THE KENNEDY-JOHNSON TRANSITION: THE CASE FOR POLICY REVERSAL1 by DR. JOHN M. NEWMAN President Johnson reversed President Kennedy's policy in Vietnam. Johnson's dispatch of American combat troops to Vietnam reversed not only a fundamental aspect of Kennedy's Vietnam policy, but also a long standing American proscription against intervening in Asia with combat troops, a tenet which had been in place since the American experience in Korea (1950-1953). Time and again, the same men who later advised Johnson to send in the troops advised Kennedy to do it, and Kennedy never wavered in refusing. Confronted with these undeniable facts, proponents of the notion that Johnson continued Kennedy's Vietnam policy attempt to build their case on the argument that Kennedy would have eventually dropped his opposition to sending combat troops to Vietnam. This proposition is arguably more speculative than the proposition that Kennedy would have adhered to his ban against their use, but without it the continuity thesis crashes. It is not surprising that the continuity proponents ignore the fact that Kennedy ruled against combat troops in Vietnam, not when he was in a position of political strength or when the argument could have gone either way, but did so in 1961 when he had suffered the twin losses in Laos and Cuba and when he was told that failure to send combat troops to Vietnam would lead to the loss of that country and much more. The lingering resistance in American academe to accept the above simple truth is an anachronistic and somewhat embarrassing outgrowth of the apologia for American intervention in Vietnam. The notion that the bad dream of Vietnam might not have been is not only unattractive but painful. The idea outrages disparate commentators from the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The real caretakers of the JFK-LBJ Vietnam continuity thesis, however, have been prominent mainstream academics, and the continuity thesis has easily survived efforts to counter it by men personally close to Kennedy such as Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen. The argument that Kennedy would have held the line against combat troops has always suffered from the unpalatable implication that the Vietnam nightmare might have been avoided. The burden of proof has therefore tended to rest with those who advance that argument. In addition, Kennedy significantly deepened the American stake in Vietnam, which is one of the few unassailable arguments the continuity proponents have. The problem with this part of the argument, however, is that this essentially externally visible characteristic, i.e. more American money, advisors and equipment, may or may not be an accurate reflection of the secret internal record. The facts pertaining to the classified record of Kennedy's Vietnam decisions have only been released in the last few years. On a more fundamental level, the problem stems from the duplicity of John Kennedy, a duplicity overlooked by JFK's supporters because it detracts so much from his image, and overlooked by the proponents of the continuity thesis precisely because it destroys their argument. There is no question but that, in the main, Kennedy's 1963 press conferences gave the impression he was unwilling to lose in Vietnam. The truth, however, is that Kennedy was preparing forand in fact begana withdrawal from Vietnam when the battlefield situation was desperate. Combat Troops: Just Another Notch or a Fork in the Road? What was American policy in Vietnam in the early 1960s? From early in his administration, President Kennedy accepted that the primary American objective was to prevent the communist domination of South Vietnam. There was never any argument over the ends of American Vietnam policy under Kennedy, but there was an argument over the means to be employed to achieve those ends. More specifically, President Kennedy's policy was to assist the South Vietnamese to prevent the communist domination of their country. The prohibition against engaging in another American land war in Asia was a fundamental policy of the Kennedy Administration, and one which President Johnson actually endorsed in 1964. To deny that the decision to send in ground combat units did not reverse this long-standing feature of American Vietnam policy simply ignores the most basic facts. A popular proposition used by observers who dispute that the use of combat troops reversed US policy is the "gradual slide" argument, which holds that, on a so-called "policy continuum", ground combat units simply represent the next rung on the ladder of escalation. In other words, when the marines waded ashore it was as if the mercury in the thermometer went from 72 to 73 degrees. Under Kennedy the temperature increased so many degrees and under Johnson it increased so many degrees and, since both were in the same direction, Johnson simply continued the policy. Such arguments blur the crucial distinction between a policy of advising the South Vietnamese army how to fight the war and a policy using the American army to fight the war. From any perspective, not the least of which was the Viet Cong's, the difference between the South Vietnamese army and the American army was not subtle, and neither was the difference between the Special Forces, on the one hand, and the Marines or 82D Airborne Division, on the other. These differences are fundamental, and to construe a large increase in advisors as something only slightly less or a little different than brigades and divisions of ground forces is just nonsense. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson could have further deepened American commitments and ratcheted up American participation in the war effort without crossing the Rubicon of conventional forces in Vietnam. Sending in the American army was nothing less than taking a different turn at the main fork in the road to Vietnam. There are those who argue that the Kennedy Administration never faced this fork in the road, and that the dire situation faced by Johnson only developed after Kennedy's unfortunate demise. This argument is misinformed, as the record of Kennedy's first year in office makes unequivocally clear. 1961: NSAM-111 and the Limits to American Involvement What does the record of the Kennedy Administration's first year reveal about Vietnam policy? What was the situation? What was the President told and how were the policy choices framed? What policy did Kennedy choose? The political and military situation in Vietnam was already critical and deteriorating further by the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961. For the first three months the worsening situation in Vietnam was overshadowed by the crisis in Laos, but over the summer and fall of 1961 Vietnam became the focus of American attention in Indochina. As the military situation became increasingly critical, calls within the Administration for the use of American combat forces in Vietnam prompted a major debate over Vietnam policy in October-November 1961, a debate Kennedy finally resolved with one of his most important decisions on Vietnam: National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM)-111, promulgated on November 22, 1961.2 The President sent his top experts to Vietnam for a look while the concerned departments and intelligence agencies in Washington studied the situation anew. All of this activity produced a veritable slew of proposals about what to do, and although there were differences between many of them, most all advocated sending American combat troops to Vietnam. The argument that Kennedy was never confronted with the situation that Johnson was, that Kennedy did not face the sort of difficult choices that Johnson later did, is an argument which ignores the heart of the Kennedy record on this matter.3 Kennedy was told in no uncertain terms that the military situation in Vietnam was critical and that the fate of South Vietnam hung in the balance. Moreover, Kennedy's advisors framed the issue this way: that the loss of South Vietnam to the communists would affect vital US interests regionally and globally, and that the only way to prevent such an outcome was to send in American ground forces.4 The President was told that nothing short of several American combat divisions could save South Vietnam. It was in that dire context and against those forceful arguments that Kennedy said no to American combat forces in Vietnam. The record on this permits no argument and no wiggle room. Kennedy was irreconcilably opposed to an American ground war in Vietnam. Instead of combat troops, Kennedy agreed to a substantial increase in American advisors. This decision was implemented under the provisions of NSAM-111. Those observers who cite this decision as evidence that Kennedy pushed a reluctant military into Vietnam obviously haven't a clue about the context in which this decision was made. When the situation, the recommendations and Kennedy's decision are looked at as a whole, they boil down to this: even when Kennedy was told the only workable solution was conventional American forces, he would only agree to assisting the South Vietnamese army fight their war. The War Effort in 1962: Winning or Losing? The significant expansion of the American advisory effort flowing from NSAM-111 led to a far larger intelligence capability on the ground in Vietnam than had so far been there. What the newly formed MACV intelligence organizationaugmented by the best men that could be found from Washington and the Pacific theaterfound was an enemy far larger and growing much faster than had been imagined by the decision-makers in Washington. What this startling intelligence meant was that the Viet Cong military force was already well beyond the capacity of the South Vietnamese Army to cope with it. The irony for John Kennedy was that his advisory policy could not work because the force being "advised" was too small for the job. Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically for history, this critical intelligence was blocked by (at the least) MACV officers who, fearful that this data might threaten the growing US presence in Vietnam, reduced the enemy strength figures by more than an order of magnitude. These figures were deliberately kept low thereafter, and other intelligence data, including reports on the effectiveness of South Vietnamese operations in the field were similarly corrupted. The year 1962 is one of the darkest moments in the history of military intelligence, for the truth was altered not just a little, but was wholly reversed. The new American program in 1962 was no more than a minor speed bump to the surging Viet Cong machine, and had this intelligence been sent to Washington Kennedy would have been forced to choose between withdrawing along the lines of the neutralization strategy then being pursued in Laos or committing American ground combat forces. Prompted by Galbraith,5 Kennedy did at this very time -- in April 1962 -- seriously entertain the thought of a neutralist solution in Vietnam. He was dissuaded by a consensus of his military and civilian advisors who argued rather vehemently6 against Galbraith's advice. Here the deception of progress looms large in building the case for a lengthier American presence and in encouraging false hopes for victory. Kennedy decided against Galbraith's recommendation but McNamara made clear to the Pentagonprobably at the President's urgingthat there was a limit to how long US participation in Vietnam could last. Consumed by the Cuban Missile Crisis over the summer and fall of 1962, however, Kennedy allowed Vietnam policy to run its course, languishing as it did the illusion of success which somehow always seemed to require more men, a few more planes, more helicopters and more equipment to sustain it. By the end of 1962, Kennedy and McNamara found themselves trapped in a deepening vortex of military escalation in which victory seemed ever more elusive. Withdrawal From Vietnam: In the Face of Defeat Why did President Kennedy begin to withdraw the advisors less than two years after sending them to Vietnam? The record of how the Administration moved from the November 1961 decision to increase the American advisory effort to the October 1963 decision to end it has remained shrouded in controversy to this day. That recordunlike the relatively clear record of 1961 -- is murky, contradictory and confounded by deception and intrigue. The declassification of relevant documents has resolved some questions and raised others anew. No serious scholar that I know of still challenges the fact that Kennedy implemented the withdrawal plan in October 1963 by promulgating NSAM-263. That decision and the minutes of the National Security Council (NSC) meeting in which it was made are now available to the public.7 They make it clear that Kennedy in fact ordered the first 1,000 men to come home by December 1963. The issue has now become: when he ordered the withdrawal to begin, did Kennedy think he was winning or losing in Vietnam? In spite of the enormous lie emanating from MACV, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Kennedy initiated the withdrawal of American advisors from Vietnam when he knew that South Vietnam was losing the war. By the end of 1962, the MACV success story became embattled8 by charges of fraud from some of its own officers in Vietnam, and by early 1963 the State Department's intelligence element (INR), the CIA, and even the Vietnam specialist on Kennedy's NSC, Michael Forrestal, began to question the very basis of MACV's claims. In one of the rare exceptions where South Vietnamese ground forces were urged into action by their American advisors, the Viet Cong scored a stunning victory in January 1963 at Ap Bac. A National Intelligence Estimate which would have told the truth about the deteriorating war effort in late 1962 was rewritten in early 1963 after being remanded by CIA Director McCone. By the Spring of 1963 there were certainly enough indicators that McNamara and Kennedy had the opportunity to conclude that MACV's reporting might be horribly erroneous. The extent of American involvement in Vietnam coupled with the failure unfolding on the battlefield began to shape up as a possible major issue in the upcoming 1964 election campaign. The seriousness of the impending crisis was underscored when the Buddhist crisis erupted in April and proceeded, over the summer, to knock the political bottom out of the regime in Saigon. In fact, the 1,000-man withdrawal, which had originally been conceived to take place during the campaign in 1964,9 was accelerated after the Buddhist crisis erupted. At the May SECDEF Conference McNamara announced "concrete" plans to withdraw 1,000 men by the end of 1963. The record of the May SECDEF Conference make it clear, however, that McNamara told those present that the phase out would take place as "the situation improves," and that "we can take out 1,000 or so personnel late this year if the situation allows."10 These words were less than straightforward, for the military officers present would have been justified in concluding that any withdrawal would be based on battlefield success. In JFK and Vietnam, I advanced the argument that the contradiction between Kennedy's public anti-withdrawal statements and private pro-withdrawal statements was deliberate and designed to conceal his willingness to withdraw in the face of defeat. Kennedy's ability to conceal his true intentions until a time of his own choosing was dependent on McNamara's cooperation. In telling the military that the 1,000-man withdrawal would occur "if the situation allows," McNamara was covering for his boss, President Kennedy. What I had not seen when I wrote JFK and Vietnam was the extent of the evidence that McNamara was indeed fully prepared to execute a withdrawal in the face of a battlefield defeat.11 In his own oral history for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), 12 McNamara shed considerable light on this very subject: I think that early on in, say, 1961-62, there was reason to accede to Diem's request for assistance to help train his forces. I believed that to the extent we could train those forces, we should do so, and having done it, we should get out. To the extent those trained forces could not handle the problemthe subversion by North VietnamI believed we should not introduce our military forces in support of the South Vietnamese, even if they were going to be "defeated". Part of this passage appeared in a 1993 book by journalist Deborah Shapley, who failed to understand its true significance when she argued that McNamara "arranged" this story "later," when the war had become a tragic trauma for the nation.13 What this passage makes painfully clear is that Kennedy was not being truthful about his ultimate plans for withdrawal, and it is therefore not something which McNamara would say to make Kennedy look good for the 70s, 80s or 1990s. Although many administration officials knew of the withdrawal plan, very few knew Kennedy's ultimate intentions. Even Kennedy's National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, told me he was not clear on this because he remembers the 1,000-man withdrawal came from discussion "quite closely held between Kennedy and McNamara."14 It was indeed closely held, as was the growing awareness of both McNamara and Kennedy that the advisory program in South Vietnam was in deep trouble. As the war continued to deteriorate over the summer Kennedy asked McNamara to go to Vietnam. McNamara returned with news that "the military campaign had made great progress and continues to progress."15 This news, based on the false story of success provided by MACV, was used to justify the withdrawal from Vietnam, a move which sparked indignation and protest from officials who knew the truth about the war but not about Kennedy's ultimate intentions. One such official -- who had been on the trip with McNamara -- was William Sullivan, Assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. While still in Saigon Sullivan happened to read what McNamara was proposing to do and told the Secretary: "I can't accept this. This is totally unrealistic. We're not going to get troops out in 1965. We mustn't submit anything as phony as this to the President."16 Sullivan threatened to write a dissenting report. He claims that McNamara agreed and that General Taylor agreed to "scrub it." Sullivan is probably right, since the 1,000-man withdrawal is clearly missing from the draft as it stood by the time the men reached Honolulu.17 Thus, there was no dissenting Sullivan report once they reached the White House, at which time the 1,000-man withdrawal was reinserted. Because many of the participants are still living, this material is sometimes difficult to deal with, but scholars must begin to deal with it with the few that remain alive for the sake of history. That Kennedy was concealing his real intentions is central to the story which unfolded in the fall of 1963. The private nature of his ultimate plans at this point are attested to by yet another source, Chester Cooper, Assistant for Policy support to the Deputy Director for Plans, CIA. Cooper was in the White House the day an argument erupted over the sentence in the 2 October White House public statement on McNamara's recommendation that US advisories could be withdrawn by 1965. Cooper recalls that in spite of the opposition of McGeorge Bundy and others to the sentence, McNamara was "trapped," because "the sentence had been worked out privately with Kennedy and therefore imbedded in concrete."18 In his OSD oral history, McNamara clearly states it was his belief that US forces should not be introduced even if it meant defeat. "Consistent with that belief," he explained, "some time in the latter part of 1963, following my return from a trip to South Vietnam, I recommended to President Kennedy that we announce a plan to begin the removal of our training forces." McNamara recounted his -- and the President's -- thinking in this way: I believed that we had done all the training we could, and whether the South Vietnamese were qualified or not to turn back the North Vietnamese, I was certain that if they weren't , it wasn't for lack of our training. More training wouldn't strengthen them; therefore we should get out. The President agreed. In other words, not only had combat troops been ruled out, but the President was preparing to declare the training mission at an end too. The key issue remains what battlefield context these decisions were made in. When pressed specifically by the OSD oral historian on whether he felt optimistic or pessimistic at the time, McNamara offered this illuminating answer: I think that you will find in my reportsprobably in the one in October 1963, a month before Kennedy's deathevidence that I felt there was considerable doubt as to whether we had succeeded in training a Vietnamese force that would be capable of defeating the attempts of North Vietnam or China to subvert the government of South Vietnam. Thus, McNamara doubted whether the training had been successful, yet he recommended the withdrawal proceed anyway. Against the backdrop of his 1963 public statement that the war had made great progress and was continuing to progress, this passage from his OSD oral history provides yet another piece of hard evidence that Kennedy and McNamara were misleading the public about the nature of the withdrawal they were planning. To repeat, this is hardly the sort of thing McNamara would "arrange" or concoct to make either the President or himself look good. It is simply the tragic truth which the President's assassination makes all the more painful. At the time, however, their focus was on resisting the forces urging intervention and on winning the election in 1964. Secretary of State Rusk had no illusions about the direction of the battle that September, and what it would lead to if it continued: ...if the situation continues to deteriorate in Vietnam, and if our relations with Diem continue to deteriorate, and if US domestic opinion becomes strongly anti-Diem, we will find no alternative short of a massive US military effort. This is what Kennedy feared and why it had become so important to get the withdrawal underway. Cooper's observation that the private agreement between Kennedy and McNamara on the 2 October White House statement was cast "in concrete" was very astute. The sentences in the White House Statement of 2 October which related McNamara's recommendation that the advisors could be brought home by 1965 and 1000 brought out by the end of 1963 had provoked a storm of controversy when discussed in the NSC that day. In his oral history, McNamara explains the schisms that divided the Security Council over his recommendation: There was great controversy over that recommendation. Many in the Defense Department, as well as others in the administration, did not believe we had fully carried out our training mission. Still others believed that, in any event, the South Vietnamese weren't qualified to counter the North Vietnamese effectively. They therefore concluded that we should stay. The President simply steamrolled over the opposition and approved McNamara's recommendation. "Then there was an argument," McNamara's OSD account continues, "over whether we should announce the decision. I thought that the way to put the decision in concrete was to announce it. So we did. It was agreed that it would be announced that day." Once again, we see the reference to putting the withdrawal plan in "concrete," only this time it is in McNamara's, not Cooper's, account. This notion of casting the decision in concrete is important, especially because the argument is sometimes advanced that the decision to begin the withdrawal was just a charade to put pressure on Diem. According to McNamara, the idea of putting the withdrawal plan in concrete had as its intended audience not Diem, but American decision-makers. "Those who opposed the decision to begin the withdrawal," he explained in his oral history, "didn't want it announced since they believed, as I did, that if it were announced, it would be in concrete." Those opposing the announcement lost that argument too, but the discussion was not over yet. The President was concerned about being identified personally with an optimistic timetable. The NSC minutes reveal the following exchange took place:19 The President objected to the phrase "by the end of the year" in the sentence "The US program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1000 US military personnel assigned to South Vietnam could be withdrawn." He believed that if we were not able to take this action by the end of this year, we would be accused of being over optimistic. McNamara, apparently afraid Kennedy might be considering dropping the sentence entirely, interjected his view: Secretary McNamara said he saw great value in this sentence in order to meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam. He said the sentence reveals that we have a withdrawal plan. Furthermore, it commits us to emphasize the training of Vietnamese, which is something we must do in order to replace US personnel with Vietnamese. Again, in these NSC minutes, there is the sense in McNamara's words of a commitment, of crossing a line, and of withdrawing the advisors from Vietnam. The result of this Kennedy-McNamara exchange was a change in the wording of the October 2, 1963 White House announcement on withdrawal. The alteration was done in such a way as to render the time predictions of 1,000 men to be withdrawn in 1963 and all out by 1965 "a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than a prediction of the President."20 McNamara himself made the announcement from the steps of the White House, and as the Secretary headed off to the waiting reporters, Kennedy is reported to have yelled after him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too."21 NSAM 263 and the Implementation of the 1,000-man Withdrawal The idea that the 1,000-man withdraw should be used as a pressure tactic was Taylor's, not Kennedys. Indeed, the General had voiced this idea on the September 1963 trip to Vietnam with McNamara. It was inevitable, as Kennedy's advisors sought to come up with measures to pressure Diem to reform, that Taylor's idea of using the withdrawal timetable as a weapon would come up in the discussion. On October 4, during the second day of these talks in the White House -- neither of which the President attended -- Robert Kennedy questioned "the logic of making known the plan to withdraw US soldiers, "and the minutes indicate the following remark by McNamara: Mr. McNamara rationalized this course of action to him in terms of there being no wisdom in leaving our forces in Vietnam, when their presence is no longer required, either by virtue of the Vietnamese having been trained to assume the function, or the function having been fulfilled. 22 This did not, however, answer the Attorney General's specific question: why make the withdrawal known? At the October 5 White House meeting, the President himself addressed the issue of making the plan known to Diem.23 The minutes indicate that Kennedy brought it up during the discussion on the McNamara-Taylor report: The President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 US advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed. Thus the 1,000-man withdrawal was not to be used as a device to pressure Diem -- it was a policy objective in its own right. Moreover, this particular passage contains another significant item: it uses the words "our decision" to remove the 1,000 men. In the 5 October NSC meeting, Kennedy implemented the 1,000-man withdrawal. The fact that McGeorge Bundy forgot to mention this important detail in the minutes of the meeting which he drafted two days later is only a minor nuisance for historians. When Forrestal drafted the final NSAM -- which was not officially signed as NSAM-263 until October 11 -- he did not forget to describe the President's historic actions on October 5.24 Those actions were as follows: The President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963. [Emphasis added] The military recommendations in Section I B (1-3) of the McNamara-Taylor report were these: that 1) MACV and Diem come up with what had to be done to complete the military campaign in I, II, and III Corps by the end of 1964 and IV Corps by the end of 1965; that 2) a training program be established so that the South Vietnamese could take over essential functions and permit the bulk of American forces to be withdrawn by that time; and 3) that the Defense Department should announce "in the very near future" the 1,000-man withdrawal. The President, however, made some changes on the third provision. The McNamara-Taylor report had said the Defense Department should announce it soon and explain it "in low key" as an initial step in the long-term withdrawal of US forces. First Kennedy actually implemented the plan, directing that 1,000 men be withdrawn before the end of the year, and that "no further reductions in US strength would be made until the requirements of the 1964 [military] campaign were clear."25 Furthermore, in directing that no formal announcement of the implementation be made, the President jettisoned the idea that the Pentagon make any statement or explanation. The question is: Why did the President slap a secrecy order on the withdrawal? He did so for several reasons. In the first place, the moment he implemented the withdrawal plan, he was exceeding the White House statement issued three days earlier. At that time the public had been told only that McNamara and Taylor had reported that "the US program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point" where the 1,000 men could be withdrawn by the end of the year. (emphasis added) It would have been awkward, having disassociated himself from this timetable, to suddenly embrace it publicly three days later. Also, as already mentioned, Kennedy specifically ordered that the subject not be brought up with Diem; Kennedy did not want his approval of the plan to be construed by anyone in Saigon or Washington as part of the pressures package he also approved on October 5. Finally, and most important, was the fact that Kennedy had not yet decided how he was going to publicly justify his withdrawal plan. The withdrawal plan had publicly been couched in terms of a battlefield success story, a success story so far not attributable to the President. A major risk associated with the withdrawal plan was the possibility that the battlefield might fall apart during the 1964 election campaign. What would Kennedy do then? While others may have different views, my argument in JFK and Vietnam was that Kennedy's reticence to make a formal public announcement that he had begun the withdrawal reflected his unease over the deteriorating situation and his fear of public criticism for being overly optimistic about the war effort. This concern was the reason why the 2 October White House statement had been changed to make the time predictions a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than as prognostications of the President. The withdrawal plan would have to be explained somehow, and Kennedy had always been cautious about making positive public assessments of the battlefield. It was he who had said -- where others had denied it -- that the Buddhist crisis had affected the war negatively, and he probably did so because he was wary of how tricky the issue might prove to be in the campaign. The choices were bleak, but the worst case would be American soldiers returning in body bags after the President himself said the war was being won. The primaries were just around the corner, and he would have to make up his mind soon. That he decided to implement the withdrawal plan on October 5 and keep it secret indicates that he was still in the process of doing just that. Of course we cannot know what was going through Kennedy's mind at the time his his unfortunate death. We do know that, before he died, he ordered the withdrawal to begin. What clues we do have about how Kennedy might have explained the withdrawal in 1964 under adverse conditions comes from the person in whom he was confiding his plans the most -- his Secretary of Defense. In his OSD oral history, McNamara explained, as his boss might have, how the role of US forces in Vietnam under John Kennedy had come to an end: ...their military role was a training role, and there's only so much you can do to train. If the student can't learn, after the training period is completed there's no use in your staying on. If he can learn, he will have done so by the end of the training period and you can go home. Once again events in Vietnam intruded, much as they had with the eruption of the Buddhist crisis in April. This time, only three weeks after NSAM-263 was put into effect, Vietnamese President Diem was assassinated. Diem's murder gave rise to a policy review which was itself interrupted by the assassination of President Kennedy. NSAM-273 and Beyond: Reversing Course in Vietnam The Vietnam policy review which took place in Honolulu two days before Kennedy's assassination produced a new draft NSAM, which National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy authored the day before the murder and President Johnson made changes to just four days afterward. The Honolulu meeting and both versions of NSAM-273 are the subjects of two chapters in my JFK and Vietnam and are dealt with fully there. The story which emerges from them is this: two days before Kennedy's death, a debate erupted over whether the war should be widened to include the more direct use of American power. The major news at the Honolulu conference was MACV's announcement that the battlefield situation was going downhill, especially in the critical delta region of South Vietnam. Thirty years later, the proceedings of the conference are still classified, a wholly inappropriate situation to persist in the post-Cold War era and one that should not have persisted past the end to American involvement in any case. We do know from anecdotal reports that options to escalate the war, up to and including the massive and direct use of American military power was discussed and, perhaps, hotly debated. McGeorge Bundy's 21 November draft of NSAM-273 does not, as some conspiracy theories argue, show that the NSC Advisor expected Kennedy to die. On the contrary, Bundy knew Kennedy was against the direct use of American forces and the draft therefore attempted to bring the Honolulu recommendations in line with Kennedy's philosophy. The result was a draft NSAM which sought to intensify the war effort without Americanizing it. Bundy's draft appears to be the act of a loyal NSC advisor who fully expected his president to be alive to read it. These NSAMs certainly do not prove Kennedy's murder was a conspiracy. They also do not suggest the reverse. Historians on both sides of the debate about Kennedy and Vietnam would do well to avoid drawing their material from movies to interpret these NSAMs. The facts are that, four days after Kennedy's death, Bundy's draft NSAM was altered, and that the crucial sentence in paragraph 7 which would have limited the increases in military activity to the use of South Vietnamese forces was simply lined through and removed. The resulting NSAM opened the door to a more direct American role in the conflict. Resisting the simple logic of this argument by claiming it is hair splitting is pointless. The change is there, it is blatant and nothing need be read into it to see how drastic it was: whereas other paragraphs were altered by changing a word or a phrase, someone took a pen and put two huge lines through the entire paragraph, and then it was totally rewritten.26 It was this very change in paragraph 7 which opened the door for the operations which began shortly thereafter and led, the following August, to the Gulf of Tonkin "incidents." For those who have difficulty analyzing the changes on these NSAMs or, for whatever reason, refuse to accept that they demonstrate the new direction in which President Johnson took American in Vietnam from the outset, it might be easier to simply focus on the issue of combat troops. For here was an issue upon which Kennedy never yielded, no matter what doomsday argument was dredged up to convince him to send them in. He simply refused to do what Johnson later did. It is a mistake to argue, as some continuity proponents try, that because both men had the same advisors, Kennedy would therefore have sent in combat troops just like Johnson did. It is the fact that Kennedy said no to the precisely the same men making precisely the same arguments they did to Johnson that makes this argument so untenable. Of course it is possible that Kennedy too, had he lived, might have shelved his withdrawal plans and reversed his policy as Johnson did. But there is no hard evidence for this. Perhaps if we had an "escalation" plan secretly ordered by Kennedy, or if he had called in his Secretary of State and said, "Dean, I want you to know I have been rethinking things, and I want you to come up with a plan to intervene after the election if the war effort is still critical," then we could discount the way Kennedy overruled his entire cabinet when then called for sending combat troops. There is nothing elaborate or perspicacious in the making the observation that the Americanization of the war effort carried out under Johnson ended the Kennedy's policy of containing the US role to an advisory one. NSAM-273, changed in the wake of Kennedy's death, effectively authorized a more direct American role, and the reversal was completed 17 months later when Johnson sent in the first of what would soom become half a million US ground troops. These are facts, not an argument "counter" to the facts. What Kennedy would have done had he lived is speculative by nature. My own is this: Kennedy's clear rejection of intervening with combat troops in the face of the most compelling arguments for using them swings the argument decisively in favor of the proposition that he would have continued, rather than reversed this policy. This argument requires no conspiratorial presumptions, no political science models, and no obtuse reasoning to advance. It is probably the most obvious and straightforward case that one can make which proceeds from the facts that we do know about Kennedy's Vietnam policy while he was alive. The policy reversal thesis and its corollary that Kennedy would have continued the withdrawal he started suggests that history would have been very different had Kennedy lived. This draws derisive rhetoric from observers such as Noam Chomsky, whose historical paradigm permits no such grandiose historical role to single individuals. Outraged, Chomsky charges that I am making a saint out of the Kennedy.27 From the other end of the political spectrum comes equally vindictive rhetoric. Advancing this thesis is pure mendacity, argues Harry Summers, whose Kennedy-as-Clauswitz paradigm moves him to charge that I have "vilified Kennedy beyond the wildest dreams of his worst enemies."28 Perhaps it would be more illuminating if Chomsky and Summers debated each other, for it is their arguments that perpetrate the saints and demons approach to John Kennedy. The time has come to take the pitchfork out of Kennedy's hand and remove the halo from above his head, and recognize that, like presidents before and after, Kennedy had both strengths and weaknesses. When we are ready to do this, the process of learning from Kennedy's accomplishments and failures can begin. 1 Foreign Relations of the United States, Vietnam, is hereafter referred to as "FRUSV," and the Pentagon Papers as "PP." 2 See NSAM-111, FRUSV, vol. 1, document 272. 3 The better part of two chapters in my JFK and Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1992) are devoted to the pressure put on Kennedy by his advisors in late 1961 to send American combat troops to Vietnam. See especially chapters 7 and 8. The battle became vituperative at times, with Kennedy arguing that if the US was not going to send troops to Cuba they should not be sent to Vietnam, and the Joint Chiefs responding that they wanted to send troops into Cuba too (see pp. 137-138). 4 See, for instance, January 13, 1962 JCS memo, PP, DOD ed., Book 12, pp. 448-54, for just one of many examples. 5 See Galbraith mem to JFK, FRUSV, vol. 2, document 141. 6 See especially the JCS memo to McNamara, April 13, 1962, PP, DOD ed., Book 12, pp. 464-65. 7 See FRUSV, vol. 4, documents 169, 170, 172, 174, 179, 187 for pertinent NSC meetings, and document 194 for NSAM-263. 8 See JFK and Vietnam, chapters 14-16 for a full discussion and complete listing of all the documents involved, which include materials from State, CIA and NSC. 9 Source is Senator Mansfield, qouted in Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncreiff, Many Reasons Why (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 81. 10 Memo for Record of the Secretary of Defense Conference, Honolulu, May 6 1963, in FRUSV, vol. 3, Document 107. 11 To his credit, McNamara, who has avoided the subject and was aware of the arguments in JFK and Vietnam, permitted me access to his OSD oral history. 12 Office of the Historian, OSD, McNamara Oral History. 13 Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), pp. 262-263. 14 McGeorge Bundy interview with author, July 16, 1991. 15 McNamara-Taylor Memorandum to the President, October 2, 1963, see FRUSV, vol. 4, Document 167. 16 See William Sullivan, Second Oral History, JFK Library. 17 See the October 1, 1963 version of "Report of the McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam, 24 September -1 October 1963," JFK Library, Hillsman Papers, Vietnam, McNamara &Taylor Trip, box 4/6. 18 Chester Cooper, Lost Crusade, (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), pp. 215-216. 19 Summery Record of the 519th Meeting of the National Security Council, White House, 6:00 p.m., October 2, 1963, FRUSV, vol. 4, Document 169, pp. 350-352. 20 Summery Record of the 519th Meeting of the National Security Council, White House, 6:00 p.m., October 2, 1963, FRUSV, vol. 4, Document 169, pp. 350-352. 21 Kenneth O'Donnell, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 17. 22 See Memorandum for the Record of a Meeting of the Executive Committee, the White House, 4:00 p.m., October 4, 1963, in FRUSV, vol. 4, document 174. 23 See Memorandum for the Files of a Conference With the President, White House, 9:30 a.m., October 5, 1963, in FRUSV, vol. 4, document 179. 24 For a copies of NSAM-263, see PP, DOD ed., Book 12, p. 578; and FRUSV, vol. 4, documentb194. 25 PP, Gravel ed., Volume II, p. 169. Researchers beware that the date in this chronology in the Pentagon Papers is mistaken: it has this meeting taking place on October 3; the correct date, however, is given in the narrative portion of the same volume on p. 251. 26 See JFK and Vietnam, chapter 23. 27 Noam Chomsky, Lies of Our Times, May 1992. 28 Harry Summers, Baltimore Sun, March 15, 1992. 31