23 Jan. 1993
Dear Noam,
Thanks for giving it one more try. I'll make this as short as possible, since I guess we're both tired of it.
As for the rhetoric, I'm sorry if I overdid it. I didn't mean to sneer.
I think we can simplify, and agree, finally, on the facts, although you find them uninteresting.
As for the "C-thesis" -- that JFK planned to withdraw without victory–the one you wish to refute, we can drop it. I am not defending it.
The "M-thesis"–that JFK planned to withdraw on the assumption of military success –- is a fact, as you say (not a "thesis"):
It is surely true, and uncontroversial, that when McNamara, Bundy, and the other planners realized that their assumptions were false, they withdrew the plans [for withdrawal] based on those assumptions, and that LBJ followed their advice (dragging his feet all the way.
We should also be able to agree that it is equally true and uncontroversial that this change in plans–and of the assumptions–took place after the assassination. As far as I know, NSAM 263 is the last document that directly attests to JFK's plans–and assumptions–regarding the war, and there is no evidence that his plans or assumptions changed after that.
We thus have:
1. a president (JFK) who thought he was winning a war (with a total of 50 or so casualties) and could therefore end it
2. his murder
3. a new president (LBJ) who began to doubt the success of the war within days of the murder of his predecessor and reversed the withdrawal policy within days, weeks, or months (take your pick).
You take these facts, if I understand you now, as uncontroversially true, uninteresting, and–though you did not use the word–coincidental, at least until proven otherwise. Here we disagree. I am content to leave it at that.
We can also agree that the policy reversal has been treated as unimportant in Establishment propaganda (with, as you say, some exceptions) and by "historians of the war, independent of their political persuasion." You say they are right, that "they treat the withdrawal plans as without much importance, for a simple reason: they were without much importance." Here too we disagree.
I say they are behaving in full accordance with the (dominant, but not the only) propaganda model (PM 1) that dictates: "No Vietnam policy change between JFK and LBJ." As for the apparent exceptions, Hilsman and Schlesinger, I have no quarrel with your pre- and post-Tet analysis. Post-Tet, in order to accommodate the Schlesingers and Hilsmans who wish to dissociate themselves with the US defeat, PM 1 can be modified to PM 2 (though PM 1 remains dominant): "LBJ reversed JFK's policy, and JFK might have acted differently"–but God forbid that this should imply any connection with the assassination (note Schlesinger's hysterical insistence on this point).
I am referring to Arthur Schlesinger's review of JFK ("JFK: Truth and Fiction," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 1992). Schlesinger reads Johnson's NSAM 273 as "reversing the Kennedy withdrawal policy." But to connect this with the assassination, as Stone and Garrison do, is "reckless, paranoid, really despicable fantasy."
PM 2 will be extended in due time to PM 3–that powerful, but "renegade," elements in the CIA and elsewhere were behind the assassination. Eventually, the passage of time will allow the arrival of PM 4, which will be a version of the coup d'état theory (which now has the status of a paranoid pipe dream), with the difference that by then the world will be assumed to be (and may be) a completely different (i.e., reformed) place, and nobody will give a damn about Vietnam. Do you notice anyone getting upset now at the suggestions (treated seriously even by Newsweek) that Churchill and Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor and chose to let it happen for strategic reasons?
Newsweek 11/25/91. See Chap. 3.9.
Of course I am talking here about the dominant PMs shared by the elite, not necessarily by the general population, among whom PM 4 is already well established. This is a striking demonstration of the degree of control exercised by the ruling class, regardless of which PM you consider closer to the truth. Half the population thinks the assassination may have been a coup d'état (PM 4), with Vietnam as a direct consequence, the message is flashed across the silver screen to millions–and nothing happens.
The lesson is clear: they have us by the balls. Result: further resignation. The Stone film may have been a bit of a gamble by Time Warner, the biggest propaganda machine in history, but it was well calculated, and it worked. The coup theory has been effectively laid to rest, at least for the time being, and the more general point has been made again, with emphasis: it doesn't matter at all what "the people" think. This particular PM, that we are powerless, is of course a total lie, but it is firmly entrenched, and the end effect of the Stone film, unfortunately, is to entrench it further.
You ask how I would answer your questions about Schlesinger. To the extent that it is worthwhile trying to dig into people's individual psyches, we do not have to assume that he was either lying or ignorant, pre- or post-Tet. He believed what he was supposed to believe, according to PM 1 or PM 2, as one evolved into the other. The third alternative–that there was no withdrawal plan, even one based on the assumption of military success ("victory" if you like)–can be eliminated, as I hope we can finally agree.
Schlesinger's behavior is a fine example of the propaganda model at work, applying more readily to academic elites than to the less "educated" population, who are much slower to conform.
I wrote to Schlesinger recently, by the way, to ask him about the phone call Rusk supposedly made to Kennedy the night before the Bay of Pigs invasion, since the account in A Thousand Days implies that he was there (at Glen Ora) when the call came.
His reply was that he did not have the time to refresh his memory of those events. His memory of critical events he (may have) personally witnessed is not directly accessible, even to himself. He must "refresh" them. How would he go about this, even if he wished to? This is a man, neither a liar nor an ignoramus, who has consistently done what has been expected of him, and what he expects of himself, according to the evolving models of permissible thought which he submits to. I don't think I need to explain further. You wrote the book [Manufacturing Consent].
One more time on the Bundy draft business: 1) Stone started working on JFK long before the declassification (at least summer 1989); 2) that particular aspect/version of the coup theory (that 273 reversed 263) has been around since 1972 (Scott); 3) it doesn't matter anyway (my point).
Chomsky had said my comments on the Bundy draft 273 were "...; I'll skip the only adjective that comes to mind." It was declassified in January 1991, "before Stone's film, at a time when there was little interest in Garrison's version" of the assassination. In other words, it could not be a false document, as I had suggested, created to detract from the film's thesis, because it was declassified 11 months before the film was released.
Chomsky must know, however, that such a commercial film can hardly be prepared in secrecy, and government agencies would certainly have known about the film before January 1991, if they were interested in knowing about such things–as I believe they were (and are).
I meant that as I had said in my letter/article, the draft 273 doesn't matter, doesn't determine anything, because you can interpret it any way you choose. You can argue about whether it is significantly different from LBJ's 273 (Newman), or not significantly different (Chomsky). Then you can argue about whether 273 was really LBJ's, or JFK's, since it was penned one day before the assassination. Chomsky and Newman seem to agree that is was JFK's.
What I was trying (in vain) to get Chomsky to see was the salient point that both versions of 273 explicitly (Paragraph 2) continued JFK's withdrawal policy as stated in 263. The official changes in policy, clearly reversing the withdrawal policy in favor of escalation, came in the first few months of LBJ's administration. And that is the entire point: the change came after the assassination. Whatever the differences between 263 and draft 273, or draft 273 and final 273, the withdrawal policy did not officially change according to those documents; it changed according to documents issued later. In other words, I was trying to say, the whole discussion about 273 and its draft was completely irrelevant, unless we wish to assume that Paragraph 2 of 273 is simply a bald-faced lie.
I did not bring up the matter of the Bundy draft again, but in his next letter (2/11/93), Chomsky supplied the adjective he had skipped in his letter of 1/7/93: "irrelevant." (I suspect originally it was something stronger.) Why? Because "the draft was declassified, pretty much on the normal time scale, before anyone knew of what Stone might be doing."
The illogic here merits attention. First of all, what is the "normal time scale" for declassifying documents? Second, how could it be "normal" for the draft to be declassified (on 1/31/91) [actually 1/21/91] 13 years after the final version (May 1978)? Third, as I have said, plenty of people knew what Stone was doing with JFK before January 1991. Fourth, Chomsky is begging the question: my comments are only "irrelevant" if you assume that his comments are correct, which they are not.
There was another reason why my comments were "irrelevant," namely that falsification of the kind I was postulating was "absolutely unattested in the documentary record." I should note, he remonstrated, "that it would not involve just Bundy–also, all the other top advisers, the State Department historians, etc."
What I should note here, too, is that this point is different from the one that follows. Here Chomsky is dismissing out of hand not the larger conspiracy of the assassination and the war (discussed next), but the mini-conspiracy that would be involved in producing a false government document. These are conspiracies of immensely different proportions, and the fact that Chomsky dismisses both with equal vehemence shows that he is thinking purely categorically here, not realistically.
It is in fact an interesting to ask how many people might be involved in forging such a document. Why did Chomsky assume that "all the top advisers" and "State Department historians" (did he mean the authors of the Pentagon Papers?) would have to be "involved"? What does this mean? It only takes one man to write a letter, and presumably one man could slip it into whatever original archive preserves such things (presuming there is one–another interesting question). Did Chomsky mean that "all" these people–and how many are we talking about, exactly, a half-dozen, perhaps?–would have to remember, in 1991, NOT having seen that piece of paper in 1963? Does Chomsky have such faith in "State Department historians" that if they do not object to the appearance of the document in 1991, and accuse the government (for whom they work, or worked) of forging it, then that must mean the document is authentic?
Finally, I agree that it is difficult to conceive of a coup being carried out under the noses of so many people (about 220 million). But it would not have required nearly as many conspirators as you imagine. Just look at Schlesinger. He was close to the action, and I don't think he was a conspirator, a liar, or a fool, either then, when he conformed to PM 1, or now, when he conforms to PM 2. Why should anyone have thought differently? That takes care of 99.9 % of everybody involved. As for the rest, the conspirators themselves (e.g., for my money, Bundy), surely you don't expect them to have left a paper trail, or to confess. A historical first? So what? So was the holocaust, the moon landing, the capitalization of the Soviet Union, etc.
Best regards,
Michael
Chomsky replied on 2/11/93, mostly repeating his version of the "facts," which are "well-established, and about as uncontroversial as historical facts of this nature can be." "Specifically," he continued, "contrary to what you say, there was no policy reversal. The logic "is extremely clear. Those who have any faith that JFK might have reversed his invariant policy, and called for withdrawal even with impairment of the war effort, are assuming that he had some special quality that distinguished him from all of his advisers and associates, and that he kept so secret that none of them had an inkling of it and it has left no trace in the voluminous record." If I were to "think it through," I would see that this position came down to nothing but "religious faith, akin to faith in the Messiah."