4. Reactions to Oliver Stone's JFK
Why do other historians find this observation by Goodwin so difficult to make? Because to acknowledge the fact of a major policy change in Vietnam means to acknowledge the possibility that the president was killed in order to effect this change.
Since this is precisely the thesis of Oliver Stone's JFK, it is not surprising to see that the critics have followed the same avoidance tactics.
The Wall Street Journal refers to the putative connection with Vietnam policy – which is the main point of the film – only obliquely, halfway through the review:
We further agree that November 1963 was a turning point in the American commitment to Vietnam. But the key was not the assassination of JFK but the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem three weeks earlier. Once President Kennedy gave the go-ahead for a coup against an allied government in the name of winning the war, the U.S. was deeply committed indeed. Lyndon Johnson, who had opposed the coup, was left to pick up the pieces (12/27/91, p. A10).
The crucial fact presented in the film – that Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal plan – is not even mentioned.
Time refers, also indirectly and buried midway in the article, to the portrayal of Kennedy's Vietnam policy as a figment of the imaginations of "the last misty-eyed believers in Camelot":
They still hold to the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's JFK: a Galahad-like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister right-wing military-industrial complex to bring the troops home, ban the Bomb and ensure racial equality on the home front – a Kennedy killed because he was just too good to live (European ed., 1/13/92, p. 39)
Here the word Vietnam does not even appear, and "bringing the troops home" is presented as only one of several equally mythical Kennedy objectives. Whether banning the Bomb and ensuring racial equality were on Kennedy's agenda is debatable, but his decision to bring the troops home is not, or should not be.
In an article entitled "Does Stone's JFK Murder the Truth?" (International Herald Tribune, 12/17/91, reprinted from the New York Times), Tom Wicker writes – also about halfway through – that according to Stone and Garrison Kennedy "seemed to question" the goals of those who "wanted the war in Vietnam to be fought and the United States to stand tall and tough against the Soviets..." This not only reduces Kennedy's withdrawal decision to a "question" but implies that even that is not certain: he did not decide, he questioned, that is, he seemed to question.
Iain Johnstone tells readers of the Sunday Times (1/26/91, Sect. 6, pp. 12-13), again at mid-point position in his article, that the idea that Kennedy was "about to let down the military and munitions men by pulling out of Vietnam" is "doubtful." The only thing that is doubtful here is whether Johnstone has bothered to read the documents.
On the last page of a seven-page article in GQ (Jan. 1992, p. 75), Nicholas Lemann finally confronts Garrison's and Stone's main thesis by referring not to the documents but to a 1964 interview with Robert Kennedy. This is apparently the same 1964 interview cited by Herbert Parmet (discussed above). I have not been able to consult the original material, which is part of an oral history collection at the JFK Library in Boston, but it is interesting that Lemann cuts off the quotation at a strategic point.
Interviewer: Did the president feel that we would have to go into Vietnam in a big way?
RFK: We certainly considered what would be the result if you abandon Vietnam, even Southeast Asia, and whether it was worthwhile trying to keep and hold on to.
Interviewer: What did he say? What did he think?
RFK: He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile...
This has to be a deliberate misrepresentation. The ellipsis conceals what we know from Parmet's citation:
As Bobby Kennedy later said, his brother had reached the point where he felt that South Vietnam was worth keeping for psychological and political reasons "more than anything else." (Parmet, p. 336).
Piecing these two parts of RFK's remark together, the complete sentence would seem to have been:
He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile for psychological and political reasons more than anything else.
As I have already mentioned, "it was worthwhile" in this context more likely meant "it was not worthwhile" (psychological and political reasons hardly justifying a war), especially since we know, just as Robert knew, that President Kennedy had decided to terminate US military participation by the end of 1965.
The German reviews of JFK, though they generally take Stone's thesis more seriously than the American ones, are equally evasive on the point of Kennedy's Vietnam policy. Several long articles do not mention it at all (Kurt Kister, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1/22/92, p. 8; Verena Lueken, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1/24/92, p. 29). Peter Buchka in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (1/23/92, p. 10) mentions only that "a withdrawal from Vietnam," according to Garrison and Stone, would have deprived the weapons industry of gigantic profits. Peter Körte in the Frankfurter Rundschau (1/24/92, p. 22) notes that President Kennedy "said he would withdraw the troops from Vietnam if he was reelected," which is only half the truth.
The only German critic who even mentions NSAM 263, Rolf Paasch, the American correspondent for the (Berlin) Tageszeitung, questions Stone's "interpretation" of it:
Whether his [JFK's] hints in 1963 about a withdrawal of US military advisers from Vietnam really demonstrated the conversion of a Cold Warrior, as Stone interprets on the basis of NSAM 263, cited in the film, or whether it was only opportunistic rhetoric aimed at his liberal supporters, is unclear (1/23/92, p. 18).
Here we are presented with two alternatives: NSAM 263 demonstrates either that Kennedy was a "converted Cold Warrior" or a liar. The possibility that he remained a Cold Warrior who just didn't feel like sacrificing thousands of American lives in Vietnam is not even considered. Why Paasch feels a clearly expressed presidential policy directive can be characterized as a "hint," why it requires "interpretation," and why he feels at liberty to question its sincerity, he does not say. It is clear that he has done his research by relying on the "interpretations" of American scholars like the ones we have discussed rather than on the prima facie documentary evidence.
Spiegel mentions Kennedy's Vietnam policy in the form of a rhetorical question: "In the weeks preceding the assassination, didn't he think about withdrawing the advisers from Vietnam?" (12/16/92, p. 192). If presidents issued NSAMs every time they "think about" something, the world would be a good deal more confused than it is.
In a box entitled "Was It [the assassination] a Plot to Keep the U.S. in Vietnam?" Time says that in Stone's movie Kennedy had "secret plans to withdraw from Vietnam" (2/3/92, European ed., p. 63). There was nothing secret about the White House statement on Oct. 2 or the press conference on Oct. 31, and the confirmation of the withdrawal plan at the conference in Honolulu was reported in the New York Times on Nov. 21, 1963. Certainly the withdrawal plan was not a secret within the Kennedy administration.
Then, magnanimously offering to set the record straight by presenting "the evidence," Time says:
Kennedy confided to certain antiwar Senators that he planned to withdraw from Vietnam if re-elected, but publicly he proclaimed his opposition to withdrawal. In October 1963 he signed a National Security Action Memo – NSAM 263 – that ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 of the 16,000 or so U.S. military "advisers."
After the assassination, Lyndon Johnson let the 1,000-man withdrawal proceed, but it was diluted so that it involved mainly individuals due for rotation rather than entire combat units. A few days after taking office, he signed a new action memo – NSAM 273 – that was tougher than a version Kennedy had been considering; it permitted more extensive covert military actions against North Vietnam. No one has come forward, however, with any direct knowledge of a military or CIA conspiracy.
This is a good example of gray propaganda – the half-truth. Kennedy's "opposition to withdrawal" is construed – probably falsely – from the September television interviews. The second half of this truth is that Kennedy publicly proclaimed the opposite – his intention to withdraw – in the Oct. 2 White House statement, of which Time conveniently omits mention. Similarly, Time tells us only half of what is in NSAM 263, leaving out the more important half, which implemented Kennedy's plan to remove all US troops – not just 1,000 – by the end of 1965.
What does the reference to Johnson's NSAM 273 as "tougher than a version Kennedy had been considering" mean? If the "Kennedy version" was Bundy's Nov. 21 draft of 273, this is wrong, because Kennedy never saw that draft, much less approved it.
Time acknowledges that Johnson "permitted more extensive covert military actions against North Vietnam," but why not also acknowledge that these commando operations later provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which in turned served – quite fraudulently, as even establishment commentators now admit – as the basis for the congressional resolution that made Vietnam "our war," that is, exactly what Kennedy said in the September interviews he wanted to avoid.
By leaving out the crucial information, Time has Johnson merely "diluting" the 1,000-man withdrawal and making "tougher" a plan that Kennedy "had been considering." In other words, there was no policy reversal, and thus no background to a possible conspiracy. But let us substitute the whole truth for Time's half-truth, and then see what their conclusion looks like:
[Johnson reversed Kennedy's plan to withdraw all US troops by the end of 1965 and] permitted more extensive covert military actions against North Vietnam. No one has come forward, however, with any direct knowledge of a military or CIA conspiracy.
Now the last sentence makes sense, but it is not the sense that Time wanted to convey. Time meant to tell us that 1) there was no policy reversal and thus no reason to suspect a conspiracy, and 2) that there is no direct evidence of one. The whole truth version tells us 1) that there was a policy reversal and thus good reason to suspect a conspiracy, but 2) there is no direct evidence of one.
There is no excusing such obvious abuse of logic and the evidentiary record. It has to be deliberate, since the writer obviously knows what is in the documents he describes and chooses to omit certain crucial information. What reader who bothers to read Time in the first place would suspect this? It is propaganda, pure but not simple. It takes skill to write like this.