Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Some other very relevant points about the October 2 memo: Taylor and McNamara went to Vietnam to assess the military situation accompanied by representatives, per the memo, “of the State Department [and the] CIA,” and said that the recommendations in the memo (including the 1,000-troop withdrawal) were “concurred” upon by these representatives, “subject to the exceptions noted,” one of which was by William E. Colby, chief of the CIA’s Far East division at the time, who really had no objection to the memo’s recommendations but added that our relation with Diem “should be supplemented by selected and restricted unofficial and personal relationships with individuals” in Diem’s government where “persuasion could be fruitful without derogation of the official U.S. posture.”245 But wait. I thought the CIA was a part of this conspiracy to murder Kennedy. And as far as the Joint Chiefs of Staff being behind Kennedy’s murder because he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, although most of them undoubtedly wanted to escalate our involvement in Vietnam, let’s not forget that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, is the person who made the recommendation for withdrawal along with Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. The very language of NSAM 263 couldn’t be any clearer: “The President considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam. The President approved the military recommendations contained in Section IB (1-3) of the report…to withdraw one-thousand U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.”

  In an October 21, 1996, article he wrote for Newsweek, Oliver Stone says, “[Robert] McNamara explains in his book [In Retrospect] that at a ‘very important’ National Security Council meeting on October 2, 1963, President Kennedy made three decisions: 1) To completely withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam by December 31, 1965; 2) To withdraw 1,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1963 to begin the process; and 3) To make a public announcement, in order to put this decision ‘in concrete.’”246 There is only one inference to draw from this. That it was all Kennedy’s idea to withdraw, and that he was so forceful about it that he wanted to make a public announcement to put his decision “in concrete.” But when we turn to pages 79 and 80 of McNamara’s book, we learn that it was he who told Kennedy before the meeting, “I think, Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from this area.” He goes on to say that at the National Security Council meeting that followed, “the President finally agreed…[and] endorsed our recommendation to withdraw 1,000 men by December 31, 1963…Because I suspected others might try to get him to reverse the decision, I urged him to announce it publicly. That would set it in concrete.” So although we know that Kennedy did not want to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, it appears he was not enthusiastic at all about withdrawing military advisers.

  By the way, if the need for the billions of dollars of profits by the military-industrial complex was so great that its members felt compelled to kill Kennedy when he was merely about to withdraw one-sixteenth of our military advisers in Vietnam, and it could not be known for sure whether he would withdraw all forces, why didn’t they kill President Nixon a few years later when he not only wasn’t ambiguous about his determination to withdraw from Vietnam, but actually did end our involvement in the war? Didn’t they need the money anymore?

  Another fatal flaw in the theory that the military-industrial complex was behind the assassination is this: Are the conspirators going to murder Kennedy not even knowing if his successor, Lyndon Johnson, is going to be any better? What assurance, one may ask, would the conspirators have had that LBJ would be more of a hawk on Vietnam? Was their position, “Let’s murder Kennedy, and hope for the best with Johnson”? If so, they must have had some very anxious moments, and wondered whether their murder of Kennedy was a big mistake. In fact, although there had been U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam in 1964 and 1965, it wasn’t until March 6, 1965, almost a full year and a half after the assassination, that Johnson finally decided to send the first U.S. ground combat troops to Vietnam, and then only Marines to provide security for the Da Nang air base, thereby freeing South Vietnamese troops for other tasks. (The 3,500-man 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed at Da Nang, South Vietnam, on March 8, 1965, the first American combat troops to be deployed in the country.) And even then, Johnson was so hesitant, and did it so gingerly, that he asked his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, if their identity could be disguised by calling them “security battalions similar to MP’s,” and McNamara said the media would see through it.247*

  In a February 20, 1964, telephone conversation with McNamara, Johnson had virtually parroted a remark JFK made to Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963, telling McNamara about the Vietnamese, “It’s their war and it’s their men. And we’re willing to train them…Our purpose is to train these people.”248 And in a telephone conversation Johnson had with his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, on May 27, 1964 (over half a year after the assassination), LBJ refers to the Vietnam War as “the biggest damn mess that I ever saw,” and added, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for.” Earlier that same day in a phone conversation with Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, LBJ speaks about the “little old sergeant that works for me…and he’s got six children, and I just put him up as the United States Army, Air Force and Navy every time I think about making this decision, and think about sending that father of those six kids in there. And what the hell are we going to get out of his doing it? And it just makes the chills run up my back.” “It does me, [too],” Russell says.249

  Former U.S. senator George McGovern writes that even before the assassination, “I knew that both Johnson and Russell opposed American involvement in Vietnam when it was proposed to them as senators by the Eisenhower administration…If it had been up to Lyndon Johnson, we would not have gone into Vietnam in the first place.”250 And when, as vice president, Johnson went on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in May of 1961 for Kennedy, his May 23, 1961, written report to JFK upon his return counseled JFK to make it clear to President Diem that “barring an unmistakable and massive invasion of South Vietnam from without, that we have no intention of employing combat U.S. forces in Vietnam or using even naval or air-support, which is but the first step in that direction.” France’s enormous misadventure in Vietnam, he told JFK, conjured up the terrible specter of American soldiers “bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength.”251

  In a 1973 interview, former president Johnson said, “All the time, in 1964, I really hoped we could negotiate our way out of a major war in Vietnam.”252* Indeed, during his 1964 campaign for the presidency, when his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, criticized Johnson for not being more militarily aggressive in Vietnam, Johnson told a campaign audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, that while “others are eager to enlarge the conflict by supplying American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do, [that] action would offer no solution at all to the real problems in Vietnam.”253 And in a September 25, 1964, speech in Texas responding to Goldwater’s charge that he was falling down on the job in repelling the growth of global Communism, LBJ said, “It’s easy to tell the other fellow, ‘Here is our ultimatum and you do as we say or else,’ but that will never be the policy of this country under my leadership…We are not about to start another war.” Johnson said he did not want a “land war” in Asia, adding, however, that “we are not about to run away from where we are.”254

  When McGeorge Bundy, a military hawk in his administration, sent a memo to LBJ on January 27, 1965, on behalf of himself and another hawk, Secretary of Defense McNamara, recommending military intervention in Vietnam (“the time has come for harder choices,” Bundy put it), LBJ turned elsewhere for help, asking his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, “to instruct [your] experts once again to consider all possible ways for finding a peaceful solution.”255 Johnson, in an August 19, 1969, tape recording of himself
and two aides helping him write his memoir, The Vantage Point, said it about as succinctly as possible: “Until July 1965, I tried to keep from going into Vietnam.”256†

  None of this, naturally, is in JFK. The Los Angeles Times, in a review of the January 14, 2002, History Channel special LBJ and Vietnam: In the Eye of the Storm (which was based in large part on the White House tapes of Johnson set forth in Michael Beschloss’s two books, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964, and Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965), concluded what was so obvious from the tapes, that rather than “the hawkish brute” eager to escalate our involvement in Vietnam, Johnson was “the most reluctant of warriors.* In recording after recording of late-night phone calls with military and political advisers, Johnson can be heard trying with growing desperation to find a way out of the murky conflict. When he does agree to dramatically ramp up the American troop commitment, he appears to do so after exhausting all other possibilities, and [then] only with the belief it will bring a quick end to the war.”257 And Johnson’s own words on the tapes aren’t the only evidence of his agonizing over what to do. For instance, a March 7, 1965, tape-recorded diary entry by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, says, “In talking about the Vietnam situation [during dinner] Lyndon summed it up quite simply—‘I can’t get out, and I can’t finish it with what I have got. And I don’t know what the hell to do.’”258 Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani observes that “the tapes underscore [Johnson’s] own early doubts about the war” and reflect “his agonized decision-making over Vietnam.”259

  Yet all that Oliver Stone showed his audience was that LBJ was gung ho for a war in Vietnam,† one scene showing him forcefully telling military leaders on November 26, 1963, the day after they buried Kennedy, “Just get me elected. I’ll give you the damn war.” (He was already president, of course, but would be coming up for election in one year.) The source? Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 book, Vietnam: A History, claims that at a White House reception on Christmas Eve, 1963, a month after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff this.260 That’s what Stone offers against all the evidence and the historical record to the contrary cited above. And even if we were to accept, at full value, this highly suspect entry in Karnow’s book for which Karnow cites no source, but which Stone completely subscribes to, it still poses a big problem for Stone. LBJ’s remark, if indeed it was ever made, was made after, not before, the conspirators supposedly murdered Kennedy. What evidence does Stone offer in his movie that before Kennedy’s murder Johnson told or indicated to the conspirators he wanted war? Nothing. Nothing at all. And, as indicated, he doesn’t present to his audience any of the overwhelming and conclusive evidence that once LBJ became president, he did everything possible to avoid war. If Stone had done so (i.e., if he had told the truth), it would have completely contradicted and refuted the main theme of his movie—that Kennedy did not want to go to war in Vietnam and LBJ did, and that’s why Kennedy was murdered.

  Right to the very end, the Vietnam War weighed more heavily on Johnson than any other chapter in his presidency. Indeed, although he eventually committed himself to the war, because of doubts about the conflict that never left him he was unwilling to commit the United States to an all-out war, prompting General William C. Westmoreland, Johnson’s chief of military operations in Vietnam, to later write, “A major problem [in the U.S. prosecution of the war] was that Washington policy decisions forced us to fight with but one hand.”261 In April of 1967, Westmoreland said in a New York City speech that “in effect, we are fighting a war of attrition.” He proceeded to fly to Washington, where he asked the president to increase the number of ground troops from the existing 470,000 to 550,500, the “minimal essential force,” or 670,000, the “optimum.” Johnson, shocked, asked, “Where does it all end?” When Secretary of Defense McNamara queried Westmoreland as to how long it would take to win the war, the jut-jawed general responded, “With the optimum force about three years; with the minimum force, at least five.”262 He got neither.

  With the war escalating out of control in 1965–1968, and the Communists’ Tet offensive in early 1968 into more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns and villages (elements even fighting their way onto the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon) demonstrating (though the Vietcong sustained tremendous losses) beyond all doubt the resiliency of the Communist forces and that the war was far from over, Johnson lost his stomach for the conflict and elected to not run for reelection.263* But there were contributing factors. “I felt that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions,” he told his biographer, Doris Kearns.

  On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. Up ahead were dozens of danger signs pointing to another summer of riots in the cities. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating [over Vietnam] students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American public, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable to me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.

  In a televised address to the nation on the evening of March 31, 1968 (a little over two months before RFK was assassinated in Los Angeles), Johnson began his speech by announcing his decision to stop air and naval attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area of the Demilitarized Zone, in the hope, he said, that “President Ho Chi Minh [will] respond positively and favorably to this new step of peace.” He then shocked the nation’s viewers by saying, “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home…I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan [political] causes…Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”264

  As seen earlier, the evidence is very conflicting and ambiguous, at best, as to whether or not Kennedy, if he had lived, would have eventually withdrawn from Vietnam.

  As previously alluded to, on September 2, 1963, less than three months before his death, he told Walter Cronkite of CBS, “In the final analysis, it is their [South Vietnamese] war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it.” Stone, naturally, put that segment of the Cronkite interview on the screen for his audience. But Stone didn’t show his audience Kennedy thereafter telling Cronkite, “But I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake…This is a very important struggle even though it is far away. We took all this—made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it, in the defense of Asia.” Since these additional words by Kennedy would have been in direct opposition to the main point of Stone’s movie, that Kennedy was murdered because he intended to withdraw from Vietnam, Stone, in the finest traditions of the conspiracy profession, simply eliminated these words for his audience.* And a week later, in an interview with David Brinkley on NBC, Kennedy affirmed his belief in the “domino theory,” suggesting that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, it would have a domino effect, harming American interests throughout Southeast Asia (and, elliptically, the world). Speaking of China, he added, “China is so large, looms so high…that if South Vietnam went, it would…give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists.”265 Naturally, these words of Kennedy also are not heard in Stone’s film.

  Just like the conflicting evidence, there are, of course, conflicting views on whether or not Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam. McNamara wrote in 1995 that he beli
eved it “highly probable that, had Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam.”266 And Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek writes that “it was hardly conceivable that Kennedy would have sent tens of thousands more Americans to fight in so inhospitable a place as Vietnam. Reduced commitments, especially of military personnel, during a second Kennedy term were a more likely development.”267 But Nicholas Lemann wrote in GQ magazine, in 1992, “Robert Kennedy, who was probably in a better position than anyone else to know what his brother’s intentions in Vietnam were, had this to say on the subject in an in-depth interview conducted for the historical record in 1964 [by John Barlow Martin for the John F. Kennedy library], the year after his brother’s death: Interviewer: ‘Did the President feel that we would have to go into Vietnam in a big way?’ Kennedy: ‘We certainly considered what would be the result if you abandoned 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?’ Kennedy: ‘He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile.”268*