Meddling...............................

     President Kennedy, during his first months in office, spent long hours on the exotic disturbances in Laos—primarily because just before his inauguration, Eisenhower had told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia.  Once they had taken Laos, the Communists, he said, could bring "unbelievable pressure" on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.  If the situation reached the point where other countries could not be persuaded to act with us, we should be willing "as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally."  Kennedy's interest in Laos was no doubt further stimulated by the natural desire of all new Presidents to show their skill at statecraft.  Laos was at the time the only game in town—the only genuine shooting war, even though little actual shooting was ever heard.
      To me, Laos and Vietnam were all part of the Southeast Asia drama that had begun long before.  Refusing to sign the 1954 settlements that made possible the French withdrawal, Secretary John Foster Dulles had the preempted the French role.  With his addiction for formalistic paper solutions, he had devised the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—a so-called mutual security arrangement the included the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand as well as three Asian states:  Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines.  By a supplementary protocol, the signatory states of SEATO pledged themselves to protect three nonsignatory nations:  South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.   Through Dulles's astigmatic vision, Laos loomed large as a "bulwark against Communism" and a "bastion of freedom," and by the end of 1960, we had provided the Laotian government with nearly $300 million, of which 85% was to help build an army.
     Not much of an army was ever built, however, for the Laotian generals and civilian bureaucrats concentrated on stealing the new wealth.  That left a Viet Minh-directed group, the Pathet Lao, to establish a firm hold on the villages and countryside.  Old friendships and family played a role;  the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, was closely tied to Ho Chi Ming, while the regular government of Laos in Vientiane was headed by his half-brother Souvanna Phouma.  In October 1957, the two half-brothers negotiated the so-called Vientiane Agreements, which provided a neutralized Laos under a coalition government—with the Pathet Lao represented in both the army and cabinet.
      That infuriated Dulles, who thought coalitions with Communists a halfway house to perdition, so he made use of his own family ties by persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the even more unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone.  Then the CIA conjured up from France a Laotian military officer named General Phoumi Nosavan; sixteen months later, Phoumi overthrew Phoui (which could have been either a significant event or a typographical error).  Five months after that, Souphanouvong escaped from jail to the North, and the Pathet Lao resumed the civil war.
     Phoumi in turn was displaced by a young paratroop captain, Kong Le, who seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new government that, as before, would be neutralist.  Meanwhile, the Defense Department continued to whoop it up for Phoumi, who, with American encouragement, took the Royal Laotian Army to Savannakhet in September 1960, where he proclaimed a new government and denounced Souvanna.  Washington promptly responded by sending him American military aid, though continuing to give economic assistance to the Souvanna government in Vientiane.   Then, in December, shortly after the American elections, Phoumi marched on Vientaine.  Souvanna fled to Cambodia, where he made a deal with Souphanouvong.  Kong Le, prudently taking along a huge store of American supplies, joined the Pathet Lao.  That ended the first act of a preposterous long-running serial that, more than anything else, resembled a Kung Fu movie.

-George W. Ball,  The Past Has Another Pattern:  Memoirs