JFK, RFK and Some Myths About American Foreign Policy

[Tracy Riddle]

In the spring of '64, Bobby was still maneuvering behind the scenes hoping to become LBJ's running-mate that year. I don't know what he was thinking, but when that didn't pan out he ran for the Senate and had his long-term sights set on the White House.

Also in the spring of '64, there weren't half a million combat troops in Vietnam, we weren't carpet bombing the North, etc. So RFK was tactically staking out a politically safe position for himself.

[Dawn Meredith]

Just goes to show. Take a few quotes to justify the left's point of view.
Why dig deeper?
JFK's intent regarding Vietnam has been proven beyond all doubt.
I doubt that showing the writer the evidence will change his opinion.
A couple of weeks ago someone posted something similar here and I wrote to that
author, citing evidence. No reply. Big surprise.

Dawn

[Jim DiEugenio]

This is so stupid. Talk about cherry picking.

I mean, McAdams used this awhile ago, in his debate with me.

First of all, unlike with Cuba, RFK was not in the middle of the Vietnam policy. By 1963, this was being run by JFK, McNamara, and to a lesser extent by State Department: Rusk, Hilsman, Harriman.

Second, RFK later contradicted this when he talked to Ellsberg in 1967. And he did so in no uncertain terms.

This is 1964, LBJ is president and RFK has ambitions to be VP. The big troop deployments have not begun yet.

What is important is not what RFK said in this oral interview, but what JFK had done as far as written instructions. And how they had been reversed by NSAM 288 in early March.

Why Blum would ignore all of that for this, that is a mystery.

[LR Trotter]

There are some very informative replies to this thread. As I recall, in the late summer or early fall of '65, I heard a news report of a troop buildup in VietNam of several hundred thousand, I'm thinking 500,00. Trust me, being age 18 at the time, and having just failed a draft physical, but with another one coming up, I WAS PAYING ATTENTION.
::face.palm::

[LR Trotter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM3uaXp8DAk

The interview was on CBS, September 2, 1963. Cronkite interviewed
JFK on the lawn of his home in Hyannis Port. This was the first half-hour
news broadcast on CBS-TV.

Kennedy says, "In the final analysis, it's their war," etc.

Yes, I remember the days of a 15 minute national news broadcast. And, if I have some recall of an event, this forum has posters that have complete information that I do not have. Much appreciated.

::

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Yes, I had noticed this, as I subscribe to Bill Blum's newsletters. I know Bill and I was shocked. He's a very good guy and this is just ignorance on his part....I'll send him an email and try to set him straight on this. He has not done JFK research and is obviously being misinformed by the Borg here..... Sad, as he gets almost everything else correctly. However, the damage is done.

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Peter please also post your comments ON COUNTERPUNCH. We need to be first responders to the liars on the Fake left, not real left. IMO you are well qualified to type to these folk because you understand their contradictions.

[Marc Ellis]

OH MY...

Weekend Edition February 7-9, 2014

Kennedy Had No Intention of Withdrawing From Vietnam

JFK, RFK and Some Myths About American Foreign Policy

by WILLIAM BLUM

On April 30, 1964, five months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was interviewed by John B. Martin in one of a series of oral history sessions with RFK. Part of the interview appears in the book "JFK Conservative" by Ira Stoll, published three months ago. (pages 192-3)

RFK: The president … had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

MARTIN: What was the overwhelming reason?

RFK: Just 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?

RFK: Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world. Also it would affect what happened in India, of course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East. Just as it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an effect on Indonesia, hundred million population. All of those countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the Communists. MARTIN: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

RFK: No.

MARTIN: … The president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there …

RFK: Yes.

MARTIN: … And couldn't lose it.

RFK: Yes. These remarks are rather instructive from several points of view:

1. Robert Kennedy contradicts the many people who are convinced that, had he lived, JFK would have brought the US involvement in Vietnam to a fairly prompt end, instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years. The author, Stoll, quotes a few of these people. And these other statements are just as convincing as RFK's statements presented here. And if that is not confusing enough, Stoll then quotes RFK himself in 1967 speaking unmistakably in support of the war. It appears that we'll never know with any kind of certainty what would have happened if JFK had not been assassinated, but I still go by his Cold War record in concluding that US foreign policy would have continued along its imperial, anti-communist path. In Kennedy's short time in office the United States unleashed many different types of hostility, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat; with one or more of these occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil.

2. "Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world." Ah yes, a vital part of the world. Has there ever been any part of the world, or any country, that the US has intervened in that was not vital? Vital to American interests? Vital to our national security? Of great strategic importance? Here's President Carter in his 1980 State of the Union Address: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America". "What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war." Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher

3. If the US lost Vietnam "everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall." As I once wrote: Thus it was that the worst of Washington's fears had come to pass: All of Indochina Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had fallen to the Communists. During the initial period of US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and other American officials regularly issued doomsday pronouncements of the type known as the "Domino Theory", warning that if Indochina should fall, other nations in Asia would topple over as well.

In one instance, President Eisenhower listed no less than Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia amongst the anticipated "falling dominos". 
(New York Times, April 8, 1954) Such warnings were repeated periodically over the next decade by succeeding administrations and other supporters of US policy in Indochina as a key argument in defense of such policy. The fact that these ominous predictions turned out to have no basis in reality did not deter Washington officialdom from promulgating the same dogma up until the 1990s about almost each new world "trouble-spot", testimony to their unshakable faith in the existence and inter-workings of the International Communist Conspiracy.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power . His latest book is: America's Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: [EMAIL="BBlum6@aol.com"]BBlum6@aol.com

[/EMAIL]http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/07/j...gn-policy/

Even if one accepts Blum's point (for the sake of argument), the question of whether JFK had an intention to withdraw* from Vietnam is entirely different from the question of whether he would have escalated the war to the catastrophic extent LBJ did. (The evidence does seem to show JFK had an intent to withdraw at least 1,000 US troops from SVN.)

LBJ sent over a half-million Americans and allies from other countries in the area to Vietnam.
Even if Blum were correct, (and I don't think he is), I don't see any evidence JFK would have followed the same path of escalation, had he lived.