Chomsky

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture

By Noam Chomsky

London: Verso, 1993. 172 pp., $27.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/5670

John F. Kennedy — "the only shining star that ever crossed the political sky" as the New York Times recently put it, the lone hero struck down, assassinated, in November 1963 because he was planning to withdraw the US from Vietnam, pull the plug on the CIA, dismantle the military industrial complex and end the Cold War, and for his after-dinner party trick, introduce the millennium.

This is all delusion, argues Noam Chomsky in Rethinking Camelot. JFK was not the unbesmirched knight that many think. The "one party, two faction" parliamentary system, Chomsky argues, can not throw up a radical reformer from the US Democrats (or the ALP) who can slay the capitalist dragon and turn the dross of life under the heel of business interests into the gold of Camelot.

Oliver Stone's film, JFK, was part of the "renewed fascination with the Kennedy era", says Chomsky, and the film has led many astray into a belief that Kennedy was assassinated for being a closet red by a "high level conspiracy" representing powerful institutional and business interests which then implemented a "massive cover-up" which has unprecedentedly survived intact for 30 years.

Chomsky trawls the vast public and internal documentary record to show that Kennedy did not deviate "from the norm of business rule". Although Kennedy and his advisers often did refer to their desire to withdraw troops from Vietnam, this was always conditional on victory first — "advocacy of withdrawal after assurance of victory was not a controversial stand" in the early '60s.

The assassination conspiracy theorists, however, do not see this. They also hang their case on the "occasional variation in wording and nuance" which is inevitable in the vast documentary record which often consisted of "committee jobs put together hastily with many compromises". Their need to believe that capitalist democracy can produce a people's hero within the mainstream predisposes them to peer into "the secret recesses of [JFK's] heart", to behave as "seers and mystics" divining the progressive soul of JFK.

Like other psychics, they are forced to ignore counter-evidence from the real world. And Chomsky presents buckets of it. JFK escalated the Vietnam War from terrorism to outright invasion, building up troop levels to 16,700. He approved the coup against, and assassination of, South Vietnam's President Diem in November 1963, which put the rabid pro-war General Thieu in charge, because Diem did not display sufficient blood-lust and was making overtures to the North for a political settlement.

Kennedy ignored the many prominent military specialists who opposed direct US military involvement because they knew the US and its client regime could never hope to win with their lack of political support. General Shoup, head of the Marines, was one such military voice, arguing that the US should "keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people".

The lack of popular support for the war in the US, the moves by Diem to settle politically, the anti-invasion views of some in the military — these were not treated by Kennedy as "an opportunity for withdrawal" but rather "a threat to victory".

Kennedy also unleashed a terrorist campaign against Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, supported six coups in Latin America during his presidency and otherwise kept US capitalism on its accustomed track domestically and internationally.

Kennedy's advisers supported Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, perceiving no fundamental conflict between JFK and LBJ's Vietnam policies — which were supposed to have changed dramatically after Kennedy's assassination. Both fell squarely within the tradition of maintaining the "traditional service role" of the Third World which was to provide "cheap labour and resources, markets, investment opportunities, and other amenities for the masters", whose people were to be punished for the "crime" of "disobedience" to the "unhampered pursuit of profits" by the US whether the malefactors be Communists, Arab nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, radical reformers or, more latterly, reactionary Iraqi dictators.

What made this mountain of counter-evidence disappear in the JFK psychics' parlour games was Tet — the 1968 mobilisation by the Vietnamese resistance which demonstrated to US business that the war was unwinnable at acceptable cost. The smart money was now on disentanglement. With this post-Tet business shift, "virtually everyone suddenly turned out to be 'an early opponent of the war'" — "in secret", Chomsky sarcastically notes, "since no record can be found".

"The enterprise [of winning the war] had soured", and so "the picture of John F Kennedy must therefore be modified". Chomsky has great and indignant fun exposing the "Camelot memoirists" who revised their earlier, pre-Tet and pro-war JFK portraits to later, post-Tet and anti-war JFK portraits. The Stalinists who air-brushed Trotsky out of pictures with Lenin could only have approved the techniques of JFK's liberal admirers.

Chomsky's book brings Australian parallels to mind — the "light on the hill" of the working person's Ben Chifley, or Gough Whitlam — the great reformer who went "too far to fast". Like JFK the redeemer, these Australian JFKs are myth and fantasy. They are beliefs which thrive at a time of "general malaise, unfocused anger and discontent" and decline of union traditions, says Chomsky.

Our alleged political heroes have feet of clay. We have to look to ourselves and our own efforts to change things. For this lesson alone, Chomsky is valuable.