Events took another twist thanks to the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, established under the 1992 JFK Records Act. Around 1997, the ARRB caused the release of over 800 pages of documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of them withheld from the Pentagon Papers. These documents show that the staff work that must necessarily precede a formal presidential decision on a national security matter did occur. Timetables were set (and then accelerated, on McNamara's orders), units specified, guidance given as to how to treat the withdrawal for public relations purposes. (You can download some of these documents in PDF format here.)

But still nobody else had heard the secret Kennedy Oval Office tapes that McNamara had cited. As time passed, I called the attention of several historians working on Kennedy to their existence. None were able to gain access. Eventually I drafted a letter of my own to the ARRB. The tapes were released within a few months; I do not know whether or not in response to my letter. Transcripts (a very difficult task, and not flawless) have been compiled by the historian George Eliades, and are included in the packet of documents accompanying this essay. Kennedy's voice is heard first, then McNamara (brackets represent my corrections).

McNamara. I believe we can complete the military campaign in the first three [corps areas] in sixty-four and the fourth [corps area in] sixty-five. Secondly, if it extends beyond that period, we believe we can train the Vietnamese to take over the essential functions and withdraw the bulk of our forces. And this thousand is in conjunction with that, and I have a list of the units here that are represented by that number ...

JFK: Can't they ...

Bundy? . (the transcriber wasn't certain the speaker was McGeorge Bundy): What's the point of doing that?

McNamara: We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they're not needed, I think is wasteful and complicates both their problem and ours.

A bit later in the conversation McNamara adds the following:

McNamara: I think Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from this area. We must show our country that means. The only slightest difference between Max [Taylor] and me in this entire report is in this one estimate of whether or not we can win the war in '64 in the upper three territories and in '65 in the fourth. I'm not entirely sure of that. But I am sure that if we don't meet those dates in the sense of ending the major military campaigns, we nonetheless can withdraw the bulk of our US forces according to the schedule we've laid out, worked out, because we can train the Vietnamese to do the job.

To illustrate the point, we have two L-19 squadrons over there. These are very important. They are the artillery observers and the fire control observers. But it's very simple to train Vietnamese to fly L-19's. Now why should we leave our L-19 squadrons there? At the present time, we've set up a training program to give them seven weeks of language training, four months of flying school, three weeks of transition training with the L-19's, and they can go out and do L-19 work. And we set it up in Vietnam. It's being run by US officers, and it's worked very well. Now I think we ought to do that for every one of our major elements.

Is Kennedy's support completely unqualified? No, it is not. He says on the tape, immediately before McNamara's last statement, that he is prepared, if things go badly in '65, to "get a new date." McNamara then reassures him that the schedule can be kept no matter what happens. Of course the war (which was not at that point very large) is not over, and will not be over simply because U.S. advisers will be withdrawn. The "major military campaigns" to which McNamara refers are South Vietnamese. And U.S. support for the government of South Vietnam was not going to disappear. Much could happen in two years, as events would prove.

But a decision to withdraw that might possibly be modified remains very different from either escalation or continuity in policy. McNamara is speaking plainly of withdrawal with or without victory in the passage just quoted. And it is McNamara's recommendation that prevails. When JCS Chief Maxwell Taylor conveyed Kennedy's decision to the Joint Chiefs on Oct. 4, the language is unconditional: "All planning" will be devoted to meeting the schedule laid down. Though the tape is hard to follow, Kennedy may be heard giving his final approval on Oct. 5.

The history of this episode has now taken definitive form with "Death of a Generation" by Howard Jones, published by Oxford University Press in 2003. Howard Jones makes two large contributions to this tale. One of them is simply range, depth and completeness. "Death of a Generation" is a full history of how the assassinations of Diem and then of JFK prolonged a war that otherwise might have ended quietly within a few years. Jones goes back to the start of the 1960s, chronicling the struggle for power and policy that marked the whole of Kennedy's thousand days. And he presents a reasonably complete account of the archival record surrounding the withdrawal decisions of October 1963.

Jones' reach extends to Saigon. In a fascinating section he outlines the intrigues that led to the murders of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu on Nov. 1, 1963. Here, Kennedy's White House appears at its worst. It was fractious, disorganized, preoccupied with American politics, ignorant of the forces it faced in Vietnam. Diem's mistreatment of the Buddhists, which provoked the monk Quang Duc to burn himself on a Saigon street in June 1963, traumatized the White House. And following that incident, Madame Nhu and her remarks about "barbecued bonzes" -- a term for Buddhist monks -- were an irritant out of proportion to their importance. Thus, in part, the decision to dissociate from Diem.

Diem was indefensible in many ways. But the coup went forward with no alternative in view; and as the French ambassador to Saigon put it at the time, "any other government will be even more dependent on the Americans, will be obedient to them in all things, and so there will be no chance for peace." Meanwhile, there are tantalizing undercurrents of what might have been. Was Nhu in discussions with intermediaries for Ho Chi Minh, with the possibility that there might have been a deal between North and South to boot the Americans from Vietnam? It appears that he was. And had he succeeded, it would have saved infinite trouble.

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