THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

by Michael Morrissey


The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson
merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the
assassination.

1. JFK's policy

In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime,
though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised
withdrawal at that early date:

The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to
it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with
Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself
because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with
Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts
about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on
the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

 'But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected,' Kennedy told Mansfield....

 After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, 'In 1965 I'll become
one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a
Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from
Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do
it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected'
(O'Donnell, p. 16)."

Sometime after that Kennedy told O'Donnell again that

"...he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of
unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American military forces from
Vietnam. He had decided that our military involvement in Vietnam's civil war
would only grow steadily bigger and more costly without making a dent in the
larger political problem of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia" (p. 13).

Just before he was killed he repeated this commitment:

"'They keep telling me to send combat units over there,' the President said to
us one day in October [1963]. 'That means sending draftees, along with volunteer
regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I'll never send draftees over there to
fight'." (O'Donnell, p. 383).

Kennedy's public statements and actions were consistent with his private
conversations, though more cautiously expressed in order to appease the military
and right-wing forces that were clamoring for more, not less, involvement in
Vietnam, and with whom he did not want to risk an open confrontation one year
before the election. As early as May 22, 1963, he said at a press conference:

"...we are hopeful that the situation in South Vietnam would permit some
withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that
judgement at the present time" (Harold W. Chase and Allen H. Lerman, eds.,
Kennedy and the Press: The News Conferences, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965,
p. 447).

Then came the statement on October 2:

"President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the
immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably
withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was
leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called
to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too" (O'Donnell,
p. 17).

This decision was not popular with the military, the Cabinet, the
vice-president, or the CIA, who continued to support Diem, the dictator the US
had installed in South Vietnam in 1955. Hence the circumspect wording of the
statement on Oct. 2, which was nevertheless announced as a "statement of United
States policy":

Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgement that the major
part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although
there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training
personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for
training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S.
military personnel assigned to South Viet-Nam can be withdrawn (Documents on
American Foreign Relations 1963, Council on Foreign Relations, New York: Harper
& Row, 1964, p. 296).

NSAM 263, signed on Oct. 11, 1963, officially approved and implemented the same
McNamara-Taylor recommendations that had prompted the press statement of Oct. 2.
They recommended that:

"A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now
performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end
of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that
time.

"In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over
military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near
future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the
end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a
long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without
impairment of the war effort" (Pentagon Papers, NY: Bantam, 1971, pp. 211-212).

The withdrawal policy was confirmed at a news conference on Oct. 31, where
Kennedy said in response to a reporter's question if there was "any speedup in
the withdrawal from Vietnam":

"I think the first unit or first contingent would be 250 men who are not
involved in what might be called front-line operations. It would be our hope to
lessen the number of Americans there by 1000, as the training intensifies and is
carried on in South Vietnam" (Kennedy and the Press, p. 508).

By this time it had become apparent that Diem was not going to mend his brutal
ways and provide any sort of government in South Vietnam that the US could
reasonably support, if indeed any US- supported regime had any hope of popular
support at that point. The only alternative to a total US military commitment
was to replace Diem with someone capable of forming a viable coalition
government, along the lines of the agreement for Laos that had been worked out
with Krushchev's support in Vienna in June 1962. The point of deposing Diem, in
other words, was to enable an American withdrawal, as O'Donnell and Powers
confirm:

"One day when he [Kennedy] was talking with Dave and me about pulling out of
Vietnam, we asked him how he could manage a military withdrawal without losing
American prestige in Southeast Asia.

'Easy,' he said. 'Put a government in there that will ask us to leave'" (p. 18).

This decision, too, was not popular with the Cabinet or with Johnson. Secretary
of State Rusk said at a meeting on Aug. 31, 1963, "that it would be far better
for us to start on the firm basis of two things--that we will not pull out of
Vietnam until the war is won, and that we will not run a coup." McNamara agreed,
and so did Johnson, the latter adding that he "had never really seen a genuine
alternative to Diem" and that "from both a practical and a political viewpoint,
it would be a disaster to pull out...and that we should once again go about
winning the war." (NYT, Pentagon Papers, p. 205).

Diem and his brother Nhu were both murdered during the coup on Nov. 1, 1963, but
much as Kennedy's critics might like to imply that he ordered their executions,
he had nothing to gain from such barbarity. O'Donnell and Powers say the
killings "shocked and depressed him" and made him "only more sceptical of our
military advice from Saigon and more determined to pull out of the Vietnam war"
(p. 17). The US liaison with the anti-Diem generals, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a
long-time CIA operative who had helped Edward Lansdale and the CIA bring Diem to
power in 1954, later told the press, on President Nixon's suggestion, that
Kennedy had known about the Diem assassination plot, but this was a pure
fabrication (Jim Hougan, Spooks, NY: William Morrow, 1978, p. 138). It is more
likely that Diem and Nhu were killed by the same forces that killed Kennedy
himself three weeks later.

Two days before Kennedy was shot, there was a top-level policy conference on
Vietnam in Honolulu, where the issue was not just withdrawal but accelerated
withdrawal, along with substantial cuts in military aid. As Peter Scott notes in
his important but much-ignored essay in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon
Papers, the Honolulu conference agreed to speed up troop withdrawal by six
months and reduce aid by $33 million ("Vietnamization and the Drama of the
Pentagon Papers," Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, Vol. 5, Boston: Beacon Press,
p. 224). The New York Times also reported that the conference had "reaffirmed
the U.S. plan to bring home about 1,000 of its 16,500 troops from South Vietnam
by January 1" (11/21/63, p. 8, quoted in Scott, p. 224).

Curiously, because of the Honolulu conference and a coincidental trip by other
Cabinet members to Japan, the Secretaries of State (Rusk), Defense (McNamara),
the Treasury (Dillon), Commerce (Hodges), Labor (Wirtz), Agriculture (Freeman),
and the Interior (Udall), as well as the Director of the CIA (McCone), the
ambassador to South Vietnam (Lodge), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(Taylor), and head of U.S. forces in Vietnam (Harkins) were all out of the
country when Kennedy was killed. Only his brother Robert, National Security
Adviser McGeorge Bundy, who apparently returned to Washington from Honolulu on
Nov. 21, the HEW Secretary (Celebrezze), and the Postmaster General (Gronouski)
were in Washington on Nov. 22. Johnson, of course, was with the president in
Dallas, but this too was curious, since normal security precautions would avoid
having the president and vice- president away from Washington at the same time,
and together.


2. LBJ's policy

In addition to Kennedy's own private and public statements, and the policy
directed by NSAM 263, the second paragraph of Johnson's own directive, NSAM 273,
signed four days after the assassination, explicitly affirms the continuation of
the withdrawal plan announced on Oct. 2:

"The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S.
military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of Oct. 2,
1963" (Pentagon Papers, NYT, p. 233).

Obviously, Johnson did not continue the withdrawal policy very long. Exactly
when he reversed it is a matter of controversy, but it is certain that the
decision was made by March 27, 1964: "Thus ended de jure the policy of phase out
and withdrawal and all the plans and programs oriented to it (Pentagon Papers,
Gravel ed., 2:196)." The first indication of this change came the day after the
assassination: "The only hint that something might be different from on-going
plans came in a Secretary of Defense memo for the President three days prior to
this NSC meeting [on Nov. 26]." Johnson "began to have a sense of uneasiness
about Vietnam" in early December and initiated a "major policy review (2:191)."

It is not necessary to agree with Peter Scott that the text of NSAM 273 in
itself reveals Johnson's reversal of Kennedy's policy, thus giving the lie to
paragraph 2, which purports to continue that policy. The differences between the
text proposed by McNamara/Taylor, JFK's White House statement, and LBJ's NSAM
273 are worth noting, however.

Where McNamara/Taylor refer to the security of South Vietnam as "vital to United
States security," Kennedy says it is "a major interest of the United States as
other free nations." The syntax is sloppy here, so that "as other free nations"
could mean "as is that of other free nations [besides Vietnam]" or "as it is of
other free nations [besides the US]," but in either case Kennedy is clearly
attempting to relativize the US commitment to South Vietnam. Further on he
refers to US policy in South Vietnam "as in other parts of the world," again
qualifying the commitment. These qualifications are missing in Johnson's
statement, which refers exclusively to Vietnam.

McNamara-Taylor refer to the "overriding objective of denying this country
[South Vietnam] to Communism." Kennedy softens this to "policy of working with
the people and Government of South Vietnam to deny this country to communism."
Johnson hardens "overriding objective" again to "central object" (i.e.
objective), which he defines as "to win their contest" rather than as "to deny
this country to communism," which was Kennedy's formulation.

McNamara-Taylor talk about "suppressing the Viet Cong insurgency." Kennedy
qualifies this as "the externally stimulated and supported insurgency of the
Viet Cong." This is important, since the "Viet Cong" were nothing more than
Vietnamese nationalists who happened to be living in South Vietnam. They were
supported by the North, but in 1963 Ho Chi Minh would have been glad to stop the
"external stimulation and support" he was giving the Viet Cong in exchange for
nationwide free elections, which had been promised by the 1954 Geneva Accords
but never took place, because he would have won in a landslide, in the South as
well as the North. The best the US could have hoped for was a coalition
government, as in Laos. 

By limiting the US commitment to stopping "external support" of the Viet Cong,
Kennedy could well have been leaving the way open for a negotiated settlement.
Johnson drops the term "Viet Cong" altogether and refers to the "externally
directed and supported communist conspiracy." Kennedy's externally stimulated
Viet Cong insurgency becomes Johnson's externally directed communist conspiracy.
The Viet Cong have been completely subsumed under a much larger and familiar
bugaboo, the international "communist conspiracy." 

In this one sentence, Johnson has greatly widened the war, turning what Kennedy
was still willing to recognize as an indigenous rebellion into a primal struggle
between good and evil.

But again, it is not necessary to agree that these textual differences give the
lie to paragraph 2 of NSAM 273, where Johnson vows to continue Kennedy's
withdrawal policy, to agree that Johnson did, at some point, reverse the policy.
This would seem to be obvious, yet we find most historians bending over backward
to avoid making this simple observation. In fact, we find just the opposite
assertion--that there was no change in policy. If we take NSAM 273 at face
value, we must say that this is correct: Johnson continued Kennedy's withdrawal
policy.

But this is not what the historians mean when they say there was no change in
policy. They mean that Johnson continued Kennedy's policy of escalation. The
entire matter of withdrawal is ignored or glossed over.


3. The Establishment perspective

Let us take some examples, chosen at random (emphasis added):

"...President Kennedy...began the process of backing up American military aid
with "advisers." At the time of his murder there were 23,000 [sic] of them in
South Vietnam. President Johnson took the same view of the importance of
Vietnam..."(J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, 2nd ed.,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. 988-989).

"Although Johnson followed Kennedy's lead in sending more and more troops to
Vietnam (it peaked at 542,000, in 1969), it was never enough to meet General
Westmoreland's demands..." (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,
NY: Random House, 1987, p. 405).

"By October 1963, some 16,000 American troops were in Vietnam... Under President
Johnson, the "advisors" kept increasing... Lyndon Johnson, who had campaigned in
1964 as a "peace candidate," inherited and expanded the Vietnam policy of his
predecessor" (Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, A Pocket History of the
United States, 7th ed., NY: Pocket Books, 1981, p. 565-566).

These examples are typical of the more general view. As the treatments become
more specialized, it becomes harder to separate fact from obfuscation, but it
should be borne in mind that all of the accounts I will review contradict what
one would think would be considered the most reliable source: the Gravel edition
of the Pentagon Papers.

The Gravel account devotes 40 pages to the history of the withdrawal policy
("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," Vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It states
clearly that "the policy of phase out and withdrawal and all the plans and
programs oriented to it" ended "de jure" in March 1964 (p. 196). It also states
clearly that the change in the withdrawal policy occurred after the
assassination:

"The only hint that something might be different from on-going plans came in a
Secretary of Defense memo for the President three days prior to this NSC meeting
[on Nov. 26]....In early December, the President [Johnson] began to have, if not
second thoughts, at least a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam. In discussions
with his advisors, he set in motion what he hoped would be a major policy
review..." (p. 196).

There can be no question, then, if we stick to the record, that Kennedy had
decided and planned to pull out, had begun to implement those plans, and that
Johnson subsequently reversed them.

This clear account in the Gravel edition, however, is obscured in the more
widely read New York Times "edition," which is really only a summary of the
official history by NYT reporters, with some documents added. The Gravel edition
has the actual text, and is significantly different. The NYT reporters gloss
over the history of the withdrawal policy in a way that cannot be simply to save
space. NSAM 263 is not mentioned at all, and Kennedy's authorization of the
McNamara-Taylor recommendations is mentioned only in passing, and inaccurately:

"[The McNamara-Taylor report] asserted that the "bulk" of American troops could
be withdrawn by the end of 1965. The two men proposed and--with the President's
approval--announced that 1,000 Americans would be pulled out by the end of 1963"
(p. 176).

That this "announcement" was in fact a White House foreign policy statement is
cleverly disguised (McNamara made the announcement, but it was Kennedy speaking
through him), along with the fact that the president also approved the more
important recommendation--to withdraw all troops by the end of 1965.

Earlier, the NYT reporter quotes a Pentagon Papers (PP) reference to the
1,000-man pullout (again ignoring the more significant total planned withdrawal
by 1966) as "strange," "absurd," and"Micawberesque" (p. 113). Then he mentions a
statement by McNamara that

"...the situation deteriorated so profoundly in the final five months of the
Kennedy Administration...that the entire phase-out had to be formally dropped in
early 1964."

The reporter's conclusion is that the PP account "presents the picture of an
unbroken chain of decision-making from the final months of the Kennedy
Administration into the early months of the Johnson Administration, whether in
terms of the political view of the American stakes in Vietnam, the advisory
build-up or the hidden growth of covert warfare against North Vietnam" (p. 114).

This is quite different from the actual (Gravel) account. It implies that the
change in the withdrawal ("phase-out") policy began well within Kennedy's
administration; Gravel says the change began in December 1963. The "unbroken
chain of decision-making" and "advisory build-up" implies that there never was a
withdrawal plan.

This has been the pattern followed by virtually all individual historians.

In his memoir Kennedy (NY: Harper & Row, 1965), Theodore Sorensen, who was one
of Kennedy's speechwriters, does not mention the withdrawal plan at all. Arthur
Schlesinger, another Kennedy adviser and a respected historian, has done a
curious about-face since 1965, but in this early book he buries a brief
reference to the White House policy statement in a context which makes it seem
both insignificant and based on a misapprehension of the situation by McNamara,
who

"...thought that the political mess [in South Vietnam] had not yet infected the
military situation and, back in Washington, announced (in spite of a strong
dissent from William Sullivan of Harriman's staff who accompanied the mission)
that a thousand American troops could be withdrawn by the end of the year and
that the major part of the American military task would be completed by the end
of 1965.

"This announcement, however, was far less significant than McNamara's acceptance
of the Lodge pressure program [on Diem]" (A Thousand Days, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1965, p. 996).

Schlesinger does not indicate that this "far less significant" announcement was
a statement of official policy and implemented nine days later by NSAM 263,
confirmed at the Honolulu conference on Nov. 20, and (supposedly) reaffirmed by
Johnson in NSAM 273.

Stanley Karnow, the author of what many consider to be the "definitive" history
of the Vietnam War (Vietnam: A History, NY: Viking Press, 1983), instead of
citing the documents themselves, substitutes his own convoluted "analysis":

"...what Kennedy wanted from McNamara and Taylor was a negative assessment of
the military situation, so that he could justify the pressures being exerted on
the Saigon regime. But Taylor and McNamara would only further complicate
Kennedy's problems" (p. 293).

This image of a recalcitrant McNamara and Taylor presenting a positive report
when Kennedy expected a negative one is absurd, first because both McNamara and
Taylor were in fact opposed to withdrawal, and second because if Kennedy had
wanted a negative report, he would have had no trouble procuring one. He already
had plenty, as a matter of fact, most recently that of Joseph Mendenhall, a
State Department official, who had told Kennedy on Sept. 10 that the Diem
government was near collapse.

Karnow goes on to enlighten us as to McNamara and Taylor's true motivation for
recommending the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of the year: "to placate
Harkins and the other optimists" (p. 293). Again, this is patently absurd. First
McNamara and Taylor are presented as defying the president's "true wishes," and
then as deliberately misrepresenting the situation to "placate" thecommanding
general (without bothering to explain why troop withdrawals would be
particularly placating to the general in charge of them). Karnow fails to
mention NSAM 263, and the reason is clear: he would be hard put to explain, if
the recommendations were "riddled with contradictions and compromises" and
contrary to the president's wishes, as Karnow says, why the president
implemented them with NSAM 263.

Karnow also tells us why the recommendation to withdraw all US troops by 1965
was made: it was "a prophecy evidently made for domestic political consumption
at Kennedy's insistence" (p. 294). This is hard to understand, since there was
no significant public or "political" opposition to US involvement in Vietnam at
that time, but plenty of opposition to disengagement. We now have Kennedy, in
Karnow's view, wanting a negative report, getting a positive one, and insisting
on announcing it publicly for a political effect that would do him more harm
than good!

In an indirect reference to the Oct. 2 White House statement, Karnow begrudges
us a small bit of truth:

"Kennedy approved the document [the McNamara-Taylor recommendations] except for
one nuance. He deleted a phrase calling the U.S. commitment to Vietnam an
'overriding' American goal, terming it instead a part of his worldwide aim to
'defeat aggression.' He wanted to preserve his flexibility" (p. 294).

This confirms the importance of the textual changes in the two documents, as
discussed above.


In JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984),
Herbert Parmet mentions both the White House statement and the McNamara-Taylor
report, but in a way that makes the two documents seem totally unrelated to each
other. Of the White House announcement Parmet says only:

"On October 2 the White House announced that a thousand men would be withdrawn
by the end of the year" (p. 333).

The larger plan to withdraw all troops by 1965 is not mentioned at all. This is
particularly misleading when followed by this statement:

"[Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell] Gilpatric later stated that McNamara did
indicate to him that the withdrawal was part of the President's plan to wind
down the war, but, that was too far in the future" (p. 333).

Who is the author of the last part of this sentence, Gilpatric or Parmet? In any
case, the end of 1965 was only two years away-- hardly "far in the future," much
less "too far," whatever that means.

Parmet continues:

"Ken O'Donnell has been the most vigorous advocate of the argument that the
President was planning to liquidate the American stake right after the
completion of the 1964 elections would have made it politically possible" (p.
336).

This reduces the fact that Kennedy planned to withdraw, documented in the White
House statement and in NSAM 263 and 273, to the status of an argument
"advocated" by O'Donnell. This clearly misrepresents O'Donnell's account as well
as the documentary record. O'Donnell does not argue that Kennedy wanted to pull
out; he quotes Kennedy's own words, uttered in his presence. It is not a matter
of interpretation or surmise. Either Kennedy said what O'Donnell says he said,
or O'Donnell is a liar. As for the documentary record, in addition to
misrepresenting the White House statement, Parmet, like Karnow and Schlesinger,
completely ignores NSAM 263 and 273.

Parmet devotes the bulk of his discussion to the purely hypothetical question of
what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam if he had lived. Parmet's answer: "It is
probable that not even he was sure." This again flies in the face what we know.
Kennedy knew what he wanted to do: withdraw. If Parmet's contention is that he
would have changed his mind, had he lived, and reversed his withdrawal policy
(as Johnson did), that is another matter. Parmet is trying to make us believe
that it is not clear that Kennedy wanted to withdraw in the first place, which
is plainly wrong.

The hypothetical question is answered by O'Donnell and Powers, who were in a
much better position to speculate than Parmet or anyone else, as follows:

"All of us who listened to President Kennedy's repeated expressions of his
determination to avoid further involvement in Vietnam are sure that if he had
lived to serve a second term, the numbers of American military advisers and
technicians in that country would have steadily decreased. He never would have
committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against the Viet Cong"
(p. 383).

Parmet says that for JFK "to have withdrawn at any point short of a clear-cut
settlement would have been most unlikely" (p. 336). But "a clear-cut settlement"
could range from Johnson's aim "to win" the war to Kennedy's more vaguely
expressed aim "to support the efforts of the people of that country [South
Vietnam] to defeat aggression and to build a peaceful and free society" (White
House statement, Oct. 2, 1963).

Parmet cites Sorensen as affirming Kennedy's desire to find a solution "other
than a retreat or abandonment of our commitment." This was in fact the solution
that the withdrawal plan offered: our mission is accomplished; it's their war
now. Parmet quotes from the speech Kennedy was supposed to deliver in Dallas the
day he was killed, as if empty rhetoric like "we dare not weary of the test" [of
supplying assistance to other nations] contradicted his withdrawal plan. He also
cites Dean Rusk, who said in a 1981 interview that "at no time did he [Kennedy]
even whisper any such thing [about withdrawal] to his own secretary of state."
If that is true, Rusk knew less than the rest of the nation, who were informed
by the White House statement on Oct. 2. Finally, Parmet quotes Robert Kennedy as
saying that his brother "felt that South Vietnam was worth keeping for
psychological and political reasons 'more than anything else,'" as if this
supported Parmet's argumentthat JFK was fully committed to defending that
corrupt dictatorship. But RFK could well have meant that means South Vietnam was
not worth keeping if it meant the US going to war-- just the opposite of
Parmet's interpretation.

Despite Kenneth O'Donnell's clearly expressed opinion in his 1970 memoir, Parmet
manages to have him saying the opposite in a 1976 interview:

"When Ken O'Donnell was pressed about whether the President's decision to
withdraw meant that he would have undertaken the escalation that followed in
1965, the position became qualified. Kennedy, said O'Donnell, had not faced the
same level of North Vietnamese infiltration as did President Johnson, thereby
implying that he, too, would have responded in a similar way under those
conditions" (p. 336).

Now--who said what, exactly? If we read carefully, it is clear that it is Parmet
who is "qualifying" O'Donnell's position, and Parmet who is telling us what
O'Donnell is "implying"--not O'Donnell.

John Ranelagh, a British journalist and author of what is widely considered an
"authoritative" (i.e. sanitized) history of the CIA, describes Kennedy as

"...a committed cold warrior, absolutely determined to prevent further communist
expansion and in 1963 still smarting from the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit,
and the Cuban missile crisis. It was time to go on the offensive, show these
communists what the United States could do if it put its mind to it, and Vietnam
seemed the right place. It was an arrogance, born of ignorance of what the world
really was like, assuming that American energy and power, applied with
conviction, would change an essentially passive world. At the fateful moment,
when the United States could have disengaged itself from Vietnam without
political embarrassment, there was a President in the White House looking for
opportunities to assert American strength.

"Kennedy wondered during 1963 whether he was in fact right in deciding that
Vietnam was the place for the exercise of this strength, and some of his close
associates subsequently were convinced that he would have pulled out had he
lived. But his own character and domestic political considerations militated
against this actually happening. In 1964 the Republican presidential candidate,
Barry Goldwater, ran on a strong prowar plank, and it would not have suited
Kennedy--just as it did not suit Johnson--to face the electorate with the
promise of complete disengagement. In addition, in September 1963 McNamara was
promising Kennedy that with the proper American effort the war in Vietnam would
be won by the end of 1965. No one was listening to the CIA or its analysts" (The
Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, NY: Touchstone, 1987, p. 420; emphasis
added).

Ranelagh not only ignores Kennedy's withdrawal decision "at the fateful moment,"
he transforms it into a desire "to assert strength," and has Kennedy pursuing
the buildup for "domestic political considerations." (This is precisely opposite
to Karnow's assumption, discussed above.) In the sentence beginning "In
addition...", Ranelagh manages to "interpret" McNamara- Taylor's recommendation
to pull out of Vietnam as an argument for Kennedy to stay in!

Ranelagh's opinion that "no one was listening to the CIA," implying that the CIA
was pessimistic about the war in 1963, contradicts what he says a few pages
earlier: "The Pentagon Papers...showed, apart from the earliest period in
1963-64, the agency's analysis was consistently pessimistic about U.S.
involvement..." (p. 417, my emphasis). This is the familiar "lone voice in the
wilderness" image of the CIA: only they were "intelligent" enough to read the
writing on the wall. But if that is true, why did the agency try so hard (from
1954 to 1964) to get us involved in the first place, and why did they continue
tosupport the war effort in clandestine operations throughout? The CIA's Ray
Cline says (as quoted by Ranelagh):

McCone [CIA Director under Kennedy and Johnson] and I talked a lot about the
U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and we both agreed in advising that intervention
there would pay only if the United States was prepared to engage in a long,
difficult process of nation-building in South Vietnam to create the political
and economic strength to resist a guerrilla war (p. 420).

Ranelagh intreprets this as evidence that the CIA wanted to withdraw from
Vietnam in 1963. Nonsense. No one in the top echelons of the CIA, least of all
Director John McCone, supported Kennedy's withdrawal plan in 1963. Nor does
Cline's remark imply this. He is saying that the CIA's opinion (i.e. one of
their opinions) was that to be "successful," the US would have to dig in for the
long haul. I think the "long haul" is precisely what the CIA wanted, and
precisely what Kennedy decided he did not want. That is why he decided to
withdraw. Clearly, more powerful forces than Kennedy himself combined to make
the intervention "pay" as the Johnson administration proceeded to engage in that
"long, difficult process of nation-building" that generated hundreds of billions
of dollars for the warmongers, destroying millions of lives in the process.

Neil Sheehan, one of the editors of the NYT Pentagon Papers and the author of
another acclaimed history of the war (A Bright Shining Lie, London: Picador,
1990), devotes exactly one sentence in 861 pages to the crucial White House
statement of Oct. 2, and not a single word to NSAM 263 or 273. His view is
consistent: the generals, except for a few, like John Paul Vann (the
biographical subject of the book), were incredibly stupid to think the war was
being won by our side, but Kennedy was even more stupid because he believed
them. The McNamara-Taylor report is presented as the height of naivety, which,
Sheehan adds sarcastically,

"...recommended pulling out 1,000 Americans by the end of 1963 in order to
demonstrate how well the plans for victory were being implemented. The White
House announced a forthcoming withdrawal of this first 1,000 men" (p. 366).

But "The President," Sheehan says, "gained no peace of mind." He was "confused"
and "angry" at the conflicting reports. In other words, according to Sheehan,
the withdrawal plan reflects nothing but Kennedy's "confusion" and misjudgement
of the situation, based on the equally false evaluation of his Secretary of
State and top military adviser.

As for the CIA, Sheehan, like Ranelagh, says the "analysts at the CIA told him
[Kennedy] that Saigon's military position was deteriorating..." (p. 366). But
Kennedy was too "confused" to understand this, and ordered withdrawal on the
false assumption that the war was going well.

All of these studies bend over backward to avoid recognizing the documented fact
that Kennedy had decided to withdraw from Vietnam by the end of 1965. The
tactics of avoidance vary from ignoringthe existence of any withdrawal plan at
all to attributing it to wishful thinking, political expedience, or sheer
stupidity and naivety.

At the same time, commentators are quick to remember the two TV interviews JFK
gave in September 1963 (Documents on American Foreign Relations, pp. 292-295).
On Sept. 2 he told Walter Cronkite of CBS: "But I don't agree with those who say
we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake." A week later he said to
David Brinkley on NBC:

"What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say, because
they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they don't like the government in
Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I
think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we
can, but we should not withdraw."

If any statements of that time frame were designed for political effect, these
TV interviews were. Presidents are far more likely to play politics in
television interviews than in official policy statements and Nation Security
Action Memoranda. These remarks must be seen as coming from a president who was
up for re-election in one year and who knew he would "be damned everywhere as a
Communist appeaser" if he withdrew from Vietnam, as he had told Ken O'Donnell a
few months earlier.

Those who take the "we should not withdraw" sentence as Kennedy's final word on
the matter do not point out that it is directly contradicted by the White House
policy statement and NSAM 263 the following month. Either Kennedy changed his
mind or -- more likely -- the earlier public statements were meant to appease
the pro-war forces. He also changed his mind about aid to South Vietnam:

Mr. Huntley: Are we likely to reduce our aid to South Vietnam now?

The President: I don't think that would be helpful at this time.

Whatever Kennedy meant by this in September, he thought and did the opposite in
October, implementing the McNamara-Taylor recommendations for aid reduction in
addition to troop reductions.

Kennedy also said in the Cronkite interview:

"In the final analysis, it is their [the South Vietnamese] war. They are the
ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them
equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win
it--the people of Vietnam--against the Communists. We are prepared to continue
to assist them, but I don't think that the war can be won unless the people
support the effort, and, in my opinion, in the last two months the government
has gotten out of touch with the people."

He repeats this, almost verbatim, a few sentences later, obviously intent on
emphasizing the point:

"...in the final analysis it is the people and the government [of South Vietnam]
who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making
it very clear. But I don't agreewith those who say we should withdraw. That
would be a great mistake."

In context, Kennedy may have been using the word "withdraw" here in the sense of
"abandon." "Abandoning" Vietnam completely would indeed have been bad politics,
but reducing aid (to force a change in Diem's policy) and withdrawing troops is
not necessarily the same thing.

Similarly, in the NBC interview, before Kennedy says "we should not withdraw,"
he says:

"We have some influence, and we are attempting to carry it out. I think we
don't--we can't expect these countries to do everything the way we want to do
them [sic]. They have their own interest, their own personalities, their own
tradition. We can't make everyone in our image, and there are a good many people
who don't want to go in our image....We would like to have Cambodia, Thailand,
and South Vietnam all in harmony, but there are ancient differences there. We
can't make the world over, but we can influence the world."

This does not sound like a strong commitment. As a whole, these remarks are
perhaps more accurately interpreted as: "We won't abandon them, but we won't do
their fighting for them either." This is an interpretation, but a plausible one.

Despite the massive efforts to obscure it, the fact remains, and cannot be
overemphasized, that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy. The curious thing
is that one hardly ever finds this fact plainly stated by those who should (and
perhaps do) know better. Richard Goodwin, an adviser to both Kennedy and
Johnson, is a rare exception:

"In later years Johnson and others in his administration would assert that they
were merely fulfilling the commitment of previous American presidents. The claim
was untrue--even though it was made by men, like Bundy and McNamara, who were
more anxious to serve the wishes of their new master than the memory of their
dead one. During the first half of 1965 I attended meetings, participated in
conversations, where the issues of escalation were discussed. Not once did any
participant claim that we had to bomb or send combat troops because of "previous
commitments," that these steps were the inevitable extension of past policies.
They were treated as difficult and serious decisions to be made solely on the
basis of present conditions and perceptions. The claim of continuity was
reserved for public justification; intended to conceal the fact that a major
policy change was being made--that "their" war was becoming "our" war"
(Remembering America, NY: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 373; emphasis added).

4. Reactions to Oliver Stone's JFK

Why do other historians find this observation by Goodwin so difficult to make?
Because to acknowledge the fact of a major policy change in Vietnam means to
acknowledge the possibility that the president was killed in order to effect
this change.

Since this is precisely the thesis of Oliver Stone's JFK, it is not surprising
to see that the critics have followed the same avoidance tactics.

The Wall Street Journal refers to the putative connection with Vietnam
policy--which is the main point of the film--only obliquely, halfway through the
review:

"We further agree that November 1963 was a turning point in the American
commitment to Vietnam. But the key was not the assassination of JFK but the
assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem three weeks earlier. Once President Kennedy gave
the go-ahead for a coup against an allied government in the name of winning the
war, the U.S. was deeply committed indeed. Lyndon Johnson, who had opposed the
coup, was left to pick up the pieces" (12/27/91, p. A10).

The crucial fact presented in the film--that Johnson reversed Kennedy's
withdrawal plan--is not even mentioned.

Time refers, also indirectly and buried midway in the article, to the portrayal
of Kennedy's Vietnam policy as a figment of the imaginations of "the last
misty-eyed believers in Camelot":

"They still hold to the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's JFK: a
Galahad-like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister right-wing
military-industrial complex to bring the troops home, ban the Bomb and ensure
racial equality on the home front--a Kennedy killed because he was just too good
to live" (European ed., 1/13/92, p. 39)

Here the word Vietnam does not even appear, and "bringing the troops home" is
presented as only one of several equally mythical Kennedy objectives. Whether
banning the Bomb and ensuring racial equality were on Kennedy's agenda is
debatable, but his decision to bring the troops home is not, or should not be.

In an article entitled "Does Stone's JFK Murder the Truth?" (International
Herald Tribune, 12/17/91, reprinted from the New York Times), Tom Wicker
writes--also about halfway through--that according to Stone and Garrison Kennedy
"seemed to question" the goals of those who "wanted the war in Vietnam to be
fought and the United States to stand tall and tough against the Soviets..."

This not only reduces Kennedy's withdrawal decision to a"question" but implies
that even that is not certain: he did not decide, he questioned, that is, he
seemed to question.

Iain Johnstone tells readers of the Sunday Times (1/26/91, Sect. 6, pp. 12-13),
again at mid-point position in his article, that the idea that Kennedy was
"about to let down the military and munitions men by pulling out of Vietnam" is
"doubtful." The only thing that is doubtful here is whether Johnstone has
bothered to read the documents.

On the last page of a seven-page article in GQ (Jan. 1992, p. 75), Nicholas
Lemann finally confronts Garrison's and Stone's main thesis by referring not to
the documents but to a 1964 interview with Robert Kennedy. This is apparently
the same 1964 interview cited by Herbert Parmet (discussed above). I have not
been able to consult the original material, which is part of an oral history
collection at the JFK Library in Boston, but it is interesting that Lehmann cuts
off the quotation at a strategic point.

Interviewer: Did the president feel that we would have to go into Vietnam in a
big way?

RFK: We certainly considered what would be the result if you abandon Vietnam,
even Southeast Asia, and whether it was worthwhile trying to keep and hold on
to.

Interviewer: What did he say? What did he think?

RFK: He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile...

This has to be a deliberate misrepresentation. The ellipsis conceals what we
know from Parmet's citation:

"As Bobby Kennedy later said, his brother had reached the point where he felt
that South Vietnam was worth keeping for psychological and political reasons
'more than anything else.'" (Parmet, p. 336).

Piecing these two parts of RFK's remark together, the complete sentence would
seem to have been:

"He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile for psychological and
political reasons more than anything else."

As I have already mentioned, "it was worthwhile" in this context more likely
meant "it was not worthwhile" (psychological and political reasons hardly
justifying a war), especially since we know, just as Robert knew, that President
Kennedy had decided to terminate US military participation by the end of 1965.

The German reviews of JFK, though they generally take Stone's thesis more
seriously than the American ones, are equally evasive on the point of Kennedy's
Vietnam policy. Several long articles do not mention it at all (Kurt Kister,
Sddeutsche Zeitung, 1/22/92, p. 8; Verena Lueken, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 1/24/92, p. 29). Peter Buchka in the Sddeutsche Zeitung (1/23/92, p.
10) mentions only that "a withdrawal from Vietnam," according to Garrison and
Stone, would have deprived the weapons industry of gigantic profits. Peter Krte
in the Frankfurter Rundschau (1/24/92, p. 22) notes that President Kennedy "said
he would withdraw the troops from Vietnam if he was reelected," which is only
half the truth. The only German critic who even mentions NSAM 263, Rolf Paasch,
the American correspondent for the (Berlin) Tageszeitung, questions Stone's
"interpretation" of it:

"Whether his [JFK's] hints in 1963 about a withdrawal of US military advisers
from Vietnam really demonstrated the conversion of a Cold Warrior, as Stone
interprets on the basis of NSAM 263, cited in the film, or whether it was only
opportunistic rhetoric aimed at his liberal supporters, is unclear" (1/23/92, p.
18).

Here we are presented with two alternatives: NSAM 263 demonstrates either that
Kennedy was a "converted Cold Warrior" or a liar. The possibility that he
remained a Cold Warrior who just didn't feel like sacrificing thousands of
American lives in Vietnam is not even considered. Why Paasch feels a clearly
expressed presidential policy directive can be characterized as a "hint," why it
requires "interpretation," and why he feels at liberty to question its
sincerity, he does not say. It is clear that he has done his research by relying
on the "interpretations" of American scholars like the ones we have discussed
rather than on the prima facie documentary evidence.

Der Spiegel mentions Kennedy's Vietnam policy in the form of a rhetorical
question: "In the weeks preceding the assassination, didn't he think about
withdrawing the advisers from Vietnam?" (12/16/92, p. 192). If presidents issued
NSAMs every time they "think about" something, the world would be a good deal
more confused than it is.

In a box entitled "Was It [the assassination] a Plot to Keep the U.S. in
Vietnam?" Time says that in Stone's movie Kennedy had "secret plans to withdraw
from Vietnam" (2/3/92, European ed., p. 63). There was nothing secret about the
White House statement on Oct. 2 or the press conference on Oct. 31, and the
confirmation of the withdrawal plan at the conference in Honolulu was reported
in the New York Times on Nov. 21, 1963. Certainly the withdrawal plan was not a
secret within the Kennedy administration.

Then, magnanimously offering to set the record straight by presenting "the
evidence," Time says:

"Kennedy confided to certain antiwar Senators that he planned to withdraw from
Vietnam if re-elected, but publicly he proclaimed his opposition to withdrawal.
In October 1963 he signed a National Security Action Memo--NSAM 263--that
ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 of the 16,000 or so U.S. military "advisers."

"After the assassination, Lyndon Johnson let the 1,000-man withdrawal proceed,
but it was diluted so that it involved mainly individuals due for rotation
rather than entire combat units. A few days after taking office, he signed a new
action memo--NSAM 273--that was tougher than a version Kennedy had been
considering; it permitted more extensive covert military actions against North
Vietnam. No one has come forward, however, with any direct knowledge of a
military or CIA conspiracy."

This is a good example of gray propaganda--the half-truth. Kennedy's "opposition
to withdrawal" is construed -- probably falsely -- from the September television
interviews. The second half of this truth is that Kennedy publicly proclaimed
the opposite--his intention to withdraw--in the Oct. 2 White House statement, of
which Time conveniently omits mention. Similarly, Time tells us only half of
what is in NSAM 263, leaving out the more important half, which implemented
Kennedy's plan to remove all US troops--not just 1,000--by the end of 1965.

What does the reference to Johnson's NSAM 273 as "tougher than a version Kennedy
had been considering" mean? If the "Kennedy version" was Bundy's Nov. 21 draft
of 273, this is wrong, because Kennedy never saw that draft, much less approved
it.


Time acknowledges that Johnson "permitted more extensive covert military actions
against North Vietnam," but why not also acknowledge that these commando
operations later provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which in turned
served--quite fraudulently, as even establishment commentators now admit--as the
basis for the congressional resolution that made Vietnam "our war," that is,
exactly what Kennedy said in the September interviews he wanted to avoid.

By leaving out the crucial information, Time has Johnson merely "diluting" the
1,000-man withdrawal and making "tougher" a plan that Kennedy "had been
considering." In other words, there was no policy reversal, and thus no
background to a possible conspiracy. But let us substitute the whole truth for
Time's half-truth, and then see what their conclusion would look like:

"[Johnson reversed Kennedy's plan to withdraw all US troops by the end of 1965
and] permitted more extensive covert military actions against North Vietnam. No
one has come forward, however, with any direct knowledge of a military or CIA
conspiracy."

Now the last sentence makes sense, but it is not the sense that Time wanted to
convey. Time meant to tell us that 1) there was no policy reversal and thus no
reason to suspect a conspiracy, and 2) that there is no direct evidence of one.
The whole truth version tells us 1) that there was a policy reversal and thus
good reason to suspect a conspiracy, but 2) there is no direct evidence of one.

There is no excusing such obvious abuse of logic and the evidentiary record. It
has to be deliberate, since the writer obviously knows what is in the documents
he describes and chooses to omit certain crucial information. What reader who
bothers to read Time in the first place would suspect this? It is propaganda,
pure but not simple. It takes skill to write like this.

5. Fire from the left

Alexander Cockburn, a talented writer and normally reasonable columnist for The
Nation, was one of the first to condemn the Stone film. When it comes to the
assassination, the views of this "radical leftist" fall right in line with those
of the Establishment.

In his review of JFK, Cockburn says the question of conspiracy in the
assassination

"has as much to do with the subsequent contours of American politics as if he
had tripped over one of Caroline's dolls and broken his neck in the White House
nursery" (The Nation, 1/6- 13/92:6-7).

He doesn't even try to justify this point of view. He rejects the coup theory
out of hand, along with all conspiracy theories, and then rejects any possible
political significance of the assassination. The question is insignificant
because he thinks he knows the answer.

Cockburn fights dirty. He dismisses Scott's "yearning interpretation" of the
textual disparities between JFK's White House statement and Johnson's NSAM 273
but fails to mention the most important part of both of these documents--the
part referring to the troop withdrawals. The reader cannot know from Cockburn's
essay that either document mentions troop withdrawals or that this is a crucial
point in Scott's analysis.

Since Cockburn makes no mention of JFK's withdrawal decision, it is easy for him
to say there was "no change in policy" and call Scott's assertion to the
contrary "fantasizing," but this misrepresents the facts. Cockburn has read
Scott and he knows what is in the documents--not only in the first paragraphs,
which he quotes, but also in the third paragraph of the White House statement
and in the second paragraph of NSAM 273. These paragraphs refer to the
withdrawal plan. Cockburn omits any mention of them.

Ignoring this documentary evidence of October and November, Cockburn backtracks
to the spring of 1963 to argue with John Newman's "frequently repeated claim [in
his then unpublished book, JFK and Vietnam] that by February or March of 1963
JFK had decided to pull out of Vietnam once the 1964 election was won," a claim
for which Cockburn sees "an absence of any substantial evidence":

Newman's only sources for this are people to whom J.F.K. would, as a matter of
habitual political opportunism, have spoken in such terms, such as Senators Mike
Mansfield and Wayne Morse, both of whom, particularly the latter, were critical
of J.F.K.'sescalation in Vietnam.

There is no mention of Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, to whom Kennedy
repeatedly told the same thing he told Mansfield. Would Kennedy have been being
politically opportunistic with the most trusted members of his personal staff?

In a subsequent issue of The Nation (3/9/92:290,317-320), replying to letters
from Zachary Sklar, Peter Scott, and Michael Parenti, Cockburn repeats his claim
that there is no evidence to show that Kennedy had planned to withdraw as early
as the spring of 1963, "aside from some conversations recollected by men such as
Kennedy's political operative Kenny O'Donnell or Senators Wayne Morse and Mike
Mansfield." This means that either Kennedy was lying, or O'Donnell et al. were
lying.

The counterargument to these "lies" is Kennedy's "numerous statements to the
contrary. There were plenty of those." Cockburn mentions two--a statement in
July and his remarks in the Sept. 9 NBC interview. Newman explains these by
suggesting that "J.F.K. was dissembling, concealing his private thoughts,
throwing the hawks off track." Cockburn calls this "data-free surmises" and "a
willful credulity akin to religious mania."

Why is it "credulous" to suggest that JFK was dissembling? And if this is
"credulous," why is it less so to assume, as Cockburn does, that JFK was not
only dissembling, but outright lying, to O'Donnell et al.? JFK was much more
explicit in his reported remarks to O'Donnell and Powers than he was in the TV
interviews. Which would be the more likely place for a politician to
dissemble--in a TV interview or in a private conversation with his most trusted
personal advisers? Did JFK tell the absolute truth on TV and lie to his
advisers? Because Newman says the opposite, Cockburn says he is a religious
maniac. Is this rational?

The crucial point, however, which Cockburn totally ignores, is that Kennedy did
not wait for the 64 election as he said he would. He made the withdrawal
announcement on October 2, 1963, and implemented it with NSAM 263 on October 11.
Regardless of what he said publicly or privately in July or September, his
official policy in October was withdrawal.

Just as he fails to mention the crucial documents--the McNamara- Taylor report
and NSAM 263--in his article, in his reply to the letters Cockburn, like Time
magazine, fails to mention the most significant parts of both documents, which
is not the 1,000-man pullout by the end of 1963 but the total pullout by the end
of 1965. One cannot know, either from Time or from Cockburn, that Kennedy not
only wanted 1,000 men out in two months but everybody out in two years.

Cockburn then says the 1,000-man withdrawal was "proposed" by McNamara and
Taylor because "at that time they thought the war was going according to plan
and victory was in sight." He fails to say 1) that this proposal was implemented
nine days later by NSAM 263, and 2) that plenty of Kennedy's advisers were
telling him that the war was not going well.

Cockburn keeps putting the word "victory" in Kennedy's mouth, butthe question
Kennedy was facing was, Should we fight this war for the South Vietnamese or
not? If JFK's answer was no, what else could he have done than declare the
mission accomplished and withdraw? This is not "victory" in Cockburn's sense,
but most likely a ploy to get out without losing face. The alternative would
have been immediate, complete withdrawal, making it obvious to the world that
the US had abandoned an ally. But withdrawal by 1966 on the basis of having
accomplished a limited military objective (not "victory") would have been
politically tolerable. What else could he have said? "Sorry folks, I made a
terrible mistake in trying to support this dictatorial South Vietnamese regime
against their own people, so we're going home"? No. He had to say: "We've done
what we can and all we promised to do, but it's their war, so we're going home."

Kennedy was not an idiot, but he would have to have been an idiot to have been
deluded by "euphoric reports from the field," as Cockburn says he was. Many of
the reports Kennedy received were anything but euphoric, and the White House
statement of October 2 was not euphoric either:

The political situation in South Viet-Nam remains deeply serious. The United
States has made clear its continuing opposition to any repressive actions in
South Viet-Nam [by the Diem brothers]. While such actions have not yet
significantly affected the military effort, they could do so in the future.

Kennedy would have been a complete fool to have thought that "victory was in
sight," as Cockburn and others suggest.

The fact remains that deluded or not deluded, Kennedy decided to withdraw. One
can't have it both ways. One can't say that Kennedy was deluded into the
withdrawal decision because he thought we were winning, on the one hand, and
also say he didn't really mean it, that he was just playing politics. But this
is exactly what Cockburn says: "There were also domestic political reasons for
the adoption of such a course." What makes him think the political pressure to
withdraw was greater than the pressure to escalate? JFK's own Cabinet, the
Vice-President, the military, the CIA, and right-wing forces in Congress and in
the general population were against withdrawal. That is why he told O'Donnell et
al. that he should be re-elected before withdrawing, because he knew there was
substantial opposition to it. The situation in Vietnam deteriorated so badly in
the summer and fall, however, that he was forced to announce the withdrawal plan
probably earlier than he would have liked.

Cockburn says that when Kennedy discussed withdrawal "a qualifier was always
there." "Always" turns out to be on two occasions, neither of which supports the
point. The first is a quote from "one Pentagon official" (who?) as saying
(when?) that the withdrawal could begin "providing things go well"--as if what
some anonymous person said sometime somewhere could be taken as a "qualifier" to
what Kennedy thought or did in October 1963 or any other time. But time, as we
have already seen, is a minor factor in Cockburn's sense of history, and in the
next sentence we are taken back to the press conference on May 22, 1963, where
Kennedy said:

"We are hopeful that the situation in Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in
any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgement at
the present time. There is a long hard struggle to go."

I suppose it is the words "hopeful" and "some" that Cockburn takes as
qualifiers. He fails to note, however, that October comes after May, or that
this fact has any significance. In October, McNamara and Taylor expressed
complete withdrawal not as a "hope" but as a belief:

"We believe that the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965,
the terminal date which we are taking as the time objective of our
counterinsurgency programs" (NYT, Pentagon Papers, p. 213).

The second "qualifier" Cockburn cites is contained in "the minutes to the
discussion of NSAM 263." He gives no reference, but says these notes "have
J.F.K. saying the same thing"--that the withdrawal "should be carried out
routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no
longer needed." Even if Kennedy actually said this, it does not say the same
thing he said in May, nor does it "qualify" the withdrawal ordered by NSAM 263.
It is perfectly compatible with the "mission accomplished" posture. US troops
were indeed no longer "needed" (as in truth they never were) in Vietnam unless
they were going to fight the South Vietnamese's war for them, which NSAM 263 is
clearly intended to prevent.

"And in implementing the withdrawal order," Cockburn continues, still apparently
quoting from these anonymous minutes, "J.F.K. directed that 'no further
reductions in U.S. strength would be made until the requirements of the 1964
[military] campaign were clear.'" But again, why does this "qualify" the
withdrawal policy? The withdrawal was to be phased over the next two years and
obviously would have to be done with consideration for the troops that would
remain in country in the meantime. Instead of trying to support this foolish
innuendo, Cockburn jumps back into his time machine to finish the paragraph:

"Remember that already by the end of 1961 J.F.K. had made the decisive initial
commitment to military intervention, and that a covert campaign of terror and
sabotage against the North was similarly launched under his aegis."

We cannot discuss NSAM 263, in other words, without remembering 1961, but who is
suggesting that Kennedy's Vietnam policy was the same in 1961 as it was in late
1963? Mr. Cockburn. The truth is that Kennedy changed his mind and reversed his
policy--from buildup to withdrawal--and after the assassination Johnson reversed
it again. Cockburn implies that the "decisive initial commitment" was, though
only "initial," also "decisive," that is, permanent. But Cockburn himself refers
to NSAM 263 as "implementing the withdrawal order." How can the initial
commitment in 1961 have been "decisive" if the opposite decision was implemented
in October 1963?

In the following paragraph Cockburn again quotes an Administration official to
represent what Kennedy supposedly thought, though this time at least the
official is identified:

"On November 13, 1963, The New York Times published an interview with Michael
Forrestal, a senior member of Kennedy's National Security Council, in which he
said, 'It would be folly...at the present time' to pursue 'a negotiated
settlement between North and South Vietnam.'"

To buttress this statement, Cockburn then quotes "J.F.K. himself" in his press
conference the next day:

"We do have a new situation there, and a new government, we hope, an increased
effort in the war....Now, that is our object, to bring Americans home, permit
the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country,
and permit democratic forces within the country to operate--which they can of
course, much more freely when the assault from the inside, and which is
manipulated from the North, is ended. So the purpose of the meeting in Honolulu
is how to pursue these objectives."

Cockburn's interpretation:

"Thus, J.F.K. was defining victory--to be followed by withdrawal of U.S.
"advisers"--as ending the internal Communist assault in the South, itself
manipulated from the North."

Again the word "victory," which is Cockburn's. The order of priorities--victory,
then withdrawal--is also Cockburn's, not Kennedy's. The first objective Kennedy
mentions is to bring Americans home. The last point is added almost as an
afterthought: of course it would be better if the support of the North for the
insurrection in the South could be ended. But it was clear to everyone,
especially after the Buddhist uprisings in the summer, that the insurrection
would continue even without support from the North unless post-Diem leadership
emerged that the South Vietnamese themselves would be willing to fight for. This
is what Kennedy meant when he said "We do have new situation there." The hope he
expressed for "an increased effort in the war" was for an increased effort by
the South Vietnamese!

Cockburn is implying the opposite--that Kennedy hoped for an increased war
effort by the US, and that this was to be the topic of the Honolulu conference.
There is no basis for this assumption. Apparently, there is still no reliable
record of that conference, which is strange. Scott's conclusion, based on
contemporary news reports and references to the meeting in the Pentagon Papers,
is that the Accelerated Withdrawal Plan was confirmed, i.e. the reduction in
military aid and troop withdrawals implemented by NSAM 263 on Oct. 11. Cockburn
tells us the opposite:

As Newman acknowledges, the upshot of the Honolulu meeting was that for "the
first time" the "shocking deterioration of the war was presented in detail to
those assembled, along with a plan to widen the war, while the 1,000-man
withdrawal was turned into a meaningless paper drill.

The question appears unresolved. What was decided at Honolulu--to continue
withdrawal or "widen the war"? In fact, Johnson's NSAM 273 did both--continued
the withdrawal plan and increased covert military operations, but only the first
of these contradictory policies was included in Kennedy's NSAM 263. That is what
counts, especially since we do not know what happened at Honolulu, and there is
no evidence that Kennedy knew either. In any case, he did not change his policy
between Oct. 11 (NSAM 263) and Nov. 22.

Cockburn's next argument is based on McGeorge Bundy's draft of NSAM 273:

"The next day [after the Honolulu conference, i.e. Nov. 21], back in the White
House, Bundy put the grim conclusions of the meeting into the draft language of
NSAM 237 [sic; presumably 273], which, as he told Newman in 1991, he 'tried to
bring...in line with the words that Kennedy might want to say.'"

Cockburn assumes that Bundy's draft, whose first paragraph is almost identical
with the first paragraph of Johnson's NSAM 273, proves that Kennedy would have
said the same thing Johnson did. But there are several obvious questions he
should be asking.

First, why has this document, along with the other documents issuing from the
Honolulu conference, remained classified so long? Second, why would Bundy draft
the text of an important policy directive based on the results of a meeting
which he had not yet even discussed yet with the president?

It is quite wrong to assume that Kennedy would have approved the language of
this draft just because Bundy thinks he would have. Cockburn forgets that we are
talking here about the possibility of a coup d'tat. Bundy's motives and
credibility are at least as suspect as Johnson's. He was a hawk on Vietnam from
the word go and thus in the same camp as Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, and CIA
director McCone. He had strong ties with the CIA through his brother William and
his former professor at Yale, Richard Bissell, the CIA Director of Operations
Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs, and through his job as National Security
Adviser. As the president's personal liaison with the Director of Central
Intelligence, who in turn represented the entire intelligence community, Bundy
was the highest national security official to survive the presidential
"transition"--the only person in a position under both Kennedy and Johnson to
know all the nation's secrets. In short, if it was a coup, Bundy must have been
in on it. If indeed he wrote the draft of NSAM on Nov. 21 (i.e., if it is not a
falsification to confuse the "record"), he may have written it for Johnson.

Cockburn doesn't hesitate to call Kennedy a liar, but he takes Johnson at his
word. Johnson said about his first presidential conference on Vietnam on Nov.
24, 1963, two days after the assassination:

Most of the advisers agreed that we could begin withdrawing some of our advisers
by the end of the year and a majority of them by the end of 1965.

Cockburn thinks this proves that "J.F.K. in the last days of his Administration,
and L.B.J. in the first days of his, defined victory in the same terms, and both
were under similar illusions." LBJ, whom O'Donnell, for example, portrays as a
bald-faced liar on several occasions, could not possibly be lying! Again
Cockburn puts the word "victory" in Kennedy's mouth, and ignores the question
astutely raised by Scott: If there was no change of policy, why was Vietnam so
important that it was the first order of business of the new president? If
Johnson was under "similar illusions" as Kennedy, why did he say in his memoirs
that he "felt a national security meeting was essential at the earliest possible
moment" (quoted by Scott, p. 224)? This meeting was held on Sunday, Nov. 24, but
Scott points out that according to the Pentagon Papers and the New York Times
there was an even earlier meeting with McNamara, on Saturday morning, where a
memo was discussed in which

"Mr. McNamara said that the new South Vietnamese government was confronted by
serious financial problems, and that the U.S. must be prepared to raise planned
MAP [Military Assistance Plan] levels" (Scott, p. 225, quoting the Gravel
edition).

First, this does not seem to be what was decided in Honolulu, where according to
the New York Times the Accelerated Withdrawal Plan was finalized. Secondly, if
this is what was decided in Honolulu, why did McNamara wait two full days
without discussing it with Kennedy and discuss it with Johnson the morning after
the assassination? Scott's conclusion that the withdrawal policy was in fact
reversed immediately after the assassination clarifies both points.

Johnson's opinion on Vietnam was no different on Nov. 23 or 24 from what it was
on August 31, 1963, when he said that "it would be a disaster to pull out...we
should once again go about winning the war" (Pentagon Papers, NYT, p. 205). This
was also Bundy's, Rusk's, and McNamara's position. Kennedy was practically a
minority of one in the upper echelons of his own Administration, as Maxwell
Taylor has written. But as long as he was boss, his view prevailed. The
McNamara-Taylor report Of Oct. 2, 1963, according to Fletcher Prouty, did not
represent McNamara's view at all, and was not even written by him. It was
written at the Pentagon according to Kennedy's wishes and handed over to
McNamara and Taylor in Honolulu when they stopped there on their way back from
Saigon, so that they could then hand it to the president in Washington as
"their" report.

With Kennedy out of the picture, the hawks took over, reversing the withdrawal
policy while maintaining the appearance of continuity.

Noam Chomsky is another radical leftist who is vehemently opposed to what he
calls the "withdrawal thesis" ("Vain Hopes, False Dreams," Z, Oct. 1992). Like
Cockburn, Chomsky says there no withdrawal plan, only a "withdrawal on condition
of victory" plan, and that arguments to the contrary are nothing more than JFK
"hagiography." His argument is more rigorous than Cockburn's, but equally false.

First, it is wrong to assume that all biographers and assassination researchers
are JFK hagiographers. One need not deny that Kennedy was as ruthless a cold
warrior as any other president to acknowledge that he had decided to withdraw
from Vietnam. Reagan's decision to withdraw from Lebanon doesn't make him a
secret dove either.

Second, the withdrawal "thesis" is not a thesis but a fact, amply documented in
the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, as already discussed. Since Chomsky
himself co-edited Vol. 5, it is surprising that he finds this fact so difficult
to acknowledge.

The thesis which Chomsky, like Cockburn, is actually arguing against is his own
formulation: that JFK wanted "withdrawal without victory." It is true that
according to the record, the withdrawal plan was predicated on the assumption of
military success. Chomsky, however, understands this as a condition. This is
wrong. There is a substantial difference between saying "The military campaign
is progressing well, and we should be able to withdraw by the end of 1965,"
which is how I read the McNamara- Taylor report and Kennedy's confirmation of it
in NSAM 263, and "If we win the war, we will withdraw," which is how Chomsky
reads the same documents. We do not know what Kennedy may have secretly wanted
or what he would have done if he had he lived. Whether he really believed the
war was going well, as the record states, or privately knew it was not, as
Newman contends, is also unknowable. What we do know, from the record, Chomsky
notwithstanding, is that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy sometime between
December 1963 and March 1964.

The point, again, is crucial. If one manages to say, as Chomsky and Cockburn and
the other authors discussed here do, that in truth there was no change in
policy, that in fact there never was a withdrawal policy but only a policy of
escalation and victory (until after Tet), it means that Johnson and Nixon simply
continued what Kennedy started. This, in turn, means that the question of the
relation of the policy change (since there wasn't one) to the assassination does
not arise.

If, however, one states the facts correctly, the question is unavoidable.
Exactly when Johnson reversed the policy, and whether he did so because
conditions changed, or because perceptions of conditions changed, or for
whatever reason, is beside the point. Why avoid the straightforward formulation,
which is nothing but a summary of the PP Gravel account: JFK thought we were
winning, so he planned to withdraw; Johnson decided that we weren't, so he
killed the plan.

The reason is clear. Once you admit that there was a radical policy change in
the months following the assassination, whether that change was a reaction to a
(presumed) change in conditions or not, you must ask if the change was related
to the assassination. Then, like it or not, you are into conspiracy theory, and
conspiracy theory is anathema to the leftist or neo-Marxian tradition
represented by Cockburn and Chomsky. There are historical reasons for this, of
course, since conspiracy theories have been notoriously exploited by the fascist
right. Nevertheless, it is as wrong to identify all conspiracy theories with the
likes of Hitler and Goebbels as it is to identify Marxist theories with the
likes of Stalin and Erich Honecker.

There is an alternative view. In this view, one accepts the fact of the policy
change, but denies that it had anything to do with the assassination. It was
mere coincidence that the policy change followed the assassination. This is a
tenable position, but one that few seem comfortable with, and for a good reason:
it is ludicrously naive. Nevertheless, it has apparently become Arthur
Schlesinger's position, who reads Johnson's NSAM 273 as "reversing the Kennedy
withdrawal policy" ("JFK: Truth and Fiction," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10,
1992). But, he adds, to connect the policy reversal with the assassination, as
Stone and Garrison do, is "reckless, paranoid, really despicable fantasy..."

Despite Schlesinger's hysterical denials, the policy reversal is the most
plausible motive for the assassination. Thus the biggest lie--the Lone Nut
theory of history--requires another one: there was no policy reversal. It is
astonishing that so many commentators of diverse political stripes have
succumbed to this imperative.

    -end-


+ Join Us! Support The NY Transfer News Collective + + We deliver uncensored
information to your mailbox! + + Modem:718-448-2358 Fax:718-448-3423 E-mail:
nyt@blythe.org +