Reclaiming History (317 page)

When McGeorge Bundy, a military hawk in his administration, sent a memo to LBJ on January 27, 1965, on behalf of himself and another hawk, Secretary of Defense McNamara, recommending military intervention in Vietnam (“the time has come for harder choices,” Bundy put it), LBJ turned elsewhere for help, asking his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, “to instruct [your] experts once again to consider all possible ways for finding a peaceful solution.”
²⁵⁵
Johnson, in an August 19, 1969, tape recording of himself and two aides helping him write his memoir,
The Vantage Point
, said it about as succinctly as possible: “Until July 1965, I tried to keep from going into Vietnam.”
²⁵⁶
†

None of this, naturally, is in
JFK
. The
Los Angeles Times
, in a review of the January 14, 2002, History Channel special
LBJ and Vietnam: In the Eye of the Storm
(which was based in large part on the White House tapes of Johnson set forth in Michael Beschloss’s two books,
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964
, and
Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965
), concluded what was so obvious from the tapes, that rather than “the hawkish brute” eager to escalate our involvement in Vietnam, Johnson was “the most reluctant of warriors.
*
In recording after recording of late-night phone calls with military and political advisers, Johnson can be heard trying with growing desperation to find a way out of the murky conflict. When he does agree to dramatically ramp up the American troop commitment, he appears to do so after exhausting all other possibilities, and [then] only with the belief it will bring a quick end to the war.”
²⁵⁷
And Johnson’s own words on the tapes aren’t the only evidence of his agonizing over what to do. For instance, a March 7, 1965, tape-recorded diary entry by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, says, “In talking about the Vietnam situation [during dinner] Lyndon summed it up quite simply—‘I can’t get out, and I can’t finish it with what I have got. And I don’t know what the hell to do.’”
²⁵⁸
Writing in the
New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani observes that “the tapes underscore [Johnson’s] own early doubts about the war” and reflect “his agonized decision-making over Vietnam.”
²⁵⁹

Yet all that Oliver Stone showed his audience was that LBJ was gung ho for a war in Vietnam,
†
one scene showing him forcefully telling military leaders on November 26, 1963, the day after they buried Kennedy, “Just get me elected. I’ll give you the damn war.” (He was already president, of course, but would be coming up for election in one year.) The source? Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 book,
Vietnam: A History
, claims that at a White House reception on Christmas Eve, 1963, a month after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff this.
²⁶⁰
That’s what Stone offers against all the evidence and the historical record to the contrary cited above. And even if we were to accept, at full value, this highly suspect entry in Karnow’s book for which Karnow cites no source, but which Stone completely subscribes to, it still poses a big problem for Stone. LBJ’s remark, if indeed it was ever made, was made
after
, not before, the conspirators supposedly murdered Kennedy. What evidence does Stone offer in his movie that
before
Kennedy’s murder Johnson told or indicated to the conspirators he wanted war? Nothing. Nothing at all. And, as indicated, he doesn’t present to his audience any of the overwhelming and conclusive evidence that once LBJ became president, he did everything possible to avoid war. If Stone had done so (i.e., if he had told the truth), it would have completely contradicted and refuted the main theme of his movie—that Kennedy did not want to go to war in Vietnam and LBJ did, and that’s why Kennedy was murdered.

Right to the very end, the Vietnam War weighed more heavily on Johnson than any other chapter in his presidency. Indeed, although he eventually committed himself to the war, because of doubts about the conflict that never left him he was unwilling to commit the United States to an all-out war, prompting General William C. Westmoreland, Johnson’s chief of military operations in Vietnam, to later write, “A major problem [in the U.S. prosecution of the war] was that Washington policy decisions forced us to fight with but one hand.”
²⁶¹
In April of 1967, Westmoreland said in a New York City speech that “in effect, we are fighting a war of attrition.” He proceeded to fly to Washington, where he asked the president to increase the number of ground troops from the existing 470,000 to 550,500, the “minimal essential force,” or 670,000, the “optimum.” Johnson, shocked, asked, “Where does it all end?” When Secretary of Defense McNamara queried Westmoreland as to how long it would take to win the war, the jut-jawed general responded, “With the optimum force about three years; with the minimum force, at least five.”
²⁶²
He got neither.

With the war escalating out of control in 1965–1968, and the Communists’ Tet offensive in early 1968 into more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns and villages (elements even fighting their way onto the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon) demonstrating (though the Vietcong sustained tremendous losses) beyond all doubt the resiliency of the Communist forces and that the war was far from over, Johnson lost his stomach for the conflict and elected to not run for reelection.
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*
But there were contributing factors. “I felt that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions,” he told his biographer, Doris Kearns.

On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. Up ahead were dozens of danger signs pointing to another summer of riots in the cities. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating [over Vietnam] students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American public, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable to me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.

In a televised address to the nation on the evening of March 31, 1968 (a little over two months before RFK was assassinated in Los Angeles), Johnson began his speech by announcing his decision to stop air and naval attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area of the Demilitarized Zone, in the hope, he said, that “President Ho Chi Minh [will] respond positively and favorably to this new step of peace.” He then shocked the nation’s viewers by saying, “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home…I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan [political] causes…Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
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A
s seen earlier, the evidence is very conflicting and ambiguous, at best, as to whether or not Kennedy, if he had lived, would have eventually withdrawn from Vietnam.

As previously alluded to, on September 2, 1963, less than three months before his death, he told Walter Cronkite of CBS, “In the final analysis, it is their [South Vietnamese] war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it.” Stone, naturally, put that segment of the Cronkite interview on the screen for his audience. But Stone didn’t show his audience Kennedy thereafter telling Cronkite, “
But I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake
…This is a very important struggle even though it is far away. We took all this—made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it, in the defense of Asia.” Since these additional words by Kennedy would have been in direct opposition to the main point of Stone’s movie, that Kennedy was murdered because he intended to withdraw from Vietnam, Stone, in the finest traditions of the conspiracy profession, simply eliminated these words for his audience.
*
And a week later, in an interview with David Brinkley on NBC, Kennedy affirmed his belief in the “domino theory,” suggesting that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, it would have a domino effect, harming American interests throughout Southeast Asia (and, elliptically, the world). Speaking of China, he added, “China is so large, looms so high…that if South Vietnam went, it would…give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists.”
²⁶⁵
Naturally, these words of Kennedy also are not heard in Stone’s film.

Just like the conflicting evidence, there are, of course, conflicting views on whether or not Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam. McNamara wrote in 1995 that he believed it “highly probable that, had Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam.”
²⁶⁶
And Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek writes that “it was hardly conceivable that Kennedy would have sent tens of thousands more Americans to fight in so inhospitable a place as Vietnam. Reduced commitments, especially of military personnel, during a second Kennedy term were a more likely development.”
²⁶⁷
But Nicholas Lemann wrote in
GQ
magazine, in 1992, “Robert Kennedy, who was probably in a better position than anyone else to know what his brother’s intentions in Vietnam were, had this to say on the subject in an in-depth interview conducted for the historical record in 1964 [by John Barlow Martin for the John F. Kennedy library], the year after his brother’s death: Interviewer: ‘Did the President feel that we would have to go into Vietnam in a big way?’ Kennedy: ‘We certainly considered what would be the result if you abandoned Vietnam, even Southeast Asia, and whether it was worthwhile trying to keep and hold on to.’ Interviewer: ‘What did he say? What did he think?’ Kennedy: ‘He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile.”
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*

McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security matters who signed NSAMs 263 and 273, told
Newsweek
, “I don’t think we know what he would have done if he’d lived. I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does know.”
²⁶⁹
Indeed, as
Time
magazine observed, “Even [Kennedy] may not have known what he really planned to do in Vietnam after the election.”
²⁷⁰

Since we are attempting to know the unknowable, those of us who are further handicapped by not knowing Kennedy personally are in no position to weigh in meaningfully on the issue. But based merely on what I have read about John F. Kennedy, I sense that he was a rationalist, even more, in fact, than an intellectual, which he surely was too.
†
Because he was a rationalist who had personally experienced the horrors of war,
‡
I feel Kennedy would have only sent combat troops to Vietnam if he strongly believed that the Communist (Hanoi and the Vietcong) aggression was a part of Soviet Communism’s plan to ultimately conquer the world—that is, if he strongly believed that his failure to fight in Vietnam would imperil this nation’s security. Since we know, not just from hindsight
but from the absence of evidence to the contrary at the time
that the Communist aggression was nothing more than a civil war between North Vietnam (and the Vietcong) and South Vietnam,
*
my guess is that his rationalism, coupled with his firsthand knowledge that war was hell, would have prevailed. This is why I am inclined to agree with this assessment by Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, next to Bobby Kennedy the president’s closest advisers: “All of us who listened to President Kennedy’s repeated expressions of his determination to avoid further involvement in Vietnam are sure that if he had lived to serve a second term, the members of American military advisers and technicians in the country would have steadily decreased. He
never
would have committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against the Viet Cong.”
²⁷¹
In other words, there would never have been a Vietnam War with its enormous loss of lives and cataclysmic consequences for decades to come.

There is also no question in the minds of two others of his closest aides, Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that Kennedy would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam. In a 2005 op-ed piece in the
New York Times
, they wrote of their being witnesses to seeing Kennedy, leaning back in his Oval Office rocking chair, “tick off all his options [in Vietnam] and then critique them.” They said he concluded “that withdrawal was the viable option,” and they point out that his clear predilection was set forth in a November 14, 1963, press conference, just eight days before his death, in which he stated, “That is our object, to bring Americans home.”
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But what Kennedy would have done is a question whose answer is lost to history. No one knows—that is, except Oliver Stone, who knew for sure, proceeded to present it as a fact to his audience, and built a central part of his movie around the proposition that because Kennedy was going to withdraw, he was murdered.

Parenthetically, the larger notion Stone propounded in his film (of which the Vietnam withdrawal, he suggested, was the most important manifestation, the straw that broke the camel’s back) was that Kennedy’s being “soft on Communism” triggered a deadly response from members of the military-industrial complex. Hating Communism as they did, they were greatly angered by any move by Kennedy toward detente with the Soviet Union (which Kennedy obviously preferred over a nuclear war). As support for Kennedy being soft on Communism, Stone showed an excerpt of Kennedy’s speech at American University in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1963: “
We must reexamine our own attitudes toward the Soviet Union
…Our most basic, common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Stone’s audience didn’t hear the prelude to this statement—the reality that we live “in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the allied air forces in the Second World War,” where “the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn…I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men.” The president’s remarks, obviously, did not betray any softness toward Communism, only a concern for survival of the human race. Since when is
detente
and a desire for peace the equivalent of capitulation to the enemy? In a memorandum to Robert Manning, assistant secretary of state, on June 11, 1963, McGeorge Bundy said, “This speech should not be misunderstood as indicating any weakening in the American resolution to resist the pressures for Soviet expansion.” It was “designed to emphasize the positive opportunities for a more constructive and less hostile Soviet policy.”
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