Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. On Nov. 26, Lyndon Johnson signed an order authorizing covert commando raids on North Vietnam, using CIA speedboats, an order whose draft had been altered in a decisive way sometime following Nov. 21. The first phase of Kennedy's withdrawal, the removal of 1,000 soldiers (in their units) by the end of 1963, became a paper exercise. The later phases were forgotten. More than that, they were eventually withheld even from the internal record that became the Pentagon Papers. Only the ARRB, an independent board of historians operating under the particular circumstances of the JFK Records Act, was able to jar loose the hidden records three decades later.

These events do not prove Oliver Stone's alleged thesis, that Kennedy was killed in order to expand the Vietnam War. Johnson had compelling reasons to act as he did at that moment: he bought time, support, and the perception of continuity by allowing the withdrawal to lapse. And while the Nov. 26 order was definitely altered to give the go-ahead to commando raids, the final wording is murky and it remains unclear, to me anyway, whether Johnson knew this when he signed it.

It is also not yet clear to me exactly when Lyndon Johnson made his decision to send main combat forces to South Vietnam. There is evidence that places that decision much later -- perhaps well after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the election of 1964, and even the start of Johnson's full term in January 1965. Johnson's 1963 decision not to withdraw on Kennedy's timetable did not preclude a decision to get out later on. It did not commit Johnson at that time to the war that later occurred.

And large as Vietnam now looms to us, we know that Lyndon Johnson had bigger foreign policy problems in November 1963 -- so much so, that by his own testimony they led him to direct the outcome of the Warren Commission report. That evidence is in plain view, in Johnson's telephone call to Sen. Richard B. Russell, available for years. Johnson tells Russell that "you gonna be my man on it." He told both Russell and Warren that it was a matter of millions of lives. He was not joking, and I do not believe he was exaggerating, either.

The reasons of state animating Lyndon Johnson at that moment are discussed toward the end of my essay in Boston Review and in more detail in a 1994 essay in the American Prospect entitled "Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?" The answer turns out to be: Yes, it did. Though Johnson told Russell that a war could cost "40 million American lives in an hour," in late 1963 the Soviet Union did not have a nuclear force that could have destroyed more than a few major cities in the United States (and possibly not even that much). But we did possess, by that time, an overwhelming first-strike power. There were those who wanted to use it.

Johnson knew this. His task, overriding all others, was to prevent even an event so grave as the murder of the president from becoming the pretext for a preemptive nuclear war. J.Edgar Hoover had told Johnson, who told Russell, that an effort was underway to blame Castro and Khrushchev  an effort that involved falsified evidence linking Oswalds trip to Mexico City in September, 1963 to the KGB. Johnson says of Khrushchev, truthfully: "He didn't have a damn thing to do with it." The stated task of the Warren Commission was to save the world from a punitive nuclear war, by exculpating the innocent. It did as much, by inculpating a dead man.

What does this prove? So far as what actually happened in Dallas, only one thing long obvious to many others on many grounds: that the Warren Commission report cannot be trusted. Whatever the underlying history, the commission acted under orders, for reasons of state. They were reasons of the utmost seriousness. But the commission clearly had an overriding agenda. There were allegations of a "vast left-wing conspiracy," to coin a phrase. Defusing those allegations was a matter of life and death.

Did Lyndon Johnson participate in a plot to kill Kennedy? Though this view is getting play on cable television this week, I don't believe he did. Was Castro or Khrushchev involved? Of course not. Did Lee Harvey Oswald fire three shots, from an old rifle, along a difficult line of sight, striking Kennedy at least twice and Texas Governor John Connally at least once, as well as a bystander some distance away? No serious person can believe that, either. And so? A great many people since have attempted to solve the mysteries of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Some of this work is useless, some is dishonest; jumping to conclusions is the occupational disease of the genre. But much is valuable. And there are millions of pages of official records now in the public domain. The problem facing the historian now is how to assemble the whole body of evidence in a compelling way, taking account of both the conspiracy (for, once one rejects the lone gunman hypothesis, that is what it was), and the coverup. The task requires both narrative power and analytical precision; jigsaw puzzles properly assembled only fit one way.

Is it possible? Perhaps. But it is much harder to believe that the great forces of inertia, laziness, deceit -- and television -- in this matter can be overcome, even if the right synthesis eventually emerges. Certainly, the media divide is already such that the solution, when eventually published, may well lie in libraries (or possibly, on the Internet) to be discovered only by the small community of very serious readers.

Finally, one may ask, does it matter, except perhaps for personal reasons to those of us who were young then and had our lives changed? It is too late to think of criminal justice. But it is perhaps not too late to revise our American view of history, as a temple of republican myths. The reality is that we are a country like any other, with good and evil people, the strong and the weak, noble and criminal acts, with truth often hidden under deception and propaganda. Our recent experience in Iraq has exposed this truth in process, unusually quickly.

This is a good thing to realize. Yet the Vietnam experience also tells us that a full documentary account of why we went to war in Iraq may not emerge for some time. To know that the weapons of mass destruction justification was bogus is the easy part. But the relative importance of oil, the neoconservatives' grand strategy for the Middle East, the simple desire to get Saddam? When this administration finally goes, forensic work will be needed, and it will not be a pretty task.

Perhaps we need a new scholarly discipline, a criminology of deception and deceit in American foreign policy. Such a field could perhaps teach us something more general about how to decipher and expose such public crimes. Perhaps by learning how to expose deception and deceit today we can eventually exclude certain people and their political allies from power and come closer, as a country, to the ideals many of us still share. But I digress.

Let me return to the darkest part of the dark side. Preemptive nuclear war was prevented in 1963, though the Vietnam War was not. The great untold story of the 1960s remains, in my view, how we managed to survive the decade, and how very close we the human race came to failing to do so. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, its immediate aftermath, and even the Vietnam War which eventually followed may prove, in the final analysis, to be pieces of that story.

This is a story with never-ending ramifications, so long as we continue to live in the nuclear age. For today, it has two lessons worth stating plainly. First, that to prevent the use of nuclear weapons of any type, by anybody, must remain the central goal of American policy at all times. Neither Kennedy, nor Johnson, nor McNamara in serving both presidents ever lost sight of this. Ask yourself whether you feel confident that the same care, on this transcendent issue, is being exercised today. For the second lesson, difficult though it may be to face, is that the largest danger that nuclear weapons will be used has come, so far in history, from ourselves.

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