Chatham House Chomsky

[Paul Rigby]

Review by John Major, University of Hull, in International Affairs (Cambridge UP/Royal Institute of International Affairs, Vol 70, No 1 [January 1994])

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US political culture. By Noam Chomsky. London. Verso. 1993. 172pp. Index. £29.95; ISBN 0860914119. Pb.: £9.95; ISBN 0860916855

Over the past 25 years Noam Chomsky has established himself as one of the leading radical critics of the American establishment, and in particular of the Vietnam War it so disastrously embarked upon. His purpose in this small thunder-flash of a book is to explode the myth, as he sees it, that President John F. Kennedy would have ended the American involvement in Vietnam had he lived to be re-elected – and that he would have done so even at the price of a peace without victory.

The opening is unpromising. Chomsky is nothing if not impassioned, and his insistence that Washington’s decision to go to war was immoral, and not simply pointless and mistaken, is dangerously Manichean. He comes very close to asserting that the war ended because the good in the American people triumphed over the evil in the American government, failing to weigh the proposition that the US political leadership might well express the often simplistic prejudices of the electorate. At the same time he seems to equate American power with barbarity and North Vietnamese weakness with virtue, when we know that atrocities were committed on both sides, however different their scale. But the ruthlessness of Ho Chi Minh falls away in a perspective which sees Vietnam only as an episode in half a millennium of the Third World’s exploitation by the West, when the enormities of that imperialism justify, even demand, the most violent possible.

When Chomsky comes down to specifics, however, he is on surer ground. The bulk of the work is devoted to a careful, if sometimes wearisomely repetitive dissection of the argument that Kennedy would have taken America out of the war regardless of its outcome, and that he was assassinated because his enemies knew he planned to do that. In his first chapter he analyses the new primary source material published over the past few years, principally in the volumes on Vietnam for 1961-64 in the State Department series ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’. Here Chomsky provides abundant evidence (often frustratingly missing from the notes to his introduction) to refute the claim that a far-sighted statesman was cut down before he could extricate his country from its fatal campaign. He then goes on to skewer the ‘court historians’ such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Kennedy propagandists such as John Newman, whose recent book (JFK and Vietnam, 1992) formed the basis of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Here he demonstrates the dramatic shift of view which came about after public opinion turned decisively against the war in 1968, when pro-Kennedy apologists who had been behind the Vietnam intervention during his time in office strove to dissociate him from the debacle and pin the blame elsewhere, above all on Lyndon Johnson.

We shall, of course, never know what might have been in a second Kennedy term. It is, to say the least, difficult to believe that the man who delivered that strident inaugural in January 1961 would have cut his losses in Vietnam four years later. And the record we now have sustains the verdict. Yet Kennedy’s success in his lifetime was built to a considerable degree on popular yearning for a hero, and to most people image will always count for more than reality. Thirty years after his death, the wishful thinkers and their spokesmen will no doubt be proof against this latest challenge to their faith.

From the same people who brought you Hitler and Stalin...a puff piece in support of Noam's fearless work on JFK and the Vietnam blood-bath.