[Peace-discuss] JFK's exit strategy from Vietnam---James K. Galbraith of Boston Review

[ndahlhei at uiuc.edu]

Check out the following article by James K. Galbraith in the 
Boston Review during late 2003 (Link here)

http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

   Many of Newman's arguments from his book JFK and Vietnam 
are mentioned here as well as details about Kennedy's plans 
to withdraw from Vietnam.  McNamara's published memoirs in 
his book In Retrospect discuss Kennedy's feelings and policy 
proposals for dealing with Vietnam in the last months of his 
life.  His reveals some rather shocking facts with regards to 
JFK's Vietnam policy.  Galbraith details some.

A quote from the Galbraith article about Chomsky and JFK upon 
which I want to comment.

1) A reply to Newman’s book appeared very quickly. It came 
from Noam Chomsky, hardly an apologist for Lyndon Johnson or 
the war. 

Chomsky despises the Kennedy apologists: equally the old 
insiders and the antiwar nostalgics—Arthur Schlesinger and 
Oliver Stone—and the historical memory of “the fallen leader 
who had escalated the attack against Vietnam from terror to 
aggression.” He reviles efforts to portray Kennedy’s foreign 
policy views as different from Johnson’s. On this point he 
may well be fundamentally correct, though for reasons quite 
different from those that he offers. 

Chomsky’s Rethinking Camelot challenges Newman’s main points. 
First, did Kennedy plan to withdraw without victory? Or, were 
the plans of NSAM 263 contingent on a continued perception of 
success in battle? Second, did the change in NSAM 273 between 
the draft (which was prepared for Kennedy but never seen by 
him) and the final version (signed by Johnson) represent a 
change in policy? 

Chomsky is categorical on both issues: “Two weeks before 
Kennedy’s assassination, there is not a phrase in the 
voluminous internal record that even hints at withdrawal 
without victory.” Elsewhere he notes that “[t]he withdrawal-
without-victory thesis rests on the assumption that Kennedy 
realized that the optimistic military reports were 
incorrect. . . . Not a trace of supporting evidence appears 
in the internal record, or is suggested [by Newman].” And, as 
for the changes to NSAM 273: “There is no relevant difference 
between the two documents [draft and final], except that the 
LBJ version is weaker and more evasive.” 

Chomsky denies Newman’s claim that the new version of 
paragraph 7 in the final draft of NSAM 273 signed by Johnson 
on November 26 opened the way for OPLAN 34A and the use of 
U.S.–directed forces in covert operations against North 
Vietnam. Rather, he reads the Johnson version as applying 
only to Government of Vietnam forces, even though the 
language restricting action to those forces is no longer 
there. 

Peter Dale Scott, the former diplomat, professor of English 
at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of part 
of the Pentagon Papers, replied to Chomsky on both points 
almost immediately. 

On the first point, withdrawal without victory, Scott writes: 

Following [Leslie] Gelb, Chomsky alleges that Kennedy’s 
withdrawal planning was in response to an “optimistic mid-
1962 assessment.” . . . But in fact the planning was first 
ordered by McNamara in May 1962. This was one month after 
ambassador Kenneth Galbraith, disenchanted after a 
presidentially ordered visit to Vietnam, had proposed 
a “political solution” based in part on a proposal to the 
Soviets entertaining “phased American withdrawal.” 
Scott goes on to point out that it cannot be proven that 
Galbraith’s recommendation was responsible for McNamara’s 
order. But there is good reason to believe they were linked, 
that both reflected Kennedy’s long-term strategy on Vietnam.6 
As for the proposition that no evidence hinting at withdrawal 
without victory exists, Scott argues that Chomsky’s “internal 
planning record”—for the most part the Pentagon Papers—“is in 
fact an edited version of the primary documents.” 
Moreover, “the documentary record is conspicuously defective” 
for November 1963. “[I]n all three editions of the Pentagon 
Papers there are no complete documents between the five 
[coup] cables of October 30 and McNamara’s memorandum of 
December 21; the 600 pages of documents from the Kennedy 
Administration end on October 30.” 
On the second point, concerning NSAM 273, Scott writes that 
Chomsky reads “Johnson’s NSAM as if it were as contextless as 
a Dead Sea Scroll,” dismissing its importance and 
ignoring “early accounts of it as a ‘major decision,’ 
a ‘pledge’ that determined ‘all that would follow,’ from 
journalists as diverse as Tom Wicker, Marvin Kalb, and I. F. 
Stone.” Scott writes that Chomsky also ignores Taylor’s memo 
to President Johnson of January 22, 1964, which cites NSAM 
273 as authority to “prepare to escalate operations against 
North Vietnam.” 

In the course of this controversy, the ground had narrowed 
sharply. After Newman’s book, no one seriously disputed that 
Kennedy was contemplating withdrawal from Vietnam. Instead, 
the disagreements focused on four questions: Did the 
withdrawal plans depend on the perception of victory? Did 
Kennedy act on his plans? Were actions he may have taken 
noisy but cosmetic, a pressure tactic aimed at Diem or a ploy 
for the American public, or were they for real? And were the 
OPLAN 34A operations that got under way following Kennedy’s 
death a sharp departure from previous U.S. policy or merely 
a “Government of Vietnam” activity consonant with 
intensifying the war in the South? 

Comment: Clearly, according to Newman's work and Peter Dale 
Scott's research Chomsky is clearly wrong in his categorical 
misassessment of JFK's policy in NSAM 263 and NSAM 273.  
Newman's book, aside from Chomsky's objections, has been 
difficult to disprove.  Until his retirement in 1994 Newman 
was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last 
stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National 
Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is 
deciphering declassified records—a talent he later applied to 
the CIA’s long-hidden archives on Lee Harvey Oswald. I think 
Newman's work here controls here.  He is a veteran 
intelligence worker with decades of experience in the 
military.

Incidentally, Newman's book is extremely hard to find.  Seems 
that it is not considered politically correct history.  
What's up with publisher?  Check out Galbraith's footnote #1

1.  JFK and Vietnam has an odd story, in which I should 
acknowledge a small role. On release, it received a front-
page review by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Times 
Book Review. But of some 32,000 copies printed (in two 
printings, according to Newman) only about 10,000 were sold 
before Warner Books abruptly ceased selling the hardcover—a 
fact I discovered on my own in the fall of 1993, when I 
attempted to assign it to a graduate class. I met Newman in 
November 1993, partly through the good offices of the LBJ 
Library. I carried his grievance personally to an honorable 
high official of Time Warner, whose intervention secured the 
return of his rights. Still, the hardback was never reissued, 
and no paperback has appeared