The Revolution of Robert Kennedy by John R. Bohrer

Author:John R. Bohrer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

This as American military planes hit North Vietnamese targets only eighty miles from the Chinese border, and Vietcong agents set off bombs just five hundred yards from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, immediately killing twenty-nine. Radio Hanoi announced the execution of a captive American army sergeant in retaliation for the South’s public execution of V.C. prisoners. The State Department condemned the “wanton act of murder” and said it was considering freeing the other nineteen captured servicemen by force. “Losses on both sides have been heavy,” Secretary Dean Rusk said in a speech, noting the thousands of Vietnamese and one hundred Americans killed in three months. “We must expect these losses to continue—and our own losses may increase.”44

The United States was breaking into all-out war. Seventy-five thousand troops were in country, having quadrupled in just one year. “Military experts anticipate heavy battles,” the New York Times reported, “perhaps even ‘set pieces’ of conventional warfare that the Communists so far have avoided.”45

Bobby always believed the war would be unconventional—the new kind of conflict he spoke of at Fort Bragg. He had raised concerns before, but did not feel the urgency until that summer to make his mark. With even his antagonists at the Times editorial board having recently called his words on foreign policy helpful, there was no better time.

On the day of the Senate nuclear speech, Joe Dolan sent Bobby a memo that the State Department wanted him to address the International Police Academy graduation on July 9. The program sought to professionalize security forces in the developing world and had 147 students from twenty-two countries, many from Latin America and 4 from Vietnam, training in operations against guerrilla tactics and Communist infiltration—“counterinsurgency,” Dolan told Bobby.46

It was a last-minute assignment, and Bobby wanted a draft based off his speech at Caltech the year before. It had discussed the United States’ troubling support for “tyrannical and unpopular regimes that had no following and no future … colonial rulers, cruel dictators, or ruling cliques void of social purpose.” It said that “guerrilla warfare and terrorism arise from the conditions of a desperate people” that “cannot be put down by force alone.” The speech continued, “Over the years, an understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers and supersonic bombers.”47

Walinsky’s draft took that sentiment and turned it into a biting critique of America’s unblinking support for South Vietnam.

“Victory in a revolutionary war is won not by escalation, but by de-escalation,” the draft said. And: “If all a government can promise its people, in response to insurgent activity, is ten years of napalm and heavy artillery, it will not be a government for long.”48 Bobby was forecasting the fall of Saigon.

Bobby signed off on these bold, blunt words. They may well have been his. In the run-up to the speech, he and Walinsky discussed America’s efforts in the developing world to work its will on smaller countries. The senator believed that no amount of aid or military pressure could overcome what the people wanted.

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