Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (75 page)

No one can be certain how Kennedy would have coped in 1964 or 1965 with the situation in Vietnam, which remained fluid and unpredictable. Perhaps he would have cut his losses. Kennedy did express greater doubts in private about escalating American involvement than he dared to state in public. On several occasions he reminded hawkish advisers that General MacArthur, no dove, had warned about the costs of America trying to fight a land war in Asia. It also seems possible that JFK would have reconsidered his course after the 1964 election. He told his friend Charles Bartlett in 1963, "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don't have a prayer of prevailing there. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the people to reelect me."
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It may be that if Kennedy had lived to win a major mandate in the 1964 election, he would have dared to confront Cold War passions and to extricate the United States from Vietnam.

The evidence for such a scenario, however, is sketchy. Some of those who cite Kennedy's CBS interview neglect to point out that he added, "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 made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia." Kennedy partisans also fail to note that the American advisers to be withdrawn from Vietnam in late 1963 were mostly part of a construction battalion that had finished its work. They were being brought home for Christmas and were scheduled to be replaced by others. Most of Kennedy's major advisers concerning Vietnam then and later were certain that Kennedy never intended to "withdraw" American advisers and military aid before he could be certain that the South Vietnamese could safely defend themselves. Rusk said later, "I had hundreds of talks with John F. Kennedy about Vietnam, and never once did he say anything of this sort [about withdrawal]." JFK's speech prepared for delivery in Dallas on November 22, 1963, contained a reminder about Vietnam: "We dare not weary of the task."

Kennedy's flawed policies in Vietnam do not entirely reflect his overall record in the field of foreign affairs. An assessment of this record shows that he was less of a hard-line Cold Warrier than some of his rhetoric, such as his speech in 1960 in Salt Lake City, had suggested. It further indicates that he grew a little more sophisticated and cautious as he gained experience. In the face of often considerable domestic pressures he acted prudently concerning Laos and toward the Congo and Indonesia, where his advisers also helped to broker settlements. The Peace Corps, while of limited effectiveness in coping with the enormous socio-economic problems of underdeveloped nations, earned decent marks for effort. So did the limited test ban treaty and Kennedy's growing awareness following the missile crisis of the need for negotiation with the Soviets. When he left office, the two nations had established an uneasy but promising detente. Above all, Kennedy was applauded for standing up behind Berlin and for maintaining Western defenses in Europe.

Against these accomplishments, however, may be listed troubling failures and misconceptions that plagued Kennedy and his advisers. Although he knew there was no missile gap, he eagerly increased defense spending and helped to escalate the arms race. Despite the Bay of Pigs debacle, he persisted in plans to harass and frighten Castro, thereby accentuating the provocative behavior of Khrushchev. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, he held fast to clichés—especially in public—such as the domino theory and the existence of a monolithic "international" Communism. He persisted in celebrating the capacity of the Special Forces and more broadly of military moves to solve deeper social and political problems. On many occasions, as in his policies concerning Vietnam, he proved poor at sorting out good information from bad and at developing long-range plans. Contrary to the claims of his acolytes, he did not grow very much on the job.

P
OLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS GAVE
Kennedy little rest. Having been elected by the smallest of margins, he never stopped planning for 1964. So it was that he traveled to Texas on November 21, 1963. His wife Jackie went with him, the first time she had taken such an obviously political trip with him since the 1960 campaign. Kennedy hoped to bring peace to warring Democrats in the state and advance his political chances.

The very thought of such a trip irritated Kennedy. He was unhappy with Vice-President Johnson, who had been unable to resolve the feuds in Texas and who had pressed him to make the journey. Johnson, he knew, would get him to come to his ranch and wear "one of those big cowboy hats." Kennedy also expected opposition from right-wing activists, for Texas, like much of the South, stirred with people who despised him for his civil rights bill and for his softness, as they saw it, in foreign policy. A month earlier Stevenson had been struck and spat upon in Dallas. When JFK arrived in Dallas on November 22, an ad in the morning paper asked why he had allowed "thousands of Cubans to be jailed and sold wheat to those [the Russians] who were killing the United States in Vietnam. Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the spirit of Moscow? . . . Mr. Kennedy, WE DEMAND answers to these questions and we want them now." Kennedy observed to Jackie, "We're heading into nut country today."
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Hostility such as this had often caused Kennedy to reflect on how easy it would be for some crazy person to take out a rifle and kill him. But he rarely took major precautions, and he did not do so on November 22. Preparing for a ten-mile motorcade through downtown Dallas, he and Jackie climbed into an open car with Texas governor John Connally and his wife Nellie. Jackie wore white gloves and held a bouquet of red roses. As they passed the Texas School Book Depository around 12:30
P.M.
, gunshots rang out. One of the shots wounded Connally, and two hit Kennedy in the head and the neck. Blood spattered Jackie and the car, which sped off to a hospital. It was too late to save the President, who was clinically dead on arrival in the emergency room. The time of death was placed at around 1:00
P.M.
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Less than an hour and a half after the shooting, Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old order-filler at the Book Depository, and charged him with the slaying of a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippitt, who had tried to detain him in the street on suspicion of the assassination.
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Nine hours later Oswald was charged with the murder of JFK. He vehemently denied all charges. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a strip-joint owner well known to police, approached Oswald as the alleged assassin was being transferred. Ruby pulled out a concealed pistol and killed Oswald on the spot. He explained that he acted out of grief for the President.

The killing of Oswald stimulated already rampant speculation about the assassination. Had Oswald really done it? If so, had he acted alone? Who put him up to it and why? Had Ruby been sent to silence him? This speculation grew enormously over the years and never seemed to stop: in early 1992, four books on the
New York Times
non-fiction best-seller list dealt with the events at Dallas on that unforgettable day. Much of this speculation centered on alleged conspiracies, which millions of Americans believed to have led to the killing. Many people could not believe the report that one bullet had managed to pass through both Kennedy and Connally. Others, accepting the claims of a few bystanders, were sure that there had been more than one assassin and that more than three shots had been fired.

In order to subvert these and other theories Johnson, now President, appointed a commission to offer an official government account of the assassination. It was headed by Chief Justice Warren and contained among its well-known members Richard Russell of Georgia, a power in the Senate, Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, a leading House Republican, and Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA. The staff of the commission concluded in September 1964 that Oswald alone had committed the crimes by firing three shots from the sixth floor of the Depository Building, whereupon he had fled into the streets, been accosted by Tippitt, and killed him, too.

The general conclusions of the Warren Report, as it was called, have satisfied most scholars. They have agreed that Oswald was a loner who had endured a deeply troubled hitch in the marines, after which he lived in the Soviet Union for thirty-two months. He was profoundly unhappy there, at one time slashing one of his wrists, and was apparently kept under surveillance by Russian officials who doubted his emotional stability. Coming back to the United States in early 1963, he remained a self-styled Marxist, identifying particularly with the virtues of Castro's regime in Cuba. At one point he tried and failed to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a right-wing leader who lived in Dallas. Oswald also moved temporarily from Dallas to New Orleans, where he opened a Fair Play for Cuba chapter. Finding no takers, he returned, embittered, to Dallas. There, the commission said, he decided to kill the President. The commission noted that Oswald's palmprint was found on the stock of the rifle, left at the Depository, that had been used to fire the fatal shot.
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Because Ruby killed Oswald, it is impossible to know why Oswald did what he did. But it is unsatisfactory to stop with the obvious: that he was highly unstable. Oswald was a politicized young man whose actions reflected the super-frigid context of the Cold War of the early 1960s. That was a time when governmentally sanctioned killing, whether by the CIA or the Soviet KGB, was an openly discussed and apparently viable option in the conduct of foreign policy. Castro, indeed, frequently (and accurately) claimed that the CIA was trying to assassinate him. While in New Orleans, Oswald read in the newspapers an account of one of Castro's diatribes against the United States and apparently convinced himself that the Cuban leader wanted Kennedy dead. The assassination of JFK, in short, was not only an outrage by an unstable individual; it was also a politicized act, one of the most terrible in the history of the Cold War.
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The Warren Report greatly pleased President Johnson, who was especially anxious to scotch rumors that the Soviets had been involved in a conspiracy to kill his predecessor. Such a finding, he knew, would generate enormous and dangerous public pressures to retaliate. He was equally eager to put down other conspiracy theories. Johnson therefore hailed release of the report. So, too, did virtually all other mainstream commentators in the media. Worried about the fragility of American institutions in the aftermath of the shock, they wanted very much to think that only a sociopathic individual would have done such a thing.

The report, however, did not put an end to theories about conspiracy. That was in part because members of the commission had pre-judged the case. Although the commission staff interviewed some 500 people (the report was 888 pages long), its work contained flaws. Moreover, it sealed some of its evidence for seventy-five years, thereby feeding suspicions that there was something to hide. As later revelations made clear, key sources did not divulge all they knew to the commission. The CIA, for instance, hid its involvement with the Mob and with plots to kill Castro. The FBI obfuscated in order to conceal its failure to keep close tabs on Oswald, who had been known to be dangerous. Commission members themselves, such as Russell, Ford, and Dulles, did not inform staff members, who wrote the report, about Mongoose and the broader tensions of Cuban-American relations that may have been highly pertinent in explaining Oswald's behavior. Robert Kennedy, who had overseen Mongoose since November 1961, also kept its nefarious doings secret from the commission. Such activities, these people persuaded themselves, were not relevant to the assassination. To reveal them to a commission, they thought, was to compromise the operations of the CIA.

These secrets, clearly relevant in retrospect, were scarcely suspected by conspiracy theorists in 1964. Rather, doubters at that time tended to imagine other scenarios. A few theorists, most of them on the right, believed that the commission failed to follow up leads that would have implicated Castro, the Soviet Union, or both. Others blamed the Mob, with which both Oswald and (especially) Ruby had shadowy ties. Gangsters, they said, were furious at Kennedy for not getting rid of Castro (who had closed down their casinos in Cuba) and at Robert Kennedy for prosecuting Mafia leaders and some of their friends, such as Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.

Many believers in conspiracy theories felt a deep personal loss. Idealizing Kennedy, they could not believe that one demented person could succeed in killing a President. Great events require great causes or conspiracies. Distrusting government officialdom and Establishmentarian reports, they concocted elaborate reconstructions involving Very Important People. Some pointed the finger at FBI chief Hoover, who was known to dislike Kennedy. Others said that the CIA had masterminded the killing out of fears that Kennedy would give in to the Communists and dismember the agency itself. A few people thought Johnson, Pentagon officials, or other Cold Warriors had ordered the killing of the President in order to stop the United States from pulling out of Vietnam and dismantling the military-industrial complex.
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So insistent were doubters of the Warren Report that a select House committee started to review it in 1976. After working for more than two years and spending some $5 million, it reported in 1979 that Oswald had shot Kennedy and that neither the Soviet Union nor Cuba nor any government agency in the United States had been involved in the killing. Most scholars have accepted this view, which echoed the major findings of the Warren Commission. But the committee otherwise challenged the commission conclusions by asserting that there was a "high probability" that a second gunman had fired at Kennedy and missed. The committee did not identify this gunman but speculated that the Mob may have been behind this conspiracy. Its evidence for this conjecture, later challenged by other experts, was unconvincing. The committee closed some of its most sensitive records until the year 2029, thereby fueling further the rampant speculation that persisted about the case.