No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon

infiltrating men and arms into South Vietnam and Cambodia. Hanoi therefore set up Group 559 in May 1959 and Group 959 in September 1959. According to the North Vietnamese history of the war, the task of Group 559 was “creating the first foot travel route connecting the North and South, and organizing the sending of people, weapons, and supplies to the revolution in the South.” Group 959 was set up for providing military specialistsfor the Pathet Lao, organizing “the supplying of Vietnamese material to the Laotian revolution and directly commanding the Vietnamese volunteer units” operating in Laos.
    With these actions, Hanoi had set out to crush the Pathet Lao’s two non-Communist rivals and take total control of the country in order to facilitate their invasion of South Vietnam. By December 1960, the North Vietnamese had stationed 7,000 troops in Laos.
    President Eisenhower believed that Laos was the key domino in Southeast Asia. Defending Laos was the major specific action Eisenhower urged on President-elect Kennedy when they met in January 1961. Eisenhower told Kennedy that if Laos were to fall into Communist hands, we would have to write off all of Indochina. But in the event that efforts to reach a political solution failed, he advised, the United States should intervene militarily with its allies if possible, or alone if necessary.
    Kennedy’s initial moves in Laos were promising. On March 23, 1961, he said forcefully that unless Communist attacks on its neutral government were stopped, “those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.” He warned that no one should doubt his resolution on this point. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence,” he said. “I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved.”
    He instructed the CIA to supply arms to the neutralists and rightists who were fighting against the expansion of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese control. It was a limited commitment, involving fewer than 700 American advisers, but it was enough to stalemate the war and keep North Vietnam’s larger forces off-balance.
    One month later, however, Kennedy backed away from his commitment to keep Laos independent. He decided that Laos was beyond our security perimeter in Southeast Asia and that it was the wrong place to draw the line against North Vietnameseaggression. If he had to engage American forces in the area, he preferred to do so in South Vietnam.
    His advisers provided him with persuasive arguments to support his reversal on Laos. Laos enjoyed little national unity. Its armed forces were small and poorly trained. Its terrain was forbidding. Its geography made it difficult to apply American air and naval power. Its common border with Communist China stirred fears that any American action might provoke Mao to intervene as he had in Korea.
    The Bay of Pigs disaster on April 19, 1961, reinforced Kennedy’s reluctance to act. When I saw him at the White House on April 20, I pledged bipartisan support for any action he decided was necessary to prevent a Communist conquest of Laos. His response was that he did not see how we could make any move in Laos, which was thousands of miles away, if we did not make a move in Cuba, which was only ninety miles away. Kennedy also told an aide that one of the lessons he had learned from his defeat in Cuba was that the United States should pursue a political solution in Southeast Asia rather than a military one.
    Accordingly, he instructed Averell Harriman to negotiate an agreement in Geneva that would neutralize Laos. The talks began in May 1961 and soon ran up against implacable North Vietnamese intransigence. Ho stalled because he sensed the United States would abandon Laos even without an agreement. After ten months of Communist