115. Editorial Note
In a September 5, 1961, memorandum to Presidentʼs Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Rostow, Robert H. Johnson of the National Security Council Staff discussed the possibility that Chairman Khrushchev might see “short run advantages” during the Berlin crisis in “stepping up the level of Communist military activity in Southeast Asia.” Johnson suggested that the United States “utilize the concern of the neutrals about the Berlin situation to help deter Khrushchev” from taking such action. “We can do this by making explicit ties between the two situations. I believe this might be usefully done in the Presidentʼs speech to theUN.” In a September 15 memorandum to President Kennedy, Rostow proposed appropriate language that Kennedy might use in his UN speech. For text of Johnsonʼs and Rostowʼs memoranda, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, volume I, pages 293–295 and 298–300. In his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 25, President Kennedy made no explicit tie between the two situations, but he did discuss the “smoldering coals in Southeast Asia” and the “dangerous crisis in Berlin”—“two threats to the peace which are not on your crowded agenda, but which causes us, and most of you, the deepest concern.” For text, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961, pages 618-626.
[Page 286]In telegram 373 to the Department of State from Saigon, September 18, Ambassador Nolting proposed a demarche to the Soviet Government regarding Vietnam in light of a report that on September 12 Georgi Pushkin, Soviet negotiator at the Geneva Conference on Laos, had told Ambassador Harriman that (in Noltingʼs words) the “USSR ‘could and would control northern Vietnam’ re Laotian settlement” and had given “faint indication of possible Soviet interest in settling hostilities between two parts Vietnam.” However, in a memorandum for the record, October 5, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy noted that at the Planning Group Luncheon on October 3, “the suggestion that talking direct to the Soviets [on Vietnam] might have some use was pretty unanimously rejected.” For text of both documents, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, volume I, pages 301–304 and 321.