Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
He added:
The elaborate secrecy precautions, the carefully contrived subterfuges, the precisely orchestrated press leaks, were intended not to deceive “the other side,” but to keep the American public in the dark. . . . For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of half-truths or deliberate deceit by executives who consider the people of the Congress as adversaries.”
1
It is important to understand the Pentagon Papers’ subtle anti-Kennedy slant. Nothing reveals this bias more than the following extract taken from the section “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May-November 1963.”
At the end of a crucial summary of the most momentous ninety-day period in modern American history from August 22 to November 22, 1963, this is what the authors of the Pentagon Papers had to say:
After having delayed an appropriate period, the U.S. recognized the new government on November 8. As the euphoria wore off, however, the real gravity of the economic situation and the lack of expertise in the new government became apparent to both Vietnamese and American officials. The deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program also came more and more clearly into perspective.
These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu conference on November 20 when [Henry Cabot] Lodge and the country team [from Vietnam] met with [Dean] Rusk, [Robert] McNamara, [Maxwell] Taylor, [George] Ball, and [McGeorge] Bundy. But the meeting ended inconclusively. After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington, the White House tried to pull together some conclusions and offer some guidance for our continuing and now deeper involvement in Vietnam. The instructions contained in NSAM 273, however, did not reflect the truly dire situation as it was to come to light in succeeding weeks. The reappraisals forced by the new information would swiftly make it irrelevant as it was overtaken by events.
Recall what had been going on during that month of November 1963. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother had been murdered, and the administration of South Vietnam had been placed in the hands of Gen. Duong Van “Big” Minh. Then, in one of the strangest scenarios of recent history, most of the members of the Kennedy cabinet had flown to Honolulu, together, for that November 20 series of conferences. The full cabinet meeting—even the secretary of agriculture was there—in Hawaii was to be followed by a flight to Tokyo on November 22. Again, almost all of the Kennedy cabinet members were on that flight to Tokyo. They were on that aircraft bound for Tokyo when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas. Upon receipt of that stunning news, they ordered the plane to return directly to Hawaii and, almost immediately, on to Washington.
But consider here the strange and impersonal words used by this “official history.” The Pentagon Papers, in its long section on the events of that tragic period, ends its own narrative report of those events by saying: “But probably more important, the deterioration of the military situation of the Vietnamese position. . . .”
What could have been the basis for that conclusion? What caused the Papers’ authors to say that in 1968? Let’s look at the record from the pages of their own work:
“I do not doubt the military judgment that the war in the countryside is going well now.”
“The war was going well, thanks in large measure to the strategic hamlets program . . .” Diem concluded his optimistic presentation by noting that “although the war was going well, much remained to be done in the Delta area” [where most of the Tonkinese had been sent].
#1. “The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress.
#2. “A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.
#3. “. . . the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
#6. “. . . We believe the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965. ”
News of this “White House Report” was splashed across the front page of the U.S. armed forces
Pacific Stars and Stripes
newspaper of October 4, 1963, in banner headlines: U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.
These are quotes taken from official documents of that time, all taking an optimistic view of the war by the leaders closest to it and including statements by President Kennedy and President Diem. The official Kennedy White House policy document, National Security Action Memorandum #263, was dated October 11, 1963, and there is no evidence that the situation, as perceived by Kennedy and his closest advisers, had changed over the next month. General Krulak was as close to the President and his policy as he had ever been, and I worked directly with General Krulak on the Joint Staff. We never heard of any changes in plans from the White House.
Just four days after Kennedy’s death and less than sixty days after Kennedy published NSAM #263, which visualized the Vietnamization of the war and the return of all American personnel by the end of 1965, Lyndon Johnson and most of the JFK cabinet viewed the situation in an entirely different light. In Johnson’s NSAM #273 they saw the military situation deteriorating (“the deterioration of. . . the Strategic Hamlet program”) and all of a sudden saw the program as a failure. (“These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu Conference on November 20. . . .”)
This is a remarkable statement. On that date, John Kennedy was still alive and President of the United States. Yet this report says that his cabinet had been assembled in Honolulu to discuss “these topics”—the very same topics of NSAM #273, dated November 26, and a vital step on the way to a total reversal of Kennedy’s own policy, as stated in the Taylor-McNamara report and in NSAM #263, dated October 2, 1963. The total reversal was completed with the publication of NSAM #288, March 26, 1964.
This situation cannot be treated lightly. How did it happen that the Kennedy cabinet had traveled to Hawaii at precisely the same time Kennedy was touring in Texas? How did it happen that the subject of discussion in Hawaii, before JFK was killed, was a strange agenda that would not come up in the White House until after he had been murdered? Who could have known, beforehand, that this new—non-Kennedy—agenda would be needed in the White House because Kennedy would no longer be President?
Is there any possibility that the “powers that be” who planned and executed the Kennedy assassination had also been able to get the Kennedy cabinet out of the country and to have them conferring in Hawaii on an agenda that would be put before President Lyndon Johnson just four days after Kennedy’s death?
President Kennedy would not have sent his cabinet to Hawaii to discuss that agenda. He had issued his own agenda for Vietnam on October 11, 1963, and he had no reason to change it. More than that, he had no reason at all to send them all to Hawaii for such a conference. It is never good practice for a President to have key members of his cabinet out of town while he is on an extended trip. Why was the cabinet in Hawaii? Who ordered the cabinet members there? If JFK had no reason to send them to Hawaii, who did, and why?
Keep in mind, through this series of vitally important questions, that we are piling circumstance upon circumstance. It is the body of circumstantial evidence that proves the existence of conspiracy.
As soon as the Honolulu conference broke up, these same cabinet members departed from Hawaii on an unprecedented trip to Japan. No one has explained why the Kennedy cabinet was ordered to Japan at that time.
This trip to Japan was not some casual event. Someone had arranged it with care. A reading of newspapers from late November 1963 reveals that extracts of speeches supposedly given by some of these cabinet officers in Japan were made available and then printed, for example, even in the Washington, D.C.,
Star
.
We all know now that these cabinet officers did not reach Japan and that their VIP aircraft returned to Hawaii. Why would newspapers in the United States print extracts of their speeches as though they actually had gone to Japan and delivered those speeches? Who had set this trip up so meticulously that even such details as the press releases appeared to validate the presence of the cabinet members in Japan when in fact they never went there?
Continuing this account of the period, the chronology prepared by the authors of the Pentagon Papers lists the following:
22 November 1963: Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.
23 November 1963 NSAM #273: Drawing together the results of the Honolulu Conference, and Lodge’s meeting with the President, NSAM #273 reaffirms the U.S. commitment to defeat the VC in South Vietnam. . . .
These are astounding statements, considering that they were written sometime in 1968, when everyone knew that the most important fact of those two days was the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This massive compilation of official documents produced by Secretary McNamara’s “task force. . . to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present” (1969) totally ignored the assassination.
The Pentagon Papers say simply, “Lodge confers with the President,” as though it were just another day in the life of a President. Which President? Didn’t that matter? What a way to dismiss Kennedy and his tragic death! This entire section of the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned to be a complete account of the history of the Vietnam war period, cannot find a word to say about that assassination. This official history simply skips all mention of the death of the President of the United States and tells the story of the death of Diem as though it had occurred in a vacuum.
Why do you suppose Leslie Gelb, director of the Pentagon Papers Study Task Force, chose to close his “Letter of Transmittal of the Study” with this quote from Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
: “This is a world of chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together as one; chance by turn rules either and has the last featuring blow at events. ”
Then, as if to introduce some reality into the study, he closes with this remarkable thought: “Our studies have tried to reflect this thought; inevitably in the organizing and writing process, they appear to assign more and less to men and free will than was the case.”
This sounds more and more like the “God throws the dice” syndrome. What could Les Gelb have been thinking about when he saw “chance” taking “the last featuring blow at events?” Did the Vietnam War happen by “chance”? Was President John F. Kennedy killed by “chance”? That takes a strange view of history. When Oliver Stone’s movie asked, “Why was Kennedy killed?” I doubt that anyone in the audience would have answered, “By chance.”
This “Letter of Transmittal” of January 15, 1969, was addressed to Clark M. Clifford, secretary of defense and a man we have quoted frequently during this work.
These questions and the subjects they unfold are the things of which assassinations and coups d’état are made. The plotters worked out their plans in detail as they moved to take over the government that Kennedy had taken from them. As a result, every other public official became a pawn on that master chess board. Assassinations and coups d’état permeate and threaten all levels of society.
These may be entirely speculative questions, but they are based upon a close reading of the subject and firsthand knowledge of the times. They are presented here for the consideration of the reader. Let the record speak for itself. It is unfortunate that most historians have not looked more carefully at Kennedy’s NSAMs from NSAM #55 in July 1961 through NSAM #263 in October 1963; or at NSAM #273 of November 26, 1963, and its draft of November 21, 1963, or at the enormous pressures that all of these documents created. If anyone had wished to zero in on the key to the source of the decision for the “Why?” and the “Who?” of that assassination, he would not have needed to go much further.
In concluding this chapter, it may be well to add a few more words. I was on Okinawa in 1945 and observed the shipments of arms being loaded onto U.S. Navy transport vessels for shipment to Haiphong Harbor in Indochina, where, as we have seen, they were given to Ho Chi Minh under the auspices of the OSS.
I was in Vietnam many times during 1952, 1953, and 1954. I saw that serenely beautiful country go from a placid recreation area for wounded and hospitalized American soldiers fighting in Korea to a hotbed of turmoil after the defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the division of the country into two parts, the forced movement of more than one million Catholic northern Tonkinese to the south, and the establishment of the Diem administration. During this period I had frequent contact with the members of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.