Office of the Historian

28. Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Rostow) to President Kennedy0

Washington, March 10, 1961.
1.
I believe you should reflect on the deeper lesson of our experience in Laos thus far. That lesson is that the Department of State has an understandable instinct to conduct pure diplomacy with minimum involvement with the CIA and the military until and acute crisis occurs. The tendency is then to turn the problem over almost wholly to those who control force, and to get the hell out. Concretely, first we listened to Brown; then we listened to Felt. We never faced them—and what they represent—together. This is the pattern which produces the uneasy relations between State and the Pentagon which surfaced yesterday.1
2.
This is the exact opposite of Communist policy which is to orchestrate force and diplomacy intimately at every stage.
3.
The instinctive American position, in the face of Communist tactics, is dangerous on several grounds. When we are being nice diplomats we tend to lose ground. We lose opportunities along the way to strengthen our diplomatic position. When we turn to force, after diplomatic setbacks, we have to use more force than would otherwise be necessary, and we bring closer the moment when our position must be defended by direct U.S. military intervention.
4.
There is another weakness. When the diplomats withdraw and we begin to think, as we did yesterday, in terms of military hardware, we tend to forget that, in the end, most of the situations we confront are, in their essence, political and can only be settled by diplomatic and political formulae. You yourself noted the vagueness of the Department’s conception as to what kind of a political settlement in Laos is possible that we could live with.
5.
I think we must put our minds steadily to work—in general and on each particular problem—on how to orchestrate diplomacy and force better all the way along the line. In the case of Laos. we must have a much sharper notion as to what our political objective is; and the Department of State should be instructed to go to work on this and report.
  1. Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Countries Series, Laos: General, 3/2/61–3/12/61. Confidential.↩
  2. Apparently in the meeting, as described in Document 26.↩