Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • Rachel Maddow, JFK and Easy Money

    Rachel Maddow, JFK and Easy Money

    In the lead up to the final declassification of the long awaited secret files on President Kennedy’s assassination, there were literally dozens of TV broadcast segments alerting the public to what President Trump had decided to do and what it all meant. Not one of these programs went beyond the surface of the event. And most of them relied on nothing but general information, questionable guests, and past clichés about the case to create their segments. Incredibly, the MSM even trotted out Mr. Plagiarism, Gerald Posner, for some appearances. No one noted that Posner has not done any work of the JFK case in twenty years. And his discredited book Case Closed was written and published before the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1994. Therefore, not only was Posner not familiar with the current batch of declassified files, he was not aware of what was in the two million pages declassified from 1994-1998. But that did not stop Michael Smerconish from hosting him on his CNN show as an authority.

    But probably the worst of the segments happened to be one of the longest ones, timing in at almost ten minutes. This took place on October 25th, the day before the documents were supposed to be released. It was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show.

    MSNBC has a reputation, and a niche, in cable television as being a liberal haven. Compared to say Fox, that is true. But many would question just how liberal, and honest, the cable network is. For instance, Melissa Harris-Perry was an acute, well-informed host who really tried to book rarely heard voices onto her program. In fact, her show was the only Sunday talk show that did not utilize a majority of white males as guests. After four years, she was forced out in early 2016. She concluded that, since she was an African-American female, they did not want to hear her comments on election returns that year. Try and find anything online, or anywhere else, that Maddow said or wrote about Perry’s highly publicized dispute with management. My other point would be this: How liberal and honest can MSNBC be if Chris Matthews is the longstanding bellwether of the network? This is the man who actually wrote a book—Kennedy and Nixon—that tried to equate the political career of John Kennedy with that of Richard Nixon. He then wrote a completely inadequate biography of JFK. In all the years I listened to the Bay-area blowhard, I never heard anything but inside-the-beltway pabulum from the man. For this he makes five million a year. Nice work if you can get it.

    Maddow has followed the Matthews paradigm on the Kennedy case, and she has also steered away from Perry’s dangerous list of guests. Her show on October 25th is a prime exhibit for what is wrong with cable news. It also demonstrates why the so-called cable revolution—begun by Ted Turner back in 1979—has been such a disappointment. Maddow’s program started off with her spoken intro to the subject of the long delayed release of the JFK assassination files. She began by showing footage of Oswald being held in detention. (To her credit, she did say Oswald was the “alleged” assassin.) She then said that as Oswald was being transferred in the basement of the Dallas jail, he was shot and killed. She added that NBC had a reporter there covering that event. His name was Tom Pettit . She then ran the NBC footage of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. Pettit said three times that “Oswald has been shot”, and he topped it off with, “There’s no question Oswald has been shot.”

    After this memorable footage was shown, Maddow said not one word about it. She just left it with Pettit ’s rather vapid and repetitive, “Oswald has been shot.” No comment on how Jack Ruby entered the building, or how the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the Warren Commission was dead wrong when they wrote Ruby came down the Main Street ramp. No observations on how the Dallas Police covered up that Ruby had help entering the building, and that even the Warren Commission suspected such was the case. (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, pp. 229-30) Nor did she mention that the night before, Oswald had attempted to make a call to one John Hurt in North Carolina, a former military intelligence officer. But that call was aborted on orders of the Secret Service. Nor did she say that Ruby had called the police the night before and warned dispatcher Billy Grammer not to transport Oswald the next day or “We are going to kill him.” (ibid, p. 224, italics added) Maddow did not even state that this event meant there would be no trial for Oswald, and thus he would not have any defense against the Dallas Police charges. Nor did she say that when the Warren Commission was constructed, they failed to give Oswald any defense at all, while violating almost every protection constitutionally afforded to the accused.

    Instead of any of that, which seems pretty important in setting the table for the JFK case, what did Maddow talk about instead? Well, Maddow seems to think Tom Pettit is more important then the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. She now mentioned his presidential interviews and some of the broadcast awards he had garnered. She chose to do that because she wanted to set up something that was really kind of inexcusable. The Pettit synopsis was used to bridge the time gap from 1963 to the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991. She described the film as positing a theory for a broader conspiracy in the Kennedy case. She then added that there had always been theories like that, without describing any of the evidence that Stone’s film advanced. Including how Ruby actually did get into the police basement.

    Our hostess then added that Stone’s film caused the enactment of the JFK Act in 1992. But she did not say that the last title card of the film noted that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations—which shuttered in 1978—were classified for over fifty years. The exposure of that fact embarrassed some of the people who were involved with that classification, like Committee Chairman Louis Stokes. And this caused hearings to be held on Capitol Hill to declassify the remaining files and let Americans see what was being kept secret. Besides missing much of that, she then added something completely unwarranted. She said the idea behind this law was to “tamp down some of the assassination conspiracy theories”. The idea behind the law was to eliminate the secrecy that enshrouded one of the most pivotal events of the second half of the twentieth century. To let the public in on what, until then, only certain people in the executive intelligence community were allowed to know. And thus let the public make up its own mind about the matter. The irony of her pronouncements here is that they were all done against the background of scenes from Stone’s film.

    From here, Maddow then segued to 1993. And we now saw why she built up Tom Pettit . Because she now cuts to Pettit ’s original segment from the first day that the JFK Act declassified any of the long secret files. This was before the Assassination Records Review Board was even constructed. Consequently, if one attempted on that day to see these files, more often than not, what you would get is a RIF notice. Which meant that the file had been tagged by its originating agency—be it the FBI, CIA, or State Department—and it would remain secret until the yet to be appointed Review Board ordered it declassified. And the vast majority of the 2 million pages that were to be declassified had to go through that process.

    Why did she choose to show this particular report? Because Pettit ’s segment is pretty much worthless. He shows us documents that he does not even know had already been declassified and are a part of the Warren Commission volumes. And he relates facts that anyone with any familiarity with the case would have already known. For example, that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife. Pettit would then smugly and stupidly say, “We already knew that.” Which would be a little like saying that President Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963; but we already knew that.

    Pettit began his report by saying the documents released that day showed that the CIA was deeply involved in the JFK investigation. This is false on two counts. The two chief investigative arms of the Warren Commission were the FBI and the Secret Service. The CIA was mainly involved with Oswald in Russia and Mexico. (And also trying to get information on foreign authors the Commission wanted to discredit, like Thomas Buchanan and Joachim Joesten.) What is quite puzzling about the Warren Commission is that the CIA produced little about Oswald in either country. In fact, as was demonstrated in the documents released this past July by the National Archives, the Agency, in the immediate days after the assassination, could not find any evidence that Oswald had been in Mexico City. This failure was driving them to distraction. Because they were stuck with audiotapes, allegedly of Oswald’s voice, in the Cuban and Russian consulates in Mexico City. So the question now became: How did the CIA capture his voice, but have no evidence he was there? And the answer to this was that—as the FBI soon discovered—it was not Oswald’s voice on the tapes. So the Agency decided to turn over this evidentiary problem about Oswald being in Mexico City to their friends in the Mexican government, specifically the Interior Department.

    Yet, in another document released this past July—which Maddow or her staff could have easily attained—it is shown that the men involved in running that investigation were not at all cooperative with the Warren Commission representatives sent to investigate the crime. In fact, as the rough draft of Commission lawyer David Slawson’s report reveals, he, William Coleman and Howard Willens were given the run around by the officers running the Mexican arm of the investigation. (Slawson Report “Trip to Mexico City” 4/22/64) This is an important point that was smudged in the final draft of Slawson’s report, which was declassified twenty years ago by the ARRB. Again, Maddow’s staff could have easily gotten hold of that report, too. The reports would have shown that the three Warren Commission representatives had all of one meeting with the man running the inquiry in Mexico. That man, Luis Echeverria, would soon become the President of Mexico.

    In reading that rough draft, they also would have learned that CIA station chief Winston Scott lied to the Commission attorneys on a key point: Namely, why he could produce no pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. (Slawson report, p. 25) Scott told his visitors that the reasons there were no photos were that the CIA was limited to daylight hours, there was not enough manpower, lack of funds, and no artificial light. This was nonsense. To take just one example: the Soviet consulate was covered by (at least) two cameras. One operated from 2 PM until darkness each day except Sunday (when the consulate was not open). The other operated from dawn to 2 PM, except Sunday. Since today we know that Oswald was supposed to be at the Soviet consulate on Friday and Saturday before 2 PM, the CIA should have four photos of him. (See John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 356; DiEugenio, p. 292) Scott was blowing smoke at the Commission—which is understandable on his part. What is not understandable is that the three investigators readily accepted it.

    But since neither Maddow nor her staff has looked at these July 2017 hidden files, she sticks with Tom Pettit back in 1993. What does Tom tell us? Well, I hate to inform Rachel of this, but Tom misinformed his audience. He told them that in these declassified files it is revealed that Oswald returned home by bus from Mexico City under the name of H. O. Lee. Tom is wrong here on two points. That information was not declassified in 1993. It is in the Commission volumes, labeled as Commission Exhibit 2530 Commission Exhibit 2530. So when Pettit then adds his refrain, “We already knew that.” Well duh? Tom, it’s in the 26 volumes, so why are you showing it to us? But there is something even worse about CE 2530, and Pettit was not going to tell us about it. And Maddow’s staff did not fact check his 24 year old report.

    As noted above, the CIA decided to solve its problem about Oswald being/or not being in Mexico City by turning over its inquiry to Echeverria, who was a friend and colleague of Scott. (Jefferson Morley, Our Man In Mexico, pp. 262, 275) The FBI did not join this inquiry until February. A point that surprised even the Commission lawyers in Mexico. (Slawson rough draft, p. 65) When the Bureau did finally arrive, they had problems with what Echeverria had done. For instance, there was no record of Oswald leaving Mexico through the border by bus, but there was a record he left by car. (FBI cable to Mexico City 3/12/64) The Bureau did not want that information to stand because Oswald had no car and probably could not drive, implying Oswald was with someone. After a while, the FBI finally thought they located the buses Oswald used to leave Mexico. But they could not locate his name on a bus manifest. (ibid) Through a confidential informant, they then discovered that his name was supposed to be on a reservation request made out by a travel agency. But when they found the travel agency and the reservation number, the woman said that particular form was blank. Then another confidential source showed up at the travel agency and discovered a carbon of this form with O. H. Lee’s name on it. But when the FBI checked on the exchange of this form for a ticket, the attendant said the man she recalled exchanging it was tall with a great deal of hair. This could not have been Oswald. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 685)

    This is what Tom Pettit did not tell us about “what we already knew” because he didn’t know it. And this is the quality of the fact-checking Maddow’s staff did. If you can believe it, based on Pettit ’s fraudulent first day report, Rhodes scholar Maddow labeled the entire ARRB process “a bust”. This about a four year long inquiry that declassified 2 million pages of documents, produced Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn’s milestone inquiry into the medical evidence, and yielded a largely unredacted version of the finest study of Mexico City, the HSCA’s Lopez Report. That report makes Slawson’s two Mexico City reports look like kindergarten coloring books. But again, the viewer does not know this since Maddow and her staff likely never read the Lopez Report. Which, again, they could have easily secured if they called the National Archives.

    Maddow concluded by guesting another alleged authority, author and former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon; even though Shenon had been on MSNBC three days earlier. One thing she could have asked Shenon is: Why in your book A Cruel and Shocking Act, do you say that Earl Warren, in some kind of deal with the Kennedys, refused to have the Commission look at the autopsy X rays and photos? First of all, the Kennedys had no control over the autopsy evidence in 1964; it was the property of the Secret Service. Secondly, during an exchange in the Commission’s executive session hearings, it was revealed to John McCloy that the Commission did have a secured room that housed this evidence. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171)

    But there is no way she was going to ask Shenon about the problems with his book. She then began to characterize those interested in this subject as being “crazy” about the next day’s release. There was not one comment on why on earth it would be necessary to keep 3100 files and tens of thousands of documents secret 54 years after Kennedy was killed. In other words, it was the critics who were touched, not those who want secrecy ad infinitum. When she asked Shenon just what was going to be released, he escaped into some gas about how much the government knew about Oswald. When in fact, just by looking at the National Archives spreadsheet, one can see that there are documents on the CIA/Cuban exile base JM/WAVE, the alleged CIA assassination program ZR/Rifle, and files on suspects like Bill Harvey, David Phillips, Howard Hunt and James Angleton. Harvey, Phillips and Hunt were all in Dallas in November for no apparent reason.

    But Shenon was allowed to spew his usual pap about how the CIA and FBI somehow knew that Oswald was talking about killing the president in advance. As I showed near the end of my review of Shenon’s ersatz book, the evidence he uses for this was all created after the fact by the most dubious sources and in the most dubious places. And it has been decimated by experts like John Newman and Arnaldo Fernandez.

    The wrap up to all this was so condescending, it was almost a parody. Maddow asked Shenon something like: how much crazinesss do you expect about this tomorrow? (The second time she used the C-word in regard to those who are interested in the case.) And also, do you expect a lot of tumult tomorrow? To which Shenon said, sight unseen, that a lot of the documents should be difficult to decipher, but it would be like Christmas for the army of conspiracy theorists looking for material to support their concepts. When I used the word parody above, I meant that the back-and-forth was parodic of the two conversants. Because Maddow never asked Shenon about his bizarre theory that somehow Castro controlled Oswald through Silvia Duran in Mexico City at the Cuban consulate and she knew he was ready to strike for Fidel.

    But if Maddow and her staff had done their homework, and really wanted to educate and interest their audience, she would have confronted Shenon with a record declassified this past July. It was an FBI document, dated February 1, 1967. The Bureau’s William Brannigan had discovered through the CIA that Shenon’s employer, The New York Times, had now lost faith in the Oswald-did-it confection. They were now engaged in a “special project involving a full-scale exposé of the Warren Report.” The memo said that this Times project would conclude that the Commission’s conclusions were not reliable. That investigative project was never enacted. And one can only guess that when the Agency got that report, they forwarded it to former Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles, who got in contact with Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, because Dulles was a good friend of the family. Since Maddow is part of that mediaocracy, this would have been too far outside the confines for her to bring up. In fact it would have blown up the whole segment.

    Maddow’s show was pretty much symptomatic of the MSM’s attitude toward these releases. It was Leslie Nielson/Frank Drebin time from The Naked Gun. Well if you ignore what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia just two years after Kennedy was killed, then yep it’s just a board game for kids on Christmas. But personally, I think it’s pretty difficult to ignore the deaths of about 5.5 million people, most of them innocent, defenseless civilians. It’s like asking someone to forget about the Holocaust.

    What these shows do is all too easy. In this one Maddow’s staff fished out some archival footage from NBC, did some research on Pettit, got permission to show parts of JFK and called up Shenon. As shown above, it results in nothing but aimless and uninformed banter. Great for the highly paid participants, but a disservice to the causes of public information, history and democracy. On this issue, all of these recent programs, not just Maddow’s, are pretty much indistiguishable from the likes of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. In the cause of journalistic irresponsibility, on the subject of JFK, left meets right. The hosts and producers simply don’t know anything and really don’t care to learn. Which is bad since, as shown above, it is an epochal subject. But unfortunately, it strikes at the feet of the Power Elite, the one that Shenon and Maddow work for and prosper at.

    I don’t really mean to single out Maddow. As I said, I did not see one good program in this ongoing boring and ultimately stultifying circus. But I did want to show that even some of the most promising figures in the media have succumbed to the radioactivity of the JFK case. Maddow attended Stanford and Oxford. She has a Ph. D. in philosophy. But as director Martin Ritt once said of actor Richard Burton, “I don’t care how talented he is. It’s how he uses that talent that concerns me.” Whatever promise Maddow showed in her early days back at WRSI in Northampton Mass. or at Air America, she has now settled into a formulaic, smooth oiled-rail routine at MSNBC. I’d wish her well on that success, but it’s not the success I had imagined for her.

  • The Larry and Phil Show, Part 3

    The Larry and Phil Show, Part 3

    On July 25th of this year, in The Washington Post, Larry Sabato and Philip Shenon co-authored a column in which they both recommended that President Trump not grant any appeal that an agency of government could make to delay any final releases of JFK-related assassination documents. When the Assassination Records Review Board closed its doors in 1998, they allowed that any document that they had exempted from release would have to be declassified in 2017. Included in that legal exemption were documents endangering an agent in place, or an ongoing operation. It was hard to believe 35 years after Kennedy’s assassination such a risk could be run. But the ARRB did allow for a large number of documents to be so withheld. It is well-nigh impossible to think that excuse could exist 54 years later. And it is also hard to fathom that, even if it did, that danger would outweigh the benefits to the public of finally getting to look at what the government had kept hidden from them on the JFK case. After all, many intelligent commentators have held that the secrecy about Kennedy’s death in 1963 provoked a corrosive effect upon the public’s belief in the government’s credibility.

    Which is almost the exact argument that Sabato and Shenon used in their July article. They wrote:

    We know we speak for an army of historians, political scientists, journalists, and concerned citizens … when we say that it is time for the federal government to release everything …. This is the moment for full transparency about a seminal event that cost many Americans’ trust in their government.

    Although Sabato and Shenon got the number of documents released in July wrong, they were correct in saying that the July release was only a partial one. At that time, the National Archives had planned on doing more partial releases until the last day the law allowed for a final release, which was October 26, 2017. The authors advised that the president not listen to any possible appeal from the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service or any other intelligence agency that wished to further delay declassification. They wrote that when it came to JFK’s murder, there were no secrets worth keeping at this late date. As for the necessity of keeping any spy’s identity secret, “logic suggests that almost all those people are now dead …”

    Sabato and Shenon closed with their usual two standard trademarks. First, that somehow 21st-century forensic science has demonstrated Oswald was the lone assassin, and that if there was a conspiracy, Oswald was still the trigger man. But they closed with a request to Trump that he must release these last documents, for if the message is that the USA cannot “tell the truth about the murder of the president, it could not be expected to be honest about anything else.”

    About ten days later, the duo printed another article, this time in the online journal Politico. Here they wrote that they had reviewed some of the documents released in July—although the evidence in the article suggested they had only read one. And that release revealed that somehow the CIA may have known that Oswald had killed Kennedy to avenge the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. The idea that Oswald was inspired by Cuban propaganda to kill JFK is quite old. In fact, there was an entire book written about it in 1970 by Albert H. Newman, a former Newsweek correspondent. In 1984, that hoary idea was then repeated by Jean Davison in her equally bad and error-filled book Oswald’s Game. (See my review) Shenon then repeated the “Oswald was inspired by Castro” premise in his book A Cruel and Shocking Act. That volume was timed for release on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death.

    In this new article, the authors again repeated their claim that somehow 21st century forensic science had proven that Oswald acted alone. More than one person—most notably forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht—has appealed to Sabato and Shenon to please make public their evidence backing up that forensic claim. For the only instance of any such “21st century” testing was done by the father and son team of Lucien and Michael Haag for the PBS series Nova; it was entitled Cold Case: JFK. That program was literally skewered by Gary Aguilar and Wecht in a twenty-page reply published in a professional forensic journal over two installments. (“NOVA’s Cold Case: JFK – the Junk Science Behind PBS’s Recent Foray into the Crime of the Century”) The Haags were so thoroughly thrashed that they have refused to debate either Aguilar or Wecht in public. Even though Aguilar has offered to pay their air fare and hotel bill. This author knows of no other such 21st century demonstration.

    But the idea behind the August 3rd story, that somehow the CIA only suspected a motive for what Oswald did and had no active role in the cover up, this was also quite questionable. And it was taken up by more than one commentator. (For an example, see “New Files Confirm the JFK Investigation Was Controlled by the CIA – Not ‘Botched’ as Some Pretended”) It is clear today that the CIA was deliberately obstructing more than one attempt to find out the truth about Oswald and the assassination. To name three examples, it has now been shown that they obstructed the Warren Commission, the Garrison investigation, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Nevertheless, Sabato and Shenon did not say anything in this column to revise or retract their previous plea for full disclosure of the ARRB documents.

    Just two days ago, however, on October 16th, they seemed to hit an off-key note. In another co-authored article for Politico, the headline reads, “The JFK Document Dump Could be a Fiasco”. The authors mentioned that the National Archives had altered their original schedule, which was to release the final JFK documents in a staggered schedule over three months. One obvious reason this was done was so the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and other executive intelligence agencies could buy time to convince the White House to grant their appeals for delay.

    But the authors criticize the decision on different grounds. They write that “with everything public at once, pandemonium is all but guaranteed, since major news organizations around the world will want to know, almost instantly, what is in the documents that is new and potentially important.” They warn that the result could be that many journalists will “reach overly hasty, cherry-picked conclusions from individual documents.” The other alternative would be for them to “throw up their hands, assuming that the confusion over the documents is simply more proof of why it is impossible to know the full truth about JFK’s death.” What makes that last statement seem a bit prejudicial is the article’s opening sentence. There Sabato and Shenon proclaim, “The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos.” They then prognosticate the worst nightmare possible for them, especially if Trump decides on further delay: it “will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories.”

    This author does not follow that logic. For the simple reason that with one lonely exception, Sabato and Shenon—over three installments—have never mentioned or reviewed a single document that was released from the July disbursement. So if you always ignore what was disbursed, how can the pattern of disbursement have an impact on the content of the disbursement?

    One reaction to their writing would be: Why aren’t Shenon and Sabato actually reviewing the files and describing what is in them? Another would be, why has no MSM outlet done something similar? In fact, the only lengthy discussion of any of the newly released July documents was by this author on Black Op Radio on September 14, 2017. (Click here and scroll down to that date) With the help of researcher Gary Majewski, host Len Osanic and I shared some of these delayed secrets with the audience. Which made for a most appreciative reaction.

    But there is also a conclusion about the remaining documents that Sabato and Shenon seem to want to avoid. That is this: contrary to their standard refrain, maybe there is material in those long hidden papers that contravenes their recurring thesis: namely, that there is nothing of real importance there that would alter the tenets of the Warren Commission. Is that not one logical conclusion for continued classification after 54 years? Why, after over a half century, and so much controversy and damage to their reputations, would the CIA, FBI, or Secret Service still want to conceal records on the JFK case? In light of the fact of how much suspicion such secrecy has already created, why not walk down the path described by Sabato and Shenon in their first article: full disclosure? Especially when some senators and congressman have already recommended that path as the only wise one to take.

    After the July release, many people complained about a long download time. There seems to be something more than just computer efficiency that made NARA alter their schedule. The evidence would suggest that there are people in high positions who want to maintain the cover-up about Kennedy’s assassination. If so, why? And if Trump agrees with that plea, the public will need to be fully informed as to why he went along with it.

    This author would like to say he trusts that Sabato and Shenon will report that possible outcome accurately. But by their past record in all this, he has some reservation about the matter.

  • Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Four (The Nixon Years)

    Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Four (The Nixon Years)

    For all practical purposes it is not possible to separate out the last months of President Johnson’s stewardship of the Vietnam War from Richard Nixon’s. For they are intertwined around two crucial points.

    First, after the Tet offensive and during the siege of Khe Sanh, Johnson called a meeting of the so-called Wise Men of American foreign policy, retired eminences like Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett. Johnson brought in the military to try and explain how America had actually won the Tet offensive. Acheson walked out. When Johnson called him later to ask why he left, Acheson said he would not listen to any more canned Pentagon presentations. He wanted the raw data of the intelligence reports. LBJ complied and Acheson got the real picture of what was happening in the field. (Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 687)

    A couple of weeks later, Johnson told Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford to begin an in depth review of the war based on the real figures. After about two weeks of discussion, with Clifford asking the generals many probing questions, the new secretary came to the conclusion it was a hopeless military situation. (Isaacson and Thomas, pp. 683-89) As Clifford later said, “The Tet offensive’s size and scope made a mockery of what the American military had told the public about the war, and devastated American credibility.” (Carl Oglesby, Ravens in the Storm, p. 156) As a result of these two developments, Johnson decided there would be no further granting of General Westmoreland’s requests for combat troops. Shortly after, he removed Westmoreland and replaced him with Creighton Abrams.

    Nixon had heard about the Wise Men meeting and understood what it meant. In March of 1968, before the presidential campaign began, he told three of his speechwriters: “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.” (Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 52)

    What makes that statement startling is the following episode. Realizing it was the end of the line, Johnson decided not to run again in 1968. When he announced this at the end of March, he said he would spend the rest of his administration, about ten months, trying to get a peace settlement. When the presidential race heated up in the summer of 1968, Nixon began to perceive this tactic as a way of aiding the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice-President. Nixon decided to hatch a plot in order to stop Johnson’s negotiations from getting off the ground. With newly discovered files, writers like Bob Parry and Ken Hughes have filled in the outlines of this previously hazy conspiracy. The idea was to use sympathetic agents like GOP lobbyist Anna Chennault and Vietnamese ambassador to the USA Bui Diem to tell President Thieu in Saigon not to enter the negotiations. If he did not, he would get a better deal from President Nixon. The plot was successful. Thieu boycotted the negotiations, stymying Johnson’s efforts, thus backstopping Nixon’s narrow victory. (For a good article on the subject, see Robert Parry, “LBJ’s X File on Nixon’s Treason,” Consortium News, March 3, 2012; for a book-length treatment see Ken Hughes’, Chasing Shadows.)

    Nixon managed to win the presidency, but unawares to him at the time, he was sowing the seeds of his downfall. For, as both Parry and Hughes have noted, the real provocation for Watergate was not the publication of the Pentagon Papers. It was Nixon’s knowledge that Johnson knew that he—a private citizen—had illegally subverted LBJ’s foreign policy. This was a violation of the Logan Act. For Johnson perceived something was wrong with Thieu’s reaction. He decided to have the CIA and the FBI place surveillance on Nixon’s campaign, Anna Chennault, and the Vietnamese embassy in Washington. The result of this was that Nixon’s covert campaign was discovered. But Johnson decided not to go public with the information. When Nixon took office, J. Edgar Hoover tipped him off as to what Johnson had done. Nixon commissioned a study of where Johnson had stored the file on the matter. A young aide concluded (wrongly) that it was at the Brookings Institute. On one of the declassified Watergate tapes one can hear Nixon talking about firebombing Brookings, and sending a team in under the confusion to ransack the place to find the file. This caused the creation of the so-called Plumbers Unit in the White House. It was that unit which would break into the Watergate Hotel in the summer of 1972. Nixon resigned facing impeachment charges two years later because of that event. (“Fleshing Out Nixon’s Vietnam Treason”)

    The Burns/Novick documentary does a decent enough job on the above. It touches on these major points (except for Johnson’s Wise Man meeting). But it does not note two important subsidiary issues. Although Nixon acknowledged the war was lost before he entered office, he greatly increased air operations over both Laos and Cambodia. During 1969, Nixon increased bomb tonnage over Laos by 60%. (Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 21) In Cambodia, the increase was even more radical. As William Shawcross noted in his bestselling book Sideshow, the leader of Cambodia in 1969, Prince Sihanouk, had allowed the Johnson administration to do small scale cross-border raids. This was to hinder North Vietnam’s supply route to South Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which crossed through Cambodia and Laos. But he never gave them permission to extend the war into his country, or to use sustained B-52 bombing. (Shawcross, pp. 70-71)

    This all changed under Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. And Burns and Novick drastically underplay the change. In fact, they attempt to blur the difference between the two administrations. As Shawcross writes, by the end of 1968 there were about 4,000 of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge rebels in Cambodia. (p. 73) Sihanouk had done all he could to walk a tightrope between Hanoi and Washington in order to protect his people and their social structure from the war, thus keeping Pol Pot at bay.

    This was not good enough for Nixon. During the first week of his administration he made Cambodia and Sihanouk targets of his war plans. (Shawcross, p. 91) In March of 1969, Nixon began secret sustained B-52 bombing attacks over Cambodia. As he said, “We’ll bomb the bastards off the earth.” (Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, p. 333 ) And he tried. In the next 14 months there were 3,630 B-52 sorties flown over Cambodia. That bombing campaign drove the North Vietnamese from the border areas of Cambodia inward; but the bombing raids followed them. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 151) And this began to destabilize Sihanouk’s government. (Shawcross, p. 113) To protect his right flank, Sihanouk appointed General Lon Nol as his prime minister. The general staged a coup against Sihanouk. Lon Nol allowed Nixon and Kissinger to supplement their air war with an invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. From here the Khmer Rouge exponentially gained in strength until Lon Nol’s government was under siege by Pol Pot. Nothing like that existed under Johnson, let alone Kennedy. Therefore, it is quite a stretch to blur the dividing lines.

    How much of an escalation in the air war was there under Nixon? Realizing in 1968 the war was lost, and later announcing a program of troop withdrawals in August of 1969, Nixon proceeded to drop more bomb tonnage over Indochina than Johnson had. And it was by a significant factor—over a million tons. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 21)

    A good question could have been posed at this time in the Burns/Novick narrative. Knowing the war was lost, why was Nixon now spreading it further beyond the borders of Vietnam? The only way to answer that question would be to trace Nixon’s involvement with Ngo Dinh Diem and President Eisenhower back to 1954-56. (Actually before that, since Nixon appealed to President Truman to support the French cause in the first Indochina War; see David F. Schmitz, Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, p. 1). Contrary to what Nixon liked to tell interviewers like David Frost, he did not inherit the South Vietnam problem. He helped create it—through illicit means. He did so, at the foot of his master Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, by breaking the Geneva Accords and not allowing unification elections. America then handpicked a homegrown, Catholic, English speaking leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. (Blum, pp. 138-139) CIA Director Allen Dulles then had veteran black operator Ed Lansdale rig the plebiscite that got rid of the French administration and installed Diem as dictator. (p. 139) The Agency furnished Diem a police force by training his security officers at Michigan State. As former Green Beret Donald Duncan wrote, some of these security measures comprised torture techniques against dissidents like lowering the prisoner’s testicles into a vise, and also waterboarding. (pp. 141-42. It should be noted, Burns and Novick imply that Americans did not do these things. A false presumption we will return to.)

    In other words, whether Nixon wanted to deny it or not, he was up to his neck in the creation of the state of South Vietnam. It would not have existed without the Eisenhower/Nixon administration. Foster Dulles, Nixon’s mentor, said in a rather famous comment, which the film ignores: “We have a clean slate there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” (Blum, p. 139)

    Yet, in spite of all this, one of the worst things about this series is that it tries to imply that three presidents fought the war: Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Utter balderdash. The fact is that when Kennedy won the presidency he was presented with this fabricated country, run by a Lansdale-chosen leader, who could hardly be less wrong for the population he was representing. And Diem was backed up by Pentagon advisors, and a CIA-run police state—replete with the infamous tiger cages—and tens of millions of dollars in aid each year. In introducing Nixon, the film ignores all of this. And, as I noted in Part 1, concerning the first Indochina War and the creation of both South Vietnam and Diem: Burns and Novick deliberately cut most of this out, including the mention of Lansdale’s name. They also excised the fact that Vice President Nixon was the first high level politician who proposed sending American combat troops to Vietnam, in order to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu.

    In my opinion, this censorship is historically untenable. One has to fully grasp Nixon’s initial involvement in the conflict in order to understand his irrational actions upon becoming president. Partly because of his schooling at the foot of Foster Dulles, Nixon was an inveterate Cold Warrior, and would die as one. About the famous and serious Sino/Soviet border dispute he once said, “They are simply arguing about what kind of shovel they should use to dig the grave of the United States.” (Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, by David Schmitz, p. 10) While campaigning for GOP Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, Nixon said the war was part of Chinese expansionism into Southeast Asia, and if they won they would spread into Australia and New Zealand. (Schmitz, p. 12) In that campaign he also said LBJ was not aggressive enough and he should take the war into the north. (p. 12) In an article for Reader’s Digest, Nixon wrote that America losing in Vietnam would be like Neville Chamberlain appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich. For, he added, the fate of all Asia relied on the outcome. (p. 13) In December of 1964, after Johnson won the election, Nixon now urged the expansion of the war into Laos and North Vietnam. For if we lost in Vietnam, it would risk a major war with Russia or China; we should therefore fight now and not later. (p. 14) Once Johnson did commit combat troops in 1965, Nixon said we needed more until the communists left. (p. 16) To say this all turned out to be wrong is not the point. It all turned out to be complete malarkey. This from a man who the MSM once framed as some kind of foreign policy guru.

    On top of that, there were his multiple trips to South Vietnam, four of them in five years. All while he was out of office. (Schmitz, p. 19) The one he took in 1964 is inexplicable. (Jim Hougan tries to explain it here.) In 1967, he met in country with Ed Lansdale and tried to encourage Johnson to mine Haiphong harbor. (p. 16)

    Then there was the Madman Theory. Foster Dulles called it the “uncertainty principle”. What it meant was this: you had to convince your foe that you were willing to go to previously unimagined lengths in order to persuade him you were irrational. (Jeffry Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 55) He would as a result either capitulate or agree to unfavorable terms. The problem is that none of this worked in Vietnam; not the bombing of Cambodia, not the invasion of Cambodia, not the increased bombing over Laos, not the invasion of Laos, not the mining of Haiphong harbor, and so on. Yet even when the military saw that the torture and assassination program, Operation Phoenix, was not working and wanted to cut it back, Nixon insisted it be renewed. (Summers, p. 334)

    The fact was that the Cold War construct that Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon bought into was faulty. The idea that there was a colossal communist conspiracy emanating from Moscow or Bejing (or both), that Vietnam was part of this plot, and if we did not stop them there then the dominoes would fall all the way to Hawaii: this turned out to be moonshine. And by 1957, State Department officer George Kennan—the man who made up the concept of containment back in 1946—deplored the contortions that his original ideas had undergone at the hands of the Pentagon, the CIA and hardline political hacks. But he specifically excluded President Kennedy from this pack. In fact, he liked working with JFK, and after he was killed, he had a “dismal foreboding for the future of this country”. (Click here) One of the most serious failings in this 18 hour behemoth is that the underpinnings of these horribly flawed ideas are never exposed. On the contrary, at times, they are even supported.

    Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger set up a series of secret negotiations in Paris in 1969. For a long time they did not go anywhere. The main negotiators were Kissinger and Hanoi’s Le Duc Tho. The latter saw through all the bluster that Nixon and Kissinger tried to throw at him. He told Kissinger in 1970 that Nixon’s Vietnamization program—the attempt to gradually turn over the war to South Vietnam as American troops left—was not working and would not work. He specifically mentioned the failure in Laos, and the previous failure of Johnson’s bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder. He then was quite frank: he told Kissinger that America had failed in Vietnam. (Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 127) Hanoi’s representative made the following cogent observation: “Before, there were over a million US and puppet troops, and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting? Now, with only US support, how can you win?” (p. 127)

    Nixon was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. For his own political survival, he knew he could not keep American troops in Vietnam. He had to maintain his withdrawal schedule. It was the only way to at least partly neutralize the anti-war movement, which—contrary to what the film states—had a strong influence on what Nixon was doing. Jeffrey Kimball, the foremost authority on Nixon’s Vietnam policies, has clearly noted this. Prior to the giant October and November 1969 anti-war demonstrations—which took place not just throughout America but also around the world—Nixon had mapped out a multi-pronged offensive against Hanoi. It was a land-air-sea plan. It included, but was not limited to: infantry operations across the DMZ, air strikes at bridges near the Chinese border, and the mining of three seaports. It was codenamed Operation Duck Hook. It was so secret that not even Defense Secretary Melvin Laird knew about it. (Kimball, p. 101) Nixon had drafted a speech to announce this surprise offensive. But after seeing the size, scope and intensity of the protest movements, he called off the operation. He then changed his planned address to his Silent Majority speech. (p. 105) It was startling to me that Burns and Novick did not mention this strophe at all. Perhaps it was excised because one of the goals of the film was to belittle the anti-war movement, a point I will return to later.

    Richard Nixon fought to the end of his life to prevent any of his records from being released through the National Archives. There was real progress made on this only after he passed away in 1994. Today, it is apparent that one reason he fought so desperately against it was due to the nature of his many discussions with Kissinger on Vietnam. The tapes would have exposed his book on the subject, No More Vietnams, as a knowing deception. For instance, Nixon wrote that he never considered bombing the dikes in North Vietnam or using atomic weapons. As Kimball discovered, during Hanoi’s Easter Offensive, in spring 1972, Nixon considered doing both. (Kimball, pp. 214-19) Although their film discusses the Easter Offensive, Burns and Novick do not play this tape.

    But there was actually something else in those tapes and papers that was just as bad. Realizing the war was lost and that Hanoi would drive a hard bargain in Paris, Nixon and Kissinger decided to prolong the conflict for purely political purposes. Kissinger called this the “decent interval” strategy. (Kimball, p. 187) What it meant was that South Vietnam could fall, but only after America had left the country, the resulting perception being that America and Nixon had not lost the war, but that South Vietnam and President Thieu had. There were two motivating forces behind this construct. First, as Kissinger and Nixon both noted, Saigon had to fall after the 1972 election. If not, their political opponents and media critics would assail them with the question as to why they had stayed in the war for four more years. (pp. 138-39) Not only would this endanger them politically, but it would also give ballast to their dreaded enemies: the leftist media and intellectuals. As Kimball notes, Kissinger knew how to drive Nixon into a frenzy over this theme. At times Kimball describes a scene that almost resembles a folie à deux: Nixon would end up screaming and pounding the table over Vietnam. (p. 172) With so much time and emotion invested in a lost cause, Nixon was willing to prolong the hostilities in order to secure a second term.

    Related to this was what Nixon told his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman: He was not going to be the first president to lose a war. (Summers, p. 337) Burns and Novick note the first factor, they ignore the second.

    And they understate how badly Nixon and Kissinger manipulated and then sold out President Thieu. When Thieu agreed to go along with Nixon’s 1968 plot to short-circuit Johnson’s bid for peace talks, Thieu went beyond the call. On November 1st, on the eve of the election, he made a speech in Saigon that was broadcast by all three American networks. It was a 27 minute address in which he declared he could not participate in the Paris talks, the implication being that they were politically motivated and would be bad for Saigon. Historian Teddy White wrote in his book about the 1968 election that if not for Thieu, “Hubert Humphrey would probably have won the election.” (See Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File, p. 28) Nixon speechwriter and conservative columnist Bill Safire agreed with that judgment. He wrote that because of Thieu’s assent to the scheme, Nixon probably owed his presidency to him. Safire then added, “Nixon remembered.” (Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 60)

    But he remembered only to a point. The most obvious indication of this was the fact that Nixon excluded South Vietnam from the secret Paris peace talks. Thieu was not told about them in advance and was not consulted on them. He was only given 1-2 page summaries after the fact. (Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor, pp. 43-44, 69) This despite the fact that Nixon had told southern delegates to the 1968 Republican convention that America could not withdraw from Vietnam because it would be sacrificing an ally. Yet this is now what he was doing. (p. 47) In less than two years, Nixon had reversed his position. But it was worse than that. At a conference on Midway Island in 1969, Nixon had promised Thieu eight more years of support: four of them would be military and four would be economic in nature. (Schecter, p. 34)

    After two years of negotiations, and before his journey to China, Nixon made the secret talks public on January 25, 1972. It was at this time that Thieu was allowed to read the record of the twelve secret meetings that Kissinger had with Le Duc Tho extending back to 1969 (Schecter, pp. 47-48) What Burns and Novick do with this episode is odd. They imply that Hanoi thought Nixon—with an upcoming trip to Moscow also scheduled—was getting too close to their allies, trying to undermine their support. And this is why the Easter Offensive was launched at the end of March. This does not jibe with the record. It is true that Nixon was using these visits as a way to negotiate the war, but the record states that he was weakening his position. For instance, during his February 1972 China visit, he abandoned his demand of mutual withdrawal. America would complete its withdrawal unilaterally. (Schecter, pp. 50-51) In late March, Hanoi launched its Easter Offensive. In preparations for the May Moscow meeting, Kissinger told Soviet premier Brezhnev that Nixon would now accept a cease-fire in place, meaning troops from the north could stay in the south after the truce. (p. 58) This was a crucial concession, because Hanoi was determined not to repeat the mistake they made in 1954, which was surrendering their military position for empty agreements. Again, Thieu was not told about this key concession until afterwards.

    In spite of this, Nixon still wrote a letter to Thieu in October that said, “… we both seek the preservation of a non-communist structure in South Vietnam …” (Schecter, p. 73) Yet when Kissinger presented the draft agreement to Thieu, it only talked about Indochina as three nations: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. (pp. 88, 108) Justifiably, he got extremely upset. And it did not help when Kissinger tried to explain this as an error in stenography. Thieu made a string of specific objections he wanted Kissinger to address with Hanoi, or he threatened not to sign the agreements.

    Here, the film had a good opportunity to elucidate the true circumstances behind the infamous 1972 Christmas bombing of the north.  Although Nixon threatened to enact the peace proposal without Thieu’s signature, he really wanted Saigon to sign. Without that, his recurrent rubric of Peace with Honor would ring hollow. For instance, Nixon once said in a speech in 1972, that his goal was “… peace with honor, and not peace with surrender in Vietnam.” (Schecter, pp. 116-17) This was false, and both he and Kissinger knew it was false when Nixon said it. They did not give a hoot about either peace or honor. What they wanted was political cover for the 1972 election. For in a taped conversation in August of 1972, Kissinger said to Nixon that all they needed was a way to keep the country together for a year or two beyond the agreement, after which “Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater, no one will give a damn.” (Ken Hughes, Fatal Politics, pp. 84-85) In fact, from the Chinese, Le Duc Tho understood what Nixon and Kissinger were angling for, since Kissinger had made the “decent interval” concept clear to Zhou en Lai. (Hughes, p. 86; also Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 187)

    When Thieu expressed his reservations at signing, Kissinger went back to Paris with his demands. There were many, and Le Duc Tho said he had to take some of them back to Hanoi for discussion. Kissinger told Nixon that Hanoi was being obstinate. So Nixon used this as an excuse for the Christmas bombing. But the latter was really designed to convince Thieu to sign. It was Nixon’s way of previewing to him that, as he promised, should Hanoi break the agreement, he would bring swift retaliation. (Kimball, p. 275) The bombing dropped Nixon’s approval ratings eleven points in two weeks. And contrary to conventional wisdom, it did not bring Hanoi back to the table. Nixon had to ask Le Duc Tho to return. (pp. 279-80) Even then, he was reluctant to do so. He had to be convinced by the Chinese to go back. They told him that Nixon was now on the ropes; plus his political problems—the Watergate scandal—would considerably alter the situation within a year. This is what convinced Hanoi to return. (Berman, p. 221) The agreement was then signed on January 23, 1973. Nixon could now conduct his second administration without the Vietnam albatross around his neck.

    Needless to say, little of the above is elucidated in the film. And without that, one cannot really fathom the level and scope of Nixon and Kissinger’s deceit and duplicity. In their books—No More Vietnams, and The White House Years—both men denied there was any such “decent interval”. Knowing there was, Nixon deliberately polarized the country: left versus right, young vs. old, all before his phantasm of Peace with Honor, and aware the entire time it was all malarkey. Malarkey designed to guarantee his election in 1972 over George McGovern, and also to avoid saddling him with the stigma of being the first president to lose a war. This is why he so bitterly fought not to have his tapes and papers declassified.

    Did Burns and Novick soften their treatment of Nixon because, in one sense they employed his tactics? As anti-war activist Christopher Koch has noted, their film seems intent on doing what it can to belittle the anti-war movement, both its character and its impact. As Koch notes, at one point, the film intercuts young people dancing at Woodstock with soldiers in combat in the jungle. The film even gets one former protester to apologize for what she did back then on the (unpictured) charge that she called a returning vet a “baby killer”. The film does the same thing to Jane Fonda. They picture her topless in the film Barbarella, and then extract an unwise thing she said in North Vietnam. This is supposed to discredit the Oscar winning actress and discount the sacrifices she made to educate the public to stop the war.

    This is both unfair and untrue. As Koch notes, the vast majority of the anti-war movement respected and tried to help veterans. Mark Lane, for example, did much to organize GI coffee houses where lawyers would counsel returning veterans, or soldiers who had serious objections to being sent to Vietnam. (See Citizen Lane, pp. 232-49) Jane Fonda toured the country with former veterans and visited local colleges, addressing standing-room-only crowds. One of the things she did was have the former soldiers demonstrate the anti-personnel, three stage cluster bombs that the army was using in Indochina. I know this, since I was at one of her talks in my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. Cluster bombs are loaded with smaller bomblets that explode and scatter over an area as large as three football fields. (What is a “cluster bomb”?) Although the film shows many scenes of combat, these weapons are not demonstrated.

    Which relates to the film’s treatment of John Kerry. At first, Kerry is depicted as a courageous and eloquent young man uttering his famous phrase, “Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake?” But then, when Kerry mentions some of the atrocities American soldiers had committed, Burns and Novick do something cheap but predictable. They cut to other veterans disagreeing with those descriptions. Of course, because the war was so polarizing, it is easy to find someone who would reflexively object to this testimony. Yet the evidence that such things happened is overwhelming. And the film ignores it all. For example, there is no mention of the Winter Soldier Investigation held in Detroit, Michigan in early 1972. There, approximately one hundred veterans testified by live broadcast into Canada about the many, many atrocities that they had seen or, in some cases, participated in. Were they all lying? Apparently Charles Colson of the Nixon White House did not think so. He composed a memo on methods to discredit these individuals because their testimony was so potent. (Lane, p. 218) He used the same tactic that, as I mentioned in part 2, Neil Sheehan used to discredit Lane’s book, Conversations with Americans. He got in contact with the Pentagon and they said some of these vets had never served in Vietnam. This was exposed as a lie. (p. 223. For a summary of those powerful, unforgettable hearings click here) Like the attack on Jane Fonda, the questions about Kerry are uncalled for and unwarranted.

    Further, in addition to stopping Nixon from launching Operation Duck Hook, there can be no doubt that the protests caused Congress to begin to cut off Nixon’s ability to prosecute the war at all. Within one year of the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State—where a total of six students were killed protesting the invasion of Cambodia—Congress had repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. (McGeorge Bundy, “Vietnam and Presidential Powers” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979-80) Contrary to what Nixon and Kissinger later said—and what the film parrots—that repeal had nothing to do with Watergate, since Watergate had not happened yet. Forced to come up with a new rationale for maintaining the war, Nixon now said he had to “wind up” what was already in process. As McGeorge Bundy explained, the reaction to Cambodia now forced the White House to explain the ongoing carnage. The “wind up” excuse was so feeble and inhuman, so condescending to Congress, that it was the beginning of the congressional movement to cut off all funding for the war. Bundy clearly elucidated that 37 years ago. If you can believe it, somehow the Burns and Novick research team missed it.

    Did they also miss the Golden Triangle? How could anyone researching the Vietnam War ignore Alfred McCoy’s milestone book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. That book demonstrated that the CIA cooperated with Southeast Asian drug lords in shipping heroin to France, with some of it eventually arriving in America. And it showed that the leaders of South Vietnam, like Nixon’s forlorn friend Mr. Thieu, knew about it. Which makes sense since Thieu’s Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky, actually participated in the drug trade. (Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, pp. 134-35)

    The film’s last episode ends with the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. Burns and Novick spend a great deal of time on this, but in this viewer’s opinion, it was done better in the 2014 film, Last Days in Vietnam. Better in every way: cinematically, dramatically, in conveying of crucial information, and in extracting the heroism involved. (Click here)

    At the very end, Burns and Novick reprise in a montage close to all of their witnesses. In an oft-used device, captions then tell us what they do today. One of them, Tim O’Brien, reads part of a book he wrote on the war. We then hear the classic Beatles ballad Let it Be. I am still trying to understand what this all meant. We know that these people survived and went on after, or they would not be in the film. Short of all-out nuclear warfare, that was going to happen; and happens in any war. Survivors often write books about their wartime experiences. The use of the Beatles song was quite puzzling: did this signify “Hey, look at these fine people who survived. It couldn’t have been all bad?” If that was the point, it did not work since many of the individual stories were not very memorable or exceptional. I could not figure out, for example, why Denton Crocker, who died early in the war, was even included. If this combination of music and montage was meant to be a tragic ending, it did not even come close. Yet that is what the Vietnam War was, an epic tragedy, especially for Vietnam.

    What I really think Burns and Novick were trying to do was perform an act of commemoration. Which might be why they do not go into the concurrent fall of Cambodia to Pol Pot in 1975. It’s well-nigh impossible to commemorate what Nixon and Kissinger caused there, which was one of the greatest genocides of the 20th century. And this is what makes the preface to the programs by Bank of America so offensive. Before each episode we hear and see the words that Bank of America is a sponsor of the show because “with perspective comes understanding.” This is a ridiculous statement, one that is simply not applicable to the study of history. Any true historian will tell you that perspective has little to do with understanding the past. And, at worst, perspective can seriously distort history. What helps us understand history is not perspective, it is the accumulation of important facts. As a famous Ivy League professor once said, facts are like sunshine, they illuminate events. Here are some facts Burns and Novick could have shown us that would have had the effect of klieg lights. In 1986, about ten years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam opened its doors to American investment. About ten years after that, in 1995, Vietnam normalized relations with America. In 2000, Washington and Hanoi signed broad trade agreements. (Oglesby, p. 313) Which means that if Eisenhower, Nixon and the Dulles brothers had not violated the Geneva Accords back in 1954, Vietnam and America would have normalized relations by 1975. Probably sooner, since the awful residue of the war would not have existed.

    You cannot understand Vietnam if you spend about six minutes out of 18 hours on the Phoenix Program. And in those few moments you do not show the viewer the segment on that subject from Peter Davis’ classic 1974 film Hearts and Minds. In that unforgettable episode, Davis interviewed a military officer who knew about the program. He described a technique they employed to get information about the Viet Cong. The agents would take a group of communist sympathizers up in a helicopter. They would ask them to reveal information. If they hesitated, they would run the suspect up to an open door. If he still did not talk, they would run him up again. If that did not work, the third time they would throw him out. The officer ended with the words that, inevitably the next suspect would talk. For me, that 1-2 minute segment revealed more about the failure of American actions in Vietnam than this entire ten-part documentary did. In miniature, that interview showed why we could not win over the populace, because we had brutalized ourselves into barbarism.

    At the end of Hearts and Minds, Davis asked a returning veteran if we had learned anything from this horrendous experience. The veteran said he thought we were trying not to. Which turned out to be accurate. Because so few people knew and understood just how bad Vietnam was, George W. Bush was allowed to repeat the whole nightmare with his unprovoked war in Iraq. He made up his own phony Gulf of Tonkin pretext: the non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That war destabilized the Middle East, just as Nixon and Kissinger destabilized Cambodia and Laos. Except this time, the White House and the Pentagon did learn something. They learned not to conduct a Living Room War. They learned the secret of the “embedded correspondent,” like Judith Miller of the New York Times, who the military trusted so much, they had her still looking for WMD when they knew there were none to be found.

    The other lesson learned was by the media. They learned how to cooperate with power. The Vietnam War caused a rightward drift in America. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford took office. The Warren Commission cover-up veteran brought with him two young conservative firebrands: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Those two did not care for Kissinger’s foreign policy. They actually considered him too moderate. Thus began the neoconservative movement. Which eventually took over Washington, including the Public Broadcasting System. The best evidence of that triumph is to compare the 1983 PBS series Vietnam: A Television History with the Burns/Novick version. The former is more honest, more hard-hitting, and more complete on the facts of the war. Much more rewarding than this newer version. And in a very real way, that comparison tells us how the Nixon/Kissinger view of Vietnam and the world eventually eclipsed John F. Kennedy’s.

    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3

  • Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Three (The Johnson Years)

    Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Three (The Johnson Years)

    Once The Vietnam War turned to Lyndon Johnson’s stewardship of the conflict, I immediately looked for several milestones to be elucidated. For what happened in regard to Vietnam from November 24, 1963 until August 10, 1964 were the most crucial contributions to the Indochina disaster since the creation of South Vietnam and the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955. The developments under Johnson allowed the conflagration to escalate to an entirely new level of violence, one that seemed unimaginable beforehand. Those events made possible both the giant air war—codenamed Rolling Thunder—unleashed over North Vietnam in March of 1965, and the introduction of American combat troops that same month. The first would lead to the explosion of more bomb tonnage over Indochina than was dropped over Europe and Japan during World War II; the second would culminate with 540,000 American combat troops in theater by 1968. There were no combat troops in Vietnam the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

    It was stunning to me to see how quickly the film moved from Kennedy’s assassination to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This was an interval of about eight and a half months. The film glides through that period in about 14 minutes. And in those 14 minutes it portrays Lyndon Johnson as a kind of avuncular stumblebum who wants to transfer the war to the South Vietnamese so he can fulfill his ambitions on the domestic front. The only way one can present this foreshortened and ersatz picture is by refusing to consult the newly declassified record.

    To understand how this colossal—and ultimately disastrous—American involvement in Indochina took place, one has to go back to 1961. In May of that year, Vice-President Johnson went on a goodwill tour to Saigon. Counter to President Kennedy’s already stated policy, he recommended that head of state Ngo Dinh Diem ask Washington for American combat troops. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) As we have seen, this was a Rubicon that Kennedy never showed any signs of crossing. And as we saw in our review of Part 2, the indications are that he would have rather evacuated South Vietnam than do so. Yet Johnson is requesting Diem do just that in the summer of 1961.

    A second key fact about Johnson is still enshrouded in mystery. As more than one author has noted, the Pentagon kept two sets of books on the progress being made by Diem in the war. One was announced to the public and press. This told the story that Saigon was doing well in its battle against the Viet Cong. But a second in-house set of books revealed the true facts: Diem was actually losing the battle. In some way, Johnson got access to that secret set of books in the spring of 1962. (Newman, pp. 225-29) Therefore, he knew that our side was losing. And that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s forecast of the USA being able to start leaving the country in 1963 was really camouflage: PR to make the American exit easier.

    Those two facts help explain Johnson’s first meeting concerning Vietnam after Kennedy’s death. This occurred on November 24, 1963. As the advisors who were there noted, Johnson’s tone and attitude were much more militaristic, uncompromising and controlling than Kennedy’s. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 102) For example, he said, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.” He instructed the ambassador to tell the generals in Saigon “that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word.” He then told those assembled that he had never been happy with American operations in Vietnam. (Newman, pp. 442-43)

    As previously noted about Part 2, Burns and Novick failed to mention NSAM 263. This was the order by which Kennedy began his withdrawal from Vietnam. It said that 1,000 advisors would be brought home for Christmas, 1963. Kennedy sent Robert McNamara out to announce this to the press. (Newman, p. 407) Which was fitting since Kennedy had appointed his Defense Secretary to supervise the withdrawal plan until its completion in 1965. Johnson not only ignored NSAM 263, he actually increased the advisors there to over 20,000. The film notes this, but does not note how that broke with NSAM 263.

    As this author mentioned in Part 2, some of the most important declassified documents of the ARRB related to Vietnam. And some of these specifically revealed what happened to McNamara after Kennedy’s assassination. Largely due to David Halberstam’s bad book, The Best and the Brightest, McNamara had been pictured as the architect of the escalation of the Vietnam War, even though the declassified record reveals that, from April of 1962 to November of 1963, he was implementing Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. For example, in a taped conference of October 2, 1963, McNamara says that after the American training mission in South Vietnam is completed, we can bring all our advisors home. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 100, 124) In light of this unearthed record, the question becomes: What happened to McNamara to alter his mindset on Vietnam?

    The answer to that key question is simple: President Johnson succeeded Kennedy.

    Johnson understood McNamara’s crucial role in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. In order to turn him around to his different point of view, he began to work on him as only LBJ could. In a phone call, he told McNamara, “I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.” (Blight, p. 310) This statement not only confirms Kennedy’s withdrawal plan, but it tells us that Johnson opposed it. Later, Johnson went even further. He tried to get McNamara to make a public statement denying he ever really meant his declarations about withdrawing! (ibid) Which indicates that Johnson was trying to conceal a conscious upcoming break with Kennedy’s Vietnam policy.

    There is another manipulative statement Johnson made to McNamara that is probably the most revealing of all. He said, “Then come the questions: how the hell does McNamara think he can—when he’s losing a war—he can pull men out of there?” (ibid) That query indicates a revealing fact, and also a dividing line in attitude. It shows that Johnson was reading the Pentagon’s back channel reports about the true state of the war: namely Saigon was losing. Secondly, it shows that Johnson thought that Vietnam figured among America’s vital interests and it had to be defended at all costs. Because if we lost there, it would embolden the international communist conspiracy.

    This is exemplified by another declassified tape. President Johnson is talking to a reporter months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. LBJ says of the option to simply withdraw that, if he did that, the dominoes would fall, and the Republicans would attack him as they did President Truman for losing China. (ibid, p. 211) Around this time, he even said the dominoes could fall all the way to San Francisco if Saigon collapsed. (Eugene Windchy, Tonkin Gulf, p. 302) Having listened to many, many tapes of Kennedy talking about the issue, this author has never heard him make those dire comparisons. But once he was out of office, Johnson went even further. He said to a writer that his losing Vietnam would have been like Neville Chamberlain appeasing Adolf Hitler. (Blight, p. 211) This illustrates the difference between the two men. Johnson was a classic Cold Warrior who completely bought into the Domino Theory. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told his biographer, that was not the case with Kennedy. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 230-32)

    With all this elucidated for the viewer, what was about to happen can be much better understood. A couple of days after his first meeting on Vietnam, Johnson had Bundy alter the rough draft of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273. This document had been prepared at a conference in Honolulu a few days previous. Since he was visiting Texas, Kennedy had not read it. And because of what happened in Dallas, he never saw it. McGeorge Bundy prepared the NSAM 273 working draft. Johnson made three important changes to this document. The first allowed the USA to use its own ships to help South Vietnam stage attacks in the north (these would be codenamed OPLAN 34A). The other two made it easier to expand cross-border covert operations into Laos and Cambodia. (Newman, pp. 446-47) In other words, their net effect was expansive and escalatory. The first one—as we shall see—set the stage for the Tonkin Gulf incident.

    With McNamara now co-opted to his view of Vietnam, Johnson sent him to Saigon to tender his opinion on the true circumstances of the war. In late December, McNamara reversed himself from what he was declaring two months earlier. Instead of saying that the training period was almost over and we could withdraw, he now said that unless major changes were made it was likely the communists would take over soon. (Goldstein, pp 105-07) In January, two months after Kennedy was killed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend air strikes and claim US forces are necessary against the north.

    On March 2, 1964 Johnson called Bundy and told him that after a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he was thinking of escalating the war by letting American air and naval elements directly attack the north. (ibid, p. 108) But he did not want to do that without congressional support. In other words, in less than three months, Johnson was contemplating doing what Kennedy would not hear of doing in three years: inserting American combat forces into Vietnam. After sending McNamara to Saigon again in March, Johnson signed onto a report by his newly converted Defense Secretary that said the US should begin contingency planning for both “Retaliatory Actions” and a program for “Graduated Overt Military Pressure” against Hanoi. For all intents and purposes, Johnson’s agreement with this report closed off any hope of withdrawal or negotiated settlement. It was adapted as NSAM 288, and with its rubric of “retaliatory action” it foreshadowed what would happen in the Gulf of Tonkin. (Frederick Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 128-130) As Logevall wrote, McNamara’s 1964 militant approach was not really due to his own attitudes, but to his “almost slavish loyalty to his president. Lyndon Johnson had made clear he would not countenance defeat in Vietnam … .” (ibid, p. 127)

    In February of 1964, Johnson announced he was creating an Inter-Agency committee to consider future actions to take in Vietnam. Again, this is something that Kennedy did not do. Two members were William Sullivan from the State Department and Bill Bundy, who worked for the Navy but would soon transition to State. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, p. 87; Windchy, p. 309) This committee suggested all kinds of escalatory actions, including Johnson making a speech in advance of direct American bombing of the north, then going to Congress for a resolution authorizing further actions. Their conclusion then was that Saigon needed direct American intervention in order to win. (Goulden, p. 88) The Pentagon picked out a series of targets—94 of them—to attack. A congressional resolution was actually drafted in May of 1964 by Abram Chayes, a lawyer in the State Department. Bill Bundy then redrafted it. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, p. 27) After Bundy revised it, Johnson would occasionally carry it around in his jacket pocket. (Windchy, p. 318)

    By now, I need not tell the reader that almost none of the above information is conveyed in the Burns/Novick film. They deal with it all in about two sentences. In this author’s opinion, it is not possible to understand or place in context what was about to happen without knowing all of the above. For what was about to occur allowed America to directly intervene in Vietnam.

    With the above in place—the inter-agency committee, the rough draft of a congressional resolution, the 94 targets list, the concept of “retaliatory action”—all that was needed to trigger these prepared paths of action was a casus belli. After Kennedy was killed, President Johnson had greatly increased the scope and size of Special Forces actions. One of these covert operations was called OPLAN 34A. (Moise, p. 7) OPLAN 34A has been described as Republic-of-Vietnam-, i.e., Saigon-, sponsored attacks against the coast of North Vietnam. But as one participant said, they “… were not really an RVN program carried out with American assistance; they could better be described as an American program carried out with RVN assistance.” (Moise, p. 7) America purchased the boats for these raids, and it appears that America employed the navigational crews, but did not land with the actual assault teams. (Moise, pp. 15-16) As the raids crept north up the coast—attacking radar installments, shooting up security posts, boarding and hijacking fishing trawlers—Hanoi decided to beef up its defensive patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin. This in turn resulted in the attack boats being furnished with large caliber, tripod-mounted machine guns so they could fire from a distance. (Moise, p. 21)

    As the raids grew in number and variety, the Pentagon decided to use them for intelligence purposes and then use the gathered intelligence to map out future raids. Thus were initiated the DeSoto Patrols in January of 1964. They were performed with Navy destroyers, which were outfitted with extra communications equipment. Their mission was to take photos, make visual observations, intercept and translate Hanoi’s radio messages, and do radar tests up the Tonkin coast. In the summer of 1964, the two ships Maddox and Turner Joy were manning this mission.

    No one with any objectivity could deny that the patrols were related to the raids. In fact, the USA made possible, and was controlling, both. Further, it would be difficult to deny that they were meant as provocations. In fact, two holdovers from the Kennedy administration—George Ball and McGeorge Bundy—labeled them as such. (Moise, p. 100, 240) Yet, this is what the administration said about them afterwards. These raids had been going on for months. (Windchy, pp. 152-53) The DeSoto patrols began in January, and the two that would ensnare the US in the war were the third and the fourth. The Maddox had been in Tonkin Gulf when OPLAN 34A raids took place at the end of July. Hanoi gunboats had counterattacked those raids. (Windchy, p. 75) On that mission, the Maddox had violated North Vietnam’s territorial waters. (Moise, p. 68) For that reason, when new raids occurred 48 hours later on August 2, and Maddox was still in Tonkin, Hanoi sent out three torpedo boats to head her off. After an exchange of fire, the navy called in planes. The Maddox was virtually unscathed; it was hit by one bullet. The American air assault hit all three attacking vessels with machine gun fire. One of the torpedo boats was dead in the water and was rescued by the other two. (Moise, pp. 79, 83)

    The naval officer in charge wanted to discontinue the patrols. (Moise, p. 94) But Johnson personally approved another one. The idea behind this was to “show the flag” and not leave the impression Hanoi was facing us down. (Moise, pp. 104-05) But a key point that Burns and Novick leave out is this: there were further OPLAN 34A raids on the night of August 3! The Maddox, joined by the Turner Joy, were in the vicinity of those raids. This information was so sensitive it was kept secret until February of 1968. (Windchy, p. 169)

    The following evening, August 4th, was the occasion for the infamous “phantom attack” on the Maddox and Turner Joy. No one knows for sure what caused the crews of the two boats to start firing. It was probably a combination of tenseness, and misinterpretation of both radar and sonar signals. (See chapter 15 of Windchy for an analysis.) The bottom line is that it was a false alarm. There was no attack. But the message was sent to Washington that there was an attack. After August 2nd, Johnson had warned Hanoi not to fire again at American ships. He now quickly came to a conclusion on two key matters: 1.) He would retaliate, and 2.) He would present the already prepared resolution to Congress.

    This much the film presents. It does not present the amazing speed with which LBJ finalized those immense decisions. Johnson got news of an impending attack from Robert McNamara at about 9 AM on August 4. The first thing Johnson asked him was how fast he could put together a retaliatory air strike. (Moise, p. 211) Johnson then went down to McGeorge Bundy’s office and told him to bring up the congressional resolution his brother Bill had written. When Bundy suggested that they think about it first, the president tartly replied: “I didn’t ask you what you thought. I told you what to do!” (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 126) As Alexander Haig later reported, after this, the air attack and resolution were faits accomplis. (Moise, p. 211)

    There are other points that should be noted that are lacking in the film’s depiction of these epochal events. The film says that Johnson was told the second attack had been “probable” when he made up his mind to retaliate. This is not really accurate. As noted above, McNamara, Haig and McGeorge Bundy stated that the news of the so-called attack had not even come in when Johnson had made up his mind. Burns and Novick further muddy things when they say that the ship officers misinterpreted Hanoi’s orders to prepare an attack for the actual order to attack. According to Ray Cline, the intelligence chief for the CIA and then the State Department, that is not the case. About seven years after the fact, he finally got to review all of the messages that came in from both ships that morning—with time stamps. He concluded that, without fail, they were all referring to the first attack, not the second. (Moise, p. 199)

    We next see and hear a pilot who was shot down during the retaliatory air strikes, code-named Pierce Arrow. The film does not reveal that a fellow pilot was actually killed in that mission. Burns and Novick also fail to mention a distinct possibility for why one pilot was shot down and became a prisoner and one was killed. The president insisted on going on TV to announce the attack. He wanted to get on in prime-time. When that was not possible, Johnson insisted on getting on at 11:30 EST before The Tonight Show. At that time, only four of the 64 sorties had been flown. In other words, Johnson’s announcement tipped off Hanoi. (Moise, pp. 217, 222; Windchy, p. 229; Goulden, p. 45) Burns and Novick fail to mention another interesting fact: the list of targets for the strikes was culled from the previously mentioned list of 94. In other words, everything Johnson did with Tonkin Gulf had been discussed and reviewed previously. (Moise, p. 211) None of it had ever been mentioned by President Kennedy.

    But there was one great advantage that the passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution held for the president. And thankfully, the film does present this. It served as a great political asset that allowed Johnson to outflank his GOP foe Barry Goldwater on the one issue the Republicans could use against him. In fact, Johnson actually spoke out loud about this the morning of August 4th. Referring to himself in the third person, he said: “The attack on Lyndon Johnson was going to come from the right and the Hawks, and he must not allow them to accuse him of vacillating or being an indecisive leader.” (Moise, p. 211) As the film shows, Johnson’s approval ratings on his conduct of the war zoomed up by thirty points.

    The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was written in such a broad manner that it amounted to a side-door pre-dated declaration of war. In fact, in the planning for its passage back in June, Johnson’s inter-agency committee stated that they should submit it only “… if it could be passed quickly, overwhelmingly, and without too much discussion of its implications.” (Moise, p. 29) Further, they noted that if Congress asks if it is a declaration of war, they should reply that it really was not. (p. 227) It was so broadly written, it also allowed American troops to enter Laos and Cambodia. (Goulden, p. 13)

    In the administration’s reports and testimony to the Senate, either by mistake or on purpose, the White House was deceptive. For instance, they called the first attack entirely unprovoked. They said the Maddox was there on a “routine patrol”, like hundreds the US Navy does around the world. (Goulden, pp. 26, 28) The White House also claimed there was no violation of territorial waters; the Maddox and Turner Joy were anywhere from 30-60 miles away from those waters. (p. 39) The White House reported that the torpedo boats had illuminated the Turner Joy, hinted there were North Vietnamese aircraft in the sky, and that the other side fired the first shot on August 2nd. (ibid) The White House denied there was any connection between the two American destroyers and the South Vietnamese raids. (p. 61) When asked the reason why Hanoi attacked, Secretary of State Dean Rusk escaped into pure Cold War boilerplate. He said there was no satisfactory explanation for the attacks since the communists see the world differently from us and it is “very difficult to enter each other’s minds …” (p. 43) I wish the film had mentioned all of this, because it was the beginning of Johnson’s credibility gap. But it was largely because of these false claims that the resolution was passed in both houses of Congress with only two dissenting votes. (Click here for an article updating Cline’s work with more documents)

    With the resolution passed, and the election pretty much over, Johnson was then able to begin to militarize the conflict. At the same time, he was on the campaign trail saying things like: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys” and “We seek no wider war”. (Goulden, pp. 38, 164) As one official admitted off the record, “Tonkin saved the war for us. It was a little raft that kept us afloat from the summer of 1964 through the election, when Mr. Johnson felt the political freedom to make the decisions he made.” (Windchy, p. 317) As more than one author has noted, scores of planes now began to be sent to Vietnam from Thailand. (Goulden, p. 236; Windchy, p. 240) Around this time, air bases were built at DaNang and Bien Hoa. (Windchy, p. 313) When the latter base was attacked by Viet Cong guerrillas on November 1, 1964, it marked the start of a small wave of these assaults culminating in the attack on Pleiku in February. McGeorge Bundy was in Vietnam at the time. Just prior to Pleiku, he began to compose a famous message to Johnson that was later called the “Fork in the Road Memo”. Dated January 27, 1965, it mapped out two paths of action to the rising attacks on American installations. One was to retaliate and marshal forces against Hanoi, the other was to negotiate a way out. In the memo, Bundy wrote that he and Robert McNamara favored the former, and Johnson agreed. He ordered another retaliatory attack on the north. (Goldstein, p. 156) In the next month, this led to 1.) Operation Rolling Thunder, a titanic air campaign over North Vietnam that would last for almost four years, and 2.) The landing of combat troops at DaNang a few days later. General Maxwell Taylor strongly disagreed with the troop landing. He said that the natural tendency would be to expand that mission from protecting the air bases to an offensive mode. Which is what happened two weeks later. (Goldstein, pp. 164-169) By the end of 1965, Johnson had committed over 175,000 American ground troops into theater.

    What is so remarkable about this commitment is not just its speed, but the fact that, a week before it began, Johnson had been warned by Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson that it would take a half million combat troops five years to win the war. (Goldstein, p. 165) Sure enough, by 1967 Johnson had 525,000 men in Vietnam.

    Johnson had appointed William Westmoreland as the commanding general in Vietnam. Westmoreland decided on a strategy of attrition. That is, by employing an enormous amount of American firepower, his forces would kill so many more of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars that they would have to sue for peace. That strategy was unsuccessful for two reasons. First, it failed to account for the inventive and imaginative methods the Viet Cong could use to counter that firepower advantage. Second, it did not allow for the many ways Hanoi could ship more replacement troops into the south.

    But there was a third reason the strategy failed. The film barely touches upon it, yet it was crucial, since both the first commander, Paul Harkins, and Westmoreland used it: the body count figures were fudged. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 288, 298-99; John Ranelagh, The Agency, pp. 456-57) This was done in a number of ways: sometimes by not updating intelligence estimates; sometimes by pure fraud, e.g., creating operations that did not happen. Or, as Nick Turse shows in his book Kill Anything that Moves, at times it was done by adding thousands of civilian deaths to the enemy combatant column.

    When Johnson submitted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the Senate, he had his friend William Fulbright of Arkansas manage its passage through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. By early 1966, Senator Fulbright suspected he had been conned by Johnson. He decided to hold public hearings on the conduct of the war. What Burns and Novick do with the Fulbright hearings shows us what is wrong with their film.

    Fulbright decided to hold the hearings not only because of what was happening with the escalation in Vietnam, but because he had discovered that Johnson had lied to him about the reasons the United States sent 25,000 Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965. Johnson had said that the communist forces had decapitated hundreds of innocent civilians and that the insurgents had fired bullets into the embassy. (Goulden, p. 166) Fulbright’s committee had done a study after the Marines had joined the military-backed government to subdue the backers of former president Juan Bosch. The study had proven not only that the above statements by Johnson were false, but that the president had vastly overstated the number of communists backing Bosch. (Windchy, p. 40) Further, that the lie about American nationals being endangered was a cover story for sending in the Marines. Fulbright had concluded the intervention was not necessary and it was also unwise. (Windchy, p. 41; see also Goulden, pp. 165-67)

    It should be added here: like Vietnam, the Dominican Republic was another example of Johnson reversing a Kennedy policy. In 1963, Kennedy had begun a series of diplomatic maneuvers to isolate the military junta that had overthrown the democratically elected presidency of Juan Bosch. Inspired by Kennedy, other nations had followed. This momentum had allowed the Bosch forces to grow and actually threaten to take back the presidency. Johnson closed the door on this with this fraudulently motivated intervention. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp 78-79)

    Fulbright, a Democrat who Kennedy seriously considered as his Secretary of State, then gave a speech that exposed Johnson’s handling of the Dominican Republic. Fulbright hesitated to give the speech. But one of his advisors sent him the following memo, which crystallizes what was happening in America. Carl Marcy wrote that a review of developments of the last 24 months helped to explain what happened to

    … turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. … We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintained is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness. (Goulden, p. 166)

    When Senator Fulbright began to hold his hearings, CBS decided to cover them on a daily basis. That is, they pre-empted regular programming. The man most responsible for this daring move was executive producer Fred Friendly. Friendly thought this could be a good opportunity for Americans to see how democracy actually worked and to partake in a debate over what was becoming a controversial war.

    One of the first witnesses Fulbright called was former diplomat-turned-historian George Kennan. Johnson knew that Kennan would be a potent witness against the war, because he was immune to the tactics the president was using: branding his critics as commie symps. The reason that would not work with Kennan is because in 1946, while diplomatically stationed in Russia, Kennan had been the author of the famous Long Telegram from Moscow. That 8,000-word memo outlined the philosophy of containment, which the USA would follow for the next 40 years in its relations with the USSR. But Kennan did not agree with starting wars in places that posed no threat to the national security of America. He compared them to an elephant being frightened by a mouse. Burns and Novick tell us that, for whatever reason, CBS decided not to air Kennan’s testimony on its network—the implication being that this was a failure of nerve on the part of the media.

    That is wrong. And I do not for five seconds think that Burns and Novick did not know it was wrong. What really happened was this: Johnson called up the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, and browbeat him into not showing Kennan! (Randall B. Woods, Fulbright: A Biography, p. 405) In my opinion, this is a serious alteration of the record. It somehow blames the media for something that they would not have done on their own. And it softens the image of Johnson, who was becoming more and more unstable as he was being attacked for his huge escalation of the war. One would think that film-makers who work through television would be sensitive to something like that.

    But as alluded to above, Johnson did not just try to neutralize Kennan. He wanted to brand the whole anti-war movement as communist-inspired. As the film notes, he called in both Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover, Directors of the CIA and FBI, and told them to come up with some dirt relating these protesters to Moscow or Bejing. (Church Committee, Book 3, p. 681; James K. Davis, Spying on America, p. 132) These attempts were unsuccessful; but they were terribly damaging in the long run, because, given permission to do such things, those forays evolved over time into the CIA’s MH/CHAOS program, and greatly expanded the FBI’s COINTELPRO project. Both of them involved massive surveillance of leftist groups in America. And the surveillance often turned into operations to undermine those groups. The film leaves that out.

    Burns and Novick mention the split the war caused between Johnson and Martin Luther King. It does not mention the fact that as King grew more vocal in his objections, Johnson struck out at him also. He began to play the so-called “sex tapes” that the FBI had put together for Hoover as a way of driving King to take his own life. Johnson had offered them to certain journalists while entertaining them in the White House. (Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, p. 574) When Vice-President Hubert Humphrey argued against escalating in 1965, Johnson became enraged and barred him from future meetings on Vietnam. He actually wanted surveillance placed on Humphrey to see who he was talking to. (Goldstein p. 162)

    The film also tries to imply that Johnson conducted the war only in cooperation and agreement with his advisors. As we have seen with Humphrey, that is not really true. Johnson ended up overriding his advisors. And one by one, they started leaving: Pierre Salinger, Ken O’Donnell, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, and finally, Robert McNamara were all gone by 1967. They all ended up disagreeing with Johnson’s war policy. And O’Donnell later wrote a book with Dave Powers where he specifically stated that Johnson had broken with Kennedy’s policy on Vietnam. (Ken O’Donnell & David Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, pp. 14-18) As McGeorge Bundy found out, the so-called troop escalation debates were crafted in advance. Johnson had a secret telegram channel with Westmoreland in Saigon. When the general would make a troop request, LBJ would approve it. The president would then call in his advisors for a meeting whose conclusion had already been ordained. (Goldstein, pp. 214-15)

    When taken with a wider lens, the picture Burns and Novick try to focus of Johnson is not really accurate or complete. The portait of Johnson drawn by the film is—to use a literary analogy—sort of like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman: a blustering, but somewhat sympathetic elderly man who stumbles into an unforeseen mess.

    This author would use two other literary comparisons: Captain Ahab and Macbeth. Ahab for the years 1963-65 and Macbeth for 1966-68. As we have shown with a surfeit of evidence, Johnson thought he knew and understood Vietnam and the Cold War better than Kennedy. So he immediately began to overturn his predecessor’s policy there. As he did so, he tried to hide the evidence of his reversal. Once he was elected in November of 1964, he began his full attack on Vietnam. Which turned into an epic tragedy for both Vietnam and America. In fact, what happened in Vietnam—short of atomic weapons—was probably the worst that could have happened. When Johnson saw how wrong he was, he turned into the Shakespearean character: striking out, and attempting to neutralize all those who opposed and criticized him. Until almost everyone had deserted him.

    As depicted in Athens or at the Globe Theater, with tragedy there is always an element of both rage and violence. Johnson assiduously worked to spring his own trap on himself. And that is what is missing from this film.

    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 4

  • Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Two

    Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part Two

    nsam 263 nyt

    When I saw that the Koch Brothers were major backers of The Vietnam War, I suspected that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick were not going to use any of the newly declassified files concerning President Kennedy and his plans for withdrawing from Vietnam. I have been exposed to enough literature and discussion from the wealthy, organized Right to understand that the mere mention of Kennedy’s name causes something akin to bug-eyed rage. But I hoped against hope that the film would at least be fair to President Kennedy. Well, Burns and Novick might be decent people, but the best I can say about them in this regard is that they were not going to bite the (many) hands that feed them.

    In Part One, Burns and Novick noted Kennedy’s visit to Saigon in 1951. And they mention his meeting with a journalist there, Seymour Topping. Like Kennedy’s meeting at the time with State Department official Edmund Gullion, Topping told the congressman that the French effort there was not winning, but losing the war. And the image of the US paled badly in the eyes of many Vietnamese because they were allied with the colonizers. The film then depicts Kennedy writing a letter to his constituents about the wrong-headedness of the American position, which would likely become a lost cause.

    As with the Burns and Novick attempt to camouflage through anonymity the perpetrators behind direct American involvement in Vietnam, this strophe discounts the record to the breaking point. To elucidate just one element: Kennedy did not write just one letter to his constituents about our ill-fated alliance with France. That visit to Saigon had a transformational impact on his entire view of European colonialism in the Third World.

    As Richard Mahoney depicted in his landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Kennedy now began to make radio addresses and formal speeches attacking the orthodoxies of both political parties on the issues of anti-communism versus nationalism in the Third World. He became a veritable one-man band warning that the United States had to stand for something more than just anti-communism in the Third World. He did this at the risk of alienating the leaders of his own party, e.g., Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson. He specifically attacked Acheson’s State Department for not recognizing the needs and aspirations of the people they were supposed to be serving in the areas of Africa and Asia. (Mahoney, p. 15) In May of 1953, with the French defeat in sight, Kennedy wrote a letter to John Foster Dulles asking him 47 questions about what his policy was for future American involvement in Indochina. (ibid) When Nixon was lobbying Congress about Operation Vulture, Kennedy assailed it by asking how “the new Dulles policy and its dependence upon the threat of atomic retaliation will fare in these areas of guerilla warfare.” (ibid, p. 16)

    About one month before Dien Bien Phu fell, Kennedy took the floor of the Senate to make a long speech about America in Indochina. He began by saying the US could not declare war on nationalism:

    To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile … no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an enemy of the people, which has the sympathy and covert support of the people. (ibid)

    It’s important to note that although Burns and Novick use Kennedy’s phrase about the Viet Minh being everywhere and nowhere, they do not attribute it to him.

    JFK’s opposition to the Dulles/Nixon/Eisenhower backing of French colonialism in the Third World culminated in 1957. In a famous Senate speech, Kennedy assailed the administration for its backing of another French colonial war, this time in Algeria. In that speech, Kennedy reminded his colleagues of two things. First, that what had happened in Indochina three years previous was now repeating itself on the north coast of Africa: We were backing a fey French effort to preserve the remnants of an overseas empire. And second, we were not being a true friend to our French ally. A true friend would have counseled Paris to negotiate an Algerian settlement allowing for an orderly departure, thus sparing more bloodshed in Africa and further polarization of the homeland. (ibid, pp. 20-22)

    It is hard for this writer to believe that Burns and Novick are not aware of that speech, for the simple reason that it created a mini-firestorm in both the press and at the White House. Kennedy specifically went after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice-President Richard Nixon. There were 138 editorial comments on the speech, over 2/3 of them negative. (ibid, p. 21) Kennedy was not just personally counter-attacked by Foster Dulles and Nixon, but by Stevenson and Acheson—members of his own party. The reaction was so violent that Kennedy told his father that he might have made a costly error. But Joe Kennedy replied to his son that he did not know how lucky he was. Algeria was going to get worse, and he would then look like a prophet. Which is what happened.

    That speech dealt with one of the same subjects that The Vietnam War deals with: the perils of America allying itself with French imperialism. One would therefore think that Burns and Novick should have noted it, especially because it fills in the background of what Kennedy did in Vietnam once he became president. It is not noted at all. Kennedy’s lonely six-year campaign to alert members of each political party to the importance of this issue, and the folly of what Eisenhower and his administration were doing—all this is reduced to one letter.

    When I saw what the film had done with this clear record, I began to wonder what Burns and Novick were going to do with the pile of new documents that had been released on the Kennedy administration and Vietnam since 1994 and the advent of the Assassination Records Review Board. Those hundreds of pages of documents, plus the research done on the subject by several authors and essayists, has created a whole new lens to look at this issue through. But when I saw that the film had almost completely muzzled Kennedy’s background on the issue, I then thought there were two paths left for the film to follow in regards to Kennedy and Vietnam. The first would be to introduce this newly declassified material out of left field, thereby making it rather jarring to the viewer; the likely reaction being: “Gosh, where is this guy coming from?” The second avenue would be simply to ignore this new scholarship and act as though it did not exist. Unsurprisingly, The Vietnam War took the latter path.

    As Kennedy himself noted on the eve of the Democratic convention in 1960, he had to win the nomination. If he lost, and either Lyndon Johnson or Stu Symington won, it would just be more of John Foster Dulles. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. 37) George Ball, the iconoclast who worked for Kennedy in the State Department, later commented on the president’s reformist ideas by saying that JFK wanted to change the dynamic in the Third World. He thought that we should not cede the nationalist cause to the Soviets, we should not automatically befriend the status quo. By doing that we gave the advantage to the Russians. (ibid, p. xiv)

    Authors like Mahoney, Philip Muehlenbeck, Robert Rakove, and Greg Poulgrain have written entire books based upon new research into this subject. This new scholarship demonstrates how President Kennedy almost immediately broke with the Dulles/Eisenhower regime in places like the Congo and Indonesia. Again, using the above authors’ work would have demonstrated that what Kennedy was about to do in Vietnam was pretty much of a piece with his foreign policy in the Third World. Burns and Novick present not a word of it.

    What do they present instead? Kennedy as some kind of conflicted Cold Warrior. They cherry-pick parts of his inaugural address in order to do this. They then say that after the Bay of Pigs, his confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy felt he had to draw the line somewhere, and that place was Vietnam. So after sending Walt Rostow and Maxwell Taylor to Saigon to gather information on what the conditions were like there, Kennedy then commissioned thousands more advisors into the theater.

    In doing so, the film pretty much eliminates the entire two-week debate in the White House where Kennedy faced off against virtually his entire cabinet and foreign policy advisors. As authors like James Blight have noted, for those two weeks, virtually every other voice in the room wanted to commit combat troops into Vietnam. The president was the only person holding the line against it. In Blight’s book Virtual JFK—co-edited with Janet Lang and David Welch—he spends over forty pages dealing with this landmark episode. And he produces the memorandum by Colonel Howard Burris (Johnson’s military aide) which memorialized Kennedy’s arguments against inserting combat troops. (Blight, pp. 281-83) These arguments included the facts that Vietnam was not a clear cut case of aggression as was Korea; America’s most important allies—like England—would not support such a move; the French effort, with hundreds of millions of dollars, had failed; combat troops would not be effective against guerillas and, in fact, would be quite vulnerable to attack. To say the least, Kennedy’s arguments look prescient today.

    As Gordon Goldstein pointed out in his valuable book on McGeorge Bundy, this was not the first time Kennedy had turned down a request to send combat troops into Vietnam. Goldstein listed no less than nine previous instances in which Kennedy had rejected such proposals before the November debates. (Lessons in Disaster, pp. 52-58) As both Blight and Goldstein concluded, this was a Rubicon that Kennedy simply would not cross. And, in fact, National Security Advisor Bundy agreed with his biographer Goldstein on this issue: Kennedy was not going to commit American combat troops to fight a guerilla war in the jungle. (ibid, p. 235)

    Of further note, when George Ball heard about this debate and Kennedy’s lonely stance against the interventionists, he thought the president might be weakening and warned him of what happened to France in Vietnam the decade before. Kennedy replied, “You’re crazier than hell George. That just isn’t going to happen.” (Goldstein, p. 62) And McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor—Kennedy’s three chief military advisors—all later wrote that Kennedy was never going to send the military in the form of combat troops into Vietnam. (Blight, p. 365; Goldstein, pp. 231, 238)

    As the film notes, after the debate, Kennedy did sign off on National Security Memorandum (NSAM) 111. This allowed for more advisors and equipment to aid Diem’s army called the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam]. A good question could have been raised at this point. During the lengthy debate, the Hawks had expressed their pleas in the most dire terms: namely, that South Vietnam would collapse without the insertion of combat troops—and lots of them. Bundy had requested tens of thousands, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had asked for hundreds of thousands. (Blight, p. 71, p. 280) If such was the case, how was Kennedy’s plan to send in more advisors going to salvage Saigon’s imminent fall?

    There is a parallel here with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. After the first day of that doomed venture, when it was apparent all was lost, Kennedy was asked by both the CIA and the Pentagon to send in the navy to save the day. He refused. The film does not acknowledge that symmetry. Or the message implicit in Kennedy’s limited aid package: the US could help Diem, they could extend weapons and supplies. But they could not fight his war for him.

    There is a famous quote about how strongly Kennedy framed this question to Arthur Schlesinger. What the film does with this key quote is revealing. It includes only the first part of it, where JFK told Schlesinger that committing combat troops would be like taking a sip of alcohol: the effect would wear off and you then had to take another. But it eliminates Kennedy’s much stronger punch line: “The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.” (Goldstein, p. 63) Could anything make the issue more clear? Congressman Kennedy had seen the folly of our effort to aid the French position in their war in Indochina. But he saw that France had overextended itself: that they had no real political base and therefore had to send in a land army to fight Giap’s guerilla war. He was not going to repeat that mistake with American troops. He was not going to be perceived as continuing a colonial war in the Third World.

    As mentioned above, Burns and Novick note Kennedy’s signing of NSAM 111. But they do not relate what else Kennedy did at this time. As James Blight has noted, all the indications are that Kennedy was shaken by the fact that he was almost alone in resisting the siren song of inserting the Army and Marines into Indochina as the main fighting force. (Blight, p. 281) Contrary to what the film implies, that cabinet was not unilaterally picked by JFK. It was done by committee, one that included Clark Clifford, Richard Neustadt, Larry O’Brien and Sargent Shriver. (Ted Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 258) For this reason, Kennedy decided to go outside that circle of White House advisors to enlist an ally. He notified John Kenneth Galbraith, ambassador to India, that he wanted him to visit Saigon and write up a report on how he saw the situation. Kennedy knew full well what Galbraith would say: namely, that we should begin to distance ourselves from Saigon. (Blight, pp. 69, 361) Then, when Galbraith arrived in town in early April, Kennedy sent him to see Bob McNamara to brief him on his report. The ambassador reported back to the president that he had achieved his mission and that McNamara was now on board. (ibid, p. 370) As several commentators have noted, e.g., Gordon Goldstein and John Newman, this was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

    What does the film do with this very important background maneuvering by Kennedy? It reduces it all by simply saying that Secretary of Defense McNamara announced in the summer of 1962 that America was making progress on winning the war and therefore a gradual withdrawal of American advisors could begin and be completed by 1965. This camouflages two important points. First, it conveys the idea that this was McNamara’s initiative. Second, it also implies that Kennedy and McNamara both thought they were actually winning the war. Both of these tenets are wrong. McNamara had to be convinced upon Kennedy’s orders to begin this plan. It was Kennedy’s plan, not McNamara’s. Secondly, there is simply no credible evidence that either of them actually thought the American effort there was militarily successful. How could McNamara think so if just six months earlier he had recommended over 200,000 combat troops be committed into Vietnam? If you don’t mention it, you don’t have to explain it.

    As per Kennedy, he told his two trusted advisors, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, that he had to delay his withdrawal plan and design it around the 1964 election, and complete it in 1965. Otherwise he would be decried by the right wing as a communist appeaser and that would endanger the election. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126) Obviously, if Kennedy thought the ARVN were winning, or were going to win, he would not have expressed it that way. Further, researcher Malcolm Blunt recently sent this author a document Kennedy requested in the fall of 1963 and which was returned to the president in November, about two weeks before his death. This was an evacuation plan for American government employees in Saigon. John Newman has argued of late that Kennedy and McNamara feared that Saigon would fall before their original final withdrawal date, which was autumn of 1965. Kennedy likely ordered this plan for that reason. For as Kennedy told NSC assistant Mike Forrestal in 1963, the probability of Saigon winning was about 100-1. (Goldstein, p. 239)

    Coinciding with all this is what is probably the most important document declassified by the ARRB. McNamara held regular meetings of the Saigon chiefs of agencies and the Pentagon in Hawaii. These were called Sec/Def meetings. For the one in May of 1963, he had requested that each agency and military chief bring with him their withdrawal schedule. After he had looked them over, he said they were too slow and would have to be speeded up. There was no qualification by McNamara that this withdrawal was hinging upon an American “victory” and there was no contingency plan mentioned to reinstate troops if the victory was not in sight. In fact, General Earle Wheeler wrote that he understood that any request for any overt action would be denied by the president. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 19-21) These documents were so compelling that even The New York Times bannered a story with the headline: “Kennedy Had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam.” (ibid, p. 19) One would think that if it were good enough for that paragon of the MSM, the Grey Lady, it would be good enough for Burns and Novick. Needless to say, none of these documents are shown in The Vietnam War.

    Neither is NSAM 263 exhibited. This was the order drawn up in early October of 1963 that delineated the withdrawal plan and mandated that a thousand men be returned from Vietnam by the end of 1963. The story of how the order and the report it was attached to were created is revealing, and would have been informative to the viewer. By the autumn of 1963, JFK now had everything in place to activate his withdrawal plan. But he wanted to send his two highest military advisors to Saigon, that is, McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor. He trusted McNamara, but not Taylor. Therefore, while those two were in Vietnam, Pentagon higher ups General Victor Krulak and Colonel Fletcher Prouty were invited to the White House. Bobby Kennedy met the duo. He instructed them, upon orders of the president, that they would actually edit and compose the Taylor/McNamara report at his direction. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 401) Once that was done, it was shipped out to Hawaii and given to Taylor and McNamara in bound form. Kennedy was not allowing for any alterations.

    That report became the basis for NSAM 263. Presidentially designed, the report was used by him to ram 263 through his foreign policy advisors—some of whom were reluctant to sign on to it. But, reluctant or not, they ultimately did. McNamara was then sent out to announce the withdrawal plan to the press. As he was walking to meet the reporters, Kennedy instructed him with the following: “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too.” (ibid, pp. 404-07)

    One would think that if a filmmaker were trying to assemble the latest scholarship on Vietnam for an American audience—if one were really trying to enlighten them with the best and newest information—then at least some of this would be included in the presentation. Or at least he or she would communicate some of the (at least) nine sources that Kennedy or McNamara confided in about the withdrawal plan. Or perhaps play the October 2, 1963 taped conference where McNamara actually says that they have to find a way to get out of Vietnam. (Blight, p. 100)

    I shouldn’t have to replay this refrain by now: None of this information is in the film. But as Burns pronounced on Marc Maron’s radio podcast of September 11th : History is malleable. Sort of like bubble gum, right Ken?

    What do Burns and Novick tender us instead? They give us Neil Sheehan and Jean Paul Vann. Which means they would have given us David Halberstam if he were alive. (See my two-part review, “David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest”) When I saw this, I realized just how much The Vietnam War wanted to be part of the MSM, and just how far PBS had fallen. For Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest—which Warren Hinckle once called “one of the greatest bullshit books ever written”—makes McNamara out to be the chief engineer of the war. When, in fact, from April of 1962 to November of 1963, he was implementing Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. McNamara had even told his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, that Kennedy had assigned him the task of winding down the war. (Blight, p. 371)

    Jean Paul Vann was one of the military advisors stationed in Vietnam under Kennedy. By all accounts he was committed to the cause of the American created nation-state of South Vietnam. Halberstam and Sheehan were young reporters at the time. Halberstam had been sent to Vietnam after being assigned to the Congo. Which is an important point. As noted above, one of Kennedy’s first reversals of Dulles/Eisenhower Cold War policy was in the Congo. In fact, that was the first place where JFK directed specific alterations to his predecessor’s policy. These would favor leftist leader Patrice Lumumba and the cause of emerging African nationalism. In that instance Kennedy was contravening a (British aided) Belgian attempt at recolonization. (Mahoney, pp. 65-69)

    Valuable research by Paul Rigby has shown that, prior to being assigned to Vietnam, Halberstam had done what he could to condescend to Kennedy’s efforts in Congo. In the pages of Times Talk—Halberstam’s employer, the NY Times in-house journal—the reporter conveyed some of those ideas. His stories, such as “It’s Chaos for a Correspondent in the Congo” and “Congo Boondocks: Land of Cannibals and Diamonds,” communicated the Establishment line that Congo could not handle independence because it was simply a land of African primitives. (William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War, p. 509; see also Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire, pp. 3-24) Halberstam seemed to be missing the overall gestalt of the struggle. He would later write of that colossal, epic conflict—which killed both Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjold—that there was less there than met the eye. (Halberstam, p. 17)

    Halberstam’s outlook and attitude failed to fully grasp Kennedy’s concepts in Congo, where JFK decided to do all he could to enforce UN Secretary General Hammarskjold’s policies for Congolese independence against America’s European allies England and Belgium. Kennedy continued that policy alone after Hammarskjold was killed. (“Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite”) It is clear today—as it was then—that both Lumumba and Hammarskjold were murdered by colonial powers trying to retake the mineral wealth of Congo. (“Plane crash that killed UN boss may have been caused by aircraft attack”) Yet, in 1965, Halberstam could write that the Congolese cared less for their country than white people did. (ibid, p. 18) Unlike Halberstam, Jonathan Kwitny later fully comprehended what had happened. As Kwitny wrote, Patrice Lumumba became a hero in Africa “not because he promoted socialism, which he didn’t, but because he resisted foreign intervention. He stood up to outsiders, if only by getting himself killed.” (Endless Enemies, p. 72) As the picture below illustrates, Kennedy certainly understood Lumumba’s cause and his martyrdom:

    jfklumumba
    Kennedy receiving word of Lumumba’s death
    (photo: Jacques Lowe)

    On the larger, more epic level, Kwitny also had a much richer understanding of what was at stake in Congo than Halberstam. After surveying what happened, he memorably wrote about the legacy of Lumumba and what it meant in the larger movement of African nations to break out of the servitude of colonialism:

    The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest … blight on the record of this new era is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their ‘democracy’ from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (ibid, p. 75)

    When Halberstam got to Vietnam—actually on his second day there—he lunched with the CIA’s station chief in Saigon. (Prochnau, p. 133) As the weeks went by, many of his CIA contacts from Congo migrated there. As author William Prochnau wrote, “By now his CIA contacts from the Congo had begun to flock to the hot new action in Southeast Asia like bees to honey; Vietnam was a spook’s dream and the Agency forever had a better fix on Vietnamese reality than the American military.” (ibid, p. 169)

    Halberstam admitted this in his 1965 book, The Making of a Quagmire, where he wrote, “But many CIA agents in Saigon were my friends, and I considered them among the ablest Americans I had seen overseas or at home.” (p. 222) In that book, Halberstam attempts an all-out defense of the CIA’s role in both Vietnam and the developing world. And he adds that inherent suspicion of the Agency is “the outgrowth of its bogeyman image among liberals …”. (ibid) This is especially puzzling today since the Church Committee revealed that Allen Dulles and the CIA had arranged numerous plots to kill Lumumba in the Congo, where the writer had just been stationed for many months. Later on, Halberstam attempted to distance himself from these admissions. He told Prochnau that UPI reporter Neil Sheehan had better CIA sources than he did, but he had better military sources. (Prochnau, p. 277)

    Both Halberstam and Sheehan were enamored with Vann, even though they understood he was an “essentially conservative, at times [an] almost reactionary man.” (Halberstam, p. 164) In their film, Burns and Novick have Sheehan tell us that, upon his own arrival in Saigon in 1962, he believed in American ideals and the alleged US mission in South Vietnam. He also believed in the dangers of the “international communist conspiracy”. Sheehan then adds that he was there to report the truth in order to help win the war for the betterment of the United States and the world. He describes going along on ARVN helicopter missions as being part of a crusade: he was thrilled by the experience.

    These attitudes made Sheehan and Halberstam easy targets for Vann. And negatively complementing that, it guaranteed that they would completely miss what Kennedy was doing. Colonel Vann was a veteran of Korea and, by 1963, had served in the military for twenty years. With Sheehan’s help, Burns and Novick spend several minutes outlining the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac, an important conflict that Vann helped plan and supervise. Although the Viet Cong were outnumbered by a large margin, even though the ARVN had helicopter support and used armored personnel carriers, this battle turned out to be, by any accounting, a losing proposition for Vann. Saigon lost 80 dead, more than one hundred wounded, and five helicopters destroyed. The Viet Cong lost 18 dead and 39 wounded. Vann was deeply angered and confided the true facts of the defeat to his students Sheehan and Halberstam, who both wrote about the failure of the battle.

    The film does not reveal a key reason for that failure, one which Vann himself had discovered. Ngo Dinh Diem had issued orders to his field commanders not to initiate large offensive operations that would provoke serious casualties. Vann’s intelligence officer, Jim Drummond, concluded that the ARVN had not really checked the growth of the Viet Cong or the area under their control. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 299) In other words, contrary to what the commander in Vietnam, General Harkins, was saying, America was not winning the war. And Ap Bac was living proof of that.

    Vann was shipped out of Vietnam in 1963 and served in the Pentagon as a procurement officer. He began to file formal reports complaining about how the war was being fought. These reports appealed to General Edward Lansdale because they clearly projected the fact that unless American ground troops were committed to Vietnam, Saigon would fall. (ibid, p. 319) As we have seen, this is the message Kennedy had listened to in November of 1961—and had rejected. Kennedy was aware of what Vann was doing. Both he and McNamara opposed the work of his acolyte Halberstam; Kennedy even asked the publisher of the Times to rotate him out of Saigon. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 261; Halberstam, p. 268)

    But Edward Lansdale had been the first to advise Kennedy to insert combat troops into Vietnam. (Newman, p. 20) Sure enough, after Kennedy’s death, when Lansdale returned to the White House, he recommended sending Vann back to Vietnam. Vann did return in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson overturned Kennedy’s policy and committed tens of thousands of American combat troops to Saigon. (Kaiser, p. 384)

    The reason that Sheehan and Halberstam admired Vann was simple: like him, they were Hawks. And like him—and opposed to Kennedy—they wanted more American involvement, not less. This is easily discernible by reading Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire. That volume is perhaps the single most complete and coruscating condemnation of America’s Vietnam policy published to that point. It attacks every element of the American mission in that country and also the policies and personages of the Diem regime. (See Chapters 3-5) It then goes on to expose the ineptness of the ARVN (Chapters 5-7), in particular how bad Colonel Hunyh Van Cao was. The latter actually gets his own chapter: 10. Why so hard on Cao? Because Vann was the advisor attached to him, and—as with Sheehan—Vann was Halberstam’s hero in 1965. Why? Because he knew how to win the war. (See Chapter 11) So for Halberstam, when Vann departed, things got worse. (see Chapter 12).

    If Halberstam could not make it more clear, he does near the end of the book. With Sheehan mentioned throughout, he proclaims: “Bombers and helicopters and napalm are a help but they are not enough.” (p. 321) He then concludes with the following: “The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder, and force the other side to practice self-deception.” (p. 322)

    Of course, when the wishes of this troika—Sheehan, Vann and Halberstam—were fulfilled, we saw what happened. Direct American involvement ended up being an epic debacle. As many as 3-4 million people were slaughtered amid almost unimaginable horror. All in pursuit of a false goal that was not possible to attain. In other words, Kennedy was right and Vann, Sheehan and Halberstam were wrong. But neither Halberstam nor Sheehan could ever admit that. It is especially startling that Halberstam never saw the parallels of what happened in both Congo and Vietnam after Kennedy was killed: In Congo, the Agency and LBJ switched sides and joined the imperial interests; in Vietnam, the Pentagon and Johnson now broke Kennedy’s strictures and eventually imported 540,000 combat troops, making it an American imperial war. Truly puzzling that he would miss all of this.

    Sheehan and Halberstam got their wish. And even after it was clear that direct American involvement would not work, it took them years to understand it. And further, that the American army was self-destructing in the jungle, as Kennedy had predicted it would back in 1961. By 1971, even the army understood this. Colonel Robert Heinl wrote a long essay on its collapse at that time, and traced it from at least 1969. (Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”)

    But author and activist Mark Lane understood it even earlier. In 1970 he published a book of personal interviews with returning veterans. The book was called Conversations with Americans. It was a shocking exposé of the individual and group war crimes that American solders had committed in Vietnam. Since there was a danger that his interview subjects would be prosecuted, he gave them the option of using fictitious names. He marked these with an asterisk in the text. He then added that the real names and full transcripts had been given over to an attorney who had worked for the Justice Department. (Lane, p. 17)

    When the book was published, The New York Times trotted out Sheehan to review it. (NY Times Book Review, 12/27/70) Sheehan wrote that he had contacted the Pentagon and some of the people named in the book did not serve in the military, or were not in the places where they said they were at the time. Which implied that what Lane was writing was fictitious. After, when Lane called the New York Times to talk to Sheehan, Sheehan would not accept his calls. The Times then sent Sheehan out on tour to promote his column. Which, of course, was a promotion of the collapsing war effort. Apparently, as a believer in the international communist conspiracy, Sheehan never imagined that there was a systematic, institutionalized cover-up of these crimes after the 1968 My Lai Massacre. But there was such a cover-up, and author Nick Turse discovered it when he found the (incomplete) records. (Kill Anything that Moves, pp. 15-21) When Lane asked Sheehan about My Lai during a radio interview, the New York Times reporter replied that it was just a rumor. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, pp. 220-21)

    Under pressure from the Times and Sheehan, Lane’s book was withdrawn from circulation.

    This is the man Burns and Novick use as the main talking head in their segment on the Kennedy years. With their defense of the Dulles brothers as “decent people” in Part One, the disappearance of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan and the championing of Vann and Sheehan in Part Two, so far the net value of this documentary is something less than zero.

    Addendum

    Although some critics of the film JFK have stated that there was no public announcement of NSAM 263, and Kennedy was keeping it quiet, as the reader can see in the following two Newsweek articles, that is false.  It was a public policy, and Kennedy had sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to brief the press on it after he had adopted it in October, 1963. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 407)

    Newsweek, October 14, 1963

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

    Newsweek, December 2, 1963

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

    Part 1

    Part 3

    Part 4

  • Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part One

    Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part One

    After a huge publicity build-up the PBS ten-part series The Vietnam War is upon us. Like previous efforts—The War, Prohibition, Baseball—it was written by Geoffrey Ward and produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I predict that like those other documentaries, it will win many Emmy Awards. But not because of any intrinsic qualitative value. But because Burns has become a cultural darling. He, Novick and Ward understand how to attain funding and how to get approval through media gatekeepers. Which is not the same as writing or filming honest, valuable history. As we will see, whatever historical value this much-ballyhooed production has is quite dubious.

    It begins with the 1858 attack on DaNang as the French begin to take over all of Indochina for colonial purposes. After France fell to Germany in World War II, the Japanese occupied Vietnam. Before he passed away President Franklin Roosevelt had made a statement that after the war, former colonies should be allowed freedom to choose their form of government in the future. The film mentions Roosevelt’s dictum but says President Truman turned this around due to the Russians exploding atomic bombs, China being taken over by Mao and the eruption of the Korean War. This sounds a lot like it was cribbed from David Halberstam’s bad book, The Best and The Brightest. And like much of that bloated mediocrity, it is not really accurate. And since one of the main talking heads in The Vietnam War is Leslie Gelb, the editor of the Pentagon Papers, Gelb could have corrected this.

    After the British let the French back into Vietnam in 1946, there were still those in the State Department who followed the on-and-off vacillations of France’s policy toward Bao Dai. Bao Dai had been the titular leader of Vietnam since 1926. The French gave him little leeway to accomplish anything of significance. The Japanese allowed him to stay as a figurehead leader during World War II. Some in the State Department told the French to alter the successive “agreements” they contracted with Bao Dai into an effective nationalist alternative to revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers the Viet Minh. This proved unsuccessful. And the US sensed that French unwillingness to concede political power to the Vietnamese “heightened the possibility of the Franco-Viet Minh conflict being transformed into a struggle with Soviet imperialism.” (Pentagon Papers, Volume I, p. A-5)

    Therefore, American diplomats were told to “apply such persuasion and/or pressure as is best calculated to produce desired result of France’s unequivocally and promptly approving the principle of Viet independence.” And Paris was put on notice that the US “was willing to extend financial aid to a Vietnamese government, not a French puppet, but could not give consideration of altering its present policy in this regard unless real progress is made in reaching non-communist solution in Indochina based on cooperation of true nationalists of that country.” (Ibid)

    This same study found that there was no strong evidence of Soviet influence with Ho Chi Minh in 1948, even though the French colonialist war had been going on for two years at that time. (Volume 1, p. A-6)

    In early 1950, the French “took the first concrete steps toward transferring public administration to Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam.” This fateful move enraged Ho Chi Minh who denied the legitimacy of Bao Dai as anything more than a puppet of Paris. At this point Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was formally recognized by China and the USSR (ibid, p. A-7) When this occurred, Secretary of State Dean Acheson now reversed the policy of neutrality that had been announced in 1948. On February 1, 1950 he made the following public statement: “The recognition by the Kremlin of Ho Chi Minh’s communist movement in Indochina comes as a surprise. The Soviet acknowledgement of this movement should remove any illusion as to the ”nationalist” nature of Ho Chi Minh’s aims and reveals Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.” (ibid, p. A-7)

    Acheson then tried to disguise the aim of France bestowing administrative powers on Bao Dai by saying this would actually lead “toward stable governments representing the true nationalist sentiments of more than 20 million peoples of Indochina.” (ibid) Apparently keeping tongue in cheek, he went further and said this move was backed by the countries of the world “whose policies support the development of genuine national independence in former colonial areas … .”

    On the day France recognized Bao Dai, President Truman also recognized him as the leader of Vietnam. A few weeks later, France began to request financial aid for their mandarin. On May 8, 1950, Acheson acceded to that request with these words:

    The United States Government, convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exist in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism, considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated States of Indochina and to France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.

    As the Pentagon Papers notes, “The US thereafter was deeply involved in the developing war.” (ibid, p. A-8) Later that year, the United Sates stationed a Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon to help the French.

    I would have gladly forfeited all the incessant Burns-Novick use of colored maps with red endangering the Far East (I counted this six times just in Part One); all of narrator Peter Coyote’s—who I used to think was a pretty decent guy—intoning the David Halberstamish warnings about Russia detonating an atomic bomb, or China going communist; I would have exchanged all of those warmed-over 1970’s clichés for just three minutes of the above passages from the Pentagon Papers. Since this was the real reason America got involved in Vietnam: our failure to stand up to the French desire to recolonize Indochina. In other words, Secretary of State Acheson valued the alliance with France more than he did Roosevelt’s pledge of colonial independence. And his failure to admit Bao Dai was a French puppet is what pushed Ho Chi Minh closer to Moscow.

    Two questions so far: how can you elucidate anything as fundamental and documented as this if:

    1. You never mention the name of Dean Acheson, and
    2. You never mention the name of Bao Dai?

    Incredible as that sounds, it is true. And it was at this (rather early) point that I began to question the film-makers’ honesty. It is fine and dandy to let people directly engaged in the conflict, that is, soldiers and civilians, have their say. It gives the series grounding in the day-to-day ugliness and drama of that prolonged horrific struggle. But do Tom Vallely, Duoun Von Mai and John Musgrave make up in importance for the lack of Acheson and Bao Dai? Anyone who saw the film Platoon—as millions did—knows how scary night patrol must have been in Vietnam. But one function of the historian is to explain how John Musgrave got into that precarious position. The declassified record shows it was Acheson’s decision that got America “deeply involved in the developing war.” (My citations are from the completely declassified Pentagon Papers, not the Daniel Ellsberg or Mike Gravel versions which were incomplete.)

    But that is just the beginning of the crucial excisions made by Burns and Novick. How in heaven’s name can one tell the story of American involvement in Vietnam without mentioning the personages of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles, or General Edward Lansdale? With a full 18 hours at one’s disposal, I would have thought such a thing would be impossible. Yet with Burns and Novick, the impossible becomes the possible. And by doing so, the film-makers all but erase the next major step of American involvement in Vietnam, and how Musgrave got stuck on that nighttime patrol in the jungle.

    John Foster Dulles was even more extreme than Dean Acheson. His anti-communism contained an almost religious-metaphysical amplification. But he was not just anti-communist. Like his brother Allen, he would not even tolerate neutrality, or non-alignment within the boundaries of the Cold War. (See Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, by Robert Rakove, pp. 5-8) Therefore, the aid to France in its imperial war was greatly increased once Eisenhower became president and Foster Dulles his Secretary of State. Today, it is common knowledge that by 1954, America was footing close to 80% of the cost of the war. In the last year of the war, America had supplied France with over a billion dollars in supplies and weapons. By 1953 this meant 12 shiploads per month, which had accumulated at that point to 777 armored fighting vehicles, 13,000 transport vehicles, and 253 naval vessels (See John Prados, Operation Vulture, Chapter 1 of the e book format.)

    Burns and Novick briefly discuss the 1954 battle at Dien Bien Phu, which ended the French attempt to retake their Indochina empire. Dien Bien Phu was a scheme created by General Henri Navarre to lure General Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s military commander, into the northwest corner of the country. The idea was to engage Giap in an open battle and crush his forces via artillery and aerial bombardment. That strategy backfired. And about a month into the 55-day siege, it became apparent that France had gambled and lost.

    But the Dulles brothers were not going to accept the fact that they had bet on the wrong horse. They now began to arrange one of the most frightening and outrageous episodes in the entire 30-year history of the war. It was called Operation Vulture. As John Prados, Fletcher Prouty and others have noted, this was the assemblage of a giant air armada. It was made up of over 200 planes. It consisted of fighters, bombers and three special Convairs to carry three atomic bombs to bail out the French. As Prados describes in his book Operation Vulture: America’s Dien Bien Phu, this was a Dulles brothers project, done with the knowledge and connivance of Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon had previously convinced Eisenhower to allow the French to use American support planes, which were flown by CIA pilots. And some of these planes and pilots flew into Dien Bien Phu in March of 1954. They were disguised with French insignias. (Prados, Chapter 3)

    Eisenhower would only approve Vulture under certain restrictions. Two of them were congressional consultation, and also that our main ally England would join the effort. Nixon lobbied Congress, while Foster Dulles had his ambassador to England approach foreign minister Anthony Eden for approval. Dulles then went to London himself. Eden refused to go along and (correctly) labeled the effort a lost cause. (Prados, Chapters 6 and 8)

    Nixon and Dulles did not agree. And Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Arthur Radford did not give up. They had meetings with congressional leaders like Senators Lyndon Johnson and William Knowland, and encouraged the Pentagon brass to support Vulture. (ibid, Chapter 6. Although David Halberstam, in his book The Best and the Brightest, wrote that LBJ did not support direct American intervention in 1954, Prados dug up written evidence that he actually had.)

    This lobbying effort included a speech in April of 1954, where Nixon proposed the insertion of American combat troops to save Dien Bien Phu. Which is perhaps the first public statement of that kind by a high ranking American politician. (Prados, Chapter 9) Foster Dulles made no attempt to reprimand Nixon for that statement. In fact, the two men were sharing working lunches on the attempt to save France. Foster Dulles now began to encourage Eisenhower to act unilaterally. At the same time Radford had sent a bombing specialist to fly over Dien Bien Phu to inspect the proper paths and altitudes for Vulture. (Ibid, Chapter 10)

    When Eisenhower would not act alone, Foster Dulles played his last card. He offered the French foreign minister the use of two atomic bombs to lift the siege. Georges Bidault said his reply did not require a lot of thought. He pointed out to Dulles, “If those bombs are dropped near Dien Bien Phu, our side will suffer as much as the enemy.” (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 245) What makes this so stunning is that Dulles was acting without presidential approval in making that proposal.

    In watching the opening episode of this series, which deals with the French defeat in Vietnam, I did not detect one mention of Operation Vulture.

    After pondering that historical black hole about the Dulles brothers, I began to think back to one of the opening statements made by poor Peter Coyote. He says that the Vietnam War “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings.” Decent people? Misunderstandings? Bidault certainly did not misunderstand the effect of thermonuclear war over Dien Bien Phu. And in this day and age, with all we know about them, how can anyone call the Dulles brothers “decent people”? One wonders if that common knowledge today is the reason that their names are left out of this installment.

    From the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the episode now shifts to the peace conference at Geneva, Switzerland. As everyone who has studied that conference knows, it was essentially stage-managed by the United States, with Foster Dulles as the ringmaster. Although Ho Chi Minh and Giap had soundly defeated the French, China and Russia understood that the Dulles brothers’ unending support for the French colonial cause signaled ominous warnings for the future. Namely, as Nixon had alluded to, direct American intervention. Their allies therefore encouraged Ho and Giap to take a smaller cut of the pie than they had earned. Foster Dulles and Eisenhower had two immediate goals. The first involved the immediate future of Vietnam. They wanted a partitioning of the country between north and south at the 17th parallel with a Demilitarized Zone there. At the end of a two-year period, national elections would be held and the country would be unified under independent, democratically elected national leadership. Since the Dulles brothers were lawyers, they pulled a neat legal trick over this agreement. The United States did not actually sign the agreement. But Foster Dulles had his representative read a statement saying that America would honor the agreement. (See Vietnam Documents, edited by George Katiaficas, pp. 25, 42, 78) The other aim the administration had was to set up an anti-communist alliance called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Which, of course, made the specter of American intervention more palpable.

    Within weeks of the conference, Allen Dulles had given veteran black operator Edward Lansdale the assignment of creating a country called South Vietnam—which had never existed before—and propping up a new leader there named Ngo Dinh Diem. The Agency gave Lansdale a blank check, and the ambitious and imaginative CIA officer came through in spades. Knowing Diem was a Catholic, Lansdale created one of the largest psychological operations in the history of the CIA. As Ralph McGehee described in his book Deadly Deceits, Lansdale infiltrated teams into the north to disseminate propaganda about upcoming pogroms by the Chinese Communists against the North Vietnamese, and perhaps American atomic weapons used over Hanoi. As a result, in the 300 day grace period for north-south migration, about a million people fled the north, about half of them Catholics. The CIA allowed free transportation on US Navy ships and also air flights through their proprietary Civil Air Transport. Not only did this boost Diem’s constituency, it fooled many Americans into thinking that somehow Hanoi embodied evil and Saigon—the new capitol of the new country—was a democratic oasis.

    Lansdale then helped further this illusion. He helped Diem rig a plebiscite that placed him officially in power with a mind-boggling 98% of the vote. Diem’s opponent, Bao Dai, was not allowed to campaign. And as Seth Jacobs wrote in Cold War Mandarin, in several districts, the vote tally for Diem exceeded the number of registered voters. What made this even harder to swallow was that voter turnout was nowhere near 100 percent. (Jacobs, p. 95) Lansdale had told Diem 60% would be plenty, but Diem insisted on the 98 number. (The CIA: A Forgotten History, by William Blum, p. 139) Lansdale had done all his masters wished, and more. In fact, as John Pilger noted in his book Heroes, Lansdale later complained, “I cannot truly sympathize with Americans who help promote a fascistic state and then get angry when it doesn’t act like a democracy.”

    Although you can see his photograph twice, you will not hear Lansdale’s name mentioned in Part One. And by doing that, the CIA’s role in the rigged plebiscite and the forced migration is not revealed. Why this silence over the man who, in reality, created South Vietnam and Ngo Dinh Diem? Maybe because he wasn’t one of the “decent people”?

    The effect of Lansdale’s work was to first, to stop the promised 1956 elections from making Ho Chi Minh president of a united Vietnam, and second, to spell the end of any leftover French rule in the south. With the plebiscite, Bao Dai was now gone. In fact, Diem formally banned him from visiting the country. After all this skullduggery and treachery, Foster Dulles would make the following astonishing statement: “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” In the judgment of history, could any statement have been more wrong?

    In May of 1956, Washington further violated the Geneva Agreements by sending in 350 military advisors. (ibid, Blum p. 139.) Burns and Novick try to place this violation on President Kennedy. But JFK just sent in more military advisors, they were not the first. And as far as violating the Geneva Accords, the Dulles brothers had broken that agreement to pieces already. But the importation of advisors was made necessary since the vote for Diem was so ersatz. He had no real broad-based constituency.

    Since Diem could not command the allegiance of the people, the resistance against him began in the countryside. To counteract this rebellion, the CIA created a training program for Saigon security forces at Michigan State University. It was these trainees who manned Diem’s brother Nhu’s police force. A law was passed in 1957 that every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the government and carry a proper ID. Anyone without a card was considered a part of the National Liberation Front, the political arm of Ho Chi Minh’s sympathizers in the south. The military arm would be called the Viet Cong. Thus, using Lansdale’s ingenuity and the CIA’s money, the Dulles brothers created a “fascistic” police state which ended up imprisoning, torturing and executing tens of thousands of people.

    But as Lansdale said, who can get angry when a fascistic state doesn’t act like a democracy?

    These are the “decent men” that Burns and Novick could not bring themselves to mention.

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

  • Jim DiEugenio at the VMI Seminar

    Jim DiEugenio at the VMI Seminar

    Alan Dale:

    He’s one of the most knowledgeable and tenacious researchers and writers on the political assassinations of the 1960s. He’s the author of 1992’s Destiny Betrayed, which details the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison’s, investigation in the trial of Clay Shaw, which was greatly expanded for a revised edition issued in 2012. Also, Reclaiming Parkland, published in 2013, but reissued and expanded in 2016. He’s also the co-author and editor of The Assassinations: Probe magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X. He co-edited the acclaimed Probe Magazine from 1993 until 2000, and was a guest commentator on the anniversary issue of the film JFK, re-released by Warner Brothers in 2013. His website, kennedysandking.com, is one of the best and most reliable online resources for students and scholars of American political assassinations of the 60s. Please welcome Jim DiEugenio.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    First of all, I’d like to thank Lee Shepherd for doing this. These things are never easy to put together. And I’d like to be gracious about sharing the program with two great guys like Bill Davy and John Newman, who I’ve both known for about 25 years. I’ve worked with them for about that long also, and their books, in my opinion, would rank in any top 15 listing of the best of the JFK Library. Considering there’s 1,000 books in that library, that’s saying something.

    I want to introduce what I’m going to talk about tonight by stating that my last book, Reclaiming Parkland, largely about the state of the evidence, as it was in 2013 in the JFK case, is what we call in the trade, something called a micro-study. As one reviewer said, it was really a kind of an updating of Sylvia Meagher’s classic book, Accessories After the Fact, which I thought was a very kind complement indeed.

    After publishing that book, I came to the conclusion, after months on end of study of all the detailed evidence, like the bullet shells, CE399, the medical evidence, etc., that there really was no case against Oswald today, that Oswald was not the victim of a miscarriage of justice. The simple problem was that there was no justice at all. You had a rogue prosecution, led by the FBI, and the Warren Commission acted essentially as a kangaroo court. But once that evidence presented was minutely examined, the case against Oswald simply did not exist. They were allowed to get away with this because, of course, Oswald had no legal defense and there were no legal restrictions to protect his rights. After going through all this, I have no problem today saying that, to say Oswald was guilty is the legal and moral equivalent of being a Holocaust denier.

    So after I disposed of that, I began to concentrate more on why was Kennedy assassinated. And I began to look more and more at Kennedy’s foreign policy. And the more I looked, the more I began to search outside of the JFK Library of books, simply because if you stay aligned with that particular lexicon, you’re probably going get like 90% Cuba/Vietnam, as if this was all Kennedy did for three years. And I found out that really was not the case, not by a long shot.

    And I also discovered something else. As much as I liked Jim Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable—and I would recommend that book to anybody who hasn’t read it—I disagree with the sales slogan that was used to sell the book. This was something like “A Cold Warrior Turns”, meaning that after 1962 and the missile crisis, that JFK stopped being a cold warrior and tried to work with Khrushchev and Castro for detente.

    The way I looked at this, and the discoveries I was making, is that Kennedy’s foreign policy was pretty much set once he entered the White House. There’s three key events that we have to question in order to understand who Kennedy was, once he entered the White House. These are number 1) Why did Kennedy not send in the Navy to bail out the Bay of Pigs invasion? That would’ve been easy enough. Arleigh Burke, the admiral, was there trying to get him to do that the first night of the invasion.

    2.) Why, in the fall of 1961, did Kennedy not send combat troops into South Vietnam? And, by the way, I have to say, in reading Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster, which is a biography of McGeorge Bundy, that culminating debate in November of 1961 was preceded by eight previous requests for JFK to send troops into Vietnam. So this is nine times in that one year that Kennedy was determined to turn down sending the military into Vietnam.

    And the third question is: Why did Kennedy not bomb the missile silos during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? Again, almost everybody in the room was asking him to take some kind of military action. And by the end of the 13 days, even McNamara, who had proposed the blockade in the first place, was leaning in that direction. But Kennedy didn’t do it. He stuck with his back channel between RFK and the Russian ambassador in Washington.

    So my question is, all these books mention them, but nobody tries to explain why he did not do those things. And if Kennedy was really a Cold Warrior, he would have done all three of those things, or at least two out of the three. For instance, we know that LBJ wanted to send troops into Vietnam in 1961. In fact, we have him on tape in 1964, telling McNamara how frustrated he was, watching McNamara and Kennedy arrange this withdrawal plan. We know that Nixon would have sent in the Navy at the Bay of Pigs, because that’s what he told Kennedy to do. When Kennedy called him, either the second or third night of the crisis, he asked him “What should I do?” Nixon said “declare a beachhead and send in the Navy”, but he didn’t do that. He was willing to accept defeat in April of 1961, at the Bay of Pigs, and he was willing to withdraw, leading to an inevitable defeat, in Vietnam. So the question is: Why?

    And so, I began to study this phenomenon and I began to consult books outside the Kennedy assassination lexicon and I discovered that the key to understanding this is a man who’s name was in no book up until Jim Douglass’ book. His name’s not mentioned anywhere that I could find, and his name is Edmund Gullion. Gullion worked in the State Department when Kennedy was a congressman and that’s when they first met. Kennedy needed some advice on a speech, so he went over to the State Department and Gullion gave him a consultation. In 1951, Gullion, because he spoke fluent French, had been transferred to South Vietnam.

    In that same year, Kennedy was preparing to run against Henry Cabot Lodge for the senatorial seat from his home state of Massachusetts. So he flies into Saigon, because he wants to become more well versed in foreign policy, which is what senators spent a lot of their time on. He decides to ditch the French emissaries that had been sent to meet him at the airport, and he starts knocking on doors of people who have good reputations in the media, there were a couple back then, and in the State Department. One of the guys he meets with is Edmund Gullion.

    So they have dinner at a roof top restaurant in Saigon, and Kennedy asks him flat out: We’re allied with the French in this thing, we’re actually bankrolling this effort, are the French going to win? Gullion says something like: There is no way in Hades that France is going win this war. Kennedy, of course, asks him: Well, how come? And he says: It’s rather simple. Ho Chi Minh has fired up the general population, to a point that you’ve got tens of thousands of these young Viet Minh who’d rather die than go back under the yoke of colonialism. France will never win a long, drawn out, prolonged, bloody war of attrition, because the home front simply will not accept it. And that’s how it’s going to end.

    To say that conversation had a rather deep impact on JFK is a large understatement. When he got back to Massachusetts, he began writing letters, making speeches and doing radio addresses; criticizing both the Republican foreign policy establishment and the Democratic foreign policy establishment and, most of all, the State Department for not understanding the real plight of colonized people in the Third World. In his new way of thinking, this was not a battle between Communism and Capitalism, but it was one between independence and colonialism. And colonialism, according to Kennedy, was going to lose.

    Allen & John Foster Dulles

    This manifests itself, on a national level, in 1954 during Operation Vulture. Vulture was John Foster Dulles—the Secretary of State at that time—it was his plan to bail out the doomed French effort in Vietnam. This was a huge air armada of about 210 planes, 3 of them were carrying atomic bombs, and this was going to bail out the French effort at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Well, Nixon, who is the Vice President at that time, is the liaison between Congress and the White House on this whole issue. Kennedy gets wind of this, of what’s going to happen, and he begins to rail against Dulles and Eisenhower. He wants them to come down here and explain to us how nuclear weapons are going win a guerrilla war. And he then added, no amount of weaponry could defeat an enemy which was everywhere and nowhere, and had the support of the people.

    And by the way, that’s a very important passage there, because one of the things historians are supposed to do is to find origins and patterns in a man’s foreign policy. And that phrase that he said, about being everywhere and nowhere and having the people’s support, that’s the argument he’s going to use in 1961; when everybody wanted to commit troops to Vietnam. Nobody had an answer to it then. I call that Kennedy’s first defining moment; his first face off against the Dulles brothers, Nixon and Eisenhower.

    Three years later, there’s another one, except it’s much more public. The second one is in 1957, when Kennedy takes the floor of the Senate and he begins to attack, very specifically, Dulles, Nixon and Eisenhower again. This time it’s over their continued alliance with French colonialism, except this time it’s off the north coast of Africa, in Algeria, where France is now involved in another civil war to maintain the French colony of Algeria. Five hundred thousand troops devolved into a war of horrible atrocities. Kennedy attacked the White House again for allying itself with the hopeless struggle of a European country to maintain an overseas empire in the Third World. And he predicted that this would turn out just like what happened three years previous in Vietnam, with another French defeat. What we needed to do, he said, was to convince Paris to negotiate, in order not to destroy the country of France in a futile war against brother and sister over this horrible dispute in Algeria. But, as important, if not more important, we had to begin to free the colonized nations of Africa.

    That was his second defining moment. And what was surprising about this speech, and by the way, I would say that speech is very much worth reading, even today. It’s an incredible speech for a young man to be making on the floor of the Senate, considering the makeup of the Senate and the White House at that time.

    This time, Kennedy was attacked, not just by Nixon and John Foster Dulles. But by people in his own party, like Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson. It was a very controversial speech. It made headlines in a lot of newspapers. There were 163 editorial comments. Over two thirds of them were negative. Kennedy really thought that he made a mistake and he called up his father and asked him what he thought. His father said he hadn’t made a mistake: You watch what’s going to happen. This situation in Algeria is going to get even worse. In two years, everybody will realize that you were right. And by the way, that’s exactly what happened. Eric Sevareid made an editorial comment on CBS TV in 1959, saying: Well, John Kennedy looks like a prophet these days, doesn’t he?

    Dag Hammarskjöld

    But that Algeria speech actually did something else. It made him a hero to the colonized people of Africa. He now became a kind of unofficial ambassador to visiting African dignitaries. And that appeal began to spread to other Third World areas. So Kennedy now became a great admirer of the Chairman of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, who wanted the United Nations to be a kind of international forum that would give voice to the powerless nations coming out of colonialism and provide a lectern to express themselves. They began to make a secret alliance over the areas of Indonesia and Africa.

    By 1960, Kennedy is very conscious that he’s on the edge with his foreign policy. So, on the eve of the 1960 convention, he told one of his advisors, Harris Wofford: We have to win this thing. Because if Johnson wins or Symington wins, its just going to be more of John Foster Dulles all over again. And, by the way, I have to say that, with what LBJ did once Kennedy took over, from ’64 to ’68, I think Kennedy was actually right about that.

    Kennedy addresses
    the U.N. General Assembly

    Once Kennedy is in office, he immediately begins to alter the Dulles brothers’ policies. For example, in the Congo, where he supported Hammarskjöld’s policy to stop the country from being partitioned or recolonized by Belgium. And he began to work with Hammarskjöld, reversing American policy in Indonesia. The Dulles brothers had tried to overthrow Sukarno the Nationalist leader of Indonesia in 1958 and 59. Kennedy decided that that was going to be reversed. That he was going to support Sukarno, both politically and economically.

    Kennedy & Sukarno

    Now what’s really remarkable about just those two instances, those alterations of the Dulles brothers’ foreign policy is this: That Kennedy continued those two policies after Hammarskjöld was murdered in the fall of 1961. And, by the way, I have no problem using the word “murdered”. Because all you have to do is read Susan Williams’ book, “Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld?” You will see that that was not an accident, that airplane crash was not an accident. In other words, with Hammarskjöld dead, Kennedy was carrying this burden by himself. And, in fact, he had to go to New York to convince the United Nations, after Hammarskjöld’s death, not to give up their mission in Congo. He actually did that twice. And then he planned a State visit to Indonesia in the summer of 1964, which Sukarno was very much looking forward to.

    Now I can mention other places where this occurs, that is when Kennedy comes in, he reverses the Dulles/Eisenhower foreign policy. For example, he wanted a negotiated settlement in Laos. Very important and, again, very overlooked, is that in the Middle East, the Dulles brothers had isolated Nasser and were beginning to favor Saudi Arabia.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Nasser, the head of Egypt.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Gamal Abdel Nasser

    Yes, Nasser was the president of Egypt. And Kennedy reversed that, also. He began to favor Nasser and isolating Saudi Arabia. Now the reason he did that was because he thought, because Nasser was a Socialist and a secularist, that he could begin to mold the foreign policy in the Middle East away from the fundamentalism and the monarchy of places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

    And, by the way, he even mentioned that issue in 1957. Because there was a big Moslem population in Algeria. He refused to meet with David Rockefeller because he did not want to initiate a coup in Brazil, which is what Rockefeller wanted to meet him about, and he moved to isolate the military regime that had deposed the Dominican Republic’s President Juan Bosch.

    Now every one of those policies, without exception, began to change at a slow rate and then at a rapid rate, under the pressure of Johnson and the CIA, in a period of about 18 months after Kennedy is assassinated. In each case, the end result was a calamity for the people living in those areas. A very good example being the CIA sponsored coup in Indonesia that took place in 1965 and which killed well over 500,000 citizens; and led to the looting of the nation by Suharto and his corporate cronies. What Kennedy wanted to do there, he was actually arranging deals for Sukarno to nationalize the industries on a very good split, the majority of the profits going to Indonesia. And Sukarno was going to use that money to start doing things like building hospitals and an infrastructure and schools, etc. He wanted those benefits of those natural resources to go to the people.

    Now let me conclude with, what I think, is a very important aspect of this whole Dulles vs. Kennedy foreign policy dispute. As most people understand today, Kennedy was never going to commit the military into Vietnam. In fact, he was withdrawing the advisory force from that area at the time of his assassination. The Assassinations Records Review Board released some really important documents on this in 1997 and that, in addition to several books, including John’s book, JFK and Vietnam, for me sealed the deal on that issue.

    Truman reacts to the assassination

    Within a month of Kennedy’s assassination, I think on December 20th, 1963, former president Harry Truman published a column in the Washington Post, in which he assailed how the CIA had strayed so far from the mission he had envisioned for them when he was putting that agency together. To the point where he really kind of didn’t recognize what it had become. From his notes, it’s clear that Truman began writing that column eight days after Kennedy’s death.

    “Harry Truman Writes”

    In the spring of 1964, while he was sitting on the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles visited Truman at his home in Missouri. This was not a social visit. He was there for one reason. He wanted Truman to retract the column. That attempt by Dulles failed. Truman never did retract what he wrote and, in fact, about a year later, in Look magazine, he repeated those same thoughts.

    But a very curious exchange occurred as Dulles was leaving. As he got to the door to join his waiting escorts, he turned to Truman and said words to the effect: You know, Kennedy denied those stories about how the CIA was clashing with him in Vietnam. Which is a really startling thing to say. Because Dulles’ visit was supposed to be about Truman’s article. And Truman never mentioned Kennedy or Vietnam in the article.

    Further, the two newspaper pieces Dulles referred to are likely one by Arthur Krock and one by Richard Starnes, both published in October of 1963. They both discussed the CIA’s growing influence over foreign policy and they both conclude that, if there was ever an overthrow of the US government, unlike Seven Days in May, the novel that had been made into a film around that time, it would be sponsored by the Agency and not the Pentagon. Again, Truman never went that far in his article. This whole angle was imputed to him and initiated by Allen Dulles. I think it’s pretty clear, from that conversation, that Dulles made the visit because he thought Truman wrote the column because the former president believed the CIA had a role in killing Kennedy over the Vietnam issue.

    What makes this even more remarkable are these two aspects. Number one, at that time, in the spring of 1964, nobody had connected those dots: That is, the CIA, Kennedy, Vietnam and Kennedy’s assassination. No one. The first time it’s going be done is four years later by Jim Garrison.

    Number two, Truman had already said to the press in 1961 that Hammarskjöld had been murdered over his Congo policy. And Dulles was aware of that. In my opinion, he saw what had happened with Hammarskjöld, and he did not want Truman to get more explicit in the Kennedy case. So in the language of prosecutors, specifically the late Vincent Bugliosi, he would have said something like this—if he had been on our side: What Dulles was doing here was showing something called consciousness of guilt, while he was sitting on the Warren Commission. Which is one more reason that the commission is really a joke.

    After four years of study, 2013 to 2017, I’ve concluded that the cover up about Kennedy’s foreign policy, and how reformist it was, has been more deliberate, more strenuous, more systematic, than the cover up about the circumstances of his death. The reason being that it gives a clear and understandable motive for the Power Elite to hatch a plot against him. There were literally tens of billions of dollars on the table in the Third World, especially Indonesia. And that’s the kind of money that these people commit very serious crimes about.

    This is why, at the time of his death, people like Nasser in Egypt fell into a month long depression. And he ordered Kennedy’s funeral to be shown four times on national television. It’s why Sukarno openly wept and asked “Why did they kill Kennedy?” It’s why Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, when the American Ambassador gave him a copy of the Warren report, he returned it to him. He pointed out the name of Allen Dulles on the title page and said one word: “Whitewash.” The people about to be victimized understood what had happened. Because of our lousy media in the United States, it’s taken the American public quite a bit longer to understand.

    Okay, thank you, I’ll conclude with that.

    Lee Shepherd:

    James, can I ask you one question.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Sure.

    Lee Shepherd:

    You’re mentioning Dulles quite a bit.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Right.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Who do you think is behind this whole thing?

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Well, I gave David Talbot’s book a very good review: The Devil’s Chessboard. And I think he makes a pretty good case, that Dulles, if I had to categorize it, I think Dulles was the outside guy and I think James Angleton was the inside guy.

    Lee Shepherd:

    So the assignment was given to Angleton?

    Jim DiEugenio:

    I think Angleton was the inside guy.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Okay.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    He was the guy working in the, what we would call, the infrastructure. And I think Dulles was the outside guy, arranging it with the people he knew had to back him.

    Lee Shepherd:

    But Dulles was fired.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Dulles was what?

    Lee Shepherd:

    Dulles was fired by that stage, by John Kennedy.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Yeah, he was fired. But if you read Talbot’s book, he was only fired symbolically. Because he kept on having meetings over at his townhouse in Georgetown. And he actually wrote about those meetings in his diary and anybody could read who he was meeting with, people like Angleton, people like Des FitzGerald, etc. And then on the day of the assassination, he ends up at the Farm,—

    Lee Shepherd:

    Yes.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    —which is the CIA headquarters.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Is that Camp Parry? Camp Parry, Virginia?

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Yes.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Secondary command post of the CIA?

    Jim DiEugenio:

    Right.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Okay, good, thank you.

    Jim DiEugenio:

    So he was figuratively separated from the CIA. But as Talbot says in his book, he was really more like leading a kind of like in-country junta against Kennedy.

    Lee Shepherd:

    Okay, James. Thank you so much.

    This transcript was edited for grammar and flow.

  • How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire

    How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire

    atlanticAs this web site has explained at length, the MSM has been completely unable to deal with the assassination of President Kennedy in any kind of rational or evidentiary manner. Since the recent presidential election touched upon the JFK case, we posted two columns dealing with it. (Click here for one published during the election and here for one dealing with the aftermath) From those two articles the reader will understand the historical factors that allowed Donald Trump to claim his victory much more clearly than the long story on the current cover of the Atlantic Monthly.

    That article was written by author and radio personality Kurt Andersen. Andersen is the current host of Studio 360, a radio program carried by WNYC in New York City. I have never listened to the show, and after reading this article, I never will. It is a weekly journal devoted to arts and culture. And that is the approach Andersen took in this essay. His rather ambitious aim is to try to explain how the last fifty odd years of American history gave us Donald Trump.

    The problem is that Andersen is not a historian. In any sense of that word. And his essay does not really deal with the political or economic history of that time period. Like the program he hosts, his essay (actually an excerpt from an upcoming book) is really a cultural history. It dates, of course, from the Sixties. And on the first page, Andersen makes it clear where he is coming from and how rigged his work will be. He says that America experienced the equivalent of a national nervous breakdown in the Sixties, and in his view, we are not cured yet.

    Our intrepid chronicler now gears down into what one of his main themes will be: the danger of widespread belief in conspiracy theories. After concluding that too many people do believe in conspiracy theories, he then says that this has allowed America to mutate into a Fantasyland where the public does not know what to think or believe.

    Why does Andersen use the Sixties as the point of demarcation for his Fantasyland mutation? A few pages later the motive becomes clear. According to our guide, the Left began believing in these constructs because of the JFK assassination. He traces this back to Thomas Buchanan’s book, Who Killed Kennedy? published in 1964. He leaves out the facts that 1.) Buchanan’s book was originally published in France, which is where he was living at the time, and 2.) that other writers had addressed problems with the official story prior to Buchanan’s book being published in America. This allows Andersen to avoid the fact that it was not just Americans who had doubts about the JFK case—the rest of the world did also. And secondly, that respectable journals like The New Republic and The Nation had also voiced doubts about the JFK case before the publication of Buchanan’s book. And that, in 1966, Life Magazine actually devoted a cover story to the problems with the Warren Commission, entitled A Matter of Reasonable Doubt. Or that, in 1967, the Saturday Evening Post featured a cover story based on Josiah Thompson’s harsh critique of the Warren Commission, Six Seconds in Dallas. It was not just Buchanan and Mark Lane.

    Let us now turn to a piece of absolutely essential cultural history—which Andersen also leaves out. The late Roger Feinman showed, with CBS internal documents, that in 1967, several reporters and mangers at CBS News wished to explore the problems with the Warren Commission’s evidence. This attempt was crushed at the executive level, most notably by CBS President Dick Salant. (see Why CBS Covered Up The JFK Assassination) That counter to a genuine journalistic effort was largely motivated by the fact that Salant’s administrative assistant was Ellen McCloy, Warren Commissioner John McCloy’s daughter. By the use of both carrots and sticks, the entire trajectory of the subsequent four-night CBS special was completely reversed by this upper level decision. Feinman demonstrates step by step how this proceeded with CBS’s own documents. Somehow, Andersen did not think that was an important piece of cultural history, even though it informs us about cultural gate-keeping.

    What does Andersen think is important? Walter Sheridan’s 1967 NBC hatchet-job on Jim Garrison. No kidding. Andersen says that this infamous special, in which producer Walter Sheridan used bribes and threats to coerce witnesses, discredited Garrison’s ideas. (For an exposé of Sheridan’s reprehensible tactics, see Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 235-258) Andersen ignores the fact that the program was so one-sided, so much a broadcast disgrace, that the FCC allowed Garrison to respond under the provisions of the Fairness Doctrine. Andersen also ridicules the idea that the owners of NBC, the Sarnoff family, sanctioned the program, when such has been proven to be the case. (ibid, p. 239)

    But actually, Andersen’s argument is even worse than that. It’s not enough for him to ignore what was really happening in media boardrooms, or in New Orleans. He now says that all this doubt about JFK’s death was really caused by the Jungian psychic need to reject the idea that President Kennedy could have been killed by “just one nutty loser with a mail-order rifle.” He then throws in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Which shows how far down he is scraping. That essay has virtually nothing to do with the JFK case. Hofstadter focuses there on the movement that brought Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964. Hofstadter tried to dismiss it as odd, eccentric rightwing solipsism. Oh, how wrong he was! For that movement would revive itself 16 years later to elect that B movie actor Ronald Reagan. Like others, Andersen just wanted to use the title as another smear device.

    On page 84, Andersen briefly halts his cascade of smears and mischaracterizations and comes up for air. After describing some American films of the seventies, e.g., Chinatown, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, he allows himself this thought: “Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break in and its cover up were an actual criminal conspiracy.”

    Perhaps nothing shows just how much Andersen has stacked the deck than those two sentences. First of all, he carefully does not describe the expanse of the Watergate plot. When it was over, 69 people were indicted, 48 were convicted, and Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the face of certain impeachment. Later, Alexander Haig arranged a deal with former Warren Commissioner and new president Jerry Ford. Nixon would be spared a trial with a pardon. Which, according to most polls, helped sink Ford’s short-lived presidency.

    Second of all, Andersen fails to reveal how the press found out about “the infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups”. Probably because he does not want to print the two words: “Church Committee”. If he did so, he would open up a Pandora’s Box that would largely burst the Fantasyland fairy-tale he is spinning. The Church Committee did much more than expose the infiltration of left-wing groups. It exposed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, like Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Further, members of that committee—i.e., Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker—wrote a report that showed how the FBI and CIA had misinformed and misled the Warren Commission.

    But there is even more to this story that Andersen fails to tell. The Church Committee sprang to life because its predecessor, the Rockefeller Commission, was largely seen as ineffective. In the wake of Watergate, many in Washington—like Senator Howard Baker, and future Senator Fred Thompson—thought that the official inquiry had not fully explored the role of the CIA in that crime. Therefore the Rockefeller Commission, led by Ford’s Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, arose. But this body was perceived by many, even the New York Times, as being a set-up. After all, Warren Commission lawyer David Belin was the chief counsel, and people like Ronald Reagan were on the Commission. Therefore, at a closed press briefing, Ford was asked why he had arranged things as he did. He replied that there were certain things that had to be concealed from the public. When asked what he meant by that, Ford blurted out, “Like assassinations.” (See James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 194) Ford is very likely talking about the JFK case since, at around this same time, he revealed to French Premier Giscard d’Estaing that, while on the Warren Commission, he had determined that some kind of organization had killed Kennedy, but he could not determine which one.

    But that is not all that Andersen leaves out about the discoveries of the Church Committee. Consider the following:

    1. He does not mention the attempts by the FBI to drive Martin Luther King to suicide.
    2. He does not mention the campaign by the FBI to exterminate the Black Panthers.   (For a summary of this, see Government by Gunplay, edited by Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian)
    3. He does not mention the explorations by both the Church and Pike committees concerning CIA control of the media. This was later summarized and expanded upon by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone’s, “The CIA and the Media”. (Click here for that article)

    Actually, Andersen loads the dice even more. How can anyone write an essay about the 50-year decline of America’s belief in its media or institutions without mentioning the Vietnam War? Well, Andersen can. What is his longest mention of that incredibly divisive issue which essentially ripped America apart for the better part of a decade? He talks about Norman Mailer’s 1967 book, Armies of the Night, where student protesters attempted to levitate/purify the evils inside the Pentagon. Forget about 250,000 wounded Americans, and 58,000 killed, or over 4 million total dead as a result of a war that should never have been fought.   Andersen says a few pages of Mailer’s book is what we should remember about that terrible epic tragedy, during which the American public was being lied to endlessly on almost a daily basis.

    By painting such a foreshortened picture, Andersen can leave out the ten years of nightly TV broadcasts, daily newspaper headlines, and weekly magazine cover-stories which pummeled the public with words and images about the Vietnam War, Watergate and the exposes of the Church and Pike Committees. It was not the American people who suffered a nervous breakdown from frivolities like the UFO phenomenon. It was the acts of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, plus the exposure of abuses by the FBI and the CIA, that shocked the country and drove down the public’s belief in government. (See the chart in The Assassinations, p. 634) And that was a natural reaction to that continuous montage of horror stories. None of this was part of a fantasy. It was all too real.

    What Andersen does not understand, but Michael Parenti does understand, is this: Reality can be Radical. Those ten years exposed a huge systemic failure. And the media was a part of it. One only has to recall how difficult it was to get the true story about the My Lai Massacre exposed. And how the Pentagon and Richard Nixon then did all they could to pardon the killers. But further, as Nick Turse demonstrates in his book Kill Anything that Moves, there were many other atrocities that the military purposefully covered up. For as Colonel Robert Heinl wrote in a famous article in Armed Forces Journal, the American army collapsed in Vietnam by 1969. (Click here) Yet Nixon kept the war going for four more years and actually expanded it into Laos and Cambodia. That is history that Andersen, again, ignores.

    Did things get better after that? Well, there was the Iranian hostage crisis; the American backing of radical Moslems—which included Osama Bin Laden—to fight the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; Reagan’s interventions in Central America and the El Mozote Massacre (where more people died than at My Lai) and which was also covered up; the Iran Contra scandal; the heists of the 2000 and 2004 elections, which allowed the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy disaster to befall this country since Vietnam. Again, somehow none of this is important to cultural historian Andersen. Maybe the author ignores it since none of it deals with the paranormal, it’s all real. But with his loaded dice, the former counts more than the latter.

    Which brings us to the payoff of the article. That includes three themes: Fake News, the rise of the Internet, and the victory of Donald Trump. I think Andersen wants us to believe that somehow the first two resulted in the last. But as anyone who watched that election closely knows, such was not the case. The whole Fake News phenomenon arose after the election. And it’s a much more complex phenomenon than Andersen portrays it to be. As he does with many issues, Robert Parry had done the best reporting on this flashpoint. (See here for an example)

    The use of the Internet probably did help Trump’s campaign, but not in the way that Andersen thinks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, used a little-known company called Cambridge Analytica to micro-analyze social media data and target trends and tendencies with voters. (Click here for a good article on this) Using this data he was able to detect weaknesses in Hillary Clinton’s and the Democratic Party’s supposed fortress: the Northeast Rust Belt. In an interview Bannon did the day after the election, he said Trump’s strategy was twofold: 1.) They had to hold the south, that is, North Carolina and Florida, and 2.) They had to win some states in the Rust Belt. This is why Trump visited Michigan almost twice as many times as Clinton, and why he honed his message as one of economic nationalism—rounding up illegal immigrants, building a wall, tariffs on Chinese imports—this countered Clinton’s failed use of identity politics, e.g., Alicia Machado.

    Bannon realized that Clinton could not effectively counter that Electoral College strategy. The reason being that her husband’s record on fair trade was pretty much indefensible. As many have commented, Bill Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway ran a very astute and pointed campaign. The Clinton campaign had much more money, many more workers, and much more favorable media. And they still lost. The problem was not just campaign tactics. Hillary Clinton simply could not fire up her own base the way that Bernie Sanders could have. Which is another factor that Andersen leaves out. Sanders outflanked the Democratic establishment almost as effectively as Trump did the GOP. Did he do that with Fake News? Or an alternative reality dealing with UFO’s and the levitation of the Pentagon? Further, according to a pre-election poll, Sanders would have beaten Trump fairly soundly. Which renders Andersen’s silly article even sillier.

    But what happened afterwards also renders the article silly. Trump’s ratings have cratered since he was elected. Is that also due to Fake News? No. It’s because America has realized that Bannon’s campaign was really a sales pitch. Which Trump, a real estate salesman, managed to deliver perfectly. Trump and the Republican Party really have no solutions to the complex issues that have assaulted this country: like the gutting of the Middle Class. Past his campaign slogans and themes, Trump simply has no vision for America. Except to make the health care problem even worse and cut more taxes for the wealthy. The real mystery about Trump is how he changed paths so radically from 2000 until today. If one recalls, when he was pondering a presidential run for the Reform Party ticket, he was much more moderate in his policies, more like a Democrat. No reporter ever tried to explain this paradox.

    Of course, Andersen mentions the Trump/Roger Stone accusations of Ted Cruz’s dad allegedly being in a photo with Oswald in New Orleans. Yet Trump endorsed the Warren Commission verdict of Oswald being the lone assassin. And it was people in the JFK community, like David Josephs, who showed that Trump was wrong about that identification.

    Yes, there is a crisis of confidence in this country. And yes, it has gotten worse over time. And, as mentioned above, for very good reasons. And as Larry Sabato showed in the polling for his book The Kennedy Half Century, and as Kevin Phillips showed in his volume, Arrogant Capitol, it began with the issuance of the Warren Report. Most people today think that the Warren Report was wrong, and something went awry with the country after the Kennedy assassination. And they are right (e.g., Vietnam).

    Andersen’s ridiculous essay is a pile of smoke and mirrors designed to distract from that fact.

  • The Larry and Phil Show

    The Larry and Phil Show

    As most of us know, the National Archives began a premature release of JFK assassination documents on July 25th. The legal target date had previously been late October. For whatever reason, NARA decided to begin early. As I noted in my Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis, the first week was marked by many problems. Most of which, in my opinion, could have been avoided.

    Anyone familiar with the JFK case understands that these documents are the leftover residue from the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Formed to declassify all the records in the JFK case, that citizens’ panel ceased operations in 1998. But they specified that, by law, certain documents could be exempted from their declassification efforts. They also stated, however, that 2017 would be the termination date for those documents.

    There were many valuable documents that the ARRB declassified, dealing both with the Kennedy presidency, and Kennedy’s assassination. Concerning the former, the ARRB declassified the records of the SecDef conference of May 1963, which cinched the case that President Kennedy had assigned Robert McNamara to implement his withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 366) Concerning the latter, the ARRB declassified the Lopez Report, which raises the most profound questions about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico seven weeks before the assassination. Chief Counsel of the ARRB, Jeremy Gunn, conducted a long inquiry into the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination. The highlight of this was the testimony of official photographer John Stringer. Under oath, Stringer told Gunn that he did not take the photos of Kennedy’s brain at NARA. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 164)

    Unfortunately for the public, there was little fanfare attended to both the process and the discoveries of the ARRB. There were some sporadic stories, for instance, about the Vietnam withdrawal plans and Operation Northwoods, but generally speaking, the MSM did not explain the task of the ARRB, nor did it inform the public about the gold in the treasure trove of documents—over two million pages—that finally saw the light of day after over 30 years of secrecy.

    Last week’s early batch of releases also featured some bracing documents. For instance, there was a document revealing the CIA status of Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell. Another one showed that, by the seventies, Collins Radio was quite close to the CIA. Collins Radio relates to the assassination through both George DeMohrenschildt and Carl Mather. And this is only from a first glance through several thousands of pages of newly declassified documents.

    Which brings us to the Larry and Phil Show. I refer here to the commentary on this NARA release by authors Larry Sabato and Phil Shenon. These two men penned two largely irrelevant books at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination: respectively, The Kennedy Half Century, and A Cruel and Shocking Act, told us very little that was new about either the Kennedy presidency or the facts of his assassination. (For a review of the former, click here, for a review of the latter, click here) What is exceptional about that fact is this: Both men wrote their books over a decade past the closing down of the ARRB. Yet one would be hard pressed to show how those millions of documents, or Gunn’s extensive medical inquiry, figured into those two books, both of which, unsurprisingly, came to the conclusion that none of the documents mattered. Neither did Jeremy Gunn’s inquiry. The Warren Commission was right all along. Lee Oswald killed JFK; the Magic Bullet lived.

    Nevertheless, that conclusion did not jibe with the information dispersed by the ARRB. To cite one example, the new files proved that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had lied about key witnesses identifying the Magic Bullet as the projectile recovered from Parkland Hospital (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 90).  Even though, as Jeremy Gunn’s inquiry proved, the autopsy doctors 1.) could not find a pathway through Kennedy’s back to exit the Magic Bullet through the neck, and 2.) could not connect their malleable probes inserted through the body at a downward trajectory, which is necessary to make the Single Bullet Theory possible. In fact, James Jenkins, an autopsy assistant, later said it simply was not possible to pass the probe through the front wound. (ibid., pp. 140-41)

    In spite of the above, the underlying Sabato-Shenon message was this: The ARRB did not matter. Sixty thousand documents did not matter. Two million pages did not matter. If you mostly bypass it all, yeah, they don’t. Censorship makes almost anything work.

    Well, Larry and Phil are at it again. On July 25th, the day of the early release of the JFK documents, the two authors published a joint editorial in the Washington Post. In that article they stated that only President Trump could stop any of the still classified JFK documents from being released in full. Which meant that an agency, like the FBI, would have to appeal to the president to halt declassification of a document, or a set of documents. Trump’s option would be either to sustain or deny the request. They urged Trump not to sustain any such request. But the plea was couched in some peculiar padding. For instance, Larry and Phil say that Oswald’s journey to Mexico City was not fully explored by the Warren Commission. It would be more proper to state that it really was not explored at all by the Commission, as the ARRB-declassified David Slawson/William Coleman report reveals. When one compares that 36-page document with the 300-page Lopez Report, one sees just how empty the Warren Commission version of Mexico City was.

    In the last three paragraphs, the authors reveal their real point. They actually write that “21st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas …” What on earth can they be speaking of? Can they really be referring to the work of Lucian and Michael Haag, which was part of the media circus for the fiftieth anniversary on PBS? Can Larry and Phil not be aware that Gary Aguilar and Cyril Wecht completely eviscerated the work of those two men in a forensic journal—to the point that neither one will appear in public to debate Aguilar, even though he has offered to pay their plane fare and hotel accommodations? (Click here to read all 31 pages of this demolition) If not to this program, then I have no idea what they are referring to, since as stated above, the work of the ARRB has spelled finis to the Magic Bullet.

    But if one combines that with the closing, one gets an idea of what their agenda really is. And it’s not pretty. At the end, in urging Trump to declassify it all, they write that if he does, he will “show that the government no longer has anything to hide.” If one combines their enigmatic “21st century forensic science” with this last plea, then one gets the drift: Let it all loose, since Oswald did it anyway.

    That agenda was confirmed in Politico on August 3, 2017. Both men wrote an article one week after the initial release of documents. Here they correct a faux pas they made the week before. There, they implied that the first release was of only 441 documents. Here, they correct that by saying it was 441 documents that had been withheld in full, and 3,369 other documents that had been partly redacted. And the grand total would have been well over ten thousand pages of material. In other words, it is a formidable pile of records which no one could have possibly read before they wrote this story. If it was published on August 3rd, it was likely started at least two days in advance. But further, the article does not mention any of the numerous problems with the release that many researchers, including this author, have previously noted: the fact that many of the documents are illegible, some are still being withheld in full, some still have redactions in place, etc. It is very odd that if one really was interested in what these documents contained, one would not note any of these problems. But they did not.

    Yet, in spite of all of that, they can write that none of the documents “released last week undermines the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald killed Kennedy … .” How could they possibly write such a thing if no person has actually read and annotated these thousands of pages? In fact, some of them are still being released as fully classified. Any real analysis of that size of a release would take weeks, if not a month to accomplish. But further, as has been proven by their track record, neither Sabato nor Shenon would print such material if it was there anyway. In addition to the material above “undermining” the single bullet theory, neither man discussed Jeremy Gunn’s medical review or John Stringer’s bombshell testimony of him not taking the photos of JFK’s brain at NARA. The latter would then necessitate the questions: 1.) Who did take the photos, and 2.) Why would they need to be substituted? That is a territory they do not want to venture into—or they lose their MSM face time. And they value that way too much. After all, that is why they get printed in the Washington Post, and Politico, which was started by two former reporters from the Washington Post.

    What do they give us instead? The bulk of the story is comprised of Shenon’s usual, mildewed ideas that somehow, some way, agents of Fidel Castro influenced Oswald, and that the CIA became curious about this story, and decided—years later—that they had missed this angle. If Shenon and Sabato had been serious and sober authors, they would have qualified this by saying that, among others, David Phillips actually pushed the Cuban angle at first, but the story was discredited. (See Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, by Michael Benson, pp. 11-12)   It was later discovered that each story associated with the Castro/Oswald angle could be traced to a Phillips asset, a fact which made the CIA officer very nervous under questioning by Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (See The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi, pp. 292-293)

    The game that Sabato and Shenon are playing is pretty clear for any discerning reader. They are urging the president not to deny declassification of any document that the ARRB allowed to be delayed, since that could lead some pesky and curious researchers to say that, “Look, the government is hiding something!” Trust us in this plea. Because we won’t print anything that negates the official story anyway. After all, look what we did in our books.

    The legacy of Shenon and Sabato is that they shamelessly continue their own JFK cover-up fifty-four years after Kennedy was murdered.

  • Open Letter to NARA Concerning First Release of Documents

    Open Letter to NARA Concerning First Release of Documents

    An Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis at NARA

    Re: Last Releases of the JFK Act

    From: James DiEugenio, Editor and Publisher, kennedysandking.com

     

    As both of you know, when the Assassination Records and Review Board closed its doors way back in 1998, they specified that after four years of operation, there were still many documents related to the JFK assassination that had yet to be declassified. That body had been set up as a direct result of the firestorm of controversy that swept the country as a result of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. At the end of that film, a title card appeared which said that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were classified until the year 2039. Stone’s film raised many questions about the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination. The most direct one was: Did Lee Oswald shoot the president? For about ten months in 1991-1992 the country was involved in a debate about this question which encompassed all forms of media.

    Finally, due to this furor, the JFK Act was passed in 1992 and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was later established by President Clinton. After some initial delay, it got up and rolling in 1994 and lasted until 1998. In retrospect, the ARRB did not last long enough and it was also underfunded. I say this because it has become apparent that many of the documents now being released should not have been withheld in the first place. But the main point is, everyone involved in the field knew that the 2017 date for final release was coming.

    The original date for final release was late October of 2017. NARA had announced previously that, for whatever reason, it would be releasing withheld documents prior to that date. And beginning on July 24th, with little advance fanfare, this is what you did. According to a previous announcement by Ms. Murphy, there was a team of four archivists and three technicians working on this project many months in advance. One would therefore have expected that you would only begin the advance release if you were ready to do so. You must have realized that there were many people interested in the subject and that these people were eager to begin going through the remainder of the documents. Why begin the process early if everything was not in place?

    After one week of sorting through the initial release of last week, that is a question that hangs pregnant in the air. To put it frankly, this early release has been the equivalent of “jumping the gun”.   There have been many complaints by many researchers. But to name just some of the more popular ones:

     

    1. Some of the documents are so poorly copied they are, quite literally, illegible.
    2. Some of the documents are related to the MLK case, not the JFK case.
    3. Some of the documents are being released with a withheld notice on them. That is, they are not declassified at all.
    4. Some documents have not been released but should be there, since the document was already known about.
    5. Some of the documents still contain redactions.
    6. Many of the documents in the index do not have titles.

     

    As I noted above, many people in the JFK community, and some in the media, were eagerly awaiting the final release of the ARRB documents. The creation of the ARRB, as you know, was a very unusual act of Congress. In fact, I can think of no other body quite like it. Many, many important and revealing documents were finally declassified by that citizens’ panel. These documents had a profound impact on the information that informed people now have about the career and assassination of President Kennedy. Whole books have been written on the JFK case that have been largely based on those documents. It would not be an overstatement to say that those documents changed the calculus on that crucial historical episode. In retrospect, as beneficial as the ARRB was to the information database on the JFK case, it is clear that many of the documents released during the last week should not have been withheld either from them or by them. In my opinion, that is a matter for them to explain, not you.

    But concerning the six points listed above, these are all matters that were up to NARA. The assassination of President Kennedy was perhaps the single most tragic event of the second half of the 20th century. According to polls conducted by author Larry Sabato for his book The Kennedy Half Century, that event had a profound impact on the course of history. Many people interviewed for that book said that the nation has not been the same since. This is one of the reasons that this case still haunts America. You should have been aware of this fact. In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, there should have been no redactions or no withholdings upon the July 24th release. And given that there are, there should have been no early release. That matter should have been resolved in advance. You also should have furnished a complete and thorough index to the documents prior to their release. That way there would have been no dispute about what was there and what was not. There should have been an explanation of why there are MLK documents in the JFK collection. And finally, you should have demanded from the originating agency that every document be readily legible.

    This case has been prominent in the public’s consciousness for 54 years. It has caused much pain, confusion, debate, and deliberate obfuscation. In this regard, it deserved a first class resolution −− one which, for some reason, NARA has yet to provide. President Kennedy deserved better. I hope the situation is corrected, for his sake as well as others’.

     

    Sincerely,

     

     

    James DiEugenio, Editor/Publisher of kennedysandking.com

    Author of Destiny Betrayed, Reclaiming Parkland, co–editor, The Assassinations

     

     

    See also: What is new in the files (Earle Cabell’s 201 file from 1956).