Reclaiming History (316 page)

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.
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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.

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?

A
nother 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
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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.”
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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.”
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