1992.06.18
June 18, 1992
Dear Noam,
Your letter arrived in the same mail (May 25) as Newman's book, which I've now read. I don't like being at an impasse with you on this, if we are, so I want to try to pin down as precisely as possible what we are disagreeing about.
I do not have access now to the new internal documentation you and he mention, so I can't evaluate that. On the whole, Newman's "deception within a deception" theory isn't much different from what occurred to me–that withdrawal on the basis of "mission accomplished" (not the same as victory) was a ploy on JFK's part, in order to withdraw without losing face and the 64 election. I agree, though, that if we discount O'Donnell et al., this is speculation, and Newman doesn't add anything to what we already know (or don't know) about what Kennedy himself thought.
He does seem to make a good case that Harkins and Taylor (and, less clearly, McNamara) were lying (i.e. lying about winning so Kennedy wouldn't pull out). This is different from the standard Bright Shining Lie à la Neil Sheehan (also the Pentagon Papers' story), which says everybody at the top (except a few lower down the line like Vann), including Kennedy, actually believed they were winning.
I'm not convinced, though, that JFK could have or needed to have "deceived the deceivers." More plausible to me would be that Harkins, Taylor and McNamara were simply playing Kennedy's game–and probably reluctantly. If the top brass were really working against Kennedy, before the assassination, surely they could have thought up a more effective tactic to prevent withdrawal, such as staging a Tonkin-like "act of war" on US troops. In the context of a coup theory, if the military advisors felt they had been sorely misused (by being forced by JFK to lie about the true military situation), this would have added to their sense of moral indignation and made it easier for them to support a coup.
The two basic questions Newman addresses are: 1) Were the top brass really optimistic, and 2) Was Kennedy really optimistic? The standard answer (the "false optimism" hypothesis) is yes to both (e.g. PP Gravel, Vol. 2, 160-200). Newman says no to both.
I'm willing to leave both questions in abeyance, since it's not likely that we'll learn much more about what anybody "really" thought.
Still, before I go on, I have to comment on the "false optimism" argument. What it really means is stupidity. The top brass and/or Kennedy were too dumb, naive, incompetent, indifferent, etc.–I'll just collapse this as "stupid"–to read the writing on the wall. We should note that this is the standard explanation for anything the US government does that threatens to be perceived as wrong. The whole war was a "tragic mistake," i.e. stupid. "Wise Men" and all, they were just too stupid to see what should have been obvious to any child–that US national security was never in danger in Vietnam, that it was an indigenous revolution, that the Saigon regime was hopelessly corrupt, that we shouldn't have been there, etc. Skipping up to the most recent war, we find the same explanations. Why did April Glaspie tell Saddam the US didn't care about his border disputes? Stupidity. Why didn't Bush at least try to get the foreigners out of Kuwait after the invasion, before sending in the troops (upon which Saddam took them hostage)? Stupidity. Why didn't they go on to take out Saddam Hussein? Stupidity. Why did they leave Saddam his helicopters and elite troops? Stupidity. Why did they get the Kurds to revolt and then abandon them? Stupidity.
No matter how skillfully the rhetoric may disguise it ("well-intentioned errors"), the "explanation" always boils down to plain old stupidity. (Well-intentioned stupidity is still stupidity.) I just don't buy it. I never thought I was smarter than McGeorge Bundy (to take my favorite hate-figure).
One alternative explanation is the propaganda model. I think it is valid and powerful, but it doesn't explain everything. For one thing, doesn't it too boil down to intellectual blindness and self-deception, and aren't those just fancy words for stupidity? Should I believe that McGeorge Bundy was so blind, propagandized, self-deceived–or stupid–that in 1963-64 he didn't know what I knew (at the age of 17-18), namely that Vietnam was (at least) a mistake?
The most obvious cases where the propaganda model fails are the assassinations. I suppose one might explain the execution of Fred Hampton (which you talked about in one of your books) in terms of the propaganda model, given the mindset of the Chicago police and the situation. But this will not do for JFK, RFK, and MLK–just to name the biggies. These were conspiracies, both the executions themselves and the subsequent cover-ups, and the evidence for high-level, long-term government complicity is overwhelming.
One could explain this complicity in terms of a propaganda model too, I suppose, i.e. if it was ultimately "well-intentioned." They did it for what they were convinced was the good of the country. But you could say the same about Hitler and anyone else. At this point, the notion of conspiracy disappears altogether, because the notion of right and wrong also disappears. If the "conspirators" are convinced that their goals are good and their means are justified, there is no conspiracy from their point of view. From our point of view, we can say they are (willing) victims of propaganda, but if we disagree with their idea of "good" we have to call it conspiracy (a plan by more than one person to do something bad).
To return to the question at hand, let us assume no more than what the paper record tells us, omitting all speculation about what anyone really believed and when, omitting Scott's thesis (that NSAM 273 confirming the withdrawal plan was a lie), omitting Newman's thesis (that the top brass were lying and Kennedy was pretending to believe them to justify withdrawal). We can also omit the question of the conditionality of withdrawal on continued battlefield success. You say the condition was crucial and explicit, but in the McNamara-Taylor recommendations implemented by NSAM 263 it is only implied ("we should be able..."), unless I've missed an if-clause. In any case, the importance you attach to this depends again on what you think people actually believed. If nobody really believed that there was any success in the first place, as Newman says, the question is irrelevant.
PP Gravel 2, 160-200 tells us that the withdrawal plan started in the summer of 1962, began wavering in December 1963 (p. 191-192, 276), and ended by March 27, 1964, at the very latest:
Thus ended de jure the policy of phase out and withdrawal and all the plans and programs oriented to it. Shortly, they would be cancelled out de facto. [P. 196.]
This means that withdrawal was still policy on Nov. 22, and it changed under Johnson. Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal plan. This–no more, no less–is fact. Do you agree?
I think the problem may be that we are coming at this from different directions. I think you are more concerned with making sure that JFK is not remade into a dove. I am more concerned with getting at the truth about the assassination. I guess I was wrong to say last time that I didn't mind if Stone et al. fall into the Camelot syndrome, because if it leads people closer to the truth about the assassination it would be in the right direction. There is no reason to compromise there, even for "strategic" reasons. You're quite right, of course, JFK was a hawk. But there are hawks and hawks. Hawks can have withdrawal policies. Reagan withdrew from Lebanon. Bush withdrew from Iraq. Nixon finally withdrew from Vietnam.
You might say that sure, the whole history of the war was based on a phony "withdrawal policy," which is true in a sense, but I refer again to the Pentagon Papers account. The withdrawal policy that ended by March 1964 was real and had nothing to do with Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war and eventual retreat.
There doesn't have to be a connection between the assassination and the withdrawal policy reversal. It is a theory, but a good one. I would hardly presume to remind you, of all people, that there is a difference between good theories and bad ones. The theory that Hinkley shot Reagan because he thought Reagan was a closet Leninist is a bad one. It's bad because there is no evidence for it and it explains nothing.
There is plenty of evidence, however, that the assassination and cover-up was a government conspiracy, a coup d'état, without going into the Vietnam question. But if you add to all this the fact–which is all I am trying to establish here–that Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal policy, you certainly have a basis to postulate that one reason for the assassination was to affect the policy change.
I think it would be more accurate to compare this theory with your propaganda model. It's not the fact that it can't be disproved that makes it a good theory. It's a good theory because it makes sense, explains more of the facts in a coherent way than other theories, etc.
That just about does it from my side for the essential point, but I'll go through your letter to make sure I've covered everything and in some cases to ask for information.
You say JFK knew that escalation was highly unpopular. What is the evidence for this? Certainly it was just the opposite among most of his own staff, and there must have been at least as many hawks as doves in Congress and in the population at large, inasmuch as anybody was even thinking seriously about it in 1963. (The first conversation I remember having about Vietnam was in the spring of 1963, when a friend asked me what I thought "we ought to do over there." All I could say then was "I don't know, what do you think?" but I was quite shocked when he said he thought we should "beat the shit out of 'em." I just thought, Why?)
I can't find any references in Newman to Shoup advising Kennedy to withdraw, or any at all to Ridgeway or MacArthur. I've read elsewhere that MacArthur advised JFK in 1961 never to get involved in a land war in Asia, but I didn't know either one advised him later on Vietnam.
What happened in Honolulu on Nov. 20 still seems a mystery, but I see no evidence whatsoever that the official withdrawal policy changed, whether the military reports had become more pessimistic or not. (Newman's argument is that the new pessimism only increased JFK's desire to withdraw, but let's ignore that.) The second paragraph of NSAM 273, both the Bundy draft and LBJ's version, confirms that the withdrawal policy was to continue.
If you consider the possibility of a coup d'état, the motives of people like Bundy, McNamara, etc., as well as Johnson, are highly suspect, to say the least, so there is no point in debating whether that Bundy draft was written "for Kennedy" or not. It doesn't matter.
I would feel like I am belaboring the obvious, except that it isn't. I mean, what should be obvious is not obvious at all to the people who should know. The standard accounts do not say what PP Gravel says quite clearly. They say the opposite. They say (like Cockburn) there was no change of policy, meaning the policy of escalation. What should be "obvious," however, and what the PP say, is that there was no change in the policy of withdrawal until after Kennedy's death. There's a big difference. Almost no one says that Johnson continued Kennedy's withdrawal policy, and then reversed it. They say Johnson continued Kennedy's policy of escalation.
Here are a few examples I've collected, quite at random (emphasis added):
...President Kennedy...began the process of backing up American military aid with "advisers." At the time of his murder there were 23,000 [sic] of them in South Vietnam. President Johnson took the same view of the importance of Vietnam...(J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, 1980, p. 988-989).
Although Johnson followed Kennedy's lead in sending more and more troops to Vietnam (it peaked at 542,000, in 1969), it was never enough to meet General Westmoreland's demands... (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987, p. 405).
By October 1963, some 16,000 American troops were in Vietnam... Under President Johnson, the "advisors" kept increasing... Lyndon Johnson, who had campaigned in 1964 as a "peace candidate," inherited and expanded the Vietnam policy of his predecessor (Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, A Pocket History of the United States, 1981, p. 565-566).
I haven't read Schlesinger's RFK, but you're right, he certainly doesn't mention the withdrawal plan in the earlier book.
The "earlier book" was A Thousand Days (1965). Chomsky's point, later elaborated in Rethinking Camelot, was that Schlesinger and other "Camelot hagiographers" changed their recollections of Kennedy's intentions in Vietnam after the Tet offensive in 1968, which was the turning point in the war, i.e. when Johnson's "wise men" (key advisers) finally decided the war was not winnable and to withdraw.
He buries a brief reference to the Oct. 2 White House statement in a context which makes it seem both insignificant and based on a misapprehension of the situation by McNamara, who
...thought that the political mess had not yet infected the military situation and, back in Washington, announced (in spite of a strong dissent from William Sullivan of Harriman's staff who accompanied the mission) that a thousand American troops could be withdrawn by the end of the year and that the major part of the American military task would be completed by the end of 1965.
This announcement, however, was far less significant than McNamara's acceptance of the Lodge pressure program [on Diem] (A Thousand Days, 1965, p. 996).
Schlesinger does not indicate that this "far less significant" announcement was a statement of official policy, implemented nine days later by NSAM 263, confirmed at the Honolulu conference on Nov. 20, and (supposedly) reaffirmed by Johnson in NSAM 273.
Stanley Karnow, instead of citing the documents themselves, substitutes his own convoluted "analysis":
...what Kennedy wanted from McNamara and Taylor was a negative assessment of the military situation, so that he could justify the pressures being exerted on the Saigon regime. But Taylor and McNamara would only further complicate Kennedy's problems (Vietnam, 1983, p. 293).
This image of a recalcitrant McNamara and Taylor presenting a positive report when Kennedy expected a negative one is absurd, first because both McNamara and Taylor were in fact opposed to withdrawal, and second because if Kennedy had wanted a negative report, he would have had no trouble procuring one. Karnow goes on to say that McNamara and Taylor's true motivation for recommending the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of the year was "to placate Harkins and the other optimists" (p. 293). First McNamara and Taylor are presented as defying the president's "true wishes," and then as deliberately misrepresenting the situation to "placate" the commanding general (without bothering to explain why troop withdrawals would be particularly placating to the general in charge of them). There is no mention of NSAM 263, and the reason is clear. If the recommendations were "riddled with contradictions and compromises" and contrary to the president's wishes, as Karnow says, how would he explain why the president implemented them?
Karnow also tells us why the recommendation to withdraw all US troops by 1965 was made: it was "a prophecy evidently made for domestic political consumption at Kennedy's insistence" (p. 294). But as I've mentioned, I know of no evidence that there was more public or political opposition to engagement than there was to disengagement (plenty of the latter even within the administration). Karnow has Kennedy wanting a negative report, getting a positive one, and then insisting on announcing it publicly for a political effect that would do him at least as much harm as good.
I could go on and on. Very rarely do we find a deviation from the standard myth, such as Richard Goodwin:
In later years Johnson and others in his administration would assert that they were merely fulfilling the commitment of previous American presidents. The claim was untrue–even though it was made by men, like Bundy and McNamara, who were more anxious to serve the wishes of their new master than the memory of their dead one. During the first half of 1965 I attended meetings, participated in conversations, where the issues of escalation were discussed. Not once did any participant claim that we had to bomb or send combat troops because of "previous commitments," that these steps were the inevitable extension of past policies. They were treated as difficult and serious decisions to be made solely on the basis of present conditions and perceptions. The claim of continuity was reserved for public justification; intended to conceal the fact that a major policy change was being made–that "their" war was becoming "our" war (Remembering America, 1988, p. 373).
Thanks to accounts like those of Schlesinger and Karnow, the general public has not even been aware that there was a withdrawal policy, much less that Johnson reversed it–despite the clear account in PP Gravel. If the Stone film has informed people of this much, it has performed a public service.
You say JFK's most trusted advisers, after the military assessment changed, proceeded haltingly and ambiguously toward committing US combat troops.
"Taylor, for one," Chomsky had told me, "was dragging his feet on this well into 1965. The chiefs remained ambiguous. Shoup called publicly for withdrawal, in the strongest terms, in 1965, at a time when all the Kennedy folk were still extreme hawks" (5/21/92).
I don't see the point. Surely you don't mean to imply that the chiefs were doves. (I would be interested to see that quote from Shoup, but in any case 1965 was not 1963). Do you mean that if they had been in on a coup, they would have sent the Marines in immediately? That would have been too obvious. There had to be some transition period, some pretext that the military situation had changed, before the big commitment was made. It didn't take long, and there was plenty of time, once Johnson was in the White House. They didn't need Goldwater.
Chomsky had referred to "the CIA, or whoever," who would have had far more reason to knock off LBJ in favor of a real alternative: Goldwater. LBJ "was more dovish than JFK had been a year earlier," and Goldwater was an extreme hawk, so the putative warmongers would have profited from getting rid of LBJ more than from JFK (5/21/92).
He [Goldwater] also would have been too obvious a change. The goal was to establish and perpetuate precisely the myth that endures today–that "there was no change in policy."
This is the whole point I am trying to make. Once this myth is shattered, one way or another, the question of a connection between the policy change and the assassination is inevitable.
I quite agree that the JFK-Vietnam issue is narrow, if you define it as whether US imperialism should take the form of counterinsurgency (JFK's preference) or full-scale war. But that, for me, is not the issue at all.
The issue is whether the government is so corrupt, so powerful, and so much in control of our minds that it can murder (even) the president and keep it secret for more than a quarter of a century. It's not a matter of Kennedy as a person; his life was worth no more or less than anyone else's. I guess I'm thinking "strategically" again, but if the assassination was a coup, it is the most dramatic and powerful demonstration of the illegitimacy of the government, of the structures of the government, of the necessity for radical change that I can imagine. If anything like ideas can be the stuff of revolution, this is one, and I simply do not understand how you can deny the political significance of it. Do you believe the Warren Report, or even give it the benefit of the doubt? If you do in this case, where there is so much evidence to the contrary, how can you doubt their word about anything?
Re Prouty (haven't heard from him in a while), if he turns out to be a raving fascist I'll be more than a little embarrassed. What makes you say so? Maybe I've been overly impressed with his "insider" account, but he seems sincere. He was wrong to associate himself with Liberty Lobby, and he's no scholar, and maybe a raving conspiracist, but why "fascist"? I'm surprised that you say "serious journalists dismiss him," since we both know how much that is worth.
I think Epstein is the one who thinks the KGB did it, which is why I haven't read him. The best books I know on the assassination are Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, Jim Marrs' Crossfire, and Groden and Livingstone's High Treason. Prouty has a book coming out in the fall, but I haven't seen it.
You ask what makes me assume that JFK knew more of the truth about the war than McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, Hilsman, etc. I didn't mean to imply that. After reading Newman, I believe Taylor and Harkins, at least, knew the truth, and lied. How much JFK knew about the true military situation, and when, what game he was playing, and whose side McNamara and Bundy, etc. were on, I suppose will go unanswered.
We do not need any of these answers, though, to make a rational connection between the assassination and the withdrawal policy reversal. It cannot be proved, but it is the best theory of the assassination I have heard. If that–the desire for rational explanation–is wish-fulfillment, then it is wish-fulfillment.
I don't see what "right-wing nuts" have to do with it one way or another.
Chomsky had referred to "Philip Green in the last Nation," who had suggested that "maybe right-wing nuts thought" JFK was going to abort their war. "Sure, maybe," Chomsky wrote. "On that 'theory' anything that happens gets an explanation: it was done by right-wing nuts, who may have thought... That's desperation, not political analysis" (5/21/92).
Are you a right-wing nut if you "believe" (but cannot prove) that the CIA helped assassinate Allende, Lumumba, Trujillo, etc.?
The pro-war forces surrounding Kennedy were not "right-wing nuts," in the usual sense of the term. They were the Vice President, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, McCone, the Joint Chiefs, etc. And, you will want to say, JFK too. But look at what we know. We know there was a withdrawal plan, and it was his plan. We cannot know if he would have carried it out, but we know that it was still his official policy on the day he was shot. What is irrational about suspecting that the pro-war forces would have assumed that he would do what he said he would do, that they feared he would do what he said he would do? Instead, we have a quasi-universal consensus that he would not have done what he said he was going to do. That is the point where the question of rationality, belief, and wish-fulfillment should be asked, in my opinion.
Kennedy was the only one of the bunch that we can say with certainty did support the withdrawal policy, because he was the one ultimately responsible for it. He is also the only one we can not say supported the policy reversal, because he was dead by the time it occurred.
Everything else is speculation. But the plain facts–the assassination and the policy reversal–suffice to support the hypothesis that Kennedy was killed in order to ensure that the withdrawal policy would be reversed and that the war, eventually worth $570 billion to the warmongers, would take place. The curious thing to me is how this not only rational but (one would think) obvious thesis has been suppressed in the mainstream. As I said last time, it strikes me as a perfect example of Orwell's problem.
I hope I've been able to hammer out some common ground, because frankly I'm surprised to find us (apparently) disagreeing on this. On the other hand, it confirms what I feel–that the assassination is the key to a lot of things, not only Vietnam. If it was just another US government-sponsored murder, I don't think we'd be talking about it at all.
With best regards,
Michael
In his reply of 7/1/92 Chomsky said he had finished about 100 pages of a manuscript (which I presume became Rethinking Camelot) attacking the "Schlesinger-Newman-Stone (etc.)" thesis that JFk "had a secret plan to withdraw." It would be hard, he said, "to find a historical thesis more utterly refuted by the evidence."
Rather than try to summarize this lengthy letter (10 pages, single-spaced), most of which is in Rethinking Camelot anyway, I will refer to it in notes to my reply.