Kennedy and Vietnam.
Not every baby boomer is obsessed with Vietnam, but a few are. As a person handicapped by relative youth, it does get extremely tiresome for me when we have to talk about Vietnam again. Just because something happened in the 1960s does not mean it had anything to do with Vietnam. Nor is the Vietnam War any more important to American or world history than other major events.
Nearly every baby boomer remembers the day John F. Kennedy was shot. For baby boomers, two traumatic public affairs events of their childhood and youth were the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination. It is not surprising that many baby boomers have claimed that these two events are somehow connected, even though no evidence supports the notion.
Son of the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith is economist James K. Galbraith. He makes the case that JFK would surely have withdrawn American troops from Vietnam. (* warning, access only after viewing ad) Galbraith asserts that this withdrawal is indisputable fact. Furthermore he says lowly that we shouldn’t forget this when discussing the Kennedy assassination, which occurred forty years ago today. Then, either Galbraith or, more likely, a Salon editor adds: “Setting the record straight is crucial as Baghdad continues to explode.” Oh, please.
As the New York Times editorial page editor says, there is just no way to answer the Kennedy and Vietnam “what if” question other than in the negative († article publicly available only after no-fee registration and then only for limited time)
What would Kennedy have done with regard to Vietnam? Other than withdrawing one thousand troops from the many thousands that were then there, Kennedy made no concrete plans. He might have withdrawn. He might have escalated. No one knows and no one can know. Not even Robert McNamara can really know what JFK would have done.
The idea of the conspiracy theorists is that the military-industrial complex, which apparently thinks with one mind, wanted Kennedy dead for the sake of war profits in the Nam. LBJ was in on it, too. He’s always in on it. Eyes roll, but they keep saying it.
Nevermind that Lee Harvey Oswald was a militant, pro-Castro Marxist with the motive and the means to shoot and kill Kennedy without any help or outside encouragement.
Nevermind that Lee Harvey Oswald got his job at the Texas School Book Depository before Kennedy’s withdrawal of 1,000 troops was announced.
Nevermind that even if JFK wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, he still might have escalated to the level LBJ did. Only an insane leader would prefer war over all other alternatives, and JFK was not insane. JFK may have wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but that was LBJ’s first choice as well. Even though the execrable Noam Chomsky has championed that JFK would never have withdrawn without victory, it is the indisputable fact.
What Oliver Stone’s propaganda and Galbraith’s “what if” history show is only motive. There were people who did oppose Kennedy’s politics strenuously and bitterly. There were indeed several people other than Oswald with a motive to kill Kennedy, but they did not act on it. It was Oswald that acted, and he acted alone. Not one shred of evidence suggests otherwise.
Vietnam was not a major issue in the Kennedy presidency. Kennedy was primarily focused on space exploration, domestic issues, and other aspects of the Cold War, especially Cuba. Only looking back do we see that Kennedy’s continuation of America’s Vietnam policy, stretching back from the days of World War II, was of particular interest.
Here I should resolve a minor difficulty. I side with those who say that Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 because of Sirhan Sirhan’s anger at RFK’s pro-Israel stance, announced shortly before the shooting. Looking back in history, we see that this was an early shot fired in the war by militant Islamism against the free world, but then it was not so understood. It was poorly explained then as the insanity of the times. In the case of the RFK assassination, we have a killer who shouted at the time of the act that he did it for his country (”Palestine”). In the case of the JFK assassination, we also know the assassin’s motive. Oswald wanted to protect Marxism and Castro’s regime from Kennedy. It is not relevant that Castro did not welcome JFK’s assassination, and was worried about a US attack on his country afterward. Oswald was not in touch with Castro. Oswald acted of his own volition. When we look back, we see what really motivated these assassinations. Even though in JFK’s case it was immediately clear what the motive was, and in RFK’s case it was not, there is no contradiction or logical tension present.
Vietnam is not the central feature of US or world history, and was not the central feature of the Kennedy presidency. Vietnam did not motivate Oswald. Vietnam was at the time a minor issue that would only later become a major one.
Many unjustly denigrate the JFK assassination researchers. They have been diligent in the search for truth. They have augmented the official investigations by the Warren Commission, for example. Thanks to them, we know more than we otherwise would have. When research devolves into conspiracy theory, however, denigration is appropriate. Furthermore, the attempt to make a certainty out of a “what if” scenario is also worthy of denigration. It is not that all the questions are now answered. We still don’t have a good handle on the motive of Jack Ruby to shoot Oswald. If researchers insist on looking at Kennedy and Vietnam, then Kennedy’s order to overthrow the Ngo Dinh Diem government, carried out in early November 1963, needs a better explanation than confusion at the White House.
Researchers should focus on the unanswered questions. It is pointless to overturn stones that have been profitlessly overturned countless times already.
Unfortunately, Galbraith destroys his own credibility with this:
Did Lee Harvey Oswald fire three shots, from an old rifle, along a difficult line of sight, striking Kennedy at least twice and Texas Governor John Connally at least once, as well as a bystander some distance away? No serious person can believe that, either.
(‡ Salon article) That is crazy. (§)
November 29th, 2003 at 11:29
Dear Mr. Hagen,
Readers of your post on my article should not have to go to the Salon piece to discover that my essay does not endorse the thesis that Kennedy was killed because of the decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Here are two key paragraphs:
"These events do not prove Oliver Stone’s alleged thesis, that Kennedy was killed in order to expand the Vietnam War. Johnson had compelling reasons to act as he did at that moment: he bought time, support, and the perception of continuity by allowing the withdrawal to lapse. And while the Nov. 26 order was definitely altered to give the go-ahead to commando raids, the final wording is murky and it remains unclear, to me anyway, whether Johnson knew this when he signed it.
"It is also not yet clear to me exactly when Lyndon Johnson made his decision to send main combat forces to South Vietnam. There is evidence that places that decision much later — perhaps well after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the election of 1964, and even the start of Johnson’s full term in January 1965. Johnson’s 1963 decision not to withdraw on Kennedy’s timetable did not preclude a decision to get out later on. It did not commit Johnson at that time to the war that later occurred."
James Galbraith
November 29th, 2003 at 13:02
Thank you, sir, for your reply and for the two paragraphs.
Your article argues that JFK would not have escalated in Vietnam. This would provide a motive for the conspiracy that you believe in, assuming that the conspiracy clearly foresaw that future and attempted to change it. But we are having trouble just seeing that what-if scenario ourselves, with all the wisdom of historical knowledge.
You explicitly deny it, but from the content of the article you are very interested in establishing a link between the JFK assassination and Vietnam. As I wrote in response, Vietnam was not a major event in the JFK presidency, nor is there evidence it was a factor in the assassination.
To establish such a link, all of the problems I stated would have to be addressed. Perhaps you will find the evidence you need, but that seems unlikely.
Acting as the single shooter, Oswald had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. No other suspect is linked to the crime scene. No one is required to put Oswald up to it. Oswald was a hard core communist before JFK was president. Oswald was a frustrated loner who wanted to advance his ideology, and he picked a violent, atrocious, regicidal way to do so.
It is useful to research these questions and to add to our knowledge, for which you deserve credit. I just can’t agree, however, with the direction of your research.