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By 1966, it was becoming clear that things were not going well in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger expressed concern that the US effort to "suppress the resistance" by widening the war had dubious prospects, though "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" if Johnson's escalation succeeds, even if it leaves "the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of ruin and wreck," with its "political and institutional fabric" pulverized. "No thoughtful American can withhold sympathy as President Johnson ponders the gloomy choices which lie ahead" -- sympathy for the President, that is, not the victims. Referring to Joseph Alsop's predictions of victory, Schlesinger writes that "we all pray that Mr. Alsop will be right," though he doubts it. The only qualms are tactical: what will be the cost to us?
In this 1966 book, Schlesinger describes himself as keeping faith with JFK -- plausibly enough. He proposes a "middle course": the indigenous resistance should surrender to the US and its client regime, accepting a US-run political process, such as the "valiant try at self-government" which "excited such idealistic hopes in the United States"; he is referring to the 1966 elections, in which the entire opposition (Communists and neutralists) was excluded from the ballot. Withdrawal, he says, is out of the question: it "would have ominous reverberations throughout Asia" and be "humiliating." We must, rather, abide by our "moral obligations" to our clients, "a new class of nouveaux mandarins...pervaded by nepotism, corruption and cynicism," and lacking popular support.7
Again we have the same alternatives: (1) Schlesinger is still concealing JFK's intent to withdraw without victory; (2) JFK had successfully concealed it from him; (3) There was there no such intent, in which case his later claims are false.
Twelve years later, Schlesinger wrote that on January 6, 1966, Robert McNamara had privately informed him and other "New Frontier friends" that the US would have to seek "withdrawal with honor" in Vietnam. A few months later, the friends "decided to do what little we could to stir public opinion." His own contribution, he says, was to write The Bitter Heritage -- which prays for victory and opposes withdrawal as unthinkable.8
After the Tet Offensive in January 1968, major domestic power sectors concluded that the enterprise was becoming too costly to sustain and called for it to be ended. Apart from the impact on the global economy, unfavorable to the US, the mounting popular opposition to the war was of particular concern. One part of the Pentagon Papers record that has gained little attention reviews the concern in high places that further escalation might lead to protest even beyond the "massive" demonstration at the Pentagon in October 1967, perhaps also large-scale civil disobedience. In considering further troop deployments, the Joint Chiefs wanted to ensure that "sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control," and the Defense Department feared that escalation might lead to "increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities," running the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions."9
President Johnson was, in effect, dismissed from office, and policy was set towards disengagement.
The effect of the policy shift on the ideological system was dramatic. Virtually everyone suddenly turned out to have been an "early opponent of the war" -- in secret, since no record can be found. In Cambridge, the home of the Kennedy "action intellectuals," it became a standing joke. A more accurate picture is given by the attitudes of the Massachusetts branch of Americans for Democratic Action, at the "ultraliberal" extreme. In late 1967, its leadership would not even accept membership applications from people they expected would speak in favor of an anti-war resolution sponsored by a local chapter that had fallen out of control.10 A few weeks later, after the Tet offensive, everything changed. By late 1969 the liberal press began to move beyond tactical complaints to critical comment, though with no serious deviation from state doctrine.11
Without too much oversimplification, we can take the Tet offensive of January 1968 to be the turning point for the cultural managers, who now faced several challenging tasks. One was to defuse the opposition, an interesting story, still untold. Another was to restore the basic doctrines of the faith: The war must now be understood as a noble effort gone astray, in part because of disruptive domestic elements who had impeded the earnest efforts of "early opponents of the war." At the outer limits, we may say that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good," though "by 1969" it had become "clear to most of the world -- and most Americans -- that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake"; the argument against the war "was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina -- that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself" (Anthony Lewis).
Recall that the population never absorbed the lessons taught by the extreme doves, continuing to believe that the war was "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not a "mistake."
It is misleading to cite only those who have scaled the peaks of independent critical thought. More in the mainstream is Peter Kann of the Wall Street Journal, who concedes that 30 years ago there might have been an issue about "defending an often imperfect ally; supporting distant Asian dominoes; sowing democratic seeds in soil that frequently seemed infertile; waging the war with too much firepower, or too little." But today, "it is hard to think of any issue or any place in the world where hindsight offers a clearer spotlight in which to distinguish right from wrong." When we compare "free, prosperous and stable" countries like Indonesia that have been celebrating "personal dignity" since 1965 with the horrors of Indochina after our retreat, it is obvious to "common sense" that the hawks were right and those who saw the Communists as "groovy little people in the jungle" were dead wrong. That opponents of the war were supporters of Communism need not be argued. It follows at once from the basic doctrine of the Gospel according to Kann and associates: since US perfection is axiomatic and the concept of "US aggression and mass murder" meaningless gibberish, it follows that opponents of US policy are supporters of the hated enemy. As for the rest, putting aside the exaltation of atrocity and oppression, one wonders whether in some dark corner of Russia there remains some commissar so vile and cowardly as to proclaim the nobility of the Soviet cause in Afghanistan, pointing to the people of Kabul terrorized by the rockets of the rebel armies. If so, he can apply for a position at any American journal or university.
Given the power of the US propaganda system, as well as shared values, loyalists elsewhere uncritically adopt its doctrinal verities. The Washington bureau chief of the London Economist writes that "The war was a tragedy, which did much damage inside and outside America. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that it was wrong, and is very far from substantiating the view that those who believed the war was necessary were mistaken." The war may even have done a bit of damage to some heathen Indochinese, but the inheritors of centuries of British culture and experience do not tarry over such childish concerns. The editors of the Toronto Globe and Mail caution the US not to overreach in its idealistic efforts to construct a new world order of heavenly virtue: "to career around the globe on a white charger invites disaster. (Remember Vietnam?)."12 The debate over "humanitarian intervention" in late 1992 may have reached even lower depths of moral cowardice, with its musings on the "lessons of Vietnam," which showed how difficult such enterprises can be, how costly to us.
Gorbachev's Russia could face up to its crimes in Afghanistan, evoking much self-righteous smirking here. But the intellectual class in the United States, and their associates elsewhere, must acknowledge nothing and concede nothing. These are among the perquisites and responsibilities of power.
The dominant cast of mind was exhibited in the attempt to portray the media, which had always loyally supported the crusade and continued to do so, as dangerously adversarial, even a threat to the survival of free institutions. This application of the lesson taught by Tacitus (see page 6) was spearheaded by a two-volume Freedom House study of the Tet offensive purporting to show that in their anti-establishment frenzy, the media had falsely portrayed an American victory as a defeat for the forces of freedom, thus undermining morale at home; the same charge was levelled against the Soviet media by the military and Communist Party hierarchy under Brezhnev, with no less merit. The conclusions of this "scholarly study" have become established doctrine, though it was demonstrated at once to be a pathetic mélange of falsehoods and fabrication, which reduces finally to the claim that the media were too "pessimistic" in their advocacy of the noble cause (though less pessimistic than US intelligence, the Pentagon, and the President's top advisers, as the Freedom House scholars chose not to say).13
For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
Interestingly, the media welcomed the Freedom House attack on their integrity, far preferring it to the readily-established truth: that they generally did their work with professional competence, but rarely straying from doctrinal purity. The preferred self-image is not the competent though compliant professional, but rather the anti-establishment crusader, who may go too far in the courageous defiance of power and institutions. Self-image aside, the crucial doctrinal goal is thereby achieved: discussion is bounded by the hawks, who say that the noble cause could have succeeded with better tactics, more commitment, and proper control over the "anti-Americans" who undermined it; and the doves, who "all prayed that the hawks would be right" but now see that our "blundering efforts to do good" were misplaced, an "error" based on misunderstanding and naiveté.
The high-level shift of policy after Tet called for a revision of the earlier record. Since everyone was now an "early opponent of the war," the same must have been true of the grand leader. The enterprise had soured; the picture of John F. Kennedy must therefore be modified. The Kennedy Administration was unusual in the role played by people sensitive to imagery and doctrine, and in a position to shape them. The love affair of the intellectual community with Camelot is in part a reaction to this unaccustomed whiff of (real or imagined) power. The liberal intelligentsia naturally felt the "need to insulate JFK from the disastrous consequences of the American venture in Southeast Asia," Thomas Brown observes in his study of Camelot imagery. "Kennedy's role in the Vietnam war is unsurprisingly...the aspect [of his public image and record] that has been subjected to the greatest number of revisions by Kennedy's admirers... The important thing was that JFK be absolved of responsibility for the Vietnam debacle; when the need for exculpation is so urgent, no obstacles -- including morality and the truth -- should stand in the way."14
No less important is another factor that Brown brings up in discussing the split among JFK's war managers over escalation: "The `doves' in this debate," he notes, "were not advocates of complete withdrawal from Vietnam but of greater reliance on counterinsurgency measures." Termination of the attack against South Vietnam was unacceptable -- indeed, unthinkable, the concept of US aggression being barred from the intellectual culture. To guard the faith, it is important to ensure that debate over the US war be constrained within the dove-hawk spectrum: the imaginable policy options lie between US-supported terror (allegedly JFK) and expansion of JFK's aggression to a full-scale attack on all of Indochina (LBJ, most of the Kennedy advisers who stayed on). And all choices must be sanitized: they are defense against "the assault from the inside" in JFK's words -- the "assault" by indigenous guerrillas against a foreign-imposed terrorist regime that could not survive political competition. If discourse is constrained within these bounds, the propaganda system will have done its duty.
Brown's comments on such obstacles as "morality and the truth" relate specifically to one of the early post-Tet efforts to revise the image: White House aide Kenneth O'Donnell's 1972 memoir. Two of O'Donnell's stories have assumed center stage in the post-Tet reconstruction.15 The first is that Kennedy had informed Senator Mansfield that he agreed with him "on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam." But he explained "that if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term." The second is that afterwards, JFK made a private comment to O'Donnell that he presents verbatim:
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 scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.
In 1975, Mansfield told columnist Jack Anderson that Kennedy "was going to order a gradual withdrawal" but "never had the chance to put the plan into effect," though he had "definitely and unequivocally" made that decision; in 1978, Mansfield said further that Kennedy had informed him that troop withdrawal would begin in January 1964.16 Noting Mansfield's (partial) confirmation of O'Donnell's report, Brown points out that "one need not reject this story out of hand...to doubt that it was a firm statement of Kennedy's intentions in Vietnam. Like many politicians, JFK was inclined to tell people what they wanted to hear." Every serious historian discounts such reports for the same reason: "Kennedy probably told [Mansfield] what he wanted to hear," Thomas Paterson observes. The same holds for other recollections, authentic or not, by political figures and journalists.
Whatever else he may have been, Kennedy was a political animal, and knew enough to tell the Senate Majority Leader and other influential people what they wanted to hear. He was also keenly sensitive to the opposition to his policies among powerful Senators, who saw them as harmful to US interests. The internal record reveals that Kennedy left decisions on Vietnam largely in the hands of his advisers. His own interventions express his "increasing concern" over the "need to make [an] effective case with Congress for continued prosecution of the war," and to ensure that congressional condemnation of Diem's repression "not end up with a resolution requiring that we reduce aid" (September 1963). As for the media, "The way to confound the press is to win the war."17
Kennedy was also aware that public support for the war was thin, as were McNamara, Hilsman, and others. A year later, LBJ won the election largely because of his outspoken opposition to expanding the war. But JFK never saw the general discontent among the public, press, and Congress as an opportunity to construct a popular base for withdrawal; rather, he sought to counter it with extremist rhetoric about the grand stakes. Like McNamara, he hoped to bring the war to a successful end before discontent interfered with this plan. Had he intended to withdraw, he would also have leaped at the opportunity provided by the GVN call for reduction of forces (even outright withdrawal), and its moves toward political settlement. As for the right-wing, a President intent on withdrawal would have called upon highly-respected military figures for support, including the most revered figures of the far right.
The post-Tet O'Donnell-Mansfield version is that JFK intended to begin withdrawal in January 1964, but to complete it only after his election, so as to fend off "another Joe McCarthy scare." Even apart from the total lack of supporting evidence (and the ample counterevidence), this story is hardly credible. Nothing would have been better calculated to fan right-wing hysteria than inflammatory rhetoric about the cosmic issues at stake, public commitment to stay the course combined with withdrawal from that commitment as the client regime collapsed in 1964, election on the solemn promise to stand firm come what may, and then completion of the withdrawal and betrayal. That plan would have been sheer stupidity. Had Kennedy intended to withdraw, he would have at least considered, and probably pursued, the course just outlined. But there is no hint in the record that he gave that possibility a moment's thought. Rather, he chose to enflame jingoist passions. The conclusions, again, seem rather clear.
The post-Tet recollections many years after the alleged conversations are subject to further question. Mansfield had not called for "complete military withdrawal," so it is not possible for JFK to have agreed with him on this. His actual advice was highly qualified: the US should undertake a very limited withdrawal as a "symbolic gesture" to warn Diem to get to business and win the war. And he explicitly opposed withdrawal as LBJ took over. Furthermore, JFK rejected Mansfield's major recorded advice: to desist from public rhetoric about the great stakes in Indochina. The post-Tet recollections are not consistent with the internal record.
Far more credible, if one chooses to take such material seriously, is General Wheeler's recollection in 1964 (not years later, in a period of ideological reconstruction) that Kennedy was interested in extending the war to North Vietnam.
Furthermore, O'Donnell's and Mansfield's belated accounts are virtually meaningless, even if taken at face value. JFK's qualified endorsement of the McNamara-Taylor recommendations on withdrawal was made public at once. Perhaps, years later, Mansfield and O'Donnell had forgotten the withdrawal plans that were prominently published; recall that these seemed so insignificant to JFK's close associates and chroniclers that they scarcely mention them, if at all. The only novelty in these private communications would have been if JFK had stated that he knew that the optimistic assessments were false, and was going to withdraw anyway, which is, indeed, the way these alleged communications are interpreted by Newman, Schlesinger, and other post-Tet advocates of the withdrawal-without-victory thesis. On a thread that thin, one can hang nothing.
Despite such obvious flaws, the O'Donnell-Mansfield stories are taken very seriously by Kennedy hagiographers.
The Camelot memoirists proceeded to revise their earlier versions after Tet, separating JFK (and by implication, themselves) from what had happened. Sorenson was the first. In the earlier version, Kennedy was preparing for the introduction of combat troops if necessary and intended to "weather it out" come what may, not abandoning his ally, who would have collapsed without large-scale US intervention. Withdrawal is not discussed. Diplomacy is considered a threat, successfully overcome by the overthrow of the Diem government. But post-Tet, Sorenson is "convinced" that JFK would have sought diplomatic alternatives in 1965 -- with the client regime in still worse straits, as he notes. Furthermore, for unexamined reasons, JFK would have made a more realistic cost-benefit analysis than did his trusted associates, who continued to run the war for LBJ as they had for him. "I believe he would have devoted increasing time...in the winter of 1963-1964 and found an answer" to the question of how to get out of Vietnam, Sorenson says, not telling us what this answer might have been as the US-GVN position rapidly deteriorated, and not recalling his own advice to LBJ while he was still on the White House staff: to avoid any hint of wavering in the pursuit of victory because of the enormous stakes (January 1964).
The October 1963 withdrawal plan, unmentioned in the old version, assumes great significance in Sorenson's post-Tet revision. Kennedy "did authorize, as an indication of his goal, the October 1963 statement by McNamara and Taylor predicting a withdrawal of most American military advisors by the end of 1965, beginning late in 1963," Sorenson writes, failing to add that in 1965 he [Sorenson] had found these steps unworthy of mention, that Kennedy refused to commit himself to the plan, that withdrawal was explicitly contingent on military success, and that the plan called for intensification of the war and stood alongside the effort to replace Diem if he would not "focus on winning the war" as JFK demanded. Sorenson also says that Kennedy "made it very clear that any suggestion from the Saigon government that our forces were unwelcome would start them `on their way home...the day after it was suggested'." That JFK made such statements is true; that he and his associates regarded such suggestions with dismay and sought to block them in every way is also true, as we have seen.18
Arthur Schlesinger entered the lists in 1978 with his biography of Robert Kennedy. Unlike Sorenson, he does not confine himself to speculation about JFK's intent. Rather, he constructs a new history, radically revising his own earlier version.19
In the pre-Tet history, General MacArthur's views merit a passing phrase as an "opinion" offered the President. There is no indication that JFK paid the slightest attention; they are not mentioned in the 600 pages that follow. In the post-Tet version, we read:
In late April, Kennedy discovered an unexpected ally -- General Douglas MacArthur, who assured him that it would indeed be a "mistake" to fight in Southeast Asia. "He thinks," the President dictated in a rare aide-mémoire, "our line should be Japan, Formosa and the Philippines... He said that the `chickens are coming home to roost' from Eisenhower's years and I live in the chicken coop."
By April 1992, we discover that A Thousand Days had recorded JFK's "delight in General MacArthur's opposition to a land war in Asia," a surprise to the reader of the earlier version.20
Pre-Tet, it was JFK and Arthur Schlesinger who rejoiced over the defeat of "aggression" in Vietnam in 1962. Post-Tet, it is the New York Times that absurdly denounces "Communist `aggression' in Vietnam," while "Kennedy was determined to stall." And though RFK did call for victory over the aggressors in 1962, he was deluded: he was following "the party line as imparted to him by McNamara and Taylor," failing to understand the huge gap between the President's views and the McNamara-Taylor party line -- which Schlesinger had attributed to the President, with his own endorsement, in the pre-Tet version. The post-Tet revision offers no explanation for these innovations, or for JFK's decision to delegate responsibility to run the war to one of the men who peddled the party line he so disdained, while promoting the other to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- a curious reaction to their betrayal of the President's cause.
The doves are identified as Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal, who called for counterinsurgency and social reform, not escalation. Nothing is said about their doctrine that "there are no quitters here" or their actual role in the Kennedy Administration, reviewed earlier; or their later thoughts as optimistic assessments changed. True, all the details were not in the public domain in 1978, though enough was; and it is hard to believe that an Administration insider would not have had at least the general picture.21
In the post-Tet version, the Joint Chiefs join the New York Times, McNamara, and Taylor as extremists undermining the President's moderate policies. Commenting on JCS Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer's invocation of the "well-known commitment to take a forthright stand against Communism in Southeast Asia," Schlesinger writes sardonically that "For the Chiefs the commitment may have been `well-known.' But they had thus far failed in their efforts to force it on the President" -- who regularly voiced it in still more strident terms. Many examples have been cited, including Schlesinger's own report of the President's fears of upsetting "the whole world balance" if the US were to retreat in Vietnam. Or, we may recall JFK's summer 1963 comment on the need to establish a "stable government" in South Vietnam and to support its "struggle to maintain its national independence": "for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." These were "temperate words" in Schlesinger's pre-Tet version. Compare Lemnitzer.22
In his laudatory 1992 review of Newman's book, Schlesinger joins Newman in casting blame on military crazies. Both cite what Schlesinger calls "a hysterical [January] 1962 memorandum" (and Newman describes as "extraordinary") in which the Joint Chiefs predict "that `the fall of South Vietnam to Communist control would mean the eventual Communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland' and that most of Asia would capitulate to what the military still stubbornly called the `Sino-Soviet Bloc'." "Such hyperbole confirmed Kennedy's low opinion of the military," Schlesinger writes. Checking back to the pre-Tet version, we read that it was JFK's State Department that babbled on about the "Sino-Soviet Bloc" while Kennedy in 1963 regarded China as the "long-term danger to the peace"; the USSR, in contrast, was merely the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" intent on world conquest. The Chiefs' "hyperbole" about South Vietnam, furthermore, sounds pretty tame in comparison to JFK's own rhetoric, as we have seen.23
To illustrate Kennedy's moderation and concern for social reform in contrast to the military, Schlesinger cites the 1956 speech quoted earlier (page 45), excising its inflammatory content, which George Ball described as "one of [JFK's] more purple passages" with "a whole bagful of well-worn metaphors" about dominos and huge stakes.24
In Schlesinger's pre-Tet book on John F. Kennedy (1965, 1967), there was only a bare mention of withdrawal plans, with no indication that JFK had ever considered the matter (recall that the basic facts were public knowledge). There is no hint that anyone considered withdrawal without victory. In his 1966 "anti-war" book The Bitter Heritage, still pre-Tet, Schlesinger rejects withdrawal outright, upholding JFK's banner, he claims.
The post-Tet biography of Robert Kennedy (1978) is radically different. Here JFK's alleged withdrawal plans merit a full chapter, even though the book is not devoted to JFK but to his brother, whose "involvement in Vietnam had been strictly limited before Dallas" and "was nonexistent" after, Schlesinger tells us. This startling difference between the pre- and post-Tet versions is not attributed to any significant new information, indeed is not mentioned at all. Schlesinger's explanation for the chapter on withdrawal is that "because [RFK] later had to struggle with his brother's Vietnam legacy, it is essential to understand what that legacy was." Perhaps. But one would then want to know why the legacy appears nowhere in the pre-Tet publications.
In 1992, Schlesinger went a step further, claiming that he had put forth the JFK withdrawal thesis all along.25
Post-Tet, the October 1963 decisions, emerging from their earlier obscurity, become "the first application of Kennedy's phased withdrawal plan," as Kennedy masterfully withstands efforts by his aides to deepen the US commitment, to limit his flexibility, and to delete any reference to troop withdrawal (Schlesinger's sources are oral reports, with little relation to the documentary record, imaginative readings apart; the New York Times account of 1963 was more informative). JFK's plan to withdraw, unmentioned before, now serves as prime evidence that he had separated himself from the two main "schools": the advocates of counterinsurgency and the purveyors of the McNamara-Taylor "party line." He was opposed to "both win-the-war factions, ...vaguely searching for a nonmilitary solution." His undeviating public call for winning the war is apparently to be understood as a ploy to deflect the right-wing; his equally insistent call for victory in the internal record is unmentioned.
Overriding the objection of the Chiefs, Schlesinger writes, in July 1962 "Kennedy instructed McNamara to start planning for the phased withdrawal of American military personnel"; in the pre-Tet version, we read only about the optimism of Harkins and McNamara in mid-1962, with no mention of any withdrawal plan (896). Post-Tet, the July 1962 instructions were the origin of the October 1963 plan, which, for the President, put a limit on escalation and was "the reserve plan for extrication," though the disruptive generals saw it only "as a means of putting pressure on Diem" -- as did Mansfield and other doves, and Schlesinger in his marginal pre-Tet reference to McNamara's recommendation.
As we have already seen, the July 1962 instructions were predicated on the assumption that victory was within reach and that any delay beyond 1965 would make it difficult to contain domestic opposition to the war. In short, JFK's goal was withdrawal after victory -- by mid-1965, McNamara thought, though to the end, JFK remained unwilling to commit himself. The top military command disagreed only in that they were more optimistic, expecting to wind it up in a year. All this is omitted, though the basic facts were available in the Pentagon Papers.
Continuing with the post-Tet version, Schlesinger writes that by 1963, withdrawal was turning from a "precaution...into a preference." That is what "the evidence suggests." What the evidence actually suggests is that withdrawal was always a preference, but only after victory; and so it remained in 1963. The evidence that Schlesinger cites is the O'Donnell-Mansfield material, already discussed. His only further evidence is Kennedy's public statement in September 1963 that "it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it...." Recall that this point was made to the President by his top military commander in Vietnam, General McGarr, in February 1962, and was reiterated after the assassination by LBJ, McNamara, and Generals Westmoreland and Taylor. By the same logic, they must have shared JFK's secret intent.
By late summer of 1963, the post-Tet version continues, "Kennedy was still playing out his public hand while secretly wondering how to get out" -- so secretly that no trace is left in the record and his closest associates knew nothing about it; the "public hand" was the inflammatory rhetoric that could only serve to undermine withdrawal. On November 14, Schlesinger reports, Kennedy told a press conference "somewhat confusedly" that the upcoming Honolulu conference would focus on "how we can intensify the struggle, how we can bring Americans out of there. Now that is our object, to bring Americans home." The confusion results from "Kennedy's private determination to begin, at whatever cost, a strategy of extrication," a doctrine for which not a particle of evidence has been adduced. With that doctrine abandoned, JFK's statement unconfusedly reflects his awareness of domestic discontent and his commitment to intensify the war and withdraw after victory, explicit in the internal and public record.
Schlesinger notes that "In May 1963 Nhu proposed publicly that the United States start withdrawing its troops," adding that "sooner or later we Vietnamese will settle our differences between us." He reports inaccurately that Nhu's hints about treating with Hanoi were not "taken seriously in either Saigon or Washington" (citing William Bundy); the record shows that they were taken quite seriously, and were a factor in the Kennedy Administration decision to overthrow the government. "No one knew then whether the explorations had any reality," Schlesinger adds correctly, without, however, giving the reason: JFK and his advisers feared that these explorations had all too much reality, and acted to destroy the threat, another crucial fact that undermines the withdrawal-without-victory thesis. A "Diem-Ho deal could have been the means of an American exit from Vietnam in 1963," Schlesinger correctly observes, so that "An opportunity of some sort was perhaps missed" -- though not because of ignorance, as he suggests. Rather, it was understood that such a deal would force the US to withdraw without victory.
Post-Tet, Schlesinger adopts the thesis that the assassination of the President led to a dramatic reversal of policy.26 He argues that LBJ abandoned JFK's withdrawal plans at once, shifting to escalation. His evidence is the opening paragraph of NSAM 273 of November 27:
It remains the central objective of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy.
Schlesinger highlights these words to show that LBJ was undertaking "both the total commitment Kennedy had always refused and the diagnosis of the conflict" that Kennedy had "never quite accepted." The highlighted words appear regularly in both the public and private Kennedy record, as does the diagnosis; numerous examples have already been given, including JFK's own demand that everyone must "focus on winning the war." The draft of NSAM 273 written before the assassination by Kennedy's top advisers, expressing his policies, opens with the same paragraph.27 The October 2 White House statement approving the McNamara-Taylor recommendations is hardly different. The hidden meanings and implications are in the eye of the beholder.
Schlesinger also claims that by emphasizing that American military programs "should be maintained at levels as high as those in the time of the Diem regime," NSAM 273 "nullified Kennedy's extrication intent." His source is the Pentagon Papers analysis (III, 18), which makes clear that it is the aid programs that are being discussed and that the statement "served to indicate continuance by the new President of policies already agreed upon." Schlesinger's source continues: "The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963." As noted, that White House public statement had also emphasized that "Major U.S. assistance" would be maintained as long as needed by the client regime. The phrase Schlesinger cites from NSAM 273 nullifies no "extrication intent," in fact changes nothing.
Schlesinger's account of what followed is hardly more persuasive. Thus he cites a high-level Kennedy official as writing that the Kennedy brothers "regarded Vietnam as a massive source of vexation and concern but not as intrinsically important in itself -- only as a counter in a larger game." These words, which Schlesinger again highlights, are supposed to prove that "As civilized, well-educated Americans they were totally devoid of the obsessive attitudes that characterized President Johnson under the influence of the `hard-liners'"; the wording expresses the boundless contempt of the Kennedy intellectuals for the boorish Texas interloper defacing the elegance of Camelot. The cited phrase is from 1970, post-Tet; a page earlier, Schlesinger had quoted a letter from RFK to Johnson in June 1964 in which he described Vietnam as "obviously the most important problem facing the United States."28 As for the "obsessive attitudes" expressed by JFK and his top advisers, enough has already been said. Finally, it was Kennedy's personally-chosen and trusted senior advisers who were influencing LBJ and directing his war, with his brother's firm support, until things began to go awry.
Schlesinger elaborates in his 1992 review of Newman's book. Endorsing Newman's "withdrawal without victory" thesis, Schlesinger writes that he himself had made the same point in his A Thousand Days, where he reported JFK's view that "it was a Vietnamese war. If we converted it into a white man's war, we would lose." He does not mention that LBJ later made similar remarks: we do not want "our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys," he proclaimed during the 1964 election campaign -- not quite the same as the JFK-Schlesinger version because for LBJ, it was a point of principle, while for JFK-Schlesinger, it was sheer expedience, a question of how to win. Furthermore, as noted, the same point had been made by the military command before and after. The sharp pre- vs. post-Tet contrast again passes unexamined.
The third pre-Tet Kennedy memoirist, Roger Hilsman, has written several letters to the press responding to critics of the withdrawal thesis, in the course of its 1991-1992 revival. In them, he takes a stronger stand on JFK's intent to withdraw than in his pre-Tet discussion.29 But a close reading shows that Hilsman is careful to evade the crucial questions. He says that JFK wanted to withdraw, which is undeniable; so did Rostow and LeMay -- after victory. He says also that JFK was determined not to let it become an American war. The same is true generally of his advisers, who then did just that as circumstances drastically changed, leaving them no other choice, they concluded, on the premises they shared with JFK. While serving in the LBJ Administration, Hilsman largely agreed, as we have seen. Hilsman's current interventions skirt the issues, only clouding them further.
Consider Hilsman's latest intervention in the debate, as I write.30 Here he addresses the charge that he waited until 1992 to make it public "that President Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam." Not true, Hilsman responds. Kennedy himself had made this clear in his news conference of September 2, 1963, in which he said that "In the final analysis it is their war. They have to win it or lose it." After the assassination, he continues, Johnson "made it clear to people in his administration dealing with Vietnam that he had dropped Kennedy's last three words": that is, he would not allow the war to be lost. Hilsman then refers to his objections to LBJ's decision to bomb North Vietnam, offered "most extensively" in his 1967 book. He claims further that "it is difficult to make yourself heard," alleging suppression by media and historians of Hilsman's efforts to inform them "that Kennedy, before his death, had begun to implement a plan to withdraw from Vietnam." Defense rests.
Note that Hilsman adduces no evidence that Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam without victory, the only point at issue. The charge of suppression is not particularly convincing; surely Hilsman could have found some journal willing to allow him a few words. That aside, he had nothing to make public: the initiation of the withdrawal plan had been prominently reported in October 1963, less fully in his 1967 book. Furthermore, his objections to LBJ's bombing in that book are hardly "extensive." Indeed they are quite pallid, as we have seen; hardly a surprise, since he himself had called for measured escalation against the North while serving in the JFK and LBJ Administrations. Finally, consider the claim that LBJ dropped the last three words in JFK's statement that "They have to win it or lose it." To claim on the basis of these three words that Kennedy intended to withdraw without victory makes as much sense as to attribute the same intention to LBJ on the basis of his statement, a year later, opposing the dispatch of US troops. Or to attribute the same intention to the top US military command throughout, on the basis of similar statements. That is why Hilsman makes no such claim in his 1967 memoir, in which he emphasizes LBJ's statement that "We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys" to show his "sincere" and "desperate" effort to carry out JFK's plans. Recall also Hilsman's observation in his 1967 book that 10 days after the three-word deletion on which he now hangs his case, JFK's public commitment to "win the war" and not "see a war lost" became "a policy guideline," as, indeed, he had recognized a few days after in internal planning (see pages 46 and 75).
However informative they may be with regard to the tasks of cultural management, the post-Tet revisions by leading Kennedy intellectuals have no value as history. Rather, they constitute a chapter of cultural history, one that is of no slight interest, I believe.
The post-Tet reconstruction is highly serviceable, therefore likely to endure irrespective of fact, at least in circles that derive their inspiration and imagery from Camelot. By early 1993, it was gaining the status of background information. Thus in reviewing a biography of Robert McNamara in the Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner writes that though McNamara had been "taken in by the bogus statistics supplied by Gen. Paul Harkins," by late 1963 his "powers of skepticism revived." "With Kennedy, he embraced a plan to increase assistance but turn the show over to the Vietnamese, win or lose, by 1965."
In the biography under review, Deborah Shapley is much more cautious. McNamara told her that he and Kennedy had agreed to withdraw without victory, Shapley writes, but she found herself suspecting that "his sincere belief that Kennedy would have gotten out of Vietnam was something he arrived at later when the war had become tragic and traumatic for him and the nation." His "reverence for John Kennedy" might have led him "to self-deceive, to believe that his hero and mentor would have wisely guided them out." "No hard evidence for McNamara's claim has come to light." "Hard evidence" is substantial, but as we have seen, it consistently undermines the claim. Shapley writes that McNamara and Kennedy "may have had a different, private agenda"; her sources are Newman and Schlesinger's "interesting theory" of 1978, concocted without a shred of evidence or a word about the still more interesting pre-Tet silence. All other sources cited are post-Tet, in part second-hand: private reminiscences of 1970 (Gilpatric) and 1986 (McNamara), and current interviews.31
In short, the belief remains pure faith, held in the face of abundant counter-evidence from every relevant source.
7 Schlesinger, Bitter Heritage; see APNM, ch. 4. On the PR function of staged elections in Vietnam and elsewhere, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections; MC, ch. 3.
8 Schlesinger, RFK, 734, 739.
9 See FRS, 25.
10 Howard Zinn and I were the applicants; the chapter was Arlington, near Cambridge. The details are not without interest.
11 On media coverage of the war from the early 1950s through 1985, see MC, 169-296and App. 3.
12 Lewis and others, see MC, 170f. Kann, WSJ, Sept. 9, 1992. Michael Elliott, BG, Oct. 27, 1991. G&M, Feb. 27, 1992.
13 See MC, ch. 5.5.2, App. 3.
14 Brown, JFK, 34ff.
15 O'Donnell, Johnny, cited by Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 322f. Also Schlesinger, RFK, 711-2.
16 Newman, JFK, 324; Schlesinger, RFK, 712. Note that withdrawal had begun a month earlier, with ample publicity. Possibly Mansfield had forgotten.
17 Paterson, Kennedy's Quest, 21. FRUSV, IV 254, 192 (167), 281.
18 Sorenson, Kennedy Legacy, 204-8; also Kennedy, 657.
19 Schlesinger, RFK, ch. 31. Chapter 32 is devoted to RFK and Vietnam in the post-assassination years, with a look backwards as well.
20 See note 1.
21 Schlesinger refers to Hilsman's hawkish August 30, 1963 memorandum, omitting its most inflammatory content (RFK, 720; see p. 00, above). He reports Hilsman's private statement to him discounting it as a response to a query by Rusk that offered "the whole range of possible responses." The document in fact proposes a single "U.S. Response" to each of the "Possible Diem-Nhu moves," each such response having several components; they are not presented as alternatives, indeed could not be, given the wording.
22 1000 Days, 902-3.
23 Review of Newman (see ch. 1, n. 39); 1000 Days, 825. On Schlesinger's review, see LL, letter 17.
24 RFK, 701; Ball, Past, 364.
25 Review of Newman.
26 RFK, 725f.
27 In both, the word "object" appears instead of "objective."
28 RFK, 728-9.
29 Hilsman, letter, NYT, Jan. 20; TLS, April 3, 1992 (responding to Grenier; cf. note 1); letter, Tikkun, Summer 1992.
30 Ibid. The "news conference" appears to be the Cronkite TV interview; To Move a Nation, 497, where the wording is given slightly differently.
31 Kuttner, BG, Jan. 17, 1993. Shapley, Promise, 262f.
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