a mistake, why he told Johnson he thought it was a mistake, but he never said another word,

he didn't do anything to... and in his book he gives this impression that it would have been

unconstitutional for him to have opposed the President. Bull!

INT: There have been people...

RH: (Interrupts) Thomas Jefferson as Vice President to George Washington organized the

opposition to some of George Washington's views. When Clark Clifford decided it was a


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mistake, he went around Washington and formed a coalition in the Congress and in the State

Department and everywhere else and confronted Johnson with it and said, you've got to go to

Paris and negotiate a peace. and that's what Bob McNamara should have done, but Bob

McNamara falsely kept quiet and kept quiet for all these years. Well, while I might add, the

number ofdead Americans in Vietnam doubled.

INT: Thank you.

(INTERRUPTION)

INT: Why do you think in the Cold War that American Presidents have found it easier

to deal with foreign policy matters than domestic policy?

RH: Well, first of all, in the Cold War you've got a clear cut enemy, everybody recognizes

the enemy, the country's united on that the Soviet Union was enemy. So that makes it fairly

easy. The second things is that the Congress of the United States, under our constitution, the

way it works, foreign affairs is esoteric, domestic affairs, they all understand, and as aconsequence getting something done in domestic affairs is much more difficult for a

President than it is in foreign affairs during the Cold War. I mean, during the Cold War,

there's a clear cut enemy, the President, the constitution gives him a monopoly of the power

in foreign affairs, he doesn't have to deal with the House, so Senate ratifies treaties, but you

know, we can go to war without a declaration of war as Truman did in Korea and so on, and

as Johnson did in Vietnam. So, they gravitated to foreign affairs out of frustration with

domestic affairs. They couldn't get anything done, they had to deal with so many interest

groups and lobbies and trade unions and the Congress and so on and so forth, the bureaucracy

in domestic affairs, but in foreign affairs, clear cut enemy, the Soviet Union, constitution

gives them greater power the lack of expertise in Congress about foreign affairs gives them

greater power so they inevitably drifted into foreign affairs out of frustration with domestic

affairs.

INT: Is there something about the American system of government which meant that

once the Johnson Administration had geared up for the conflict in Vietnam, it was very

difficult to pull back?

RH: Well, I think that's true of any political system. I mean, look at the Russians and

Chechnya, you know, they had a terrible time getting out of that thing, it was a terrible

mistake, it's a quagmire. Afghanistan, the Russians had and that's a, you know, a Communist

dictatorship. If they can't, you know... if the top people can't have the freedom, once they gotin, you know, a very small group go the Russians into Afghanistan and it took them a hell of

a long time to get out. Similarly with Chechnya, so I don't think that's in the nature of politics.

Once you suffer casualties, once you're in there, it's very difficult to admit I was a stupid

fool, I shouldn't have gotten us in there, I'm going to pull out. It's very difficult. I used to say

about Lyndon Johnson, that you know, if you're Lyndon Johnson and you suddenly realize

that the Vietnam is a mistake, you look in a mirror and you say, you Lyndon Johnson are

responsible for the deaths offifty five thousand American soldiers, because you were

stupidly bull-headed and didn't understand the situation. I mean, a man will do anything to

avoid have to confront himself with that sort of th. He'll rationalize, he'll justify as Bob

McNamara has done, you see. you know, they were wrong, but it's awfully hard to admit you

were wrong when there are fifty fivethousand dead Americans because you were stubbornlywrong and there were a lot ofhigh officials, Averill Harriman and others, who were


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opposed to it from the beginning and they turn out to be right. It's a very difficult

psychological problem for a man like Bob McNamara or Lyndon Johnson, for any man it's a

difficult psychological problem.

INT: Thanks, thanks, thank you.

(INTERRUPTION)

INT: I'm now going to ask questions for the program about Cuba. This is still the same

day, June the eighth with Roger Hilsman. Why did it take so long for the US intelligence

community to uncover the missile build-up?

RH: Because the Soviets camouflaged it and made it so secret, that was the first reason. I'll

tell you, there was one major mistake on the part of the intelligence community. In one sense,

the discovery of the missiles in time for Kennedy to do something about them was a great

intelligence victory. the Soviets had gone to enormous extremes to hide it, they had

prefabricated the storage sites for the warheads, you know, the nuclear warheads in the SovietUnion and shipped them that incredible distance. Let me just give you an idea of what the

planning was required. There were over a hundred ship loads of war materials sent from the

Soviet Union to Cuba. It takes about I've forgotten now, two or three hundred freight trains to

fill one ship, so you get two or three thousand freight trains full of war material being shipped

to Cuba. Now, you know, they went to elaborate extents to hide this, when they got there they

put big fences around the port areas, no Cubans were allowed inside. When they moved them,

they moved them by night under canvas covers, you know, elaborate things. Now, so in one

sense the fact that we found out about them in time was a great success. But there was one

intelligence failure and that was, you see back a year earlier when Kennedy came into office,

he and everybody else was convinced that the Soviets had a missile gap in their favor, that is

that the Soviets had three or four hundred ICBMs and we had about fifty or maybe a hundred

at that time. Now, we later discovered that that big ICBM and I mean much later years later

that we thought that the American intelligence and everybody thought was giving the Soviets

a big advantage, that they... that's the one that orbited Yuri Gagarin around the earth, when

they got it out to Plasetsk up in the Arctic Circle to employ, it was just too big and too bulky

and as a consequence they had to go back to the drawing board. We didn't know this, so when

Kennedy came into office, we thought there was a missile gap. there were a few, Bob

McNamara claims that he had a gut feeling that there wasn't, but he had no evidence. So what

happened was in the summer of '62 we flew the successfully the orbiting satellites and by

September we knew that there was not only a new missile gap, but the missile gap was in our

favor. So then the problem was, what do we do? Do we tell the Soviets? in the meantime, theSoviets are putting pressure on Berlin and it looks like there's, you know, going to be a hell of

a crisis there and so there's a big struggle inside the American government about do we tell

the Soviets? And finally, we decided to tell them, but we did instead of... you know, we didn't

have the President do it or the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, that would have

been too threatening, too belligerent, so we had the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Ros

Gilpatrick make a speech, very technical, but anyway what it said to the Russians was, the

United States now knows that there's no missile gap in your favor and there is a missile gap

in our favor. That was in October of '62. Now, what the Soviets did was they panicked for a

little bit, you see, they said, oh my God, if we had an advantage like that, we would certainly

do all sorts of things, not war necessarily, but we would take Berlin, we'd do all sorts of

things, you know, like that and the Americans are going to do something like that too. but theAmericans were not going to do something like that. so the Soviets, what can the Soviets do


14/24

to even things? And somebody comes up with the idea that... somebody, some Soviet comes

up with the idea, well we've got all these MRBMs and medium-range ballistic missiles,

IRBMs, intermediate range ballistic missiles, let's ship 'em to Cuba, that it'll be an interim

solution. So that was what happened, you see. Now where American intelligence made its

mistake was that back in October you know, of the year before when Gilpatrick made his

speech,

INT: So in fact, Khrushchev and the Politburo, learning that there was a missile gap in

the United States' favor decided that they were then going to install missiles in Cuba as

a stop gap?

RH: As a stop gap, exactly. They, you know, the trouble was if they'd launched on a crisis

crash ICBM program, it would have meant their foreign policy would have been... their

foreign aid program would have had to go down the drain, a lot of the things they were doing

in agriculture all would have cost them heavily and this was a cheap, easy way out, they

thought.

INT: Nonetheless, you note in your book that the Soviets had increased the destructive

power they could deliver by fifty per cent.

RH: Oh, more than that. Now what it meant was that once they got those missiles there, they

could more and more and more and more and you know, until it was overwhelming. but even

the missiles that they had there, that actually arrived there, in a first strike would have

knocked out all the American air bases, bomber bases, all the American missile bases and all

American cities except Seattle, which was out of their range. But Washington, DC, New

York City, Dallas, would all have gone under the hammer. But that's in a first strike, you see,

and that's what made it so important was that we not permit that, that we had to get those

things out of there. Now,... I'm not saying that the Soviets planned a first strike, I'm only

saying that with them there, they could do things all over the world with very little risk,

because they had this first strike capability, so we simply couldn't tolerate it. And the other

thing was that, you know, we all recognized that sooner or later the Soviets were going to

achieve parity in missiles, but it's one thing to do it overnight, secretly, without any other

preparations for it and another thing to do it over a twenty year period, when you're going to

have mutual adjustments and treaties and getting used to the situation.

INT: Given the danger posed by the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba, why wasn't there

a possibility that that might happen, given more credence?

RH: Well, you know, I just said that I accept blame for a good portion of this. But the

reasoning, or the reason we didn't think of it sooner was that the Soviets had never put any

nuclear weapons outside the Soviet borders. They had never put them in Poland, they'd never

put them in Eastern Europe, noneof the satellites were given nor were any Russian rockets

stationed in satellite count... this was something they'd never done before, you see, it was

quite unusual. And we didn't think they'd do it, you know. Truth of the matter is that it never

dawned on us that they would take that kind of risk, we should have thought of it, and we

should have realized that something like that might happen, but it just never occurred to us,

until these enormous ship loads arrived in the summer. Then we were very nervous about it,

we were quivering we were so nervous about, you know, that's what they were doing. We had

seen nothing, but before, you know, just the mere volume and magnitude of this massive


15/24

transfer of equipment, military equipment, led us to believe that the missiles might be among

them. But that was not until the summer.

INT: Was there ever any thought that this might be a sort of decoy effort in a possible

Soviet attack on Berlin?

RH: Yes. Rusk had that idea all along that that was the purpose of it and it's perfectly true

that you know once they got 'em in place, they would have been free to do things in South

America, in Berlin, all over the world that they weren't free to do when there wasn't a balance

of power.

INT: Can you take us through the events of October fifteenth, the Monday, when there

was evidence that the missiles were in place, getting the news to Secretary Rusk and so

on, can you just take us through how that happened.

RH: Well, the way it happened, the U-2 flew on Sunday and by Monday... you got a vision of

this, the kind of camera. If you took a piece of film, about fifty miles long, the distancebetween Baltimore and Washington DC and about fifty feet wide, that's what those photo-

interpreters had to do and you know they had to crawl over that kind of photograph with a

magnifying glass. Well, they found them on October fifteenth, the missiles were there. Now,

what happens is that the photo-interpreters, it's a joint military CIA venture, they called the

CIA and reported that there were missiles there and then, you know, the head of the CIA calls

Mac Bundy and says, I'm prepared to brief the President and Mac says, he's going to need all

the sleep he can get, there's nothing he can do about it this Monday afternoon, let him have a

good night's sleep and we'll wake him up in the morning with the bad news. then the CIA

calls me, I'm head of Intelligence at the State Department, and I tell Rusk. now in that case,

Rusk was hosting a dinner for the (unintelligible) ambassador on the top floor of the State

Department building, so I had his aide drop him a note and he went out to the kitchen and got

on a pay phone and called me and I said, are you on a secure phone? And he said, no, I'm on

a pay phone. So I said, well, remember that conversation we had last week about events down

south? And he said, yes. And I said, well, they're there. And he said, are you sure? And I said,

yes, I'm very sure. So that was the way he was told. McNamara was at a dinner party, I guess

Bobby Kennedy was holding a dinner party for McNamara and some of the Joint Chiefs and

the guy came out there and briefed them at the dinner party.

INT: On the next day, the sixteenth, Tuesday, there was an Excom meeting...

RH: (Interrupts) What became the Excom.

INT: What became Excom, yeah. What was the mood at the meeting, what did Kennedy

say and do?

RH: Well, you know, mainly what you wanted to do was to find out you know how solid this

information was and that's the kind of questions that were asked the first day. And then they

met almost continuously from thereon and then questions like, how soon will they be

operational, that becomes a very key question and you know what are we going to do about

it. And they go around and around and around from the military and Curt Lemay who wanted

a... well, what Bobby Kennedy said, you want a surprise first strike, without any warning.

And you know, very... dramatic meeting on a Friday night, just... you see the... the disclosurewas the following Monday, a week later from the discovery, but that Friday night, after four


16/24

or five days of arguing, the NSC... the Excom met and Kennedy deliberately stayed away and

said you know, let me be absent once... The presence of the President may be inhibiting. And

so in this meeting, while the hawks and McNamara and... John McCone, head of CIA, argued

again for a first strike without warning. And Bobby Kennedy with a very moving and

emotional scene, which swayed a lot of people there, recalled Pearl Harbor and he said I do

not want my brother to be the Tojo of American history, I do not want the Americangovernment to engage in a Pearl Harbor. And it moved everybody there and that swayed the

meeting, so the point was that a blockade would prevent any more missiles getting in. The

stickler was it wouldn't remove the missiles that were there, you see, and that's what was

bothering the hawks. but it would keep them from putting more and more and more in there

and we weren't even sure the warheads had arrived. It turned out they had arrived but we

weren't sure of that at the time. But anyway, as Kennedy said, this is only a first step, we'll

blockade it, we'll prevent any more build-up and then we can go on from there. I mean, if

they won't remove the missiles, we can start about sanctions, we can put in, you know, add

food and everything else and turn the screws and maybe at the end we'll have to invade,

maybe we'll have to have an air strike. But the first step should be a blockade and that was all

agreed upon.

INT: And Kennedy decided that very much in the beginning?

RH: Yeah. My own feeling, now this is speculation, but my own feeling was that from day

one, Kennedy was not going to invade, he was going to blockade first, he was going to take it

in slow bites, incremental steps. what he said was, he used an expression that was very vivid,

you know, he said if we do something very dramatic, they're likely to have a spasm reaction,

you know, a knee-jerk reaction, a spasm reaction, that's the phrase he used, and he said, we

must avoid that, we must take it very steady. So what he did was, it was very carefully

crafted, he made a speech and said, I will seek the permission of the Organization of

American States for a blockade, you see. He didn't say, he waited twenty four hours, he

sought the permission of the OAS, he got the permission of the OAS, he waited twenty four

hours, he announced the blockade would be imposed another twenty four hours lathe waited

another twenty four hours before stopping a ship. He stopped an oil tanker - you couldn't put

a missile on an oil tanker you see - and let it go by. He then waited another twenty four hours

and he stopped a Lebanese freighter on Soviet charter. The Soviets are not going to put

missiles on a Lebanese freighter. He stopped that and boarded it. It was a step by step

process, so that the other side would have time to think and not have a spasm reaction. That

was his plan and that's what worked out.

INT: At the beginning, back on October the sixteenth, what was the decision aboutletting the public or preventing the public from knowing? What was it...

RH: Well, Kennedy first of all the very first thing... well, actually he did this long before we

discovered missiles in Cuba, back after these enormous ship loads in the fall, he instituted a

special security procedure called PSALM, P S A L M, PSLAM, was the code name, and this

limited the number of people who could, if we discovered that there were missiles in Cuba, it

limited the number of people who would be privy to that information to those who really

needed to know and... 'cos he was afraid of a leak. And as he said, we'll need time to figure

out what to do. So by PSALM and secrecy, he bought a week. But the Sunday night... I mean,

the plane flew Sunday, October fourteenth, we learned about it Monday October fifteenth, he

was going to make a speech the following Monday, it was decided, but on Sunday, the NewYork Times and the Washington Post by devious means, you know, calling up somebody and


17/24

saying, well, I understand that we're going to blockade Berlin. Oh, no, no, nothinlike that,

you know, so finally they get most of the story and Kennedy called the publisher of the

Washington Post and the New York Times and said I'm going to make a speech tomorrow,

iyou publish it in tomorrow morning's papers, the Soviets are liable to, you know, move

ahead of me and so please don't. Well, the Post honored it, the Times fudged and said that

there was some crisis in the air and so on. I do not respect the Times for that decision. Butanyway, it held. Kennedy made his speech and we went on from there.

INT: There was obviously that week great fear that there would be a leak and people...

RH: Yeah. Well, one of the things that happened was that the reason the press got so alert

was that you know, the sixth floor was where the Assistant Secretaries lived and the seventh

floor was where the Secretary lived. Well, anybody driving by there at one o'clock in the

morning, you know, would look up and there all the lights are on the sixth floor and all the

lights are on the seventh floor, you see, they're bound to know something was up and the

press were prowling the halls before the week was out. So on one occasion, one of the NSC

meetings, all these black cars are driving up to the State Department, black limousines and sofinally they put 'em in the basement, you see, instead of parking outside and took the

Secretary's private elevator up to his office. In the White House, one day to avoid this sort of

thing, they piled everybody concerned in one big limousine, sitting on each other's laps and

drove to the Treasury Department, because it was discovered that there was a tunnel between

the Treasury Department and the White House that everybody had forgotten about, but it was

still there, so they went to the Treasury Department and went through the tunnel to the White

House, all part of trying to keep the... you know, give him time, give us time to think.

INT: Was there any thought at the time that this was Khrushchev trying to test

Kennedy?

RH: Well, all sorts of such hypotheses were put forward, you see. But the trouble was when

somebody did put forward that hypothesis, but you know, you don't play around with nuclear

missiles when... nobody does, when you're testing somebody and, by the way, you know,

remember that the Berlin crisis had gone on, Kennedy had done a number of things that

showed that he had seal and soul. they broke the cease-fire in Laos and we sent a division to

Thailand, all before the Cuban mis... I think that's nonsense. I think that Khrushchev and the

Soviets were afraid of being on the wrong end of a missile gap and here was an easy and

quick solution, a very dangerous one, but it wasn't, to their point of view, it wasn't as

dangerous as it might sound, because, you see, although it's missiles and it's nuclear war, they

had their hand on the trigger. Now, I'll tell you one thing that since then I've written a bookabout this, about the Cuban Missile Crisis and before that time, we all thought, the Americans

and the Soviets that nuclear war was so terrible that there was no risk of it, you see, and we

called it the balance of terror, using Churchill's phrase, the balance of terror will guarantee

peace. There were so many slips during that thing, the Soviets shot down a U-2, apparently

the local anti-aircraft commander made the decision. They had warheads all over the place,

they, you know, all sorts of crazy things were done and there were, you know, and our own

navy put the blockade in close against Kennedy's orders. They used some target depth

charges to bring up the Soviets... you know, they weren't enough to kill 'em, but they were

enough to bring 'em to the surface. If Kennedy had known that, he'd have screamed bloody

murder you see. There were all sorts of things on both sides. In the midst of the crisis, a U-2

had been flying up to the North Pole every month for several years not with photographicequipment, with air sampling equipment to see if the Soviets had tested the... atomic bomb,


18/24

you see. And that's the way we kept monitoring their tests. We fly up over the

(unintelligible). This pilot, a U-2 pilot, circles the North Pole, picks the wrong star and next

the bloody Cuban Crisis is over the Soviet Union. The Soviet fighters are scrambling and

everything else and he goes on the clear and, you know, what the hell. You know, as

Khrushchev said later you know, in the midst of this crisis, when we're both on the verge of

war, you send a U-2 over the Soviet Union. We thought it was a reconnaissance for a firststrike. Well, it was an accident, you know, it was an accident, nobody knew about this. There

were so many of those things that happened that I became convinced, and a number of others,

that you know, we talk about abolishing nuclear weapons and this is this book, you know,

that I've written, we talk about abolishing nuclear weapons, it became clear to me at that time

that that was not enough, that we were really going to have find some way to abolish war,

because if you start a war now between major powers, even though you've had nuclear

disarmament, both sides will start building nuclear weapons just as a precaution. You know,

after all we built the nuclear weapon before anybody knew how to do it in the midst of a war

and in time to use in the war. Both sides will build 'em and sooner or later there'll be a war

and they're used again. So the only thing to do is to find some mechanism for abolishing war,

it seems to me.

INT: There were the (unintelligible) talks weren't there about...

RH: (Interrupts) I'm sorry?

INT: There was something called the (unintelligible) talks...

RH: Right, OK.

INT: You were involved?

RH: Yeah, I was involved in that. Well, what happened was that first of all, the Soviets...

there were several methods the Soviets used to communicate with other governments, one is

a direct message from Khrushchev to Kennedy or something like that, another is ambassador

to ambassador. But the Soviets really had a practice of they would frequently, throughout

their history, they would make some sort of a public and official or non-public, I mean,

Khrushchev to Kennedy, they would do something that was official, you see. Usually they

would... in the cases that I'm talking about, it would be very vague, forthcoming, but vague.

Then in a deniable way, using a KGB man or a TASS man, they would go around and try

something very specific, but easily deniable, you see, on it. Now in this case, what they did

was, they sent a cable from Khrushchev to Kennedy - this was the famous four part cable -very... it was clear just reading it that this that, you know, Khrushchev and their Politburo

sitting around a table, he calls in a secretary, he dictates the cable, long, rambling, pure

Khrushchev. The most important paragraph in it is, Mr. President, Mr. Kennedy, you and I

are like two men pulling on a rope with a knot in the middle, the harder we pull, the tighter

the knot until it will have to be cut with a sword. Now why we don't both let up the pressure

and maybe we can untie the knot. Now that was what the cable... and that's about the level of

specificity, you see. But that same day, well one thing it didn't go anywhere. A KGB man

approaches U Thant at the UN and says to him, practically the same thing that Foreman said

to Scali to say to me, and U Thant didn't pick up on it for some reason, so that didn't go

anywhere. But Khrushchev sent Fomin a... Fomin was the head of the KGB in Washington

DC, and we all knew that, and apparently what they've said was, try out a very simpleformula on as high an official as you can get. So Fomin called Skally and said, you're a friend


19/24

of Hilsman, can you take him a message, I assure it comes from Khrushchev. Well, he kept

saying it comes from Khrushchev. Well, Scali brought me this message, it was very simple, it

was four points. We will remove the missiles from Cuba, under UN supervision, and in

exchange you make an announcement, President Kennedy, that you will not invade Cuba.

Just three simple points. there may have a fourth point, but anyway. And so, I, you know, say

to Scali, are you sure this comes from Khrushchev, over and over again. Finally, he said yesand so I take it to Rusk and to Kennedy and so they mull this over and Rusk calls back and

says, get Fomin up here... get Scali up here. So we get Scali up there and Rusk writes in his

own handwriting, we think that this has got something... you know, that this will help solve

the problem with the... I will instruct our ambassadors to the UN etcetera to follow up on this.

And so that goes back to Fomin and to Khrushchev. Now, I think that, you know... and then

what happened was - and this is Bobby Kennedy, this brilliant, so-called Trollope play, we

called it the Trollope play after the... in the novels of Anthony Trollope, you know, a boy

squeezes a girl's hand and she turns and I says I accept your proposal of marriage. So what

happened was, on the Saturday - this happened the Friday night, the Khrushchev long

telegram and the Scali Fomin Hilsman exchange occurs Friday night, (unintelligible) a U-2

gets shot down, there's a lot of garbage in the meantime, but that afternoon, Bobby Kennedyhad this brilliant idea. He said let's pick out of the Khrushchev cable the things we like and

let's pick up the Fomin Hilsman exchange, what we like, and pretend that the rest isn't there.

So we then craft it and Kennedy and... Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, they crafted this

answer to Khrushchev that did just that. It ignored the shoot down of the U-2, it ignored the

broadcast from Moscow that was very hawkish, you kno

(INTERRUPTION)

INT: There was a Radio Moscow announcement wasn't there about it at the time.

RH: Yeah, and what happened was we figured that one out. That when the U-2 flew over the

Soviet Union, that morning I had spent the whole night, the five or six of us in the

Intelligence Bureau, the Soviet experts and I, we hadn't been to bed for thirty six hours and

that Saturday morning I was with Rusk and Tommy Thompson, the Soviet expert, and they

had drafted a very harsh telegram... in response to the shoot down of the U-2, you see, this

Saturday morning. And so I had to go to the White House for some other reason, I've

forgotten what it was, so they said, Roger you take it over so I took it over and I gotten in

Kennedy... this is in Lincoln's Office, Kennedy's secretary (unintelligible) and Mac Bundy

was there and Kennedy and Mrs. Lincoln and we discussed the cable and Kennedy said, well,

I don't like this, but we'll talk about it this afternoon, (unintelligible). So I went downstairs,

you see, and Mac Bundy's office, the way the White House is on one side is a basement butit's at ground level, the other side, that would be in the basement you see, but Mac Bundy's

office was right there. So we're down by Mac Bundy's office and a guy grabs me and says,

your office is on the phone urgently. So I pick up the phone and the guy on the other phone

says, he was our coordinator with JCS, Joint Chiefs, he says I've got this phone in one hand

and I've got a phone to the War Room in the Pentagon in the other. A U-2 has strayed over

the Soviet Union and he's gone clear and I can hear the pilot screaming for help, you know, in

my other phone. So, and you know, you don't need to explain, everybody thought my God,

the Soviets'll think this U-2's a reconnaissance for a first strike and it's (unintelligible) by the

door, the shit hit the fan, this is what we were afraid. So I ran upstairs. Well, I hadn't been to

bed for thirty six hours and we got up there and I was shaky and puffy and all that, puffing

and shaking and I blurted out the news and, you know, everybody just, you know, like that,my God, nobody said anything, but it was total silence, everybody thinking oh my God,


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they'll think it's a reconnaissance and we're gonna and you know we're in minutes of a nuclear

war. And Kennedy was the first guy to recover you know, his cool. I remember Hemingway,

I've put this in the book, Hemingway said that grace under pressure, well that was Kennedy.

and he laughed and he said there's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word! And

so he said, Roger handle this, you know, get down there and get the Pentagon and get to the

Soviet Union and, you know, make sure this doesn't escalate. So I started to move and ofcourse without sleeping or anything and I started to fall and Mac Bundy caught me and said

to the President, Roger hasn't been to bed for thirty six hours, can't somebody else handle

this? And Kennedy looked at me, he said, you go home and go to bed right now and Mac

handled it. I went home went to bed, but before I went to bed, that's the reason for this story, I

went back to my office and got the Soviet experts together and we took at look at this radio

broadcast from Moscow. Now... and then compared it to the Khrushchev cable, you see. Now

the Khrushchev cable comes in Friday night, the radio broadcast from Moscow comes in

Saturday morning and what was perfectly clear when you looked at these two documents was

that the radio broadcast was pure Soviet bureaucratize, you see, absolutely Khrushchev was

pure Khrushchev. So we figured what had happened was that it picked up on a Walter

Lippman column, a very irresponsible column of Walter Lippman's that sort of equated themissiles in Turkey with the missiles in Cuba, which is just nonsense, you know, the missiles

in Turkey were put there in response to the Soviet missiles aimed at Europe and

(unintelligible) they were very vulnerable, they were in a long count-down etcetera. So any

way, very irresponsible. So we deduced that the Moscow cable had

INT: That's a good place to stop.

INT: The next day or sometime after this incident with the U-2 spy plane inadvertently

over the Soviet Union, wasn't there a U-2 plane shot down over Cuba as well?

RH: Well, the sequence of events was that the Khrushchev cable, the four part cable, came in

Friday night and simultaneously the Fomin Scali Hilsman exchange came in. The next

morning, on Saturday, a U-2 was shot down and immediately almost at the same time, the

Moscow broadcast came, you see, so that's why the initial reaction of the American

government was that the Soviets are bent on war. The combination of the Moscow broadcast,

which seemed to repudiate the Khrushchev of the night before, the combination of the

Moscow broadcast with the shoot down of the U-2 really put it to us. Now I went back,

analyzed the Moscow broadcast with the Soviet experts and we decided that they were not

related, that the Moscow broadcast actually was crafted before the Khrushchev thing and so

we got that into the mill. Then Bobby Kennedy said, let's don't do anything about it. You see

one of those things, the kind of standby plan was if a U-2 was shot down, we wouldimmediately bomb that SAM site, (unintelligible) missile site out of existence. If another U-2

was shot down or shot at, we'd bomb all the SAM sites. Kennedy, President Kennedy,

cancelled that order he said don't bomb any aircraft site, I want time to exchange with

Khrushchev. So Kennedy's intervention that prevented the bombing of that missile site, our

analysis of the Moscow broadcast has said it was not related and Bobby Kennedy's Trollope

ploy brought us out of it.

INT: 'Cos by this time the United States has realized that there were twenty four or so

missiles operational within Cuba.

RH: No, you're talking about the surface to air missiles.


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INT The medium...

RH: No, no...

INT: (Unintelligible) missiles were operational.

RH: That's right. well... what I thought you were saying is I recall there were twenty four

anti-aircraft sites, anti-aircraft missile sites, SAMS, surface to air missiles, there were twenty

four of those. I've temporarily forgotten, I guess there were also twenty four... well the

MRBMs had become operational and they had warheads.

INT: When did you know that?

RH: We knew that...

INT: From the U-2 plane?

RH: yeah. it's a...

INT: That same week.

RH: Well, I'll tell you. in this book, the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, you check that, you've

got a copy of it, if you want that exact time, that's in there. I mean, I know... it's a difference

between relying on my memory. Some time before... it may have been as early as Wednesday

or Thursday that the MRBMs went operational.

INT: Right, they went operational at that time, right?

RH: They were...

INT: They were operation.

RH: The MRBMs, not the IRBMs. The IRBMs never arrived, but the MRBMs were there and

at the time we didn't know whether the missiles, the warheads had arrived or not. We didn't

learn about that until much later and that was at... what happened was that after the crisis was

over... well, I should say that when Khrushchev, you know, caved, the first thing that

happened was a Soviet freighter came in to Marielle and there was some very funny activity.

and the activity was that a bunch of very peculiarly shaped vans, very funny trucks, youknow, came out of the woods near Marielle and were loaded on to this ship. So the CIA, this

crisis is all over now, the CIA then goes back and looks at their old pictures of U-2... of

missile sites all over the Soviet Union and here are those same little vans and it became

obvious that the vans were the warhead carriers, that they were designed to carry the

warheads.

INT: Right, so we've got Bobby Kennedy's ploy, we've got... deciding to focus only on

the important things from the Khrushchev memo. What actually happens next, how

does Khrushchev back down?

RH: Well, what happens is that after the... you know, after the Fomin Scali Hilsman exchangeand the subsequent things, you know, that is Rusk writes his little piece in handwritten letter


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saying, you know, we will instruct that. That goes back to Khrushchev, etc., those go back

and forth, then Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy and the security council, the Excom, draft

a cable picking up things that they like about the Fomin's exchange and about the Khrushchev

cable and send it off. The next morning, there is a Radio Moscow broadcast saying stand by

for an emergency high level broadcast and Khrushchev caves.

INT: What did he actually say?

RH: He says we will withdraw what you call offensive missiles.

INT: And that's what Rusk and Kennedy had asked him to do?

RH: Yeah. Where's a copy of the book?

INT: Yeah, well let's come back to that.

(INTERRUPTION)

INT: So Roger how close did the world come to nuclear war at that point?

RH: Well, there were going to be a few more steps I think. In other words, I think one of the

reasons that the Soviets put the missiles in Cuba was that they felt that they could control the

pace of events, that they could always pull them out, you know. And as it turns out, that was

true. and so I would say that you know we weren't that close, but if you look at the record,

you know, a post-mortem as I have done in this book, you see so many occasions where we

came very close to making a fatal mistake. They came close or we came close, you see. let

me give you one example. We had decided that they probably would not ship the warheads

by sea, because, you know, they were vulnerable to be boarded and captured. So they were

probably going to send them by air. So we went to the African countries and told them all this

and said, please don't give the Soviets permission to land or refuel. And so the African

stations were very co-operative on this. So in the middle of the (unintelligible) crisis, a super

jet leaves Moscow with extra fuel tanks and so on and so forth, so we think, God, these are

the warheads, you see. And Bobby Kennedy said there's nothing we can do, we have to shoot

the damn thing down, we cannot let those warheads arrive. And finally the compromise was

that we put airplanes all over the sky, around Cuba, with photographic planes and everything

else you see, and the idea was that when the plane landed in Havana and warheads started to

come out, we'd go in and destroy them on the ground, that was the compromise. The damn

plane was loaded with three hundred newspaper correspondents from the Soviet Union,inaugurating a new Aeroflot service to Cuba. Jesus, you know, that's the kind of thing... how

close we came, you know, how close we came. And that was our fault. Now, the Soviets, you

know, shot the U-2 down there were just all sorts of slips all over the place.

INT: When the whole thing was over you said Kennedy kept his elation to himself and

you shouldn't allow people to gloat and you just put that in your...

RH: (Interrupts) Well, he was already thinking about what became his great American

university speech. you know, the peace in our time sort of speech and he didn't want the

Americans to gloat, because he wanted to... this was the nuclear test ban speech, and he

already had this in mind and it's one of the tragedies of his assassination is that Kennedy hadmade this speech, as I say, he already had it in mind, so he didn't want anybody to gloat or to


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make it difficult for the Soviets, so he made his speech and the agreement that they had was

there'd be a nuclear test ban treaty and inspections. Now the Soviets, you know, a totalitarian

system, inspectors are just not acceptable. Khrushchev was agree... agreed to three

inspections a year and this was unprecedented, it really would have been a major

breakthrough. The damned American military insisted on six and Kennedy, you know, was

afraid that the treaty would be shot down in the Senate, because the Pentagon was objectingand he didn't count on being assassinated. He thought, well, we'll make the first treaty and

then next year I'll come back and we'll make another treaty and have inspections. But

unfortunately he was killed.

INT: Was the Cuban Missile Crisis the most dangerous thing in the Cold War, do you

think?

RH: I don't think there's any question it was. I mean, we were... as I say, it was not... you see

I'm trying to be very responsible and careful here. We had a number of other steps we would

have taken before war, but those steps might have been gone through in five days or four

days, you see, or it might have been five months, I don't know, you see, but all I'm saying isthat we had a lot of intermediate steps before we actually invaded Cuba, but on the other

hand, you know, events (unintelligible) and if they had shot down some more planes or

something like that...

INT: How did the Cuban Missile Crisis change the course of the Cold War?

RH: Well, I think... two things. I think it made everybody aware that Churchill's balance of

terror, two scorpions in a bottle, if either one strikes, both will die, unreal, you know, you

can't put all of your face on a nuclear balance of terror. There are too many ways it can slip.

So that shook a lot of people's faith in that. Now what disturbs me about it is that we still

have nuclear arsenals. The Cuban Missile Crisis I think was because of that we got the

nuclear test ban treaty, because of that we got a lot of other treaties, all of which are good, but

that's not enough, you see and I think the bad side of it is that because it was so horrible that

nobody wants to think about nuclear war, you see. Now, for example, this book I've written

about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the publisher to my horror put a huge price on it, forty five

dollars, and I said why did you do that? And he said the mass of the public doesn't want to

read about nuclear war, even if it has a happy ending. they don't want to think about it. The

only people that are going to buy your book are people who have to think about it, you know,

and they don't care what they pay for it! They'll pay... So I tthat's true. Essentially what's

happened is because of the horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that scared everybody and

governments as well, people got complacent and I think that I've got another book that I hopeto publish next year, which is really a (unintelligible) for getting rid of nuclear weap, but for

getting rid of war itself. But it's just that people don't want to think about it, they don't want to

talk about it. and so, you know, in a sense the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us a lot of peace

and a lot of awareness of the danger of nuclear weapons, but on the other hand it also has

postponed the day we do something really definitive.

INT: Do you think the Cold War was necessary?

RH: Well, you're now coming to the province of historians who, you know, everything is

inevitable, most historians, it happened, therefore it had to happen. I don't believe that, you

know, I don't believe that. I don't think the Vietnam War had to happen, I think that was amistake stupid mistake. and I think the same's probably true of World War Two, that you


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know, if the allies, the French and the British should have moved when the Rhineland was

occupied, they should have moved. Better a small war then than a big war later. I don't think

anything is inevitable in human history.

INT: And what do you think the lessons are from the Cold War, what do you think

we've actually learned and achieved?

RH: Well, we didn't fight the Soviet Union. I mean, it was a huge success. I mean, here's a

war that everybody thought was inevitable didn't happen and that's a great success, you know.

There was another such thing in history. You know around the year 1900 everybody thought

that the big war was going to be between Russia and Britain and that the major site of it

would be in Afghanistan, in that part of the world, you know. And what happened was... the

British government decided this was silly and I've forgotten the name of the guy... the British

ambassador, his son who was also an author and wrote a very important book, but now it's

escaped me for the moment. But around the turn of the century, you sent this ambassador out

there and of course in those days, ambassadors had more authority, 'cos they didn't have jet

aircraft, and he essentially negotiated a peace with Russia so that that war didn't happen. Andeverybody thought it was inevitable. Look at some of Kipling's stuff, you know,... that was

the inevitable war, it didn't happen. Then the Kaiser made the stupid mistake of trying to

build a navy and challenging Great Britain on the seas. And you know there had been a stable

peace with Germany being the land power... Germany and France being the land power and

Britain being the sea power. But when the Germans decided to challenge Britain at sea, I'm

sure the Kaiser had no intention of war, but if you're going to build a navy, you know, he

challenges the whole balance of power. So there's no war that's inevitable.

INT: Thanks very much.

(END OF INTERVIEW WITH ROGER HILSMAN)

interview with roger hilsman on vietnam

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