Reclaiming History (387 page)

†That the majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (one of whose members, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, Kennedy almost outwardly detested because of his crude bravado and hard-line, saber-rattling rhetoric) wanted our nation to militarily intervene in Vietnam has been established and is almost a given. That’s usually, though not always, the military’s mindset. As General George S. Patton Jr. wrote in a letter to his hero, General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing, at the time of the First World War, “War is the only place where a man really lives.” Indeed, as far back as October of 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff took the position on Vietnam that “the time is now past when actions short of intervention by outside forces could reverse the rapidly worsening situation” (Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on October 5, 1961). It also is well known that Kennedy’s relationship with the nation’s military leaders was only lukewarm. Basically, he did not trust their judgment, particularly after the Bay of Pigs, where they had endorsed the CIA operation, and they weren’t enamored with his overly cautious military instincts. But where is there any evidence in American history that when our military leaders wanted a war and their commander in chief wouldn’t give it to them, they even thought about murdering him, much less actually doing it?

^*
Our military presence in Vietnam (opposing Communism), in the form of military advisers, arms, and equipment, dated back to the administration of President Eisenhower during the Indochina War between France and the Vietminh, the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. The war, which started in 1946, ended with the Geneva Accords of 1954 (which the United States refused to endorse) calling for the withdrawal of all French troops from Indochina (which included Vietnam [divided by the Accords at the 17th parallel into North and South Vietnam], Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaya, and Burma), which the French had dominated and colonized since the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the war, the United States had 342 military advisers in Indochina, mainly in Saigon, assisting the French Expeditionary Corps.

^*
Stone told the National Press Club that his movie
JFK
“suggests it was Vietnam that led to the assassination of John Kennedy, that he became too dangerous, too strong an advocate of changing the course of the Cold War, too clear a proponent of troop withdrawal for those who supported the idea of a war in Vietnam” (C-Span transcript of appearance by Oliver Stone before National Press Club on January 15, 1992, p.5).

†NSAM 273 came out of the now famous “Honolulu Conference” of November 20, 1963, at CINCPAC (Commander in Chief of the Pacific) headquarters in Hawaii. There, President Kennedy’s top national security people, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director John McCone, and McGeorge Bundy met to formulate a post-Diem (South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated on November 2) American foreign policy vis-à-vis Vietnam, the withdrawal plans for the 1,000 troops, and the increase in U.S.
covert
actions against the North Vietnamese. (Newman,
JFK and Vietnam
, pp.429–435; O’Leary and Seymour,
Triangle of Death
, p.49) Author Craig Roberts erroneously writes that the draft of NSAM 273 was “prepared for LBJ” (Roberts,
Kill Zone
, p.98). But not only was the draft prepared while Kennedy was still alive, but its language can only be interpreted as referring to President Kennedy, not LBJ.

^*
One thing that militates against Kennedy ever sending combat troops to Vietnam and, even if he decided he wanted to, to his not ordering U.S. soldiers to engage in armed conflict in Vietnam without an actual congressional declaration of war (as opposed to the mere congressional resolution in 1964 flowing from the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was cited as support for our further military involvement in Vietnam) is that Kennedy, unlike so many of his predecessors and successors, understood that as president he did not have the constitutional
right
to engage the nation in war.
Although Article II, Section 2 (1) does provide that “the President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” technically this only places the president at the head of this nation’s armed forces. It clearly envisions, as a predicate to his conducting war as the head of the nation’s armed forces, that war has been
declared
. And Article I, Section 8 (11) (“The Congress shall have power…to declare war”) exclusively and unambiguously gives that power to Congress, not the president. So much for the apparent intent of the framers of the Constitution. The reality is that throughout this nation’s history, presidents, with
out
the approval of Congress, have time and again committed American military forces abroad. In fact, only five times in the nation’s history has Congress declared war: the War of 1812; the Mexican War, 1846; the Spanish-American War, 1898; World War I, 1917; and World War II, 1941. Political commentator Russell Baker has wryly observed that “presidents now say, sure, the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war, but it doesn’t forbid presidents to
make
war, so long as they don’t
declare
it. As a result, the declared war has become obsolete. Its successor is the undeclared war.”
In a March 1962 press conference, Kennedy said that if combat troops “in the generally understood sense of the word” (i.e., fighting soldiers, not advisers) were required in Vietnam, that would call for a “
constitutional
decision, [and] of course, I would go to Congress” (Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, pp.708–709). Kennedy’s realization that a congressional declaration of war was truly necessary may have had at least some deterrent effect on him, if only in the sense that he knew that if he were going to follow the Constitution he could not commence war at his whim, but would have to negotiate a major, heavily publicized hurdle in Congress.

^*
“As is stated in the Pentagon Papers, NSAM 273,…only three days after [Johnson] assumed the Presidency, was intended primarily to
endorse
the policies pursued by President Kennedy and to ratify provisional decisions reached in Honolulu just before the assassination” (
Pentagon Papers
, vol.3, p.2).

†As George Lardner, national security reporter for the
Washington Post
, said, “There was no abrupt change in Vietnam policy after JFK’s death” (George Lardner Jr., “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland—How Oliver Stone’s Version of the Kennedy Assassination Exploits the Edge of Paranoia,”
Washington Post
, May 19, 1991, p.D5).

^*
Ken O’Donnell, Kennedy’s appointments secretary and political right hand, says that actually, Kennedy would have wanted to withdraw American troops before 1965, but, as he told Senator Mike Mansfield (who recommended to JFK that we withdraw from Vietnam after JFK sent him there in 1962 to assess the situation) during a meeting in the Oval Office in the spring of 1963, “I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected.” O’Donnell quotes the president as telling him after Mansfield left the office, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I
am
reelected.” (O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
, pp.16, 472)

^*
A reference to the North Vietnamese Communist government (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) of President Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, which supported militarily and manipulated the Vietcong in their joint effort to overthrow the South Vietnamese government (Republic of Vietnam) of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon.

^*
As we know, the number of American combat troops in Vietnam would eventually swell to over 500,000, of whom 58,000 would die. The Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese) would claim an estimated 3.6 million Vietnamese lives. (David Shipler, “Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnam,”
New York Times Magazine
, August 10, 1997, pp.30, 50; the highest troop deployment was 529,000 in 1968:
New York Times
, January 28, 1973, p.1) Although the number of troops deployed and casualties were vastly greater in the Second World War (as well as the First World War), remarkably, by December of 1967, “the United States had dropped more tons of explosives—1,630,500—on North and South Vietnam than it did on all World War II targets (1,544,463) and twice as many tons as were dropped during the Korean War” (Wicker,
JFK and LBJ
, p.286).
America’s military involvement in Vietnam ended with the cease-fire agreement signed in Paris on January 27, 1973, by representatives of the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong (
New York Times
, January 28, 1973, pp.1, 24). On March 29, the last U.S. combat troops in Vietnam were withdrawn. However, the war continued between North and South Vietnam until Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975. Today, of course, there is no North and South Vietnam, just the one Communist nation of Vietnam, whose capital is Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

^*
See endnote for a discussion of the allegation that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged and used as a pretext by LBJ to go to war.

†A classic day during this period wherein Johnson must have felt like he was the rope in a tug-of-war, being pulled from both sides, was July 1, 1965, which was after the war had begun but before the big buildup. Undersecretary of State George Ball, a lone dove among the Vietnam principals in the Johnson administration, sent LBJ a memo forcefully and presciently arguing that a massive intervention in Vietnam would inflict a terrible toll on this country. “The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial,” Ball said. “Once large numbers of U.S. troops are committed to direct combat they will begin to take heavy casualties in a war they are ill-equipped to fight in a non-cooperative if not downright hostile countryside. Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we have paid terrible costs.” Ball recommended “cutting our losses” and withdrawing from Vietnam before it was too late, or making U.S. deployment there very limited. That same day Johnson received a memo from Ball’s superior, Dean Rusk, who had come over to the side of the hawks, arguing that South Vietnam had to be defended from Communist aggression with U.S. troops. “The integrity of the U.S. commitment is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world,” Rusk argued to LBJ. “If that commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin.” Rusk predicted that if the Communists in Vietnam were not stopped, it would “almost certainly” end in a “catastrophic war” for America. (
Pentagon Papers
, vol.4, pp.22–23; vol.3, p.415)

^*
Two other contravening dynamics were at play here, however, both of which involved pride and human weakness. Johnson knew that his cherished “Great Society,” the label given to his administration’s effort to eliminate poverty in America—the one, he thought, that would be “his passport to historical immortality”—would necessarily be compromised by the budget demands of a war in Vietnam. But he told his biographer, Doris Kearns, “Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.” (Kearns,
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
, pp.210–211, 259–260; see also Dallek,
Flawed Giant
, p.400, for Johnson pestering the director of the Bureau of the Budget, Charles Schultz, to cut back on reform programs) What Johnson wanted, of course, was to have it both ways, which he could do if he could find a peaceful resolution to the mushrooming conflict in Vietnam.
The other dynamic was a quite ironic one, particularly in the fact that, though it was coming from his political Left, it may possibly have been more influential on his ultimate decision to go to war than that which was coming from the war hawks on his Right, and that was “the almost obsessive intensity of Johnson’s feelings about Robert Kennedy,” which had been reciprocated by Kennedy, even more so, since the Democratic convention in 1960. Kearns writes that “Kennedy’s mere existence intensified Johnson’s terror of withdrawing from Vietnam. And when Kennedy became an open opponent of the war [this] only helped to stiffen his [Johnson’s] unwillingness” to yield in Vietnam. (Kearns,
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
, p.259)

†Not only was LBJ depicted in the film as wanting war, but Stone makes it very clear in the film that he believes LBJ was part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. At the moment in the movie when X tells Garrison about “the perpetrators” of Kennedy’s assassination, Stone spotlights LBJ and the Joint Chiefs of Staff with real television footage. Indeed, he has Garrison tell his staff in the movie, “This was a military-style ambush from start to finish, a coup d’etat, with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.”
If the old injunction “Put your money where your mouth is” has merit, and assuming, as some conspiracy theorists like Oliver Stone suggest, that the military-industrial complex conspired with the CIA and with LBJ to murder Kennedy, a 1965 CIA document titled “Cost Reduction Program” is not helpful to them on the CIA and LBJ part of the conspiracy. As indicated previously in an endnote to the “CIA” section, according to the document, the last CIA budget under Kennedy, in 1963, was $550 million. The very next year, under LBJ, it dropped to $517 million, and was $525 million in 1965. It dropped again to $505 million in 1966, an amount supplemented by $40 million for “Southeast Asia escalation.” Some thanks from LBJ to a group (CIA) that along with the military-industrial complex supposedly murdered Kennedy to make him president. Although the CIA would later tell Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, that the 1964–1965 figures were “not accurate,” one wonders if the agency said that only because it was not ordered to disclose the budget for these years to Aftergood, as it was for 1963. After all, the 1964–1966 figures appear in an official CIA document titled “Cost Reduction Program, FY 1966, FY 1967, Central Intelligence Agency” dated September 1, 1965, that was declassified from Top Secret on March 10, 1998.