Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Additionally, though Kennedy was very upset with the CIA over its bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and “allowed” its leaders, including the director himself, Allen Dulles, to resign in the aftermath of the debacle, his animus toward the agency was not long-lived, and his overall relationship with the CIA was good. (See discussion on this issue in the “CIA” section.)*

  Then X, with the slight, confident smile of a lunatic, tells Garrison that “the Warren Commission is fiction,” and proceeds to go beyond the CIA and lay out the principal reason for the assassination. It coalesces with the opening scene of the movie where President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, warns of the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” in our society. X tells Garrison that the “power structure” was behind Kennedy’s assassination and it was a “coup d’etat…President Kennedy was murdered by the highest levels of our government.” “Who benefitted?” X asks Garrison, the only message being that whoever did must have killed Kennedy. X lectures that “the organizing principle of any society is for war. War is the biggest business in America, and Kennedy wanted to end the cold war…He signed a treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear testing, he refused to invade Cuba in 1962 [Cuban missile crisis], and he set out to withdraw from Vietnam. All of that ended on November 22, 1963.”

  There’s a fictitious scene in the movie of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the presence of white-collared business executives, angrily denouncing Kennedy’s policies. It is clear, X tells Garrison, that they hate him, as do the captains of industry—“defense contractors, big oil, bankers”—because without war, they’ll lose “big money, a hundred billion dollars.” In short, the military-industrial complex wanted, needed war, and Kennedy wanted to end the Vietnam War, so they decided to kill him.† Just like that. As I said earlier in this book, that’s what we do in America. If the president is pursuing policies that members of a certain segment of our society, like Wall Street, the unions, or the military, don’t like, why they simply kill him. Of course.

  And of course, not one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or one corporate leader would ever think of not going along with this plan to murder the president and instead alert the president or call the authorities. After all, what’s the big deal about joining in a conspiracy to murder the president of the United States? If any reader of this book were on the Joint Chiefs of Staff or a corporate leader and the president’s policies were going to interfere with your objectives or cut into your profits, you wouldn’t think twice about conspiring to murder him, would you? More seriously, even if we imagine the unimaginable, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and leaders of American industry were crazy enough to be willing to murder Kennedy because of his plan to end the cold war, would they be so crazy as to not at least first try to beat him at the ballot box by putting all their money, power, and influence behind his opponent when he came up for reelection in just one year? Or if not that, where is there any evidence that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the titans of industry first demanded an audience with the president and tried to talk him out of his expected (in their minds, if we accept Stone’s thesis) withdrawal from Vietnam? Instead, Stone simply shows his audience several bemedaled generals in a smoke-hazed room profaning Kennedy and boozing it up as they set in motion the murder of their commander in chief. Stone adopts the military-industrial-complex theory of the assassination as the principal theme of his film, ostensibly superseding the Shaw-Ferrie-Oswald troika, unless there was a connection between the two groups, which Stone never indicates to his audience.

  Since we know that the conversation between X and Garrison never took place and was invented by Stone for his movie, and inasmuch as no one has ever produced one single particle of evidence that the military-industrial complex was behind Kennedy’s assassination, no further discussion of the issue is really necessary. However, even though the military-industrial-complex-killing-Kennedy theory is offensive to one’s intelligence, because of Stone’s movie (“What makes Stone so dangerous,” a Hollywood producer acquaintance of mine told me, “is that he’s a great filmmaker. He makes his films believable”), millions of otherwise intelligent Americans now subscribe to it. A representative example: In a November 1999 Playboy interview, the savvy governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, was asked, “Who do you think killed President Kennedy?” He replied, “The military-industrial complex. I believe Kennedy was going to withdraw us from Vietnam and there were factions that didn’t want that.”230 So even though Stone invented the conversation on the bench, and there’s no evidence the military-industrial complex had anything to do with the assassination, because the theory has taken hold in the conspiracy community and among many Americans, let’s examine the allegation as it was presented in the movie.

  X tells Garrison that the objectives of the military-industrial complex in murdering Kennedy worked. He tells Garrison that Kennedy had a “plan for getting all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965” and that NSAM 263, signed on October 11, 1963, “ordered home the first 1,000 troops” of the 16,500 military advisers then in Vietnam* by the end of 1963. X says that four days after the assassination, “Lyndon Johnson signs National Security [Action] Memo 273, which essentially reverses [Kennedy’s] withdrawal policy.”

  So Stone wanted his audience to believe that the issue was very clear-cut: Kennedy wanted to withdraw from Vietnam (NSAM 263 spelled out his intentions), he was murdered because of it,* and shortly after his murder, LBJ, by NSAM 273, set aside Kennedy’s plans. But that doesn’t begin to tell the story of what really happened. If Stone had told it, his whole thesis would have crumbled. In the first place, even though NSAM 273 was issued under President Johnson on November 26, 1963, four days after Kennedy’s death, the draft, containing the identical language in its relevant clauses, was prepared by McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs, on November 21, 1963, while Kennedy was still president.231† So no inference can be drawn that after Kennedy died, Johnson, by NSAM 273, changed course.

  Few question that Kennedy did not want to employ combat troops in Vietnam. “Kennedy had no intention of dispatching ground forces to save Vietnam,” says historian and JFK special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Having watched the French Army fail in Vietnam…, he had no desire to send the American Army into the same quagmire.”232 General James M. Gavin wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that “having discussed military affairs with [Kennedy] often and in detail for fifteen years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia.”233 Roger Hilsman, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, says that “on numerous occasions President Kennedy told me that he was determined not to let Vietnam become an American war. He agreed to have Americans serve as advisers…but he refused every suggestion to send American combat forces.”234 And the National Security Action Memorandums, all of which had to express his will, clearly show he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam. Indeed, Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam can be traced as far back as May 8, 1962, when his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, in Saigon attending the fifth of eight SECDEF (Secretary of Defense) conferences held on the Vietnam War during the Kennedy presidency, ordered General Paul D. Harkins, commander of the Military Advisory Command in Vietnam, to start working on a plan to remove all American military advisers from Vietnam.

  None of this, however, is synonymous with saying that irrespective of circumstances, Kennedy would have withdrawn and would never have employed American combat troops as his successor eventually did. Presidents, like all humans, often do things they had hoped they’d never have to do. Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College, London, says in his book, Kennedy’s Wars, that “to get out of Vietnam was less of a decision” for JFK “than a working assumption” that the South Vietnamese government, whose side we supported, would be able to repel the Vietcong (South Vietnam Commu
nist guerrilla rebels) with U.S. military assistance. But he goes on to say that “it requires something of a leap of faith to assume that Kennedy would have stuck to a predetermined policy come what may. This was, after all, a man who prized flexibility and keeping open all options.”235

  It would be nice, one could say, if Kennedy himself had told us if he’d ever be willing to employ American combat troops in Vietnam. Well, he did, on the last day of his life. In the already prepared text of the speech Kennedy was scheduled to give at the Dallas Trade Mart after the motorcade through Dealey Plaza, Kennedy suggests he would have used American combat troops if the situation called for it. In addressing the issue of the wisdom of assisting 3.5 million allied forces in Southeast Asia to repel the advance of Communism, the text reads, “Our assistance…can be painful, risky, and costly…But we dare not weary of the task…We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchman on the walls of world freedom…A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas [which he said included “Vietnam, free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran”], necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program—and might cost us heavily in American lives as well…Reducing our efforts to train, equip and assist [the allied] armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces.”236

  Does any reader of this book think that Oliver Stone would have ever dreamed of quoting the above in his travesty of a movie?*

  Moreover, NSAM 273 (November 26, 1963) does not, as Stone’s audience was told, reverse NSAM 263 (October 11, 1963). In fact, it specifically reaffirms Kennedy’s decision to withdraw 1,000 troops by the end of 1963, providing in its second numbered paragraph that “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 October 2, 1963.”* The White House statement of October 2, 1963, became the basis and precursor for NSAM 263, which provided for “the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963.” The October 2 statement was read to the media by Press Secretary Pierre Salinger following a National Security Council meeting convened by Kennedy earlier in the evening. At that meeting the recommendations set forth in a ten-page memorandum of that same date (October 2) from General Maxwell D. Taylor (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Robert S. McNamara (secretary of defense), based on their one-week fact-finding mission for Kennedy in Vietnam, were discussed. The resulting statement, in part, said that Taylor and McNamara “reported that by the end of this year [1963] the United States program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where one thousand United States military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn,” and that “the U.S. military task [in Vietnam] can be completed by the end of 1965.”237

  Not only didn’t Stone tell his movie audience that NSAM 273, under President Johnson, actually reaffirmed NSAM 263† issued under Kennedy, but also Stone couldn’t find thirty seconds in his three-hour-and-eight-minute movie, and Stone’s two Vietnam advisers, L. Fletcher Prouty and John M. Newman, couldn’t find one paragraph of space in their respective 366-and 506-page books (Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy and Newman’s JFK and Vietnam), to point out that there was much more to Taylor and McNamara’s memo to the president of October 2, 1963, than withdrawing 1,000 military advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and enunciating the objective of removing the remainder of the U.S. military task force from Vietnam by the end of 1965. But since the main motive for the assassination of Kennedy in Stone’s movie was Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, this apparently is all that he wanted his audience to know. Other than a single, one-sentence paragraph in Newman’s book that had nothing to do with the heart of the October 2 memo, the only two paragraphs of the memo he quotes in his book (on page 402) are the withdrawal paragraphs. That’s also all that Prouty talks about (on page 279) in his comments about the memo.

  However, the October 2 memo goes on for ten pages, and the main thrust of it is not withdrawal, which is secondary, but how to deal with the very repressive policies of Ngo Dinh Diem (the president of the Republic of Vietnam whose ascension to power in 1955 was largely engineered by our country to promote democracy in Vietnam, but who himself became dictatorial, repressing by imprisonment, torture, and death, dissident members of the Buddhist majority, though we continued to support his regime) and his terrorist brother and political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The concern was not only humanitarian. “Our policy is to seek to bring about the abandonment of repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist [the Vietcong].” The memo agonizes over whether or not it would “be wise to promote a coup” against Diem by his generals (who eventually murdered Diem and his brother on November 2), but decides against it. Indeed, the paragraph of the memo (number 3) dealing with the withdrawal of 1,000 military advisers is followed by a paragraph (number 4) which reads that the specific purpose for the withdrawal action is “to impress upon Diem our disapproval of his political program [of repression].” Elsewhere the memo refers to “numerous possibilities of applying pressure to Diem in order to incline him to the direction of our policies.” If one reads not only Taylor and McNamara’s October 2, 1963, memo to Kennedy, but McNamara’s book In Retrospect, the main issue being discussed by the president and his advisers during the period of the October 2 memo and the October 11 NSAM 263 was not the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, but whether to support a coup of Diem.238 But we learned years later from a Hollywood producer and his daffy adviser, Colonel Prouty, that the real coup being contemplated at the time, and eventually carried out, was not against Diem but against the president of the United States.

  This is not to suggest that Kennedy didn’t hope he’d be able to withdraw all U.S. troops by 1965, as recommended in the October 2 McNamara-Taylor memorandum and repeated in the October 2 White House statement that followed. Other than right-wing extremists in our society, any sensible president would have wanted, as Kennedy did, to prevent the flower of America’s youth from shedding its blood on foreign soil.* But the October 2 memo, in conjunction with other statements by the president, made it very clear that Kennedy’s backing out of Vietnam was contingent upon the Vietnamese government being able to successfully resist the Vietcong. For instance, the minutes of the National Security Council meeting on October 11 show that the withdrawal of the 1,000 men “should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed.” And the October 2 Taylor-McNamara memo speaks of the “present favorable military trends”—that is, at the time of the ordered withdrawal of 1,000 troops on October 11, the United States had cause to believe that the South Vietnamese would repel the Vietcong on their own. Indeed, the New York Times headline of October 3, 1963, following the White House statement the previous night about the withdrawal of U.S. forces, read, “Vietnam Victory by the End of ’65 Envisaged by U.S.” Reporting from Saigon on October 2, 1963, New York Times reporter David Halberstam said that “the military [including General Paul D. Harkins, head of the U.S. military mission in Vietnam] believe the war is being won.”239

  Most important, the October 2 memo, like the White House statement later that evening, says (not, of course, mentioned in the film or the two books) that “the security of South Vietnam remains vital to United States security. For this reason, we adhere to the overriding objective of denying this country to Communism and of suppressing the Vietcong insurgency as promptly as possible…Any long-term reduction of aid cannot but have an eventual adverse affect on the military campaign…Hence, immediate reductions must be selected carefully and be left in effect for short periods.”240 And it was clear that the “overriding objective” set forth by Taylor and McNamara was accepted by Kennedy. The White House statement was almost a carbon copy
of the memo. The statement said, in part, that “the security of South Vietnam is a major interest of the United States…We will adhere to our policy of working with the people and government of South Vietnam to deny this country to Communism and to suppress the externally stimulated and supported* insurgency of the Viet Cong as promptly as possible. Effective performance in this undertaking is the central object of our policy in South Vietnam.”241 Quite a difference, right, between the above and X telling Garrison in the movie that in effect Kennedy was abandoning South Vietnam to the Communists.

  Apart from the fact that NSAM 273, after Kennedy’s murder, specifically ratified, by its very language, the 1,000-troop withdrawal of NSAM 263, and that the draft of 273 was written before Kennedy’s assassination, there’s nothing in 273 that represents a clear departure from 263 and U.S. commitment to help the South Vietnamese repel the Vietcong if the situation demanded it. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who remained in his post under LBJ after Kennedy’s murder, wrote in his book In Retrospect, “[NSAM] 273 made clear that Johnson’s policy remained the same as Kennedy’s: ‘to assist the people and government of South Vietnam to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy’ through training support and without the application of overt U.S. military force.”242

  Much has been made, by the conspiracy theorists who believe Kennedy was murdered by members of the military-industrial complex, of President Johnson’s letter of January 1, 1964, to Diem’s successor, Major General Duong Van Minh, chairman of South Vietnam’s Revolutionary Council, in which he stated that “the United States will continue to furnish you and your people with the fullest measure of support in this bitter fight. We shall maintain in Vietnam American personnel and material as needed to assist you in achieving victory.”243 The fact that Johnson didn’t append to his pledge of support that the military advisers aspect of it would terminate at the end of 1965 (something that, diplomatically, Kennedy may not have added either) has been interpreted, in a stretch by the conspiracy theorists, to mean that as early as January 1, 1964, Johnson intended to change Kennedy’s 1965 withdrawal plans for his military advisers, those who trained the Vietnamese military, and indeed intended to introduce U.S. combat troops into the Southeast Asian conflict. The theorists maintain that this “fact” about Johnson’s intent was somehow known before the assassination by those who ordered Kennedy’s death, and indeed was the reason for it. But no one has ever offered any evidence to support this allegation. Moreover, on January 27 and 29, almost a full month after Johnson’s letter to Duong Van Minh, Secretary of Defense McNamara all but decimated the inference drawn by conspiracy theorists from the letter when he testified before the House Armed Services Committee that “it is a Vietnamese war. They are going to have to assume the primary responsibility for winning it. Our policy is to limit our support to logistical and training support.”244 (This from a man who would later become an advocate of escalation, the Vietnam War becoming known to many as “McNamara’s War,” a war he would later acknowledge was wrong.) In other words, the policy of nonintervention by combat troops was still extant in the Johnson administration at the time of Johnson’s letter to Duong Van Minh.