5. Fire from the left
Alexander Cockburn, a talented writer and normally reasonable columnist for The Nation, was one of the first to condemn the Stone film. When it comes to the assassination, the views of this "radical leftist" fall right in line with those of the Establishment. In his review of JFK, Cockburn says the question of conspiracy in the assassination
has as much to do with the subsequent contours of American politics as if he had tripped over one of Caroline's dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery (The Nation, 1/6-13/92:6-7).
He doesn't even try to justify this point of view. He rejects the coup theory out of hand, along with all conspiracy theories, and then rejects any possible political significance of the assassination. The question is insignificant because he thinks he knows the answer.
Cockburn fights dirty. He dismisses Scott's "yearning interpretation" of the textual disparities between JFK's White House statement and Johnson's NSAM 273 but fails to mention the most important part of both of these documents – the part referring to the troop withdrawals. The reader cannot know from Cockburn's essay that either document mentions troop withdrawals or that this is a crucial point in Scott's analysis.
Since Cockburn makes no mention of JFK's withdrawal decision, it is easy for him to say there was "no change in policy" and call Scott's assertion to the contrary "fantasizing," but this misrepresents the facts. Cockburn has read Scott and he knows what is in the documents – not only in the first paragraphs, which he quotes, but also in the third paragraph of the White House statement and in the second paragraph of NSAM 273. These paragraphs refer to the withdrawal plan. Cockburn omits any mention of them.
Ignoring this documentary evidence of October and November, Cockburn backtracks to the spring of 1963 to argue with John Newman's "frequently repeated claim [in his then unpublished book, JFK and Vietnam] that by February or March of 1963 JFK had decided to pull out of Vietnam once the 1964 election was won," a claim for which Cockburn sees "an absence of any substantial evidence":
Newman's only sources for this are people to whom J.F.K. would, as a matter of habitual political opportunism, have spoken in such terms, such as Senators Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse, both of whom, particularly the latter, were critical of J.F.K.'s escalation in Vietnam.
There is no mention of Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, to whom Kennedy repeatedly told the same thing he told Mansfield. Would Kennedy have been being politically opportunistic with the most trusted members of his personal staff?
In a subsequent issue of The Nation (3/9/92:290,317-320), replying to letters from Zachary Sklar, Peter Scott, and Michael Parenti, Cockburn repeats his claim that there is no evidence to show that Kennedy had planned to withdraw as early as the spring of 1963, "aside from some conversations recollected by men such as Kennedy's political operative Kenny O'Donnell or Senators Wayne Morse and Mike Mansfield." This means that either Kennedy was lying, or O'Donnell et al. were lying.
The counterargument to these "lies" is Kennedy's "numerous statements to the contrary. There were plenty of those." Cockburn mentions two – a statement in July and his remarks in the Sept. 9 NBC interview. Newman explains these by suggesting that "J.F.K. was dissembling, concealing his private thoughts, throwing the hawks off track." Cockburn calls this "data-free surmises" and "a willful credulity akin to religious mania."
Why is it "credulous" to suggest that JFK was dissembling? And if this is "credulous," why is it less so to assume, as Cockburn does, that JFK was not only dissembling, but outright lying, to O'Donnell et al.? JFK was much more explicit in his reported remarks to O'Donnell and Powers than he was in the TV interviews. Which would be the more likely place for a politician to dissemble – in a TV interview or in a private conversation with his most trusted personal advisers? Did JFK tell the absolute truth on TV and lie to his advisers? Because Newman says the opposite, Cockburn says he is a religious maniac. Is this rational?
The crucial point, however, which Cockburn totally ignores, is that Kennedy did not wait for the 64 election as he said he would. He made the withdrawal announcement on October 2, 1963, and implemented it with NSAM 263 on October 11. Regardless of what he said publicly or privately in July or September, his official policy in October was withdrawal.
Just as he fails to mention the crucial documents – the McNamara-Taylor report and NSAM 263 – in his article, in his reply to the letters Cockburn, like Time magazine, fails to mention the most significant parts of both documents, which is not the 1,000-man pullout by the end of 1963 but the total pullout by the end of 1965. One cannot know, either from Time or from Cockburn, that Kennedy not only wanted 1,000 men out in two months but everybody out in two years.
Cockburn then says the 1,000-man withdrawal was "proposed" by McNamara and Taylor because "at that time they thought the war was going according to plan and victory was in sight." He fails to say 1) that this proposal was implemented nine days later by NSAM 263, and 2) that plenty of Kennedy's advisers were telling him that the war was not going well.
Cockburn keeps putting the word "victory" in Kennedy's mouth, but the question Kennedy was facing was, Should we fight this war for the South Vietnamese or not? If JFK's answer was no, what else could he have done than declare the mission accomplished and withdraw? This is not "victory" in Cockburn's sense, but most likely a ploy to get out without losing face. The alternative would have been immediate, complete withdrawal, making it obvious to the world that the US had abandoned an ally. But withdrawal by 1966 on the basis of having accomplished a limited military objective (not "victory") would have been politically tolerable. What else could he have said? "Sorry folks, I made a terrible mistake in trying to support this dictatorial South Vietnamese regime against their own people, so we're going home"? No. He had to say: "We've done what we can and all we promised to do, but it's their war, so we're going home."
Kennedy was not an idiot, but he would have to have been an idiot to have been deluded by "euphoric reports from the field," as Cockburn says he was. Many of the reports Kennedy received were anything but euphoric, and the White House statement of October 2 was not euphoric either:
The political situation in South Viet-Nam remains deeply serious. The United States has made clear its continuing opposition to any repressive actions in South Viet-Nam [by the Diem brothers]. While such actions have not yet significantly affected the military effort, they could do so in the future.
Kennedy would have been a complete fool to have thought that "victory was in sight," as Cockburn and others suggest.
The fact remains that deluded or not deluded, Kennedy decided to withdraw. One can't have it both ways. One can't say that Kennedy was deluded into the withdrawal decision because he thought we were winning, on the one hand, and also say he didn't really mean it, that he was just playing politics. But this is exactly what Cockburn says: "There were also domestic political reasons for the adoption of such a course." What makes him think the political pressure to withdraw was greater than the pressure to escalate? JFK's own Cabinet, the Vice-President, the military, the CIA, and right-wing forces in Congress and in the general population were against withdrawal. That is why he told O'Donnell et al. that he should be re-elected before withdrawing, because he knew there was substantial opposition to it. The situation in Vietnam deteriorated so badly in the summer and fall, however, that he was forced to announce the withdrawal plan probably earlier than he would have liked.
Cockburn says that when Kennedy discussed withdrawal "a qualifier was always there." "Always" turns out to be on two occasions, neither of which supports the point. The first is a quote from "one Pentagon official" (who?) as saying (when?) that the withdrawal could begin "providing things go well" – as if what some anonymous person said sometime somewhere could be taken as a "qualifier" to what Kennedy thought or did in October 1963 or any other time. But time, as we have already seen, is a minor factor in Cockburn's sense of history, and in the next sentence we are taken back to the press conference on May 22, 1963, where Kennedy said:
We are hopeful that the situation in Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgement at the present time. There is a long hard struggle to go.
I suppose it is the words "hopeful" and "some" that Cockburn takes as qualifiers. He fails to note, however, that October comes after May, or that this fact has any significance. In October, McNamara and Taylor expressed complete withdrawal not as a "hope" but as a belief:
We believe that the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965, the terminal date which we are taking as the time objective of our counterinsurgency programs (NYT, Pentagon Papers, p. 213).
The second "qualifier" Cockburn cites is contained in "the minutes to the discussion of NSAM 263." He gives no reference, but says these notes "have J.F.K. saying the same thing" – that the withdrawal "should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed." Even if Kennedy actually said this, it does not say the same thing he said in May, nor does it "qualify" the withdrawal ordered by NSAM 263. It is perfectly compatible with the "mission accomplished" posture. US troops were indeed no longer "needed" (as in truth they never were) in Vietnam unless they were going to fight the South Vietnamese's war for them, which NSAM 263 is clearly intended to prevent.
"And in implementing the withdrawal order," Cockburn continues, still apparently quoting from these anonymous minutes, "J.F.K. directed that 'no further reductions in U.S. strength would be made until the requirements of the 1964 [military] campaign were clear.'" But again, why does this "qualify" the withdrawal policy? The withdrawal was to be phased over the next two years and obviously would have to be done with consideration for the troops that would remain in country in the meantime. Instead of trying to support this foolish innuendo, Cockburn jumps back into his time machine to finish the paragraph:
Remember that already by the end of 1961 J.F.K. had made the decisive initial commitment to military intervention, and that a covert campaign of terror and sabotage against the North was similarly launched under his aegis.
We cannot discuss NSAM 263, in other words, without remembering 1961, but who is suggesting that Kennedy's Vietnam policy was the same in 1961 as it was in late 1963? Mr. Cockburn. The truth is that Kennedy changed his mind and reversed his policy – from buildup to withdrawal – and after the assassination Johnson reversed it again. Cockburn implies that the "decisive initial commitment" was, though only "initial," also "decisive," that is, permanent. But Cockburn himself refers to NSAM 263 as "implementing the withdrawal order." How can the initial commitment in 1961 have been "decisive" if the opposite decision was implemented in October 1963?
In the following paragraph Cockburn again quotes an Administration official to represent what Kennedy supposedly thought, though this time at least the official is identified:
On November 13, 1963, The New York Times published an interview with Michael Forrestal, a senior member of Kennedy's National Security Council, in which he said, "It would be folly...at the present time" to pursue "a negotiated settlement between North and South Vietnam."
To buttress this statement, Cockburn then quotes "J.F.K. himself" in his press conference the next day:
We do have a new situation there, and a new government, we hope, an increased effort in the war....Now, that is our object, to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate – which they can of course, much more freely when the assault from the inside, and which is manipulated from the North, is ended. So the purpose of the meeting in Honolulu is how to pursue these objectives.
Cockburn's interpretation:
Thus, J.F.K. was defining victory – to be followed by withdrawal of U.S. "advisers" – as ending the internal Communist assault in the South, itself manipulated from the North.
Again the word "victory," which is Cockburn's. The order of priorities – victory, then withdrawal – is also Cockburn's, not Kennedy's. The first objective Kennedy mentions is to bring Americans home. The last point is added almost as an afterthought: of course it would be better if the support of the North for the insurrection in the South could be ended. But it was clear to everyone, especially after the Buddhist uprisings in the summer, that the insurrection would continue even without support from the North unless post-Diem leadership emerged that the South Vietnamese themselves would be willing to fight for. This is what Kennedy meant when he said "We do have new situation there." The hope he expressed for "an increased effort in the war" was for an increased effort by the South Vietnamese!
Cockburn is implying the opposite – that Kennedy hoped for an increased war effort by the US, and that this was to be the topic of the Honolulu conference. There is no basis for this assumption. Apparently, there is still no reliable record of that conference, which is strange. Scott's conclusion, based on contemporary news reports and references to the meeting in the Pentagon Papers, is that the Accelerated Withdrawal Plan was confirmed, i.e. the reduction in military aid and troop withdrawals implemented by NSAM 263 on Oct. 11. Cockburn tells us the opposite:
As Newman acknowledges, the upshot of the Honolulu meeting was that for "the first time" the "shocking deterioration of the war was presented in detail to those assembled, along with a plan to widen the war, while the 1,000-man withdrawal was turned into a meaningless paper drill.
The question appears unresolved. What was decided at Honolulu – to continue withdrawal or "widen the war"? In fact, Johnson's NSAM 273 did both – continued the withdrawal plan and increased covert military operations, but only the first of these contradictory policies was included in Kennedy's NSAM 263. That is what counts, especially since we do not know what happened at Honolulu, and there is no evidence that Kennedy knew either. In any case, he did not change his policy between Oct. 11 (NSAM 263) and Nov. 22.
Cockburn's next argument is based on McGeorge Bundy's draft of NSAM 273:
The next day [after the Honolulu conference, i.e. Nov. 21], back in the White House, Bundy put the grim conclusions of the meeting into the draft language of NSAM 237 [sic; presumably 273], which, as he told Newman in 1991, he "tried to bring...in line with the words that Kennedy might want to say."
Cockburn assumes that Bundy's draft, whose first paragraph is almost identical with the first paragraph of Johnson's NSAM 273, proves that Kennedy would have said the same thing Johnson did. But there are several obvious questions he should be asking. First, why has this document, along with the other documents issuing from the Honolulu conference, remained classified so long? Second, why would Bundy draft the text of an important policy directive based on the results of a meeting which he had not yet even discussed with the president?
It is quite wrong to assume that Kennedy would have approved the language of this draft just because Bundy thinks he would have. Cockburn forgets that we are talking here about the possibility of a coup d'état. Bundy's motives and credibility are at least as suspect as Johnson's. He was a hawk on Vietnam from the word go and thus in the same camp as Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, and CIA director McCone. He had strong ties with the CIA through his brother William and his former professor at Yale, Richard Bissell, the CIA Director of Operations Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs, and through his job as National Security Adviser. As the president's personal liaison with the Director of Central Intelligence, who in turn represented the entire intelligence community, Bundy was the highest national security official to survive the presidential "transition" – the only person in a position under both Kennedy and Johnson to know all the nation's secrets. In short, if it was a coup, Bundy must have been in on it. If indeed he wrote the draft of NSAM on Nov. 21 (i.e., if it is not a falsification to confuse the "record"), he may have written it for Johnson.
Cockburn doesn't hesitate to call Kennedy a liar, but he takes Johnson at his word. Johnson said about his first presidential conference on Vietnam on Nov. 24, 1963, two days after the assassination:
Most of the advisers agreed that we could begin withdrawing some of our advisers by the end of the year and a majority of them by the end of 1965.
Cockburn thinks this proves that "J.F.K. in the last days of his Administration, and L.B.J. in the first days of his, defined victory in the same terms, and both were under similar illusions." LBJ, whom O'Donnell, for example, portrays as a bald-faced liar on several occasions, could not possibly be lying! Again Cockburn puts the word "victory" in Kennedy's mouth, and ignores the question astutely raised by Scott: If there was no change of policy, why was Vietnam so important that it was the first order of business of the new president? If Johnson was under "similar illusions" as Kennedy, why did he say in his memoirs that he "felt a national security meeting was essential at the earliest possible moment" (quoted by Scott, p. 224)? This meeting was held on Sunday, Nov. 24, but Scott points out that according to the Pentagon Papers and the New York Times there was an even earlier meeting with McNamara, on Saturday morning, where a memo was discussed in which
Mr. McNamara said that the new South Vietnamese government was confronted by serious financial problems, and that the U.S. must be prepared to raise planned MAP [Military Assistance Plan] levels (Scott, p. 225, quoting the Gravel edition).
First, this does not seem to be what was decided in Honolulu, where according to the New York Times the Accelerated Withdrawal Plan was finalized. Secondly, if this is what was decided in Honolulu, why did McNamara wait two full days without discussing it with Kennedy and discuss it with Johnson the morning after the assassination? Scott's conclusion that the withdrawal policy was in fact reversed immediately after the assassination clarifies both points.
Johnson's opinion on Vietnam was no different on Nov. 23 or 24 from what it was on August 31, 1963, when he said that "it would be a disaster to pull out...we should once again go about winning the war" (Pentagon Papers, NYT, p. 205). This was also Bundy's, Rusk's, and McNamara's position. Kennedy was practically a minority of one in the upper echelons of his own Administration, as Maxwell Taylor has written. But as long as he was boss, his view prevailed. The McNamara-Taylor report Of Oct. 2, 1963, according to Fletcher Prouty, did not represent McNamara's view at all, and was not even written by him. It was written at the Pentagon according to Kennedy's wishes and handed over to McNamara and Taylor in Honolulu when they stopped there on their way back from Saigon, so that they could then hand it to the president in Washington as "their" report.
With Kennedy out of the picture, the hawks took over, reversing the withdrawal policy while maintaining the appearance of continuity.
Noam Chomsky is another radical leftist who is vehemently opposed to what he calls the "withdrawal thesis" ("Vain Hopes, False Dreams," Z, Oct. 1992). Like Cockburn, Chomsky says there was no withdrawal plan, only a "withdrawal on condition of victory" plan, and that arguments to the contrary are nothing more than JFK "hagiography." His argument is more rigorous than Cockburn's, but equally false.
First, it is wrong to assume that all biographers and assassination researchers are JFK hagiographers. One need not deny that Kennedy was as ruthless a cold warrior as any other president to acknowledge that he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Reagan's decision to withdraw from Lebanon doesn't make him a secret dove either.
Second, the withdrawal "thesis" is not a thesis but a fact, amply documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, as already discussed. Since Chomsky himself co-edited Vol. 5, it is surprising that he finds this fact so difficult to acknowledge.
The thesis which Chomsky, like Cockburn, is actually arguing against is his own formulation: that JFK wanted "withdrawal without victory." It is true that according to the record, the withdrawal plan was predicated on the assumption of military success. Chomsky, however, understands this as a condition. This is wrong. There is a substantial difference between saying "The military campaign is progressing well, and we should be able to withdraw by the end of 1965," which is how I read the McNamara-Taylor report and Kennedy's confirmation of it in NSAM 263, and "If we win the war, we will withdraw," which is how Chomsky reads the same documents.
We do not know what Kennedy may have secretly wanted or what he would have done if he had he lived. Whether he really believed the war was going well, as the record states, or privately knew it was not, as Newman contends, is also unknowable. What we do know, from the record, Chomsky notwithstanding, is that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy officially sometime between December 1963 and March 1964.
The point, again, is crucial. If one manages to say, as Chomsky and Cockburn and the other authors discussed here do, that in truth there was no change in policy, that in fact there never was a withdrawal policy but only a policy of escalation and victory (until after Tet 1968), it means that Johnson and Nixon simply continued what Kennedy started. This, in turn, means that the question of the relation of the policy change (since there wasn't one) to the assassination does not arise.
If, however, one states the facts correctly, the question is unavoidable. Exactly when Johnson reversed the policy, and whether he did so because conditions changed, or because perceptions of conditions changed, or for whatever reason, is beside the point. Why avoid the straightforward formulation, which is nothing but a summary of the PP Gravel account: JFK thought the military mission was being accomplished, so he planned to withdraw; Johnson decided that it wasn't, so he killed the withdrawal plan.
The reason is clear. Once you admit that there was a radical policy change in the months following the assassination, whether that change was a reaction to a (presumed) change in conditions or not, you must ask if the change was related to the assassination. Then, like it or not, you are into conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theory is anathema to the leftist or neo-Marxian tradition represented by Cockburn and Chomsky. There are historical reasons for this, of course, since conspiracy theories have been notoriously exploited by the fascist right. Nevertheless, it is as wrong to identify all conspiracy theories with the likes of Hitler and Goebbels as it is to identify Marxist theories with the likes of Stalin and Erich Honecker.
There is an alternative view. In this view, one accepts the fact of the policy change, but denies that it had anything to do with the assassination. It was mere coincidence that the policy change followed the assassination. This is a tenable position, but one that few seem comfortable with, and for a good reason: it is ludicrously naive. Nevertheless, it has apparently become Arthur Schlesinger's position, who reads Johnson's NSAM 273 as "reversing the Kennedy withdrawal policy" ("JFK: Truth and Fiction," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 1992). But, he adds, to connect the policy reversal with the assassination, as Stone and Garrison do, is "reckless, paranoid, really despicable fantasy..."
Despite Schlesinger's hysterical denials, the policy reversal is the most plausible motive for the assassination. Thus the biggest lie – the Lone Nut theory of history – requires another one: there was no policy reversal. It is astonishing that so many commentators of diverse political stripes have succumbed to this imperative.