JFK (26 page)

Between 1960 and 1962, when the American military advisory strength in South Vietnam was limited to 16,000 men, Gen. Paul Harkins, then the senior commander in Saigon, complained bitterly that with a ceiling of 16,000 men, he could get only 1,200-1,600 effective combat advisers, because most of the rest were confined to logistical support work. The bulk of that support work and cost was related to the helicopter.

Gen. Earle Wheeler, at that time director of the Joint Staff,
⁶
ordered an analysis of the Harkins complaint that led to the Okanagan study
⁷
of helicopter operations in Vietnam. The study revealed that not only was General Harkins’s complaint well founded; it was learned that a major segment of the oversized logistics contingent was directly involved in the support of helicopters that General Harkins himself had requested, little realizing the resultant burden of his action.

The surprising thing revealed by this study was that this was true even when most of the helicopters in Vietnam were assigned not to the army but to the CIA
⁸
and much of the maintenance was being performed by highly paid contract civilians.

The helicopter mushroom grew, and it generated greater demands of its own. Helicopter bases were soft and vulnerable targets. They needed vast supporting perimeter defenses. These defenses created a heavy demand for “noncombatant” U.S. military personnel. Because these perimeter guard elements were sparsely positioned and were immobilized by the nature of their task, they became centers of little wars of their own, thus heating up the intensity of combat throughout the land.

As opposition increased and became more sophisticated, helicopter formations were seeded with gun-carrying helicopters. Because the gunships carried no combat troops at all, the ratio of men carried, per aircraft per mile, dropped. With this, the cost per man transported, related to the number of helicopters per mission, skyrocketed again.

There is much that can be said in support of the tactical employment of the helicopter in warfare. But there are very few missions of such exceedingly high priority that they can best and most profitably be performed at the cost that helicopters incur. And even if certain operations can be justified, do they occur with enough frequency that they require the continuing availability and maintenance of operational helicopter units?

We have noted the loss of five thousand helicopters, the loss of fifteen thousand or more American lives, and the loss of not less than $1 billion in direct cost; yet we have not scratched the surface. The helicopter is one of the most costly vehicles to maintain and operate of any device ever built, and in South Vietnam the cost per hour of civilian maintenance and facilities was without equal. The helicopter is a voracious consumer of engines, rotors, and spare parts—all of which had to be airlifted from the United States, halfway around the world.

Although the helicopter can land in a space roughly equal to its own length, large numbers of helicopters must be gathered onto major airfields in order that supplies, fuel, and other services may be brought to them efficiently. The vast number and expense of helicopter airfields must be added to all the above.

Of course, these are not the only costs and the only burdens. The military services have thousands of pilots and aircraft crewmen. But these men (and now women) cannot be used for helicopter operations; all helicopter crews must be specially trained. All of these helicopter-related requirements cost heavily in men, money, and material things.

In a war in which the true measure of victory and defeat must be measured in terms of the cost and attrition on each side, the helicopter was found to be the biggest contributor to both cost and attrition. In retrospect, we discovered that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Vietcong never had to contend with anything like it on their side. They won because we lost so much.

This paradoxical situation has caused many of us who were close to that action to wonder what might have happened if the war in Vietnam had been a “normal” war, with aerial strike forces on both sides? Imagine the havoc and devastation that could have occurred if a real, first-class enemy had been able to mount effective air attacks against those airfields where the helicopters were massed. The losses would have been catastrophic. We could not have justified having created such targets in the first place in the face of sophisticated opposition.

This helicopter episode has been a tragic lesson. The copters were introduced by the CIA and used by the agency to cause the escalation of the war. Once the pattern had been set, the military commanders who came later, in 1965 and thereafter, were caught in a tactical bind they could not break.

Much has been said and written about the number of Americans in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, and there are many who attempt to place the blame for the escalation of that conflict on him. The facts prove otherwise.

As I have shown above, there was a ceiling of 16,000 personnel during the 1960-62 years. This is true; and it must be kept in mind that those Americans, except for such limited assignments as the Military Assistance Advisory Group, were there under the operational control of the CIA. When General Harkins complained about the few combat-effective men he had available, he learned that only 1,200 to 1,600 of the 16,000 personnel in Vietnam were in that category. The rest, more than 14,000, were support troops, and most of them for helicopter support. This was a relatively small number of combat troops considering that the overall total rose to 550,000 within the decade.

According to interpretations of these data that attempt to place the blame for the Vietnam War on Kennedy, the
New York Times
publication of “The Pentagon Papers” states, “President Kennedy, who inherited a policy of ‘limited-risk gamble,’ bequeathed to Johnson a broad commitment to war.” This is contrived and incorrect. The
Times
all but ignored President Kennedy’s important National Security Action Memorandum #263, October 11, 1963, that, as official policy, ordered 1,000 men home from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. That was the carefully planned Kennedy objective announced scarcely one month before his untimely death.

It was not until President Johnson had signed NSAM #273 on November 26, 1963, that the course of the Kennedy plan began to be changed, and this trend became most apparent with the publication of NSAM #288 in March 1964.

The directed escalation of the war began under Johnson, as we shall see. Had Kennedy lived, all the madness that happened in Vietnam after 1964 would not have taken place. President Kennedy had vowed to bring one thousand Americans home from Vietnam by Christmas 1963 and to have all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. Kennedy’s death brought about a total reversal of that carefully structured White House policy and that sincere promise to the American people.

ONE OF THE BITTEREST electoral battles of the century was fought in 1960, when Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was elected President over the incumbent vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. For Nixon and his longtime backers
¹
in and out of government, the defeat on November 8 proved staggering and unexpected. They had many concrete plans for the next four years, and their dreams had been deflated by that “half-a-vote-per-precinct” loss.

Years later, Nixon wrote one of the most unusual articles ever published for the millions of readers of
Reader’s Digest.
Under the title “Cuba, Castro and John F Kennedy,” the article appeared in the November 1964 issue.

Nixon began with these remarkable sentences: “On April 19, 1959, I met for the first and only time the man who was to be the major foreign policy issue of the 1960 presidential campaign; who was destined to be a hero in the warped mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin; and who in 1964 is still a major campaign issue. The man, of course, was Fidel Castro.”

Nixon had been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president during the 1950s, and before that, going back to 1947, had served in both the House and the Senate. He knew Washington well, and the great industrial, legal, and banking combines that are so closely enmeshed with the government. In the article, he looked back over the hectic earlier years and linked the four factors that were uppermost in his mind:

1. the 1960 election
   
2. Fidel Castro
   
3. the death of the President, John F Kennedy
   
4. the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
   

He wrote almost nothing about the growing warfare in Southeast Asia, even though he knew very well that it had been under way since 1945, when a vast shipment of American arms was put in the hands of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. By 1964, it had run its complex course, a course he had encouraged under the direction of the CIA.

Nixon’s article was published just one month after the release of the twenty-six-volume report of the Warren Commission, which made public the incredible finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had been responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy. It is astonishing that, since Nixon’s article was actually written before the Warren Commission report was issued, he had arrived at the same finding as that highly confidential report with his identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as “President Kennedy’s assassin.”

It is worth noting that a member of the Warren Commission also wrote an identical finding before the report was published. Gerald R. Ford’s article “Piecing Together the Evidence” appeared in
Life
magazine on October 2, 1964, before the Warren Report came out.

These two men—subsequently Presidents—for some reason found it necessary to put on the record, as soon as they could and before the official publication of the Warren Commission Report, their support of the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. This allegation of theirs was not true. Anyone with a few minutes of spare time can prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin. Why did both of these men feel compelled to say that he was? To whom were these public figures beholden?

It has been established that Nixon was in Dallas on the day, and at the exact time, that JFK was shot—12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963.
²
Oddly, he avoided that fact in his
Readers Digest
article. Nixon wrote:

In the November 1973 issue of
Esquire
magazine, there’s the following imaginative quote by Nixon:

That is not the end of Nixon’s version of that busy day. The Nixon story that appears in Jim Bishop’s book
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
is said to be the “official” account:

Nixon covered up the important fact that he had been in Dallas at the very time Kennedy was killed with that erroneous recollection which he included in the
Reader’s Digest
article. Why did Richard Nixon not want anyone to know that he was actually in Dallas at the time of the assassination? Why did he so categorically pronounce Oswald to be the killer before the specious evidence of the Warren Commission had been made public? Does he have other information that he has been concealing to this day? It is uncanny that he so positively linked Cuba, Castro, Oswald, and Kennedy while at the same time completely omitting other important events. They were his priority; he must have had his reasons.