1961–1963: (The Duel with Kennedy: The Marines as Doctor with a Suction Pump on the Other Arm, Duvalier Extraordinarily Resistant, the CIA Armed Attempts to …

1961–1963: (The Duel with Kennedy: The Marines as Doctor with a Suction Pump on the Other Arm, Duvalier Extraordinarily Resistant, the CIA Armed Attempts to Overthrow Him, and the Aid Program Closed Out): The Marines’ adamant refusal to train or support the milice or VSN precipitated the first open rupture — when milice leaders were hastily commissioned in the FAd’H and nominated for U.S. training, they were vetoed en bloc by the mission chief, and Duvalier’s response was to cancel all pending American training for FAd’H officers. In the words of the Marines’ commander, after four years of ever-increasing obstructionism and overt anti-Americanism, he felt like a doctor transfusing blood into one arm of a failing patient while another M.D. — Dr. Duvalier — had a suction pump on the other. As Secretary Rusk later wrote, they were very concerned about Haiti — a kind of political and social cesspool — and felt the regime constituted an open invitation to a Castro-type dictatorship. The Kennedy administration would have been happy to see a new regime but could never decide how, with the Bay of Pigs fresh in mind, such change might be brought about. Rusk reflected that they used persuasion, aid, pressure, and almost all techniques short of the landing of outside forces, but President Duvalier was extraordinarily resistant — an allusion vividly confirmed by a 1975 Senate investigation disclosing that the CIA had armed and supported attempts to overthrow Duvalier. From the May 1961 re-election until his death, Kennedy withdrew the American ambassador from Port-au-Prince so that the United States would not be represented at anniversary celebrations. In August 1962, Washington began closing out its once-grandiose aid program; by January 1963, the former seventy-man AID Mission was down to eight caretakers administering a holdover malaria-eradication program.