McAdams, JFK Facts, and "Moderation"

[Marc Ellis]

I think it was total withdrawal as Jim has done a good job of showing. All part of a plan to move towards neutralization. This would have been accompanied by detente with Castro and Khrushchev as a move towards bigger things. Those bigger things would have put a lot people whose power depended on the Cold War going strong out of business. Those men killed Kennedy.

If McAdams, et al, are arguing the Vietnam War would have played out in exactly the same way with JFK as President, I think that's a dumb argument. There are no facts or even trend-lines to support it. If they stipulate the war would have played out differently, then they've made a significant concession.

Since the purported Tonkin Gulf Incident was supposedly the spark - it might be useful to analyze how that event might have played out with JFK in office. Personally, I think it never would have happened. I think it was a false flag operation. And if it never happened - it's reasonable to conclude there would have been no Vietnam War had JFK lived.

The issue of whether and when JFK intended to withdraw everyone doesn't interest me much. It's clear JFK would never have sent a half-million US soldiers there. That being the case, there would not have been 58,000 Americans killed there if JFK had not been assassinated.

My position on this, as I outlined at the Wecht conference, is kind of revolutionary.

I don't accept the JFK was a Cold Warrior in 1961 concept. And today, I do not think it is supportable.

I also don't like the Cuba/Vietnam only nexus as a measurement of JFK.

If you don't begin with Gullion, and you skip the Congo, you cannot understand Kennedy.

Kennedy was never going into Vietnam and that was predictable by 1954 with his anti Operation Vulture speech when he said no amount of American material can defeat an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere and has the support of the people. Because that is the same argument he used in November of 1961 to reject combat troops. We have that in the only memorandum made of that debate, the Burris Memorandum.. And its in Virtual JFK.

When I began to accumulate all this material, and read the Muelenbeck book, the Mahoney book and the Rakove book, I began to see this was all of one piece. And if you look at it that way, as a continuous line from Gullion and 1951 to, Congo in 1961, to NSAM 263 and Attwood, then Kennedy's foreign policy has perfect consistency.

So this is what I thought was missing from Stone's DVD. I was also disappointed that he fell for that MM crap. And no I don't think Adlai was more of a dove than JFK in 1961. When Kennedy was campaigning for Stevenson in 1956 he made a great anti colonial speech for him in LA. When Stevenson read it, he telegramed JFK to stop it and not make any more speeches for him. That is how out there the guy was.

Although I like the Douglass book a lot, I don't like that rubric the company put on it, A Cold Warrior Turns, because that is not the case. Kennedy's ideas were in place in 1960 and he acted on them immediately, but in places the vaunted and self licking JFK community doesn't know jack about e.g. Indonesia, Congo. But its there. And it took people outside the community to find it: like Mahoney.

PS: Tracy, Kennedy did not put together the advisory plan for Vietnam in 1962. That was done by Rusk and Rostow. Whether or not he knew what the herbicide program was, and was briefed on it, I don't know. But we do know at this time he was looking to JKG and McNamara to begin to find a way out of Vietnam. And he eventually did with the SecDef meeting the next year in Hawaii. Mike Swanson, the guy who wrote The War State, is writing a book on this. He is almost done with his research. He told me he cannot understand why there is a debate on this at all. Kennedy was not going into Vietnam. Period.

I know why there is a debate though. Because the battle to define JFK is as pitched as the battle over the facts of his murder. That is how ingrained and political this all is. All you have to do is look at McAdams' site on Vietnam to see that. As long as you can keep JFK a Cold Warrior then it takes some of the sting out of his death. Even if its a lie. In his debate with me, the professor said that Truman and LBJ were both more liberal than Kennedy.

LOL. ROTF. What a fruitcake.

I think the troop levels and dates speak for themselves. Vietnam was LBJ's war. Regardless of JFK's intentions or beliefs, LBJ presided over a war that ultimately claimed 58,000 plus American lives. That was all on him. A more important question to me is whether McAdams or anyone else can show persuasive evidence that JFK would also have sent a half-million US military personnel there and stood by and watched tens of thousands of them die. I think that's an argument with no facts to support it.

The Texas military contractor nexus interests me though. Bell, Schlumberger, Brown & Root, Haliburton. The more Americans died - the more money Bell helicopter made.