Meanwhile, Back in Washington, DC
As author McMasters described Kennedy’s lapse of control leading up to the coup against Diem, “The president seemed ambivalent. Advice from his brother and Taylor almost swayed him, but, at the end of the meeting, Kennedy declared indecisively that he would ‘discourage’ a coup only if Lodge, on whom he depended to generate Republican support for his policy, shared Taylor’s and Robert Kennedy’s misgivings. On October 31, McGeorge Bundy instructed Lodge that ‘once a coup under responsible leadership has begun … it is in the interest of the U.S. government that it should succeed.’ Diem’s fate was sealed.”188 On Saturday morning, Kennedy held a meeting at the White House with his principal advisers on Vietnam. As the meeting began, the fates of Diem and Nhu were not known, but Michael Forrestal soon walked in with a telegram from Lodge, which said that “Diem and Nhu were both dead, and the coup leaders were claiming their deaths to be suicide.”189 General Maxwell Taylor, seated next to Kennedy in the cabinet room, described Kennedy’s reaction: “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and has been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.”190
Kennedy had sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a Kennedy appointee, on a trip to Vietnam in September, and upon their return they advised Kennedy that conditions had improved so impressively that all military personnel could be withdrawn by the end of 1965. Unbeknownst to McNamara and Taylor, their report had been ghostwritten by John and Robert Kennedy and dictated to General Victor Krulak, whose editorial and stenographic team in the Pentagon compiled the raw data being received from McNamara and Taylor. Krulak had been invited to come to the White House to confer with the Kennedys during this trip, and their combined efforts produced a nicely typed report that was bound in a leather cover, flown to Hawaii, and handed to McNamara and Taylor to read on their trip back to Washington.191 Acting on this new information, Kennedy approved an accelerated withdrawal program, designed to accomplish this complete withdrawal by the end of 1965. A few weeks later, after Kennedy’s assassination, amazingly, the same two officials who gave this advice to John Kennedy gave opposite advice to Lyndon Johnson, who had already rescinded the Kennedy plan to withdraw troops just days after his assassination. Instead, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, now decided that a major effort, including American combat troops and a massive clandestine program, was needed to prevent a Communist victory. National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 went well beyond just canceling the troop withdrawal; it also changed the military objective from “assisting” the Vietnamese to “winning” against the Communists.192 In fact, as will be seen, the first draft of NSAM 273 was written even before Kennedy left Washington on his fateful, and fatal, trip to Dallas.
As reported by Dick Russell, strange things were afoot by November 21, 1963, at the summit conference on Vietnam in Honolulu. Kennedy’s highest-level military advisers, several cabinet members, and Ambassador Lodge attended the meeting. All attendees were provided VIP suites in military quarters, but Lodge turned that down and rented a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. “There, shortly after lunch on the day before Kennedy’s assassination, he was noticed by a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin putting coin after coin into a pay phone in the lobby. The newspaper found this incident worthy of remark, since Lodge had ready access to phones in the privacy of his room or through military circuits.”193 The question this raises—why would Ambassador Lodge need to resort to the use of a pay phone on this date?—can only be answered one of two ways: He was either afraid the hotel room phones were tapped and didn’t want to be recorded, or he did not want a paper trail showing to whom he talked—or both of the above. Henry Cabot Lodge had been on his way to Washington to meet with President Kennedy; unbeknownst to him was the fact that JFK had planned to fire him at their meeting on November 24, after his return from Dallas. According to Robert Kennedy, “We were going to try to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge … [it was only a matter of] trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him” because he refused to carry out JFK’s instructions, or even bother to respond to them; he would not communicate with Kennedy.194 Given his refusal to communicate with Kennedy, together with the presence of all other high administration officials (except for Johnson) with him there in Hawaii on November 21, the question of whom he had the need to communicate with, using a pay phone in the hotel lobby on that date to maintain secrecy, raises profound questions as to his alliances and whose agenda he was trying to accomplish, given that it wasn’t Kennedy’s.
Shortly before his death, Kennedy gave Mike Forrestal odds of a hundred to one that the United States could not win in Vietnam. But he also knew that he could not get out before the elections in November 1964, without inviting his own political eclipse … He told Forrestal, “I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, what we thought we were doing and what we now think we can do … I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.”195 Just an hour before he departed for Texas on November 21, 1963, he told Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, “I’ve just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damn many people over there. It’s time for us to get out. The Vietnamese aren’t fighting for themselves. We’re the ones who are doing the fighting … After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”196 He had also told his friend columnist Charles Bartlett, “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”197
Kennedy’s friend and personal aide Kenneth O’Donnell said that “he never would have committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against the Viet Cong. Lyndon Johnson’s charge in his 1971 memoirs that the Kennedy administration’s support of the coup that finally overthrew the Diem-Nhu regime in Saigon was ‘a serious blunder which caused deep political confusion’ would have astonished Kennedy … The killing of Diem and his brother during the coup, after their safe removal from the country had been guaranteed by the military leaders of the revolt, came as a shock to President Kennedy and made him all the more resolved to withdraw from further entanglement in the Vietnam war.”198 Somehow, Lyndon Johnson had managed to portray John F. Kennedy as the architect of the Diem assassination when in fact it was the combination of the intelligence and military forces supported by Johnson which caused it; Lyndon Johnson had managed, in his book at least, to turn the facts around to portray Kennedy as the conniving antagonist and murderer while presenting himself as a friend and benefactor of the unfortunate and misunderstood Ngo Dinh Diem.
If John F. Kennedy was disappointed in some of his cabinet selections by 1962, none of them would have compared to his biggest disappointment: His vice president, whose abject failure to accomplish any of the objectives Kennedy had set for him on his May 1961 trip to Vietnam, was only part of that failed mission. His attempt to curry his own personal favors with President Diem had also impeded Kennedy’s goals related to the neutralization of Laos and maintaining stability in Vietnam without introducing U.S. troops. There were many other issues Kennedy was experiencing with Johnson on the home front as well, one of which was his feckless leadership on the Equal Opportunity Commission, which JFK had appointed him to head. The ongoing scandal involving Johnson’s involvement with Billie Sol Estes, including his pressure on the Department of Agriculture to accommodate the massive fraud being carried out, which would hit the front pages of practically every newspaper in the country in the spring of 1962, woul
d have certainly given the president some degree of concern, regardless of his public statements to the contrary. The continuation of the scandals surrounding Johnson in 1963, with the name of Bobby Baker replacing Estes’s in all the newspapers, would have only increased the presidential anxiety. By October of that year, the Senate investigations threatened to replace Baker’s name with that of Johnson and his associates, possibly putting the credibility of his entire administration in jeopardy.
1. Hersh, The Dark Side, p. 180.
2. Reeves, R., p. 22.
3. O’Donnell and Powers, pp. 244–245.
4. Ibid., p. 244.
5. Brugioni, pp. 68–69.
6. See “An Interview with Richard Helms,” at the CIA website https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v44i4a07p_0020.htm
7. Ibid.
8. Russell, p. 459.
9. Ibid.
10. Morley, Our Man in Mexico, p. 101.
11. Hurt, pp. 324–325 (ref. House Select Committee Report, pp. 148; X HSCA, pp. 6–8; interview with Dominguez, 1984; Phillips, The Night Watch, p. 63; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 204–205, 207; Public Papers of the Presidents, 1963, p. 876; Murphy, “Cuba,” The New York Times, January 4, 1961.
12. Ibid., p. 325.
13. Morley, Our Man in Mexico, p. 102.
14. Ibid., pp. 103–106.
15. Ibid., pp. 108–110.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Lasky, JFK—The Man …, pp. 520–521.
19. Ibid.
* This phenomenon was doubtlessly noted by Lyndon Johnson, as he planned his own eventual presidency: Becoming a “wartime president” was a sure way to establish a legacy as one of the greatest presidents.
20. Lasky, JFK—The Man …, pp. 522–523.
21. Ibid.
22. Douglass, pp. 14–15.
23. Douglass, p. 116.
24. Hurt, p. 325.
25. Ibid., p. 326 (ref. HSCR, p. 129).
26. Caro, Master … p. 1035.
27. Brown, p. 190.
28. Hershman, p. 117.
29. Waldron and Hartmann, p. 82.
30. Martin, p. 125.
31. Twyman, pp. 459, 624, 668, 734, 769.
32. Martin, pp. 128–129.
* Evidently, this was offered as more evidence of his Indiana upbringing as contrasted with that of many of his Ivy League colleagues, many of whom were born and raised in expensive boarding schools of New York and Connecticut.
33. Brugioni, pp. 66–67; Twyman, p. 430.
34. Ibid.
35. Twyman, p. 430.
36. Ibid.
37. Twyman, p. 385.
38. Brugioni, p. 68.
39. Ibid., p. 67.
40. Martin, David C., pp. 76–88.
41. Martin, David C., p. 88.
42. Brugioni, p. 68.
43. Waldron and Hartman, pp. 79–82.
44. Russo, p. 163 (Ref. Al Haig, interview on ABC’s Nightline, 29 December, 1997).
45. Waldron and Hartman, p. 82.
46. Russo. pp. 164–167.
47. Brugioni, p. 69.
48. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 513.
49. Ibid.
50. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Memorandum for Special Group-Augmented, July 31, 1962).
51. Memorandum for Deputy Director (Plans), August 14, 1962; (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, November 20, 1975, p. 147; Document 12, National Security Action Memorandum 181, on Actions and Studies in Response to New Soviet Bloc Activity in Cuba, August 23, 1962; Schlesinger, p. 497).
52. National Security Action Memorandum 181, on Actions and Studies in Response to New Soviet Bloc Activity in Cuba, August 23, 1962; Office of the Secretary of Defense, Memorandum for Special Group-Augmented, July 25, 1962.
53. National Security Action Memorandum 181, on Actions and Studies in Response to New Soviet Bloc Activity in Cuba, August 23, 1962; Recollection of Intelligence Prior to the Discovery of Soviet Missiles and of Penkovsky Affair, n.d.; Chronology of John McCone’s Suspicions on the Military Buildup in Cuba Prior to Kennedy’s October 22 Speech, November 30, 1962).
54. Memorandum to Robert McCloskey, August 25, 1962; Memorandum from Permanent Mission of Cuba to United Nations, New York, August 25, 1962.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
58. Ibid., p. 68, 70.
59. Ibid., p. 106.
60. Ibid., p. 108.
61. Ibid., p. 140.
62. Brugioni, p. 111.
63. Ibid., p. 72 (ref. Senator J.W. Fulbright, “Some Reflection upon Recent Events and Continuing Problems,” Congressional Record, 87th Congress, First session, Senate, June 29, 1961, p. 11704).
64. Brugioni, p. 112.
65. Ibid., p. 113.
66. May and Zelikow, p. 678 (ref. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 1970, p. 494.
67. May and Zelikow, p. 678 (ref. Dobrynin, Anatoly, In Confidence, New York: Random House, 1995, pp. 79–80).
68. Brugioni, p. 82.
69. Ibid., p. 96.
70. May and Zelikow, p. 680.
71. Ibid., p. 115.
72. Ibid., pp. 240–242.
73. Ibid., p. 242.
74. Ibid.
75. Brugioni, p. 98.
76. Reeves, pp. 214–222, pp. 273–274.
77. Douglass, p. 25.
78. Douglas, p. 26 (ref. State Department volume “Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1961–1963, Vol. VI: Kennedy–Khrushchev Exchanges,” Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1996).
79. Ibid. (ref. Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 97).
80. Ibid., p. 27 (ref. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 497–498).
81. Douglass, p. 49 (ref. Schlesinger, Arthur, Thousand Days, p. 899).
82. Douglass, p. 49 (ref. Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 107).
83. Ibid.
84. Douglass, pp. 35, 50–51.
85. Hurt, p. 326.
86. Ibid. (ref. CIA to FBI et al., November 12, 1962 (CIA #F82-0430/106); Sunday Star, October 14, 1962; Washington Post, October 30, 1962; HSCR, pp. 134–135; Dallas Morning News, May 10, 1979; Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, pp. 164–167; Fonzi, “Who Killed JFK?” pp. 180–181).
87. Ibid., pp. 328–335.
88. Ibid., p. 330 (ref. X HSCA, pp. 38–39; Fonzi, “Who Killed JFK?” pp. 176–178).
89. Ibid., p. 330.
90. Guthman and Shulman, p. 378 (Interview with John Bartlow Martin, May 14, 1964).
91. Martin, David C., p. 146.
92. Brugioni, p. 154.
93. Morley, Our Man in Mexico, pp. 164–165.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., pp. 165–166.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.
98. Twyman, pp. 307.
99. Twyman, pp. 440–441.
100. Ibid., pp. 442–443.
101. Ibid., p. 441.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid. p. 424.
104. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 761.
105. Ibid., p. 759.
106. Ibid.
107. O’Donnell and Powers, pp. 13–14; Life magazine, August 7, 1970, p. 51.
108. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 759 (ref. de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, New York, 1971, pp. 255–256).
109. Ibid., p. 763 (ref. Pentagon Papers, Vol. 2, p. 123).
110. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 763.
111. Newman, pp. 130–138.
112. Newman, p. 138.
113. Douglass, p. 375 (ref. George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs, New York: W.W. Norton, 1982, p. 366).
114. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 761 (ref. his interview with George Ball).
115. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 34.
116. Ibid., p. 36.
117. Ibid., p. 37.
118. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 56.
119. Marrs, Crossfi
re: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, pp. 306–307.
120. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 67–68.
121. Ibid., pp. 68–69.
122. Ibid., p. 68.
123. Ibid., p. 71 (ref. Rowan, Carl, Breaking Barriers).
124. Ibid., p. 70.
125. Karnow, p. 250.
126. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 76–78.
127. Ibid., pp. 84–85.
128. Ibid., p. 73.
129. Ibid., pp. 86–87.
130. Ibid., pp. 88–89.
131. Ibid., pp. 70–72.
132. Ibid., pp. 92–93.
133. Douglass, pp. 105–106 (ref. Pentagon Papers, Vol. 2, p. 22).
134. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 90.
135. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
136. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
137. Ibid., pp. 92–93.
138. Douglass, pp. 106–107.
139. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 96–97.
140. Ibid., p. 93.
141. Ibid., p. 91.
142. Ibid., p. 92.
143. Clifford, pp. 425–426.
144. Hershman, p. 284 (ref. Dean Rusk, As I Saw It, New York: W.W. Norton, 1980, p. 467).
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid., p. 216.
147. Douglass, p. 123.
148. Ibid.
149. Ibid., p. 124.
150. Ibid.
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