March 17, 1992
Dear Noam,
Thanks very much for your last letter. I can't imagine how you find the time and energy to do all you do and also write letters to obscure admirers lik0e me, but you said somewhere you work like a madman and I believe it. Anyway, you are truly a phenomenon and an inspiration.
Re Cockburn, if he's a friend of yours he can't be all bad, but to be honest I am even more suspicious of him now, after reading his reply to letters from Zachary Sklar, Michael Parenti and Peter Scott in The Nation (3/9/92), which is even worse than his original article. He argues unfairly. I'll spare you the details, but just to take one example, after finally being forced by Scott et al. to discuss NSAM 263 (not even mentioned in the original article), he only mentions the 1,000-man withdrawal, not the plan to pull out all the troops by the end of 1965. Time magazine did exactly the same thing (2/3/92, box "Was It a Plot to Keep the US in Vietnam?"). There are other examples that are similar to the way Time and Newsweek do their thing, which is propaganda.
It's not just that I disagree. I disagree with you too on this (the first time ever, I believe!), but I certainly do not have the feeling you are being dishonest. I hope I'm wrong abut Cockburn, and I probably am wrong to jump to conclusions, but it wasn't exactly reassuring to learn that he was living with Katherine Graham's daughter in 1979 when he was "asked," according to Deborah Davis (Katherine the Great), to attack Davis's book in the Village Voice. When I made the remark about his "strange bedfellows in the establishment," I didn't mean it literally, but it seems there's more truth in that than I thought.
Another blast, Davis says, came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, and this name struck me too. As I think I wrote to you some time ago, I was impressed by a remark he made on C-Span in December 1990 when I happened to be watching. A caller said the primary reason we were defending Kuwait was economic and that the primary beneficiaries of the whole thing were everybody in the oil business except Iraq–a perfectly straightforward observation, and correct, in my opinion. Ignatius's response was that he didn't believe in conspiracy theories! I believe he also writes spy novels, which may indicate his true interests and loyalties.
Ok, that may be a little paranoid, but it is 1984 + 8, and the assassination, especially, does seem to bring out the smoke and mirrors, both inside and outside of people's minds. As you say in Deterring Democracy, it's unproductive to try to dig into people's minds to figure out why they say what they do or if they really believe it themselves or not. Still, one can't help wondering.
Now on to more substantive issues. I'm very glad to have your thoughts on this because I haven't seen anything in print you've done on it.
The political significance of the assassination is nil, of course, if the Warren Report is correct. If it is incorrect, as it seems to me the evidence overwhelmingly indicates, some version of the Garrison (coup d'état) theory must be correct, and the significance of that is clear. I say it must be correct because I see no possibility that anyone could have pulled off the cover-up without the complicity of the government and the press. Not pro- or anti-Castro Cubans nor Russians nor the Mafia nor "renegade" US intelligence agents. None of these groups could have faked the autopsy, manipulated the Warren Commission, sabotaged the House investigation, etc. and managed the press non-coverage for more than a quarter of a century. However that complicity operates–by "manufacturing consent," conscious conspiracy, or (more likely) a combination of the two, it is real.
What Garrison's theory does not explain, but your propaganda model does, is the refusal or inability of the intelligentsia to take Garrison et al. seriously–a prime example of Orwell's problem and of education as the best form of propaganda in a "free" society.
The "propaganda model" is the one proposed in Manufacturing Consent. It is not complicated: the interlocking and pyramid-like connections of ownership explain the media's subservience to government and big business. Orwell's problem, as Chomsky has expressed it, is "How is it that we know so little?"–as opposed to Plato's problem, which is "How is it that we know so much?"
Why else would 99% of elite opinion be so vehemently against the Stone film, when half the US population thought Garrison might be right (i.e. that the CIA or military were involved)–even before they saw the film? I suspect the even higher percentage–73% according to Time–of the public who believe the assassination was a conspiracy would correspond to a much smaller figure among mainstream journalists and academics (both left and right), if a poll were taken just of them.
According to a Time/CNN poll taken just before the film was released, 73% of Americans thought the assassination was a conspiracy, and 68% of these (i.e. 49.6% of all Americans) said the CIA or the US military may have been involved (Time, Jan. 13, 1992, European ed., p. 40).
Stone has at least informed the public and put the question on the table. How many people had even heard of NSAM 263 before the film? How many would have dared to talk about this "terrifying" hypothesis (and it is terrifying for most people, I think), even if they had heard of it? The film has at least made the subject discussable. I'm sure Time Warner is working a quite different agenda, counting on a burn-out effect (already apparent), but that is a different question.
Now the (putative) Vietnam connection. First I have to say that I haven't been able to get hold of Newman's book yet (one of the joys of living here–takes weeks and often months to get books), so I don't know what new evidence has come out, but I'll try to respond on the basis of what you say and the bits Cockburn refers to.
Taking it chronologically, Kennedy's public statements prior to October 1963, including the much-cited September TV interviews, are clearly subject to interpretation. Of course he was playing politics, since pulling out would be the unpopular course, both with the population in general and in his own administration. Rusk, McNamara, Johnson, Bundy, McCone of CIA–all the top people were against withdrawal. Cockburn and others have said the withdrawal plan was "political," as if Kennedy intended it to make him more popular, but how could it have? There was no political pressure for withdrawal, or at least less than there was for continued escalation.
The "McNamara-Taylor" report, according to Fletcher Prouty, doesn't represent McNamara's opinion at all. It wasn't written by either him or Taylor, but back at the Pentagon, strictly according to Kennedy's wishes. They flew it to Honolulu and handed to McNamara and Taylor there for them to give to JFK as "their" report when they arrived in Washington. McNamara's true opinion was expressed to Johnson as president the morning after the assassination (Scott, p. 224-225), though it was no secret before then.
Prouty also says, by the way, that although JFK was for the coup against Diem, he planned to have him and Nhu evacuated by air to Europe immediately afterward. They were actually on the plane when for some reason they returned to the presidential palace and were later murdered in an military vehicle. I know there are different versions of this and I don't know where Prouty has his from, but by all accounts Kennedy was genuinely surprised when they were murdered. I don't mean to defend Kennedy here, but it looks to me like another CIA sabotage operation. CIA (and Rusk, Johnson, etc.) wanted to keep Diem, and when Kennedy insisted on his removal, they knew he would be blamed. Nixon later had Lucien Conein deliberately spread the word that JFK had been behind the murders (according to Jim Hougan, Spooks).
I see no reason to assume that Morse, Mansfield, Powers and O'Donnell lied about what Kennedy said to them privately, or that Kennedy lied to them. It makes sense–both the public dissembling and the private candor. Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that O'Donnell et al. are telling the truth, what else could Kennedy have done in the situation? He could not tell the world, "Ok, we failed, we're going home." Of course he was wrong to have us in Vietnam in the first place, but how could he admit it at that point? The only alternative was to declare the mission accomplished (not "victorious") and beat an orderly retreat, putting as good a face on the affair as possible: "We've done what we can, but it's their war."
The McNamara-Taylor report did not talk of "victory" (the word Cockburn repeatedly puts in their and JFK's mouth) but of "progress." It's "optimism" was in my opinion (and I gather in Newman's as well) a ploy under which to effect the pullout without it looking like complete abandonment of the South Vietnamese. Kennedy was also getting completely opposite reports from the field, i.e. pessimistic assessments, and the political situation was clearly bad–"deeply serious," as the White House statement said. Kennedy would have had to be a complete idiot to have thought the war was being "won" (in the sense that Johnson obviously wanted to win), but this is exactly what the "false optimism" argument implies. I know of no other cases where Kennedy, whatever else one might think of him, has been accused of being such a numbskull.
It is true that Kennedy's statements on Nov. 14 continue to present a belligerent front, but note that the first objective mentioned was "to bring Americans home," and none of these statements for public consumption can deny the overriding significance of the withdrawal plan implemented by NSAM 263. That was policy; the talk about "staying the course" was rhetoric. Again, what else could he have said?
All I know about the Honolulu meeting is what Scott says about it, based on references to it in the Pentagon Papers and the press at the time: the Accelerated Withdrawal Plan was confirmed. Are the documents related to that meeting still secret? What new information has been revealed to make you (or Newman) think Kennedy was not aware of the truth about the war before then?
I am skeptical of that Bundy draft of NSAM 273. You say he wrote it in Honolulu, Cockburn says the next day (Nov. 21) "back in Washington." I thought Bundy and virtually the entire Administration (except for JFK, LBJ, RFK and a couple of others) were still in Honolulu on the 22nd. The whereabouts of all these people at the critical moment is strange enough, but be that as it may, why would Bundy draft such an important document before he had even discussed the results of the Honolulu meeting with the president–especially if new information had been revealed there?
It is clearly foolish of Newman to try to find differences between that draft and 273, since they are almost identical. He should look at the big picture instead. We are talking about the possibility of a coup d'état. If it was a coup, it is even more likely that Bundy was in on it than Johnson, being No. 2 in the national security hierarchy (above the vice-president)–and this throughout the "transition." Of course Bundy would claim that there was no policy change, that Kennedy would have signed the same NSAM that Johnson signed, continued the war the same way Johnson did, etc.
And of course Johnson had to claim that Kennedy's withdrawal policy would continue, as formulated in paragraph 2 of NSAM 273. This is indeed the heart of the story: if Kennedy was killed (among other reasons) because of his withdrawal decision, every effort would have been made to conceal the fact that the successor to the throne disagreed with and reversed that decision. How convenient to have documents drafted both the day before the murder and two days afterward, neither of which JFK ever saw, much less approved, but which he supposedly would have signed and which supposedly show that there was a seamless continuation of policy!
What does it really mean to say, as Cockburn and others do, "there was no change in policy"? It means that both JFK and LBJ wanted and planned and implemented a policy to withdraw all US troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965. This is NSAM 263, confirmed by paragraph 2 of 273. Why is it never said this way? Because the inescapable conclusion is that Johnson not only reversed JFK's policy, he also reversed his own policy. Saying "Johnson continued Kennedy's policy" sounds harmless enough, but if it is true it is only half the story. The other half is "...for a short time, then he reversed it." In other words, whether paragraph 2 of 273 is a lie or not, two things are incontrovertibly true:
1. Kennedy's plan was to withdraw all troops by the end of 1965.
2. Johnson reversed this policy.
Seen in this way, the differences between 263 and 273 are irrelevant. Whether Johnson reversed the (JFK's, or JFK's and LBJ's) withdrawal policy on Nov. 24 or a couple of weeks or months later, the fact remains that he reversed it.
The significant thing to me is that all the historians bend over backward to avoid acknowledging these facts, determined to make it appear that there was no policy change, period, which is patently false. Why?
Because there are three, not two, facts to consider–rather, to avoid considering:
1. Kennedy's plan was to withdraw all troops by the end of 1965.
2. Kennedy was murdered.
3. Johnson reversed this policy.
Once these facts are stated plainly–which is never done (except in the dissident assassination literature)–it is obvious why the historical engineers have struggled so long and hard to avoid doing so. The question then becomes inescapable: Is there a causal relationship between 1-3? Since the question is not permissible, 1 and 3 must be suppressed by all possible means. I've looked into this a bit and it is truly amazing what gyrations the "responsible" commentators go through to avoid making these simple and well-documented facts clear.
Questions are not proof, of course, but the point is that even the question must be avoided. It is not permissible, any more than it is permissible to ask, Is Washington the terrorist capital of the world?
Chomsky has said and written this on many occasions.
Maybe for publicity-starved kooks like Garrison and war-crazed vets like Stone, but not for responsible journalists and historians.
If we had "won" the war, à la Gulf, maybe the truth could have been allowed to emerge. Then one could conceivably argue that "victory" was so important that Kennedy's assassination was necessary for "national security" reasons. But as things turned out, this excuse is impossible. Theoretically, one could still say, "Well, we thought the Vietnam War was so important that JFK had to be sacrificed," but it wouldn't work. In reality, it is impossible to admit the truth about the assassination because it violates the necessary illusion that such things don't happen in the USA. The irony is that exactly the same excuse is acceptable, as long as the president's assassination is omitted: "Well, we thought the Vietnam War was so important that 58,000 Americans and a couple of million Vietnamese had to be sacrificed." That is a perfectly acceptable truth, violating no illusions, since it is quite normal for us to sacrifice our own lives and other worthless entities for the good of the State–but not the life of a president.
You say the best evidence that JFK intended to withdraw is that he respected MacArthur's advice not to get involved in a land war in Asia. But that was rather early, wasn't it? JFK's initial escalation shows that he had something in mind–probably exactly what happened up to 1963, not full-scale war but counterinsurgency along the lines his hero Taylor recommended, using indigenous cannon fodder and mercenaries (as in Laos), with direct US participation limited to CIA and special forces. This conforms to what he told O'Donnell–that he would never send draftees to Vietnam. But certainly the best evidence–proof, in fact–of his withdrawal intention is NSAM 263.
I do not share the "Camelot" illusions, though one cannot help but observe that JFK was the last president to have any charisma and independence of mind whatsoever–neither of which are desirable qualities of leadership in a national security state. He did stand up to the Mafia and the CIA, which doesn't necessarily make him any less of a thug or less dangerous, but in fact it made him more dangerous–to his handlers. He bucked the Joint Chiefs and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs by refusing to send in the Navy and the Marines, and there was similar pressure to attack the Russian ships during the missile crisis. He defied them again ("them"=the military-industrial-intelligence-complex) with the Vietnam withdrawal decision. It was the Bay of Pigs all over again.
My theory about the Bay of Pigs, which I have written up in some detail based on a close reading of Operation Zapata (the minutes of the Taylor investigation), is that the CIA sabotaged it themselves. (Sent this to CAIB along with some other stuff but they never even acknowledged.)
This article did appear, two years later, in an "assassination research" journal called The Fourth Decade ("The Bay of Pigs Revisited,"), and I gave a talk on the same theme at the founding meeting of COPA later the same year. See Ch. 1 and Addendum 1.
The purpose was to put Kennedy in exactly the position he ended up in: send in the troops or face disaster. The scenario was repeated in Vietnam. The clandestine involvement had built up since at least 1954 and probably since 1945 (when Ho Chi Minh was still an ally), climaxing in the fall of 1963, when again it was: call it war or quits. Kennedy refused again, for the last time. These snafus don't occur any more. In the Gulf War, it was not necessary to maneuver Bush, CIA's own, into position; it was only a matter of getting Congress into position, which was accomplished by Jan. 12: fight or be humiliated (after drawing a 500,000-man line in the sand and months of name-calling).
I have no inclination to defend Kennedy's record otherwise. He probably did what was expected of him on most occasions, but in that office you can't make too many mistakes. Witness Noriega, Saddam, etc., who also got out of line. Even Bush can make mistakes, like his hesitation about sending the troops into Iraq last April. Whatever the particularities were in that case, I doubt that it was a coincidence that Bush changed his mind the day after the New York Times published Gary Sick's October Surprise story (after ignoring the whole thing for years). In the end, JFK was a victim, just like the rest of us. He may have been a thug, but he was an inconvenient thug, and not enough of a thug for the people who really run the show. (I don't know who these people are but I'll bet McGeorge Bundy does.)
If others want to play up the significance of the test ban treaty, the rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviets, JFK's (albeit reluctant) commitment to civil rights, his opposition to Big Oil, the Federal Reserve, the Mafia, and the CIA, and so on, frankly I don't mind, because the arguments are going in the right direction. I doubt that any of those factors alone could have brought about the assassination and cover-up, but the war was bigger than all of them put together. It's interesting to note that the JFK reviews (Cockburn being an exception in this respect) do their best to obscure this point, usually burying the Vietnam thing in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of the article among all the "other possible" reasons. There are no headlines that read: "Was JFK Killed Because He Wanted to Withdraw from Vietnam?" But this is the main message of the film, as most people who see it will confirm. It's that impermissible question again: ok for the movies but not for the papers. Damage control.
To change the subject just a bit, I must mention Michael Albert's terrible essay in Z magazine (Jan. 1992) pitting Craig Hulet as an exemplar of "conspiracy theory" against you as one of "institutional" critique? I don't know anything about Hulet, but it's interesting that Cockburn mentions him too. I don't know Albert either, but this article is really a crock of do-do. Time, Newsweek, Cockburn, Albert–they all form a united front against "conspiracy." Albert at least allows for the existence of "progressive and left conspiracy theory," which I guess is the category I would fall into, but I reject this dichotomy. I see a continuum, from the particular to the abstract, conspiracies as particular manifestations of -isms.
Not only is it a false dichotomy, it plays right into the hands of the CIA and their ilk, who would like nothing better than to see all "conspiracy theorists" branded as fascists, which is the usual implication (Cockburn's too). Why mention Craig Hulet (whoever this guy is) or Lyndon LaRouche (who some people, like Ramsey Clark, don't think is quite as crazy as he's made out to be), and not Peter Scott? (Cockburn, to his credit, does deal with Scott–by misrepresenting him–but more as a "fantasizer" than a "conspiracist.") The notion that "conspiracists" are fascists or even extremists is disproved by the great majority of Americans who think the assassination was a conspiracy and are not fascists or even extremists–yet, though they may be driven to fascism if their common sense understanding of the conspiratorial nature of government continues to be refuted by elite opinion. According to my dictionary, "conspiracy" and "government" are practically synonyms, and ordinary people seem to understand that much more easily than the better-propagandized elite. What governments do not plan bad things in secret? I see no contradiction between Jim Garrison and Noam Chomsky. Why can't they both be right?
The question is, why is what Scott calls "deep politics" and "parapolitics" (I guess to avoid saying "conspiracy theory") consistently "resisted by the establishment left (The Nation) in almost the same terms as the establishment center (the Times)"? Scott's answer is that the left writes out of "false despair," and, like the center, "out of false consciousness, to rationalize their disempowerment," but I don't see that that explains anything. (Garrison is more depressing than Cockburn, everybody rationalizes their disempowerment, and I have no idea what "false consciousness" is.) Cockburn's answer seems to be that if the conspiracists are right,
Out the window goes any sensible analysis of institutions, economic trends and pressures, continuities in corporate and class interest and all the other elements constituting the open secrets and agendas of American capitalism (Nation 1/6-13/92:6)
which is so foolish I can't believe he means it. Why should Garrison, Scott et al. render Chomsky et al. (and Cockburn for that matter) invalid or superfluous? We don't need this confusion. Hasn't anybody thought of trying to consolidate the revolutionary (peaceful of course) elements in these supposedly disparate analyses rather than insisting on driving them farther apart than they really are? I see now why Z magazine rejects my stuff; it violates the anti-conspiracy doctrine. But if that Albert article is their idea of "sensible analysis" I am unimpressed. Oh well, there's still the computer network (no editors!).
Best regards,
Michael
Chomsky replied (5/21/92) that we were "at a bit of an impasse about JFK." He said he had now been through all the "internal documentation," which "undermines the case almost entirely." He mentioned his "friend Peter Dale Scott, a fine scholar," again, and having "recently had a long discussion with Peter about this and what it came down to was his belief that some still classified material might support the theory." But, Chomsky added, "we simply have no reason to believe it, and the evidence to the contrary is quite compelling."
The "theory" Chomsky was referring to is Scott's early theory, later elaborated by Newman, that there was a significant difference between JFK's NSAM 263 and LBJ's 273. But this Chomsky had already conceded, in his previous letter to me. The significant difference, he had said, was between 263 and the draft of 273, which was written by Bundy for JFK, and which was not significantly different from LBJ's 273. Newman, agreeing that the draft 273 was written for JFK, says it is significantly different from the 273 LBJ signed.
In the end, then, Chomsky was agreeing with Scott and Newman that 273 shows a policy change, but disagreeing with them that the change came with Johnson. Bundy's draft 273 proved that it came with Kennedy.
He went on to review "several types of evidence." The public record, he said, was clear, and everybody (including Scott and Newman) agreed that "JFK was, publicly, an extreme hawk, until the very end, holding that withdrawal without victory is unthinkable and would be a disaster." He did not want to withdraw because "he knew that escalation was highly unpopular, both among the public and in the Senate," and that therefore, if he had wanted to withdraw, he would have said so publicly because "he would have received enormous support." Instead, he kept "using his bully pulpit to drive the general public in a more hawkish direction, as much as he could." The record makes clear "his unwillingness to withdraw without victory." If he had planned to withdraw, he "could have drawn on highly respected military authorities to back him up," such as MacArthur, Ridgeway, and Shoup.
The McNamara-Taylor report of Oct. 2, 1963, Chomsky said, concluded "that the military part of the war was going so well that if the 1964 battle plan succeeded, US forces could be withdrawn by the end of 1965." But all of this "was explicitly contingent on the success of the 1964 plan." By October 1963, JFK was concerned about the deteriorating political situation in Saigon and afraid that Diem and his brother Nhu would negotiate a settlement with the North, "which would lead to neutralization and force the US to withdraw." To this JFK was adamantly opposed, "because it would lead to withdrawal without victory." After the coup against Diem, negative facts about the progress of the war began to filter in, leading to the Honolulu meeting and the draft for NSAM 273, "adapted to the changing assessment."
If Kennedy had been planning to withdraw, "he surely had a great opportunity when the Diem family was negotiating with the North for a settlement." In that case his public utterances would have been different, there would be some trace in the internal record, and "he would have given prominence to the highest military brass who were strongly opposed to escalation, etc. None of this is the case."
Prouty, Chomsky said, is "utterly untrustworthy" and "a raving fascist," avoided by "serious journalists" such as Edward Epstein, "who does think there was an assassination conspiracy."
Oliver Stone had misinformed the public, spreading "fantasies about NSAM 263."
In sum, it was "pretty clear" to Chomsky "that no one with even a shred of rationality could have thought that getting rid of JFK had anything to do with the war in Vietnam." Maybe "right-wing nuts" thought so, but there was no evidence for it, just "belief and wish fulfillment." He lamented the "ugly name-calling and irrationality" that was causing "movement circles" to "tear themselves apart on this," when there were "so many important issues to address."