About nine years ago (12/29/03 and after) James Galbraith, Eric Alterman
and I had a go-round on the question of JFK and withdrawal from Vietnam on
H-Diplo.   I have copied one of my postings from that below, and further
discussion can be found in the H-Diplo archives
(http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lm&list=H-Diplo). I
presented an excerpts
from an interview with Robert Kennedy in mid-1964, which was restricted for
more than two decades, in which he says they actually had not thought it
through, as they thought they were winning the war.  In my view, there had
been no decision to withdraw and Robert Kennedy's testimony supports that
view.

My *opinion* is that JFK never would have gone "all in" as LBJ did, but
that cannot be proved or disproved.   Sometimes there are just no
definitive answers.

Doug Macdonald
Colgate University

BEGIN:


Eric Alterman helpfully posted James Galbraith's essay in which he claims
that Kennedy had decided to pull out of Vietnam prior to his death. The
essay really does not present any new evidence, and superficially argues
against alternative scenarios. My personal view is similar to that of
Richard Reeves in that the announced and implemented troop withdrawals
were part of a bargaining strategy, primarily to pressure the Diem regime
to reform, but also to signal the Vietnamese military that the US would
support them if the coup took place. [See my *Adventures in Chaos*
(Cambridge, 1992), ch. 9] Other actions taken to fulfill these
simultaneous goals were the canceling of aid programs, the removal of the
CIA chief of station (who was seen as too close to Nhu and his removal had
been requested by the Vietnamese generals), and the moving of Colonel
Tung's special forces troops, essentially Diem's palace guard, to the
countryside at US insistence.

The US troop withdrawal announcement, which was purposefully kept low key
to avoid a negative psychological effect on Vietnamese morale, is best
seen as one part of that overall strategy. I do not see that the decision
not to approach Diem "formally" with the initial US troop withdrawal has
the portentous meaning that Galbraith posits. Many non-military aid
programs were put on "maximum administrative delay" without formally
approaching Diem. The Americans had openly talked about the 1,000 troop
withdrawal in the midst of the military optimism of late 1962. During the
Buddhist Crisis of 1963, in response to US pressure to reform his
government, Ngo Dinh Nhu publicly suggested that Vietnam did not need so
many US troops since the military and other counterinsurgency measures
were going so well. Surely Diem would have known about any withdrawal as
soon as it happened, or probably prior to its implementation. So keeping
it low key in no way demonstrates that a final decision had been made
about full withdrawal. It can be read in several different ways. There
also remains the important question, of course, of why would Kennedy get
involved in this pressure and coup plotting at all if we were going to
pull out anyway? Neither Galbraith nor other Kennedy revisionists,
including John Newman, have supplied a satisfactory answer to this
question, in my view.

Moreover, it is not clear that President Kennedy or Robert McNamara,
believed that the war was being lost at the time as claimed by Galbraith.
In a series of oral histories published long after his death, but recorded
in 1964, Robert Kennedy suggests the opposite and conveys the military
optimism and hawkishness that was prevalent in the administration at the
time, and which Galbraith discounts. These decisions were taken, contra
Galbraith's account, within the context of a belief that we were winning
in Vietnam that was widespread in the administration. [All quotes from
Robert F. Kennedy, *Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished
Recollections of the Kennedy Years* (Bantam, 1988). This much overlooked
book is crucial for understanding the mindset of the administration *at
the time* rather that retrospectives from McNamara or anyone else. I have
posted excerpts from it on H-Diplo previously.] Presumably Robert Kennedy
would know his brother's thinking on the subject of Vietnam (he was
attending meetings on Vietnam in late 1963 in his role as a leader of the
counterinsurgency operations in the administration) and clearly would have
known whether he was going to pull out. What did he have to say on the
subject in 1964?

"[Following a brief discussion of Mike Mansfield's negative report on
Vietnam in early 1963]

Kennedy: ...The President felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason
for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

[Interviewer John Bartlow] Martin: What was the overwhelming reason?

Kennedy: The loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think
everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.

Martin: What if it did?

Kennedy: It would just have profound effects on our position throughout
the world and our position in a rather vital part of the world. It would
affect what would happen in India, of course, which in turn has an effect
on the Middle East. It would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect.
It would have an effect on Indonesia, with a hundred million population.
All of these countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the
Communists, particularly as we had made such a fuss in the United States
both under President Eisenhower and President Kennedy about the
preservation of the integrity of Vietnam.

Martin: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

Kennedy: No.

Martin: But at the same time no disposition to go in -

Kennedy: No.

Martin: - in an all-out way, as we went into Korea. We were trying to
avoid a Korea - is that correct?

Kennedy: Yes, because everybody, including General MacArthur, felt that
land conflict between our troops - white troops and Asian - would only end
in disaster. So we went in as advisers to try to get the Vietnamese to
fight, themselves, because we couldn't win the war for them. They had to
win the war for themselves.

Martin: That's generally true all over the world, whether it's in a
shooting war or a different kind of war. But the President was convinced
that we had to stay there?

Kennedy: Yes.

Martin: And we couldn't lose it?

Kennedy: Yes.

Martin: And if the Vietnamese were about to lose it, would he propose to
go in on land if he had to?

Kennedy: We'd face that when we came to it.

Martin: Or go with air strikes direct from carriers - something like that?

Kennedy: It didn't have to be faced at that time. In the first place, we
were winning the war in 1962 and 1963. Up until May or so of 1963, the
situation was getting progressively better." [pp. 394-395]

He then discusses the deterioration with the Buddhist Crisis which began
in May. There is also an interesting discussion of his view of the famous
August 22 telegram that set the coup process in motion.

A few pages later Kennedy responds to a suggestion that Henry Cabot Lodge
was named ambassador in 1963 to share some of the political heat for
failure in Vietnam [it might be remembered that the interviews took place
in 1964 when the situation in Vietnam had deteriorated, especially
following the December, 1963 decision in Hanoi to go for military victory
in the South]:

"Martin: When the appointment was announced - Lodge, I mean - I had a
feeling that we were going to lose Vietnam and we were trying to
distribute the responsibility politically.

Kennedy: No. No. Because - at least, I thought - we were winning the war
in Vietnam.

Martin: Even at that time? I mean he wasn't appointed until pretty late
in the game.

Kennedy: No. That was not a factor." [p. 401]

As for the McNamara-Taylor Mission of late September, 1963, according to
RFK:

"Kennedy: They [i.e., McNamara and Taylor] came back and gave an account
that the war was going well, that the efforts by the Buddhists and the
internal struggles were not having an adverse effect on the carrying out
of the war, that they could win under present circumstances.

Martin: This doesn't seem to have been true.

Kennedy: No." [p. 402]


Taken together, the recollections of Robert Kennedy - *at the time* -
strongly suggest the following:


1) The Kennedy Administration believed in and supported policies derived
from a stark version of the domino theory (that the President himself
defended in an interview in September, 1963);

2) There was a good deal of military optimism that was maintained among
major players, including Robert Kennedy himself, despite the growing
*political* pessimism that grew with the expanding Buddhist crisis (I
argued in my book that this is why so many in the State Department were so
in favor of a coup and so many in the Defense Department were so against
one: the political situation was in crisis, but the military situation had
been improving.);

3) According to his brother and closest adviser, President Kennedy had
given no thought to withdrawing from Vietnam, and the administration had
simply not thought through what it would have done if they had had to face
the political and military deterioration that followed Diem's overthrow.

I find this evidence to be superior to anything presented in the Galbraith
article or John Newman's book, which are highly dependent on analytical
speculation and interpretation. My own personal view is that Kennedy
would never have escalated the war to the extent that Johnson did,
although beyond that I do not speculate about it. It is messy and
unsatisfactory, but the truth is we do not know what the hell he would
have done. But the claim that he had already decided to withdraw
militarily from Vietnam and never informed his brother is simply
incredible to me.


Doug Macdonald
Colgate University

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