Amid the soft fog of irresolution that settled on the Kennedy Administration after the Cuba disaster, some vague and scattered signs of clearing were visible last week. "We're on the brink of a lot of things now," said a high-up White House aide. At a vacation retreat in Palm Beach, President Kennedy pondered a speech he plans to make within a few weeks calling for added defense expenditures and for a deeper spirit of sacrifice among the people. Vice President Lyndon Johnson sped out to faraway Saigon to deliver to President Ngo Dinh Diem a top-secret letter containing Kennedy's offer to aid South Viet Nam with new infusions of money and advisers in its struggle against Communist subversion and guerrilla warfare (see following story).
White House insiders reported that the Administration would "almost certainly" send U.S. troops to endangered Thailand in the near future, and that if the Geneva peace conference on Laos breaks down, as it well may, the Administration may intervene before the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas can take over the whole country. At the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Oslo, Secretary of State Dean Rusk reaffirmed the U.S.'s pledge that it will insist "with all means possible" upon continued access to West Berlin. In a speech to a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, President Kennedy said that in Cuba "the story is not yet finally ended." White House aides explained that the President was determined, by political and economic isolation of Fidel Castro, to topple or enfeeble him—but he was setting no deadline.
Revolt Against Tyranny. These intimations of action, plus intensified national concern about the cold war and continuing reverberations of the Cuba disaster, combined to stir intense new interest in a long-debated issue of international law and international morality: the rights and wrongs of "intervention." Heard again, after a spell of hibernation, was the view that intervention in all cases is wrong on principle—a dangerous doctrine that could weaken the West in its struggle against Communism. Floating around the U.S. last week were "open letters" signed by 250 faculty members from 40-odd U.S. colleges and universities, ranging from Harvard to Stanford, urging President Kennedy to keep hands off Cuba as a matter of noninterventionist principle.
Far from being an ancient principle of the law of nations, the doctrine of nonintervention emerged during the century as the self-interested claim of small nations to immunity from great-power intrusions. In the U.S., adherence to nonintervention was fortified by the nation's inclination to keep out of foreign entanglements. Wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1863, upon declining an invitation to join Britain, France and Austria in aiding the Poles, who had revolted against Russian tyranny: "The American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention and interference."