My new book, "Into the Nightmare"

[Joseph McBride]

Joseph I am finding your book fascinating, and very difficult to put down. I think the personal angle really works and it sure is interesting that your parents were both newspaper people. It really is a rich story with all kinds of different elements interacting, kind of like existence.

I also find your background in film to be, perhaps contributing to the book, particularly when you are talking about discrepancies between visual and verbal representations and how they conflict at certain interesting times and places.

There is soooooo much one has to grapple with in terms of what to include and leave out. The main reason I find JFK and the Unspeakable such an important book is the way it contextualizes the assassination in terms of the long arc of the cold war policies and how these policies interrelated to create a situation in which JFK found himself at the crescendo of an evolving conflict between presidents and the new National Security State.

I am wondering how much of the latest scholarship re JFK v LBJ and Vietnam you managed to read. I find it challenging to describe just how JFK fits in in terms of the Cold War precisely because his years were the most dangerous of Cold War in terms of the risk of nuclear conflicts, but ALSO because these years were the years of most intense conflict between an elected president and the National Security State that were his de jure assistants, but in reality often worked to subvert JFK's authority and his policies.

Also it is difficult to measure how the different policy choices overlapped and effected one another. For example, I was recently reading the historian Marc Trachtenbergs books on US nuclear policy in Europe and how that effected conventional forces and the political rhetoric around it. The ironic fact was that JFK was facing a major conflict within the JCS and NATO over preventing Germany from getting nukes. Now IF HE WERE TO DENY AUDENAUR NUKES , he had to make some reassuring, cold war noises to guarantee West Germany that the US would still protect them and not just worry about the US. Trachtenberg emphasizses that this reassurance was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY if JFK were to be successful in strongly denying German autonomy or semi-autonomy of nukes within NATO (an issue,you will recall, that was perhaps the greatest point of conflict between JFK and Nitze during the Cuban Missile Crisis [NATO autonomy to respond to events in Europe without checking with the president first]) The denial of Nukes for Conrad in turn created the possibility of detente with the USSR that JFK was deepening when he was murdered by the national security state.

So what on one level might seem like cold war boilerplate, was on another level, something very different. Moreover how did the these different policies interact with each other. e.g. to what extent did JFK s refusal to escalate Laos effect his immediate relations with JCS and CIA in Vietnam?

Sometimes, especially when reading your descriptions of JFK and Vietnam I think that you underestimate the degree of conflict that JFK was experiencing with the CIA and JCS. Several times your summations seem to bypass these conflicts as if these new, young, and flexin' institutions were in reality the tools of the president that they were on paper. How much of the latest JFK and Vietnam books did you actually have time to read?

I should say that I am only on page 130 and am finding the book fascinating reading. The book got here much faster than was originally suggested on Amazon, and I must have sounded rather petty to complain about shipping time for a book 31 years in the making. I apologize for that but I have a reputation to maintain.

Nathaniel,

Thanks very much for your good words and feedback. I am glad you appreciate
the book's personal approach. I found that the best way of structuring
this highly complex story of my evolution and investigation and
how I learned from others' discoveries along the way.

As for your thoughtful questions about JFK and Vietnam, etc., I would defer some
responses until you've had a chance to read the whole book. I discuss
his policies throughout the book and how they affected the events in Dallas. I have,
of course, read a great deal about the Cold War, Vietnam, Cuba, and other
issues from that period, and admire, among other books, JFK AND THE
UNSPEAKABLE and John Newman's JFK AND VIETNAM. Peter Dale Scott's
writings on "deep politics" are highly recommended. The books and recordings of LBJ's phone conversations
are greatly revealing, as are the various books about him and about Nixon (and
Watergate) and many documents from that era. Cf. also the revealing taped discussions between Robert McNamara
and JFK and LBJ in the Errol Morris film THE FOG OF WAR.

All these subjects relate to the assassination. You'll appreciate that
I couldn't go into the same amount of detail or depth on each aspect
of JFK's foreign and domestic policies in a book focused primarily on
an investigation of his assassination, related though these policies are. I discuss
what I find most germane to what happened in Dallas and refer
the reader to other books and articles for further discussion of various
topics (topics which often are the subject of many books in themselves).

I agree with Newman that JFK was struggling to find a way out
of Vietnam but was having to keep his options flexible both for
political reasons and for practical reasons of policy, and that
he was facing internal conflicts with the military, the CIA, and
some members of his own administration. JFK was skeptical about colonialism
and a land war in Asia and made
contradictory remarks about Vietnam for all these reasons but was
taking steps to extricate us, however tentatively and carefully.
These have been obscured by some mainstream historians.
Scott was among the first to analyze in an acute way what Kennedy was
trying to do. Chomsky misses it in his sometimes
incisive but mostly wrongheaded book about Kennedy and Vietnam. I don't have as romantic a view of JFK as
I had when I was a kid working in his campaign -- his Cold Warrior
stands, which I wasn't critical enough of at the time, were partly authentic and partly rhetorical ploys -- but I see
him as a basically admirable figure struggling with
a terribly complex set of circumstances and enemies
both foreign and domestic.