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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
The evidence is clear: JFK decided to withdraw from Vietnam a month before he was assassinated. Setting the record straight is crucial as Baghdad continues to explode.
Nov 22, 2003 | This week's crescendo of Kennedy commemoration has ranged from banal to lurid. The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley has pointed out how the event signaled the rise of modern television as our dominant medium for news. Forty years later, every vice of TV is on display: an obsession with glamour, sex, hearsay, computer simulation and sentimental appeals to authority; along with reckless disregard for evidence, complicated ideas, policies and organizations. Plainly, given the nature of the medium, access to even a small part of the underlying history of our defining trauma will be restricted to those who read.
Meanwhile, over in Iraq, crashing helicopters are giving resonance to a persistent mystery: What exactly was Kennedy planning to do, in the fall of 1963, about Vietnam? Some parallels between the two wars are uncanny. In both cases, U.S. intervention was driven by small, secretive, bellicose, conspiratorial factions within the government. In both cases, military intelligence was officially optimistic -- but the optimism was believed neither by its authors nor its readers. In both cases, the question of how and when to exit had to be considered early on -- and in light of an upcoming election campaign. In both cases, though details were energetically shielded from public view (and though neither North Vietnam nor Iraq had nuclear weapons), the specter of escalation to nuclear war hung over the conflict. The fate of millions depended (and today still depends) on how carefully and responsibly the decision-makers in Washington behaved.
In the Vietnam case, events took an ugly turn, beginning in November 1963, and spun out of control thereafter. As that happened, Kennedy's exit strategy disappeared from history for decades. What will happen to us in Iraq remains to be seen. To be sure, there are those who wanted us in and do not want us to leave; their next move will be interesting to watch. Now, as then, the government is divided, and neither faction is anxious to lose. So it is worthwhile to read the history of Kennedy and Vietnam now, partly for its own sake, partly for general lessons about neocolonial war, and partly with a view to understanding how the questions of national security and domestic politics play out in Washington.
I believe the evidence now available shows that Kennedy had decided, in early October of 1963, to begin withdrawing 17,000 U.S. military advisers then in Vietnam. One thousand were to leave by the end of 1963; the withdrawal was scheduled to be completed by the end of 1965. After that, only a military assistance contingent would have remained. The withdrawal planning was carried out under cover of an official optimism about the war, with a view toward increasing the effort and training the South Vietnamese to win by themselves. But Kennedy and McNamara did not share this optimism. They were therefore prepared to press the withdrawal even when the assessments turned bad, as they started to do in the early fall of 1963. This was a decision to withdraw without victory if necessary, indeed without negotiations or conditions. In a recent essay in Boston Review, I assemble this evidence in detail.
At one level, it isn't news. Certain facts -- that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, that he encouraged Sens. Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse to keep criticizing his policy, that he told Kenneth O'Donnell that he would get out after the 1964 election, that he resisted all suggestions that main combat forces be sent to Vietnam -- have been known for decades. In my family, we know that JFK sent John Kenneth Galbraith (then serving as ambassador to India) to Saigon in September 1961 because, as my father has often put it, "Kennedy knew I did not have an open mind." JKG turned in a pessimistic report, reiterated in letters and discussions with the president thereafter.
Kennedy's decision document, National Security Action Memorandum 263, has been in the public domain for a long time. As early as 1972, Peter Dale Scott called attention to it, and to its (then still-classified) successor, NSAM 273, which Lyndon Johnson approved on Nov. 26, 1963. Arthur Schlesinger mentions the withdrawal in "Robert Kennedy and His Times," published in 1978. In 1992 Maj. John M. Newman, an Army intelligence officer and professional historian specializing in South Asia, published a book giving still greater evidence and detail. This provoked wide-ranging controversy, with objections flowing in from Walt Rostow, Noam Chomsky, and many others in between.
Newman received early support from a figure who had, up to that moment, remained silent on Vietnam for nearly 30 years. In 1993, Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense to both Kennedy and Johnson, gave Newman the relevant part of an oral history he had recorded in 1986. In that document -- of which McNamara had made no public use -- McNamara states that Kennedy had made a decision to withdraw in spite of growing pessimism over the conduct of the war. Neither then nor later has McNamara ever tried to use this history to change the perception of his own responsibility for how the war was eventually conducted.
McNamara's book, "In Retrospect," appeared in 1995. I bought a copy the day it hit Austin, Texas, as I knew it would test McNamara's capacity for candor on this point. The statement that Kennedy made a "decision" to begin a withdrawal appears flatly in the table of contents. And there are several matter-of-fact pages that report on the decision meeting of Oct. 2, 1963, at which McNamara recommended, and Kennedy agreed to, the withdrawal plan. But how well could McNamara document his case?
An opportunity to find out came soon. On April 1, 1995, McNamara came to Austin to speak at the LBJ Library, to an enormous crowd. I drafted a question (of which, sadly, no copy survives) referring very specifically to the passages on Kennedy's withdrawal decision and asking for details. I printed it on a full page in large type and sent it up to the panel of screeners who were assigned to sort through scribbled questions from the audience -- a system designed, no doubt, to protect McNamara from verbal abuse.
My question ended up in front of Neal Spelce, then anchorman for the local CBS affiliate. I suppose Neal assumed that it had been planted by the chair. He started to read it, seemed to realize that his inference was incorrect, and swallowed the rest. But McNamara understood where my question had been leading. He confirmed the "decision" to withdraw, and gave an account of Kennedy's taping system and of how he had gotten access to these tapes. The scene was recorded on a videotape, which I possess. I wrote an account for the Texas Observer, modestly neglecting to mention my own slightly subversive part:
"Why is this issue explosive? Because with only two obscure exceptions none of the dozens of books on the history of Vietnam decisionmaking over the past thirty years has winkled out the story of Kennedy's decision to withdraw. It is not in David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest", not in Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam", not in Richard Reeves' "President Kennedy," not in any of the scholarly volumes. ...
Now comes McNamara, with confirmation of Newman's argument and the flat statement that there exists a tape as proof. ... . It might be added that McNamara is on record as far back as July, 1986 confirming Kennedy's decision to withdraw, in an oral history closely held since then by the Kennedy Library. McNamara's oral history also makes plain, though his book fudges the issue, that Kennedy's decision was based on McNamara's own recommendation to withdraw in spite of the fact that the U.S. was losing the war."
I had never met McNamara, and only learned from his memoir that he credits my father (who interviewed him in preparing what became "The New Industrial State") with recommending him to Kennedy as Pentagon chief. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a few months later a letter arrived, asking permission to reprint my obscure Observer column. In 150,000 copies. And from whom? Robert Strange McNamara, the form said. My column appears in an appendix to the paperback edition of "In Retrospect." In 1997 we did meet, in Vermont, and spent a long afternoon reviewing these issues in the company of two great newspaper people, both now deceased: Tom Winship and Katharine Graham.
