by Jim Marrs
Initially Kennedy was fascinated by this concept, since by nature he was a strong believer in negotiation and limited response rather than simply using military options. Words such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification,” and “special forces” began to creep into our political language.
Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, a special board of inquiry was convened to dissect what went wrong. It was here that both John and Robert Kennedy began to learn what the new military doctrines of counterinsurgency, flexible response, civic action, and nation building really meant. They saw how the obsession with secrecy had completely changed the way the military and intelligence operated. Everything was on a “need-to-know” basis, with fewer and fewer responsible leaders included on the “need-to-know” lists. After the Bay of Pigs inquiry Kennedy became convinced that the CIA and the Pentagon had misled him terribly, and from that point on he was highly skeptical of information from those sources. Moreover, the inquiry showed the Kennedy brothers how powerful the military-industrial complex and its intelligence-security force had become.
Kennedy did learn something from this coalition—how to concoct a “cover story,” which may account for his public support of the CIA while his private comments and actions showed otherwise.
Kennedy began to balk at his military advisers, who had assured him of victory in Cuba, and who now were urging military intervention, to include the use of nuclear weapons, in Laos, where communist insurgents were gaining ground. Military hawks became incensed when Kennedy negotiated with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev a coalition government in Laos, forestalling armed conflict. They were further angered when Kennedy told them he would not send combat troops to South Vietnam.
The blending of the military and the political was seen most clearly in Vietnam, where it was the US ambassador who was in charge, not the senior military commanders.
War should be politicians’ last resort. But once war is inevitable, it should be fought by professional soldiers with clearly defined goals and objectives.
After the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs fiasco Kennedy began to see that this nation’s paramilitary and undercover operations were getting out of hand. He attempted to stem this trend by issuing two National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM) in June 1961. NSAM 55, signed personally by Kennedy, basically stated that he would hold the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally responsible for all activity of a military nature during peacetime, the same as during wartime. In other words, Kennedy wanted all cloak-and-dagger operations as well as military expeditions under the control, or at least under the scrutiny, of the chairman—and hence under his control.
NSAM 57 attempted to divide paramilitary activity between the military and the CIA. Basically, this document stipulated that the CIA would be allowed only small covert operations, while any large operations must be studied and approved by the military. It seemed a reasonable division of responsibility. However, there were men in both the CIA and the Pentagon who did not appreciate this attempt to curb their power and prerogatives.
Not only did Kennedy attempt to curtail the power of both the military and intelligence, but he also presented a very different worldview from the past. On November 16, 1961, Kennedy told a Seattle audience, “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
With his words and actions, Kennedy became the first US president since World War II to address the myth of America’s infallibility. This did not sit well with the military-industrial complex, which had so much to gain—including profits—by controlling the raw resources of other nations.
In the midst of Kennedy’s reappraisal of US military and intelligence operations came the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In October 1962, information from satellites and U-2 flights revealed that the Soviets were preparing offensive missile bases in Cuba, only ninety miles from the United States. The military and the CIA were aghast. They prescribed nothing less than immediate bombing of the missile sites and another invasion of the island.
Kennedy chose a different approach. He personally struck a deal with Premier Khrushchev—the Russians would remove their missiles from Cuba and in return the United States would remove its offensive missiles from Turkey and Kennedy would pledge not to support a new invasion of Cuba. The Soviets appeared to back down and Kennedy’s popularity rose significantly, except in offices at the Pentagon and at Langley, Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration continued its efforts to reduce military spending. On March 30, 1963, McNamara announced a reorganization program that would have closed fifty-two military installations in twenty-five states, as well as twenty-one overseas bases, over a three-year period.
Then on August 5, 1963, following lengthy negotiations, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a limited nuclear test–ban treaty forbidding the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.
As part of this “first step” toward what later would be termed “détente,” Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to install a “hot line” telephone system between Washington and Moscow.
It was a serious deviation from the hard Cold War policies of the past, and military leaders—both retired and active—did not hesitate to voice their disapproval.
But for all his activities to reduce the risk of war and curtail the military and intelligence establishments, Kennedy’s most momentous—and perhaps fatal—decisions came when he began to reevaluate US policy in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy and Vietnam
From the moment Lyndon B. Johnson took over the presidency, the idea was encouraged that he would simply carry on Kennedy administration policies. In some ways he did. It has been acknowledged that Johnson was able to push Kennedy’s civil rights legislation through Congress where his predecessor may have failed. But one emerging Kennedy policy was not continued—that involved South Vietnam.
Early in his presidency, Kennedy simply went along with Eisenhower’s policy to continue sending military “advisers” and materiel to South Vietnam. In fact, during 1961 and 1962, Kennedy actually increased the US military presence in that war-torn nation. This may have been due to his desire to avoid at all costs another foreign-policy disaster such as the Bay of Pigs.
But by summer 1963, Kennedy had begun to reevaluate US involvement.
By the time Kennedy was elected president in 1960, large-scale guerrilla warfare was being conducted against the South Vietnam regime. But because of Castro and Cuba as well as Soviet incursions in Berlin and the Congo, Vietnam was not an issue during the 1960 campaign. Three days after his election, Kennedy barely noticed that South Vietnam’s President Diem was the object of an unsuccessful military coup d’état. In December 1960, the communists announced the formation of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong), and the internal guerrilla war got under way in earnest.
During 1961 Kennedy, though distracted by the Bay of Pigs Invasion, continued to support further US military assistance to Asia, particularly after communist forces seized the city of Phuoc Vinh, only sixty miles from Saigon. On December 11, two helicopter companies arrived in South Vietnam, beginning an expanded role for US advisers. By January 1962, total US military personnel in Vietnam numbered 2,646. And on January 13, a memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, titled “The Strategic Importance of the SEA [Southeast Asian] Mainland,” stated that if the Viet Cong were not soon brought under control, the chiefs saw no alternative but to introduce US ground combat units.
Kennedy continued to hesitate about sending combat units to Vietnam. At a news conference on May 9, 1962, he said, “Introducing American forces . . . also is a hazardous course, and we want to attempt to see if we can work out a peaceful solution.”
According to assistant secretary of state Roger Hilsman, one of Kenn
edy’s key foreign policy planners, Kennedy told confidants, “The Bay of Pigs has taught me a number of things. One is not to trust generals or the CIA, and the second is that if the American people do not want to use American troops to remove a communist regime 90 miles away from our coast, how can I ask them to use troops to remove a communist regime 9,000 miles away?”
By mid-1963, after receiving conflicting advice and intelligence from his advisers regarding Vietnam, Kennedy began to further reassess US commitment there. He was especially concerned about the treatment of Buddhists under the Diem government. Thousands of Buddhists were demonstrating for freedom, and on June 11, the first Buddhist suicide by self-immolation occurred.
Reflecting Kennedy’s concern, the State Department notified Saigon, “If Diem does not take prompt and effective steps to re-establish Buddhist confidence in him, we will have to re-examine our entire relationship with his regime.”
Diem grew even more unmanageable as 1963 drew on, staffing his government with relatives and refusing to listen to the pleas of the Buddhists. Talk began about replacing Diem with leaders more agreeable to American policy.
The American government, including Kennedy, left no doubt of its displeasure with Diem, thus paving the way for yet another Vietnamese coup, which occurred on November 1, 1963, just twenty-one days before Kennedy arrived in Dallas.
Accompanied by CIA agent Lucien Conein, South Vietnam generals seized key installations and attacked the presidential palace. After hours of fighting, Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, surrendered. While being taken to the generals’ headquarters, both were murdered.
Kennedy, who had approved the coup, then rejected it, then okayed it again, was genuinely shocked at the murders. Washington was forced to recognize the new military government in Saigon, but for the next twenty months, there were no fewer than ten changes of government as one general overthrew another.
It was time for a decision in Vietnam—to support a major American military expedition as the Pentagon desired or to simply withdraw and take the criticism of the anticommunists.
The assassination of the Diem brothers may have strengthened Kennedy’s decision to disengage from Vietnam, and there is evidence that he would have curtailed the Vietnam War.
Kennedy, forever the astute politician, also was very much aware of the approaching 1964 election.
Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana told news reporters that once, following a White House leadership meeting, Kennedy had confided to him that he agreed “on a need for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam,” but he couldn’t do it until after being reelected.
The president also may have given a hint as to his plans in a broadcast on September 2, 1963. Speaking of Vietnam, he said, “In the final analysis, it is their war. They have to win or lose it.”
People within the Pentagon and the CIA—who had so much to gain by widening the Vietnam War—continued to put out conflicting and often erroneous information.
Shortly before the Diem coup, McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor had returned from Saigon and told Kennedy that things were looking better in Vietnam and that the United States could withdraw all military personnel by the end of 1965. On hearing this optimistic assessment, on October 5, 1963, Kennedy approved an Accelerated Withdrawal Program, designed to carry out the promise to end the American military presence by the close of 1965.
National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 stated that at a meeting on October 11, 1963, the president considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam. It read:
The President approved the military recommendations [withdrawal by the end of 1965] . . . but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963.
Such unpublicized moves to disengage from Vietnam allowed anti-Kennedy forces to argue that no change of policy took place.
Less than one month after Kennedy’s assassination, McNamara and Taylor changed their tune. They reported to President Johnson that conditions in Vietnam were grave and that a major effort—including American combat troops and a massive clandestine program—was needed to prevent a communist victory.
Kennedy’s covert withdrawal plan ended a mere two days after Kennedy’s assassination when President Johnson signed NSAM 273, which canceled the troop withdrawal. This document also subtly changed the US objective from simply assisting the South Vietnamese to assisting them “to win” against the communists, and authorized plans for expanding the war into North Vietnam and Laos. The memorandum also ordered senior government officials not to contest or criticize the changes.
It should be noted that a rough draft of NSAM 273, which essentially rescinded Kennedy’s withdrawal policy, was found in the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. It was dated November 21, 1963, the day before the assassination! Someone knew that JFK’s troop reduction order would not be fulfilled.
Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell confirmed this in his 1972 book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. He wrote, “The President’s orders to reduce American military personnel in Vietnam by one thousand before the end of 1963 was still in effect on the day he went to Texas. A few days after his death, during the morning, the order was quietly rescinded.”
Nine months after the assassination, the Vietnam War got into full swing when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Johnson the power to wage full-scale war in Southeast Asia. The US military had been secretly raiding the North Vietnamese coast, and in the adjacent Gulf of Tonkin jittery US sailors egged on by a CIA radio monitoring station had reported gunfire in the dark and were told they were under attack. By 2012, it was well documented and even presented in the mainstream media that the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was phony. There was no attack by North Vietnam and no US sailor was killed. But within a month of this false-flag incident, Johnson had ordered ground combat troops into Vietnam.
Obviously, at this late date, no one wants to claim responsibility for a ten-year undeclared war that killed 58,000 Americans, caused domestic riots and demonstrations, engendered lasting hatred between classes and age groups, and according to many, nearly wrecked the American economy.
Was Kennedy’s embryonic move to disengage in Vietnam a catalyst for his assassination? Was this the straw that broke the back of the military-industrial camel?
As terrible as it is to contemplate the involvement of the US military in the Kennedy assassination, there are many connections between the two. Several factors have raised suspicions concerning the military’s role in the assassination.
It has been reported that the 112th Military Intelligence Group at 4th Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio was told to “stand down” that day rather than report for duty in Dallas, over the “violent” protests of the unit commander, Colonel Maximillian Reich. As noted by CIA-Pentagon liaison Colonel Fletcher Prouty, “Who has the power to make this kind of call? Not Lee Oswald, or Castro, or the Mafia . . . only someone with [military code] knowledge can make the call and use such code words that are needed to ‘stand down’ an entire Army unit.”
Though apparently some elements of the military intelligence unit did arrive in Dallas, their activities there remain obscure. One member may have been with FBI agent James Hosty the morning Kennedy was killed. In Warren Commission testimony, Hosty said that forty-five minutes before the assassination he was in the company of a naval intelligence officer, but he added the meeting had no connection with Kennedy’s visit.
Recall that Agent Hosty’s name, address, phone number, and license number were found in Lee Harvey Oswald’s personal notebook, which was originally deleted from the material turned over to the Warren Commission, and it was Hosty who destroyed a message from Oswald days after the assassination apparently on orders from superiors.
An Army intelligence officer involved in the assassination was special agent James Powell. Carrying a 35 mm Minolta c
amera, Powell had taken several photos in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. He entered the Texas School Book Depository and his presence became public knowledge when he was forced to show his identification after Dallas police sealed the building. Powell told researcher Penn Jones he “worked with the sheriff’s deputies at the rear of the Texas School Book Depository for about six or eight minutes” and that Powell had ordered a news reporter to hang up a telephone on the building’s first floor so that he could use it.
The government has not pursued any meaningful investigation to determine what intelligence Agent Powell was conducting in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination or why he was photographing the exterior of the Depository prior to the shooting.
And the military connection becomes even more curious in light of other strange incidents that occurred in Dallas that day.
Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill told the Warren Commission that a military intelligence officer rode with him from Dealey Plaza to the Dallas police station. It was Revill, as head of the police criminal intelligence division, who submitted a list of Texas School Book Depository employees. Heading Revill’s list was the name “Harvey Lee Oswald,” with the address given as 605 Elsbeth in Dallas.
During the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation it was revealed that the 112th Military Intelligence Group, which maintained an office in Dallas, had possessed a file on a man named “Harvey Lee Oswald,” identifying him as a procommunist who had been in Russia and had been involved in pro-Castro activities in New Orleans. This military file erroneously gave Oswald’s address as 605 Elsbeth, the same mistake found on Revill’s list.
Oswald had lived at 602 Elsbeth in late 1962 and early 1963 but had since moved, and the Elsbeth address had never been given to his employers at the Depository. And, of course, his name was Lee Harvey Oswald. It seems evident, based on this information, that military intelligence tipped off the Dallas police as to the identity of their suspect.
