The 2nd Biggest Lie: JFK & Vietnam/
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Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
From: M.MOR...@ASCO.central.de (Mike Morrissey)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 93 04:44:20 +0100
THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE
by Michael Morrissey
Part 3 of 3
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'état. 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-
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Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
From: M.MOR...@ASCO.central.de (Mike Morrissey)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 93 04:44:20 +0100
THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE
by Michael Morrissey
Part 1 of 3
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.
Continued in Part 2....