New documentary: Virtual JFK (Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived)
From: Daniel C. Tsang
Date: 2009/1/9
Documentary on a what if.
Review in: Chicago Sun Times:
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/movies/1368463,MOV-News-art09.article
James G. Blight, a research professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, speculates that if President John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated, the Vietnam War might not have happened.
That's the intriguing thesis of "Virtual JFK," a persuasive documentary by Koji Masutani. By 1963, Kennedy had sent 16,000 advisers to South Vietnam. By 1968, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had sent 500,000 soldiers. "Wouldn't there have been some way to avoid it?" asks Blight. "That would be worth knowing."
Blight narrates an illustrated essay that abridges an upcoming book he co-authored, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK. He charts Kennedy's decision-making style, using footage of press conferences and declassified audio recordings. "It turns out that John F. Kennedy was pressured more often and more strongly by more people to take this nation to war than any president ever was within the first 1,000 days [of his administration]," notes Blight, who was initially trained in cognitive psychology. "Six times when he was put to the test, John Kennedy avoided war all six times."
[clipped]
--
Daniel C. Tsang
Social Science Data Librarian
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
Economics, Political Science & Business (acting)
University of California, Irvine
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From: william turley <wturley@siu.edu>
Date: 2009/1/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The durability of the urge to burnish Kennedy's memory amazes me. The effort to "prove" that Kennedy would have kept the U.S. out of war had he lived probably says more about retrospective yearnings than it reflects hard-headed reasoning. For what it's worth, in the new edition of The Second Indochina War I examined the Kennedy years with considerably greater care than I did in the first edition and concluded thus:
"The other assassination [after Diem's], that of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, made no difference in U.S. policy. Confidantes of the president have said that Kennedy privately expressed misgivings about the war and intended to reduce the American commitment to an advisory role after his re-election,[i] a view strongly endorsed by more than one historian.[ii] Fredrik Logevall argues that Kennedy’s plan was nothing more than a ploy to pressure Diem, silence critics, and counter the impression that the war was an American affair, but Kennedy would have chosen “some form of disengagement” anyway.[iii] This is unlikely. Kennedy often expressed frustration over the war’s conduct but was persistent in seeking ways to win it. Moreover, once a president has staked his prestige and credibility on a course of action and powerful bureaucracies have developed interests in implementing it, reversing course is a colossal political challenge. And Kennedy did deepen the American commitment. It was Kennedy who sharply increased the number of American advisors (to 16,000 by the time of his assassination); it was Kennedy who authorized covert raids into North Vietnam; and it was Kennedy, dismayed by Diem’s recalcitrance and alarmed by his brother’s contacts with the enemy, who acceded to Diem’s overthrow. Complicitous in the coup and therefore in Diem’s death, Kennedy would have found it politically and morally difficult to withdraw support from the generals Lodge had abetted with Kennedy’s approval. Kennedy’s planned partial withdrawal, moreover, was contingent on reducing the insurgency to a level the ARVN itself could control – a condition the ARVN would never meet. Finally, nothing in the dual assassinations altered the prevailing belief in Washington that Southeast Asia’s future as a non-communist region hinged on South Vietnam’s survival as an independent non-communist state. Among policymakers, advisors and analysts, pessimism about the prospects of winning was abundant; serious advocacy of alternatives to fighting was nearly inaudible. When Lyndon Johnson took over the Kennedy team, the key players remained in place, still believing that Kennedy’s commitment had to be kept, even if that meant expanding U.S. military involvement, and they went on planning accordingly. Johnson too believed in the importance of keeping Kennedy’s commitment, of maintaining credibility, but even more he dreaded the domestic political consequences for his “Great Society” reforms that might flow from withdrawal or open debate on the probable costs of a deeper commitment.[iv] Johnson did not want a wider war any more than Kennedy did, but both presidents calculated that staying in the war was preferable to getting out."
[i] A notable exception is Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk (as told to Richard Rusk), As I Saw It, ed. Daniel S. Papp (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1990), 441-442.
[ii] Howard Jones, Death of a Generation, 377-406, 452-456. Also see John Newman, JKF and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992); David Kaiser, American Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Neese and O’Donnell, Prelude to Tragedy.
[iii] Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999), 69-73, 395.
[iv] Francis M. Bator, “No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Mass. (2007). Bator was Johnson’s deputy national security advisor.
Blight is impressed because "Six times when he was put to the test, John Kennedy avoided war all six times," a behavior which Blight interprets, based on the assumptions of cognitive psychology, as indicating exceptional resilience in the face of pressures to go to war. Unfortunately, the record can be read quite differently. Kennedy did not "avoid war" so much as he forestalled it. He did not say "no" to the pressures; rather, he took steps to prolong Saigon's survival and to blunt domestic criticism of inaction, and these were steps with a momentum and trajectory. Moreover, Kennedy himself apparently subscribed to the idea that the U.S. could not simply abandon Saigon to certain defeat. Counterfactual history needs to make sense, and in my view the "if-only-Kennedy-had-lived-school" doesn't, even though I fervently wish he had lived and fulfilled his admirers' dream.
Cordially to all,
William S. Turley
Dept. of Political Science
Southern Illinois University
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From: David Marr
Date: Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 4:10 PM
"What if" questions in history are always fun. In late 1963-early 1964 I was at Camp Smith (CINCPAC/FMFPac) in Hawaii and reading a lot of the Vietnam-related traffic. I tend to agree with Bill that Kennedy if he had lived would not have pulled the plug. However, Kennedy would have been much more reluctant than Johnson to adopt the bomb-the-north/combat divisions to the south strategy in force from early 1965. This returns us to the question of whether America was ready for a counter-insurgency strategy that would see language training and tours of duty of 3 or 4 years, whether the NFLSVN/PLAF could have been contained, and whether Kennedy could then have accepted a coalition, non-aligned government in Saigon...
David Marr
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From: Edward Miller
Date: Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:08 AM
David makes an excellent point here, I think. The "What would Jack have
done?" debate has long been framed as an either/or choice between two rather
extreme outcomes. On the one hand, there is the view promoted by
Kennedy-philes like Oliver Stone who maintain that JFK would have withdrawn
in short order from Vietnam (and indeed had already decided to do so). On
the other side are the Kennedy critics who believe that there was no real
daylight between his strategic views and those of LBJ, and so therefore JFK
would have escalated just as LBJ did in 1965.
Neither of these is persuasive, in my view. I do not believe that JFK had
made any firm decisions about anything on Vietnam at the time of his death.
His top advisors in the White House and State and Defense departments--even
those who would later counsel withdrawal, such as George Ball--were still
optimistic that the insurgency was on its way to defeat. At the same time,
however, Kennedy seems to have been much more aware of the political and
strategic pitfalls in Vietnam than most of his advisors were. This was due
in part, I think, to Kennedy's initial enounter with Vietnam in the early
1950s and to the particular lessons he had drawn from the earlier French
defeat. (These lessons were at least part of the reason JFK acquiesced in
Diem's ouster in 1963--a move which LBJ very strongly opposed.) I believe
that these aspects of JFK's thinking--and the critical fact that he, unlike
LBJ, would not have been positioning himself for re-election in 1968--would
have inclined him to view the situation in Vietnam differently in 1964-5 and
to consider different strategies and tactics. As David observes, its hard
to say whether or not JFK would have gone for the negotiated
withdrawal/coalition option. But I do think it likely that he would have
resisted the particular path that LBJ took.
Ed Miller
Dartmouth College
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From: william turley
Date: Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:51 AM
These are reasonable speculations. Ed's point that Kennedy would not have been repositioning himself for reelection after November 1964 is particularly well worth considering, given the proven weight of domestic politics in American foreign policy. But I'm not convinced. PAVN units (against which counterinsurgency strategy was ineffective) were entering the South during November 1964 and Kennedy would have had to ignore them as he negotiated a coalition, non-aligned government for Saigon over the fierce resistance of Saigon's generals (unless he meddled even more to keep Duong Van Minh in power), thus preparing, as it is put today, to "cut and run." Consider the political fallout of that course for Kennedy's domestic political effectiveness, for the credibility of his party on security issues (and this was during the Cold War!), for relations with his closest advisors, not to mention the enormous diplomatic difficulty of pulling this off. It would have been so much easier to escalate. Unfortunately, we have no way to know how Kennedy would have adjusted his thinking to the changed circumstances of 1964-65. But we do know that Johnson, the president who did choose to bomb the north and send combat divisions into the south, was every bit as wary, in private, as Kennedy about sinking into the Vietnam quagmire and probably more committed than Kennedy to achieving domestic reforms that he feared a war would undermine. Why think Kennedy was any more steadfast in his determination to limit the American commitment, to resist the domestic pressures for war, and to impose an unwanted peace on his ally than Johnson -- who was by all accounts the more skillful and dominating politician?
Bill Turley
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From: Marc J. Gilbert
Date: Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 6:49 PM
Turley makes an excellent point regarding NVA infiltration in 1964, but
Kennedy may have anticipated that action, thereby influencing his
decision-making against war.
A work on the air war in Laos opens with Kennedy pointing at a map of
eastern Laos and remarking that infiltration routes from the DRV though
Laos would frustrate any US policy in the south. If this citation is
accurate, it indicates that Kennedy's understanding of the dimensions of
an American War in Vietnam went far beyond a containable southern
counter-insurgency, which we assume was not merely of interest to JFK,
but of consuming or defining interest. I will look for that reference
and the book that contains it as I go about my continuing unpacking
project from the move to Hawaii, but I am sure someone else has seen it.
I agree with Ed Miller that Kennedy had not made any doctrinal or
irreversible decision about Vietnam, but I think we must go beyond the
realm of current arguments as these are based on reasoning alone--good
reasoning, but still conjecture and am thus more reluctant to speak with
the same authority on JFK's possible action as does Turley when
addressing my own students, though I find his reasoning compelling and
present it as such.
Kennedy enjoyed toying with ideas for a variety of reasons as is clear
from his speeches on the first Indochina conflict, on which he offered
both hawkish and dovish opinions at different times. We often forget
that Kennedy was far more a lightweight as an intellectual than we often
surmise, and his toying with policy-positions was one means of managing
this weakness; his strength was in not letting advisors always determine
his course of action (a factor when evaluating whether the same set of
advisors would lead LBJ into war). The fact of the matter is that JFK
faced down the JCS on the eve of the Cuban Missile crisis, sent them to
bed and sent RFK to Dobrynin to put the case for war directly before
America's adversary (only to find the Soviets were motivated by
misleading intelligence, which opened the possibility of a settlement).
Turley's argument is that the deck was so stacked that perhaps no
President could have avoided a debacle in Vietnam, but given similar
trends, personalities and logic (if different stakes), perhaps no
President could have avoided war with the Soviets over Cuba. And yet .
. .
Best,
Marc
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From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
Date: 2009/1/15
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Yes, it's fun and it tends to point to the kind of America people would want it to be. Since lots of people are hoping for a better version of American power, the topic remains, and perhaps will always remain, a continuing fascination.
The pro-withdrawal side bases its arguments principally on two major points:
(1) the difference between NSAM 263 (signed by Kennedy on Oct 11, 1963) and NSAM 273 (signed by Johnson on Nov 26, 1963). That is one of Colonel Fletcher Prouty's major contentions (JFK, pp. 275-285), which Chomsky has attempted to demolish by saying that there was no major differences and by looking at the internal record of escalation up to that time (Rethinking Camelot, 76-86)(*) ;
(2) Kennedy's intention as revealed to his close associates (John Newman's "JFK and Vietnam", Schlesinger's "A Thousand Days"). Kennedy's intention to withdraw was true, but it was based on his estimation then (as reported by General Taylor, the army, and Ambassador Lodge at the time) that SVN was winning! We have no evidence as to whether Kennedy would still intend to withdraw in the case SVN were NOT winning. There was no such record because Kennedy had not reached the point when he had to face that question. Each side is; therefore, free to draw its own conjecture! Chomsky shows that Kennedy's doves supported Johnson's escalation policy, but then ameliorated their memory of Kennedy after the Tet offensive (Rethinking Camelot, 102-103, 114-127). The internal record, the preparation of NSAM 273 for Kennedy to sign (drafted on Nov 20, a few days before his death), his willingness to consider the overthrow of Diem, etc. however, all tend to point to further commitment (Chomsky's Rethinking Camelot, Mark White's The Kennedy and Cuba, etc.).
David's questions, as Edward points out, are more interesting. Clearly, I think, Kennedy's policy would differ from Johnson's. He, for one, mistrusted the wisdom of his military commanders and the CIA establishment (as evident in the Bay of Pig crisis) while Johnson mostly relied on them. He was more aware of the limitation of military power, although he was not above using it clandestinely (his support for secret operations to achieve his Cold war objectives - operation Mongoose, the use of counterinsurgency terrors, internal plan to escalate the war in VN when Diem failed to assure defeat of the communist force).
Prouty puts special emphasis on one issue: the significance of the corporate power that truly held the behind-the-scene reign in America, and Kennedy's ongoing conflicts with it (his victory over the captains of the steel industry, his promise to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds", his refusal to invade Cuba, his initial plan to withdraw the first 1000 advisors from VN, his issue of the US (versus federal) note, NSAM#55, the award of the TFX program, the draft of NSAM 271 on the possibility of joint space effort with the Soviet Union, etc.). That eventually might have played a role in his death.
And it is here that the point Marc makes, as I also points out above, becomes crucial: regardless of how Kennedy would pursue the war, it wouldn't have been in close collaboration with the "Power Elite," which made it unacceptable. Notice that within a month of Johnson's ascension, he withdrew all the US notes that Kennedy had issued. If the "Power Elite" did not allow Eisenhower's peace plan to proceed (the U2 Gary Powers incident - Secret Team, chp. 20), how could it allow Kennedy's disappointing independence to continue, esp. for the second term. It confirmed their fear that Kennedy's future policy would be, at the very least, unpredictable.
Aside from Roosevelt (called by some a "Traitor to His Class") there is no other US President that I know took the same kind of stand, to that great extent. That's one of the reasons why, I think, Kennedy remains such a fascinating phenomenon, and an idol to many who dream, perhaps a bit wistfully, of a more humane world.
Beside the fact that "What-if" question in history, by its very nature, can rarely be definitively proven, there is another issue raised by Colonel Fletcher Prouty's works on this topic which goes beyond these conjectures to go to the heart of the meaning, and the nature, of "what is history." For Prouty was not just an ordinary writer/recorder/interpreter of history, he was an actor in it, an actor without any reason to tell it differently from what he saw. For example, in all works in the history of this period, from FRUS Vol XIV (Vietnam Aug-Dec 1963) to all the historical texts that we have, it has always been written that General Taylor & Secretary McNamara were sent to VN by President Kennedy and returned with an Oct 1963 report, the "Taylor-McNamara Report," which became the basis for NSAM 263, highlighting a plan to withdraw the first 1000 advisors in 1963 and all the rest by the end of 1965. That would be all that we know, and ever will know, except for what Prouty revealed.
"Prouty: That was in September of 1963. By that time General Krulak knew what Kennedy's plans were. So that when he came back he sat down and he started writing what became NSAM 263 -- otherwise known as the Taylor/McNamara Trip Report of October '63.[1] <http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp1_p3.html#fn1> They both are the same, although some people don't realize that the numbered memoranda simply covers the Taylor/McNamara Report.
But they're the same document, and they bear the same authority coming from the White House as a National Security Action Memorandum. So Krulak was engaged writing this major report -- and I was one of his principal writers -- I wrote probably as much or more of that document than anybody else did. It was a very large report, profusely illustrated; we had pictures in it, we had maps in it. When it was all done, they bound it in a big leather cover that said "President John F. Kennedy from Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor."
We flew the finished report to Hawaii in a jet, gave it to Taylor and McNamara so they could read it on their way back, so that when they gave it to Kennedy they at least would know it existed. But what the report was really, was Kennedy's own views on the Vietnam War -- not anybody else's. All Krulak did (and all I did) was write what Kennedy had told us to do.
The agent in that was Bobby Kennedy. Krulak would see Bobby Kennedy, I guess, every day. We even slept in the office for awhile. We were working right around the clock. We had something like 16 secretaries, four every four hours, just going right around the clock like that, getting this huge report prepared. (It was before the days of word processors and things like that.)
But when Taylor and McNamara came back and landed in a helicopter on the lawn of the White House, they gave the President this big report. The President knew exactly what was in the report because it was what he had dictated to Krulak. What Krulak had written and given to them had made the circle; it was back in Kennedy's hands and now he could declare it to be national policy.
About two days later, on October 11th, 1963, he signed this NSAM 263 which, among other things, said that by Christmas time a thousand military men are coming out of Vietnam, coming home. And by the end of 1965 all U.S. personnel will be out of Vietnam.
That was very important. For instance, in the Pacific at that time we had a military publication called the Stars and Stripes. It was the old newspaper from WWII. The headline of the Stars and Stripes that day (great big headline) said: "One thousand troops being withdrawn from Vietnam by Christmas and the remainder by '65." Nobody missed the point. It was right there in big letters. And this is what Kennedy planned. "
[David Ratcliffe, 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, "Understanding Special Operations,"
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp1_p3.html#17316]
The least that it did show is how determined was Kennedy to get out. General Krulak had never disavowed Prouty's account. There will never be an answer, as far as I can tell, that we could satisfactorily account for this unprecedented action involving General Krulak by President Kennedy. We can all offer a conjecture, but then, it would only be a conjecture...
C. Nguyen
UMASS Boston
(*) See Prouty's careful rebuttal to the view that there were no major differences between NSAM 273 and NSAM 263 in "JFK," pp. 275-285. Esp. the organization of the Nov 20 series conference in Honolulu with the attendance of almost all Cabinet members on an agenda that Kennedy would have found strange. Prouty also claims that Kennedy had never asked Mac George Bundy to prepare the NSAM 273 draft, and questions why Bundy did it, and then submitted for Johnson to sign so promptly after Kennedy's assassination, rapidly expanding the intervention. There would be a real war now.