3. The Establishment perspective
Let us take some examples, chosen 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, 2nd ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 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, NY: Random House, 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, 7th ed., NY: Pocket Books, 1981, p. 565-566).
These examples are typical of the more general view. As the treatments become more specialized, it becomes harder to separate fact from obfuscation, but it should be borne in mind that all of the accounts I will review contradict what one would think would be considered the most reliable source: the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers.
The Gravel account devotes 40 pages to the history of the withdrawal policy ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," Vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It states clearly that "the policy of phase out and withdrawal and all the plans and programs oriented to it" ended "de jure" in March 1964 (p. 196). It also states clearly that the change in the withdrawal policy occurred after the assassination:
The only hint that something might be different from on-going plans came in a Secretary of Defense memo for the President three days prior to this NSC meeting [on Nov. 26]....In early December, the President [Johnson] began to have, if not second thoughts, at least a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam. In discussions with his advisors, he set in motion what he hoped would be a major policy review... (p. 196).
There can be no question, then, if we stick to the record, that Kennedy had decided and planned to pull out, had begun to implement those plans, and that Johnson subsequently reversed them.
This clear account in the Gravel edition, however, is obscured in the more widely read New York Times "edition," which is really only a summary of the official history by NYT reporters, with some documents added. The Gravel edition has the actual text, and is significantly different. The NYT reporters gloss over the history of the withdrawal policy in a way that cannot be simply to save space. NSAM 263 is not mentioned at all, and Kennedy's authorization of the McNamara-Taylor recommendations is mentioned only in passing, and inaccurately:
[The McNamara-Taylor report] asserted that the "bulk" of American troops could be withdrawn by the end of 1965. The two men proposed and – with the President's approval – announced that 1,000 Americans would be pulled out by the end of 1963 (p. 176).
That this "announcement" was in fact a White House foreign policy statement is cleverly disguised (McNamara made the announcement, but it was Kennedy speaking through him), along with the fact that the president also approved the more important recommendation – to withdraw all troops by the end of 1965.
Earlier, the NYT reporter quotes a Pentagon Papers (PP) reference to the 1,000-man pullout (again ignoring the more significant total planned withdrawal by 1966) as "strange," "absurd," and "Micawberesque" (p. 113). Then he mentions a statement by McNamara that
...the situation deteriorated so profoundly in the final five months of the Kennedy Administration...that the entire phase-out had to be formally dropped in early 1964.
The reporter's conclusion is that the PP account
presents the picture of an unbroken chain of decision-making from the final months of the Kennedy Administration into the early months of the Johnson Administration, whether in terms of the political view of the American stakes in Vietnam, the advisory build-up or the hidden growth of covert warfare against North Vietnam (p. 114).
This is quite different from the actual (Gravel) account. It implies that the change in the withdrawal ("phase-out") policy began well within Kennedy's administration; Gravel says the change began in December 1963. The "unbroken chain of decision-making" and "advisory build-up" implies that there never was a withdrawal plan.
This has been the pattern followed by virtually all individual historians. In his memoir Kennedy (NY: Harper & Row, 1965), Theodore Sorensen, who was one of Kennedy's speechwriters, does not mention the withdrawal plan at all. Arthur Schlesinger, another Kennedy adviser and a respected historian, has done a curious about-face since 1965, but in this early book he buries a brief reference to the White House policy 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 [in South Vietnam] 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, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 996).
Schlesinger does not indicate that this "far less significant" announcement was a statement of official policy and 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, the author of what many consider to be the "definitive" history of the Vietnam War (Vietnam: A History, NY: Viking Press, 1983), 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 (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. He already had plenty, as a matter of fact, most recently that of Joseph Mendenhall, a State Department official, who had told Kennedy on Sept. 10 that the Diem government was near collapse.
Karnow goes on to enlighten us as to McNamara and Taylor's true motivation for recommending the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of the year: "to placate Harkins and the other optimists" (p. 293). Again, this is patently absurd. 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). Karnow fails to mention NSAM 263, and the reason is clear: he would be hard put to explain, if the recommendations were "riddled with contradictions and compromises" and contrary to the president's wishes, as Karnow says, why the president implemented them with NSAM 263.
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). This is hard to understand, since there was no significant public or "political" opposition to US involvement in Vietnam at that time, but plenty of opposition to disengagement. We now have Kennedy, in Karnow's view, wanting a negative report, getting a positive one, and insisting on announcing it publicly for a political effect that would do him more harm than good!
In an indirect reference to the Oct. 2 White House statement, Karnow begrudges us a small bit of truth:
Kennedy approved the document [the McNamara-Taylor recommendations] except for one nuance. He deleted a phrase calling the U.S. commitment to Vietnam an "overriding" American goal, terming it instead a part of his worldwide aim to "defeat aggression." He wanted to preserve his flexibility (p. 294).
This confirms the importance of the textual changes in the two documents, as discussed above.
In JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984), Herbert Parmet mentions both the White House statement and the McNamara-Taylor report, but in a way that makes the two documents seem totally unrelated to each other. Of the White House announcement Parmet says only:
On October 2 the White House announced that a thousand men would be withdrawn by the end of the year (p. 333).
The larger plan to withdraw all troops by 1965 is not mentioned at all. This is particularly misleading when followed by this statement:
[Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell] Gilpatric later stated that McNamara did indicate to him that the withdrawal was part of the President's plan to wind down the war, but, that was too far in the future (p. 333).
Who is the author of the last part of this sentence, Gilpatric or Parmet? In any case, the end of 1965 was only two years away – hardly "far in the future," much less "too far," whatever that means.
Parmet continues:
Ken O'Donnell has been the most vigorous advocate of the argument that the President was planning to liquidate the American stake right after the completion of the 1964 elections would have made it politically possible (p. 336).
This reduces the fact that Kennedy planned to withdraw, documented in the White House statement and in NSAM 263 and 273, to the status of an argument "advocated" by O'Donnell. This clearly misrepresents O'Donnell's account as well as the documentary record. O'Donnell does not argue that Kennedy wanted to pull out; he quotes Kennedy's own words, uttered in his presence. It is not a matter of interpretation or surmise. Either Kennedy said what O'Donnell says he said, or O'Donnell is a liar. As for the documentary record, in addition to misrepresenting the White House statement, Parmet, like Karnow and Schlesinger, completely ignores NSAM 263 and 273.
Parmet devotes the bulk of his discussion to the purely hypothetical question of what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam if he had lived. Parmet's answer: "It is probable that not even he was sure." This again flies in the face what we know. Kennedy knew what he wanted to do: withdraw. If Parmet's contention is that he would have changed his mind, had he lived, and reversed his withdrawal policy (as Johnson did), that is another matter. Parmet is trying to make us believe that it is not clear that Kennedy wanted to withdraw in the first place, which is plainly wrong.
The hypothetical question is answered by O'Donnell and Powers, who were in a much better position to speculate than Parmet or anyone else, as follows:
All of us who listened to President Kennedy's repeated expressions of his determination to avoid further involvement in Vietnam are sure that if he had lived to serve a second term, the numbers of American military advisers and technicians in that country would have steadily decreased. He never would have committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against the Viet Cong (p. 383).
Parmet says that for JFK "to have withdrawn at any point short of a clear-cut settlement would have been most unlikely" (p. 336). But "a clear-cut settlement" could range from Johnson's aim "to win" the war to Kennedy's more vaguely expressed aim "to support the efforts of the people of that country [South Vietnam] to defeat aggression and to build a peaceful and free society" (White House statement, Oct. 2, 1963).
Parmet cites Sorensen as affirming Kennedy's desire to find a solution "other than a retreat or abandonment of our commitment." This was in fact the solution that the withdrawal plan offered: our mission is accomplished; it's their war now. Parmet quotes from the speech Kennedy was supposed to deliver in Dallas the day he was killed, as if empty rhetoric like "we dare not weary of the test" [of supplying assistance to other nations] contradicted his withdrawal plan. He also cites Dean Rusk, who said in a 1981 interview that "at no time did he [Kennedy] even whisper any such thing [about withdrawal] to his own secretary of state." If that is true, Rusk knew less than the rest of the nation, who were informed by the White House statement on Oct. 2. Finally, Parmet quotes Robert Kennedy as saying that his brother "felt that South Vietnam was worth keeping for psychological and political reasons 'more than anything else,'" as if this supported Parmet's argument that JFK was fully committed to defending that corrupt dictatorship. But RFK could well have meant that South Vietnam was not worth keeping if it meant the US going to war – just the opposite of Parmet's interpretation.
Despite Kenneth O'Donnell's clearly expressed opinion in his 1970 memoir, Parmet manages to have him saying the opposite in a 1976 interview:
When Ken O'Donnell was pressed about whether the President's decision to withdraw meant that he would have undertaken the escalation that followed in 1965, the position became qualified. Kennedy, said O'Donnell, had not faced the same level of North Vietnamese infiltration as did President Johnson, thereby implying that he, too, would have responded in a similar way under those conditions (p. 336).
Now – who said what, exactly? If we read carefully, it is clear that it is Parmet who is "qualifying" O'Donnell's position, and Parmet who is telling us what O'Donnell is "implying" – not O'Donnell.
John Ranelagh, a British journalist and author of what is widely considered an "authoritative" (i.e. sanitized) history of the CIA, describes Kennedy as
...a committed cold warrior, absolutely determined to prevent further communist expansion and in 1963 still smarting from the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and the Cuban missile crisis. It was time to go on the offensive, show these communists what the United States could do if it put its mind to it, and Vietnam seemed the right place. It was an arrogance, born of ignorance of what the world really was like, assuming that American energy and power, applied with conviction, would change an essentially passive world. At the fateful moment, when the United States could have disengaged itself from Vietnam without political embarrassment, there was a President in the White House looking for opportunities to assert American strength.
Kennedy wondered during 1963 whether he was in fact right in deciding that Vietnam was the place for the exercise of this strength, and some of his close associates subsequently were convinced that he would have pulled out had he lived. But his own character and domestic political considerations militated against this actually happening. In 1964 the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, ran on a strong prowar plank, and it would not have suited Kennedy – just as it did not suit Johnson – to face the electorate with the promise of complete disengagement. In addition, in September 1963 McNamara was promising Kennedy that with the proper American effort the war in Vietnam would be won by the end of 1965. No one was listening to the CIA or its analysts (The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, NY: Touchstone, 1987, p. 420; emphasis added).
Ranelagh not only ignores Kennedy's withdrawal decision "at the fateful moment," he transforms it into a desire "to assert strength," and has Kennedy pursuing the buildup for "domestic political considerations." (This is precisely opposite to Karnow's assumption, discussed above.) In the sentence beginning "In addition...", Ranelagh manages to "interpret" McNamara-Taylor's recommendation to pull out of Vietnam as an argument for Kennedy to stay in!
Ranelagh's opinion that "no one was listening to the CIA," implying that the CIA was pessimistic about the war in 1963, contradicts what he says a few pages earlier: "The Pentagon Papers...showed, apart from the earliest period in 1963-64, the agency's analysis was consistently pessimistic about U.S. involvement..." (p. 417, my emphasis). This is the familiar "lone voice in the wilderness" image of the CIA: only they were "intelligent" enough to read the writing on the wall. But if that is true, why did the agency try so hard (from 1954 to 1964) to get us involved in the first place, and why did they continue to support the war effort in clandestine operations throughout? The CIA's Ray Cline says (as quoted by Ranelagh):
McCone [CIA Director under Kennedy and Johnson] and I talked a lot about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and we both agreed in advising that intervention there would pay only if the United States was prepared to engage in a long, difficult process of nation-building in South Vietnam to create the political and economic strength to resist a guerrilla war (p. 420).
Ranelagh intreprets this as evidence that the CIA wanted to withdraw from Vietnam in 1963. Nonsense. No one in the top echelons of the CIA, least of all Director John McCone, supported Kennedy's withdrawal plan in 1963. Nor does Cline's remark imply this. He is saying that the CIA's opinion (i.e. one of their opinions) was that to be "successful," the US would have to dig in for the long haul. I think the "long haul" is precisely what the CIA wanted, and precisely what Kennedy decided he did not want. That is why he decided to withdraw. Clearly, more powerful forces than Kennedy himself combined to make the intervention "pay" as the Johnson administration proceeded to engage in that "long, difficult process of nation-building" that generated hundreds of billions of dollars for the warmongers, destroying millions of lives in the process.
Neil Sheehan, one of the editors of the NYT Pentagon Papers and the author of another acclaimed history of the war (A Bright Shining Lie, London: Picador, 1990), devotes exactly one sentence in 861 pages to the crucial White House statement of Oct. 2, and not a single word to NSAM 263 or 273. His view is consistent: the generals, except for a few, like John Paul Vann (the biographical subject of the book), were incredibly stupid to think the war was being won by our side, but Kennedy was even more stupid because he believed them. The McNamara-Taylor report is presented as the height of naivety, which, Sheehan adds sarcastically,
...recommended pulling out 1,000 Americans by the end of 1963 in order to demonstrate how well the plans for victory were being implemented. The White House announced a forthcoming withdrawal of this first 1,000 men (p. 366).
But "The President," Sheehan says, "gained no peace of mind." He was "confused" and "angry" at the conflicting reports. In other words, according to Sheehan, the withdrawal plan reflects nothing but Kennedy's "confusion" and misjudgement of the situation, based on the equally false evaluation of his Secretary of State and top military adviser.
As for the CIA, Sheehan, like Ranelagh, says the "analysts at the CIA told him [Kennedy] that Saigon's military position was deteriorating..." (p. 366). But Kennedy was too "confused" to understand this, and ordered withdrawal on the false assumption that the war was going well.
All of these studies bend over backward to avoid recognizing the documented fact that Kennedy had decided to withdraw from Vietnam by the end of 1965. The tactics of avoidance vary from ignoring the existence of any withdrawal plan at all to attributing it to wishful thinking, political expedience, or sheer stupidity and naivety.
At the same time, commentators are quick to remember the two TV interviews JFK gave in September 1963 (Documents on American Foreign Relations, pp. 292-295). On Sept. 2 he told Walter Cronkite of CBS: "But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake." A week later he said to David Brinkley on NBC:
What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say, because they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they don't like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.
If any statements of that time frame were designed for political effect, these TV interviews were. Presidents are far more likely to play politics in television interviews than in official policy statements and Nation Security Action Memoranda. These remarks must be seen as coming from a president who was up for re-election in one year and who knew he would "be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser" if he withdrew from Vietnam, as he had told Ken O'Donnell a few months earlier.
Those who take the "we should not withdraw" sentence as Kennedy's final word on the matter do not point out that it is directly contradicted by the White House policy statement and NSAM 263 the following month. Either Kennedy changed his mind or – more likely – the earlier public statements were meant to appease the pro-war forces. He also changed his mind about aid to South Vietnam:
Mr. Huntley: Are we likely to reduce our aid to South Vietnam now?
The President: I don't think that would be helpful at this time.
Whatever Kennedy meant by this in September, he thought and did the opposite in October, implementing the McNamara-Taylor recommendations for aid reduction in addition to troop reductions.
Kennedy also said in the Cronkite interview:
In the final analysis, it is their [the South Vietnamese] war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it – the people of Vietnam – against the Communists. We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I don't think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort, and, in my opinion, in the last two months the government has gotten out of touch with the people.
He repeats this, almost verbatim, a few sentences later, obviously intent on emphasizing the point:
...in the final analysis it is the people and the government [of South Vietnam] who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear. But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.
In context, Kennedy may have been using the word "withdraw" here in the sense of "abandon." "Abandoning" Vietnam completely would indeed have been bad politics, but reducing aid (to force a change in Diem's policy) and withdrawing troops is not necessarily the same thing.
Similarly, in the NBC interview, before Kennedy says "we should not withdraw," he says:
We have some influence, and we are attempting to carry it out. I think we don't – we can't expect these countries to do everything the way we want to do them [sic]. They have their own interest, their own personalities, their own tradition. We can't make everyone in our image, and there are a good many people who don't want to go in our image....We would like to have Cambodia, Thailand, and South Vietnam all in harmony, but there are ancient differences there. We can't make the world over, but we can influence the world.
This does not sound like a strong commitment. As a whole, these remarks are perhaps more accurately interpreted as: "We won't abandon them, but we won't do their fighting for them either." This is an interpretation, but a plausible one.
Despite the massive efforts to obscure it, the fact remains, and cannot be overemphasized, that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy. The curious thing is that one hardly ever finds this fact plainly stated by those who should (and perhaps do) know better. Richard Goodwin, an adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson, is a rare exception:
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, NY: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 373; emphasis added).