Office of the Historian

39. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assist3nt for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to the President1

Washington, February 10, 1964.

SUBJECT

  • Notes for your meeting with Senator Mansfield today at 6:002

1. Vietnam

On Vietnam he continues to believe in the De Gaulle approach, and we don’t, though public finger-pointing at De Gaulle is not your line. I suggest you should say to him that for the present any weakening of our support of anti-Communist forces in South Vietnam would give the signal for a wholesale collapse of anti-Communism all over Southeast Asia. Khanh’s government may be our last best chance, and we simply cannot afford to be the ones who seem to pull the plug on him. For this reason you might wish to urge Mansfield himself not to express his own doubts in public, at least for a while. His Vietnamese memoranda are at Tab A.3

You are acting promptly to reorganize the Washington end of our South Vietnamese operations and depending on the success of your conversation with Sullivan, you may wish to tell Mansfield in confidence of your plans. The draft NSAM is attached at Tab B.4

[Here follow items 2–4 which are unrelated to Vietnam.]

McG. B.
  1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Memos to the President, Vol. 1. Confidential.↩
  2. The meeting took place from 6:35 p.m. to 7:15 p.m., February 10. (Johnson Library, President’s Daily Diary) No record of the meeting has been found.↩
  3. Document 2 and Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, vol. IV, pp. 691–692.↩
  4. Not attached; for the approved NSAM, see Document 46.↩