Know your BFEE: At every turn, JFK was opposed by War Party

Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 29, 2000; A04

Shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a top CIA
official told an investigative commission that the Soviet Union had
somehow learned the exact date of the amphibious landing in advance,
according to a newly declassified version of the commission's final report.

Moreover, the CIA apparently had known of the leak to the Soviets--and
went ahead with the invasion anyway.

CONTINUED…

http://www.jfklancer.com/jfk1bop.html

Our Men in Havana

In Havana this past October, Professor James Blight brought together old foes Robert McNamara and Fidel Castro for the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such meetings, part of Blight’s unconventional fifteen-year study of the crisis, have led McNamara and others to a startling conclusion: we were much closer to nuclear war than anyone thought.

By Norman Boucher

EXCERPT…

Over the past decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that the grown-ups may not have had much of an idea what was going on either. At least this has been the conclusion to emerge from a series of six conferences held over the past fifteen years on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, those thirteen days in October during which the world came the closest it has ever been to destroying itself. Orchestrated by Professor James Blight and Adjunct Associate Professor Janet Lang, both of the Watson Institute for International Studies, these conferences—along with two related ones on the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—have revealed that we were much closer to nuclear annihilation four decades ago than anyone had previously thought, and that the management of the crisis in Washington and Moscow was blessed with a far higher level of sheer dumb luck than analysts and historians had earlier been able to accept.

“I conclude from this discussion,” Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the missile crisis, said in Havana at the latest conference this past October, “that we’re damn lucky to be here.”

SNIP…

The alternative interpretation of those October 1962 events is messier. As McNamara explained to the students in the Blight-Lang class, no one in the White House in 1962 knew the number of nuclear warheads already in Cuba at the time of the crisis; nor did they know that the Soviets and Cubans had tactical nuclear warheads they were ready to use against U.S. troops. Had Khrushchev not agreed to withdraw the missiles on October 28, a military conflict might have easily broken out, with consequences no one in Washington had sufficient information to foresee, far less control.

CONTINUED…

http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/printerfriendly.cfm?ID=1936

Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962

In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled “Body of Secrets,” author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”

Source (w/link to PDF of actual Operation NORTHWOODS document):

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/

Spy Flights of the Cold War

Review by Capt. Troy Thomas, USAF
Book by Paul Lashmar
Naval Institute Press, 118 Maryland Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland 21402, 1996, 256 pages, $29.95.
Document created: 13 May 99

Perceptions of the cold war often focus on nuclear arsenals and Third World surrogate conflicts, overlooking a persistent war of aerial espionage in which hundreds of airmen lose their lives. Spy Flights of the Cold War offers an intriguing yet controversial historical record of US and British aerial reconnaissance against the communist bloc from 1946 to 1963. The author’s research reveals numerous harrowing missions by brave aircrews flying deep into hostile territory on missions previously declared “routine.” Overlaying this operational history is a political account that indicts the US Air Force (USAF) and, specifically, Gen Curtis E. LeMay for exceeding presidential authority, manipulating intelligence estimates, and using the spy flights in an attempt to instigate another world war. Although it is a tribute to individual airmen, the text openly criticizes USAF leadership.

SNIP…

Criticism of the USAF and LeMay is a prominent theme. In addition to questionable evidence that LeMay encouraged unauthorized overflight missions, Lashmar devotes an entire chapter to SAC’s aggressive use of reconnaissance missions as a political tool intent on provoking nuclear war. If successfully implemented, Project Control overflights would “demonstrate the Russians’ military impotency” and possibly create the conditions for a preventive war. In addition to attributing a prolonged cold war to General LeMay and other senior USAF leaders, Lashmar also contends that SAC and the USAF intelligence community inflated Soviet missile, and later bomber, strengths to justify inordinate spending on SAC. Although estimates by the intelligence community later proved high, evidence for a duplicitous USAF agenda is suspect.

CONTINUED…

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/bookrev/lashmar.html

Exit Strategy

In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam

By James K. Galbraith

Forty years have passed since November 22, 1963, yet painful mysteries remain. What, at the moment of his death, was John F. Kennedy’s policy toward Vietnam?

It’s one of the big questions, alternately evaded and disputed over four decades of historical writing. It bears on Kennedy’s reputation, of course, though not in an unambiguous way.

And today, larger issues are at stake as the United States faces another indefinite military commitment that might have been avoided and that, perhaps, also cannot be won. The story of Vietnam in 1963 illustrates for us the struggle with policy failure. More deeply, appreciating those distant events tests our capacity as a country to look the reality of our own history in the eye.

SNIP…

A more thorough treatment appeared in 1992, with the publication of John M. Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.1 Until his retirement in 1994 Newman was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is deciphering declassified records—a talent he later applied to the CIA’s long-hidden archives on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Newman’s argument was not a case of “counterfactual historical reasoning,” as Larry Berman described it in an early response.2 It was not about what might have happened had Kennedy lived. Newman’s argument was stronger: Kennedy, he claims, had decided to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam, that he had ordered this withdrawal to begin. Here is the chronology, according to Newman:

(1) On October 2, 1963, Kennedy received the report of a mission to Saigon by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The main recommendations, which appear in Section I(B) of the McNamara-Taylor report, were that a phased withdrawal be completed by the end of 1965 and that the “Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 out of 17,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Vietnam by the end of 1963.” At Kennedy’s instruction, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger made a public announcement that evening of McNamara’s recommended timetable for withdrawal.

(2) On October 5, Kennedy made his formal decision. Newman quotes the minutes of the meeting that day:

The President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed. (Emphasis added.)
The passage illustrates two points: (a) that a decision was in fact made on that day, and (b) that despite the earlier announcement of McNamara’s recommendation, the October 5 decision was not a ruse or pressure tactic to win reforms from Diem (as Richard Reeves, among others, has contended3) but a decision to begin withdrawal irrespective of Diem or his reactions.

(3) On October 11, the White House issued NSAM 263, which states:

The President approved the military recommendations contained in section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.

In other words, the withdrawal recommended by McNamara on October 2 was embraced in secret by Kennedy on October 5 and implemented by his order on October 11, also in secret. Newman argues that the secrecy after October 2 can be explained by a diplomatic reason. Kennedy did not want Diem or anyone else to interpret the withdrawal as part of any pressure tactic (other steps that were pressure tactics had also been approved). There was also a political reason: JFK had not decided whether he could get away with claiming that the withdrawal was a result of progress toward the goal of a self-sufficient South Vietnam.

CONTINUED…

http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

Papers reveal JFK efforts on Vietnam

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | June 6, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Newly uncovered documents from both American and Polish archives show that President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union secretly sought ways to find a diplomatic settlement to the war in Vietnam, starting three years before the United States sent combat troops.

Kennedy, relying on his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, planned to reach out to the North Vietnamese in April 1962 through a senior Indian diplomat, according to a secret State Department cable that was never dispatched.

Back-channel discussions also were attempted in January 1963, this time through the Polish government, which relayed the overture to Soviet leaders. New Polish records indicate Moscow was much more open than previously thought to using its influence with North Vietnam to cool a Cold War flash point.

The attempts to use India and Poland as go-betweens ultimately fizzled, partly because of North Vietnamese resistance and partly because Kennedy faced pressure from advisers to expand American military involvement, according to the documents and interviews with scholars. Both India and Poland were members of the International Control Commission that monitored the 1954 agreement that divided North and South Vietnam.

The documents are seen by former Kennedy aides as new evidence of his true intentions in Vietnam. The question of whether Kennedy would have escalated the war or sought some diplomatic exit has been heatedly debated by historians and officials who served under both Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.

(...)

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/06/papers_reveal_jfk_efforts_on_vietnam/?page=1

Published September/October 1999

JFK & Castro: The Secret Quest For Accommodation

Recently Declassified U.S. government Documents Reveal That, at the Height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro Were Exploring Ways To Normalize U.S.-Cuba Relations

by Peter Kornbluh

In February 1996, Robert Kennedy Jr. and his brother, Michael, traveled to Havana to meet with Fidel Castro. As a gesture of goodwill, they brought a file of formerly top secret U.S. documents on the Kennedy administration's covert exploration of an accommodation with Cuba--a record of what might have been had not Lee Harvey Oswald, seemingly believing the president to be an implacable foe of Castro's Cuba, fired his fateful shots in Dallas. Castro thanked them for the file and shared his "impression that it was intention after the missile crisis to change the framework" of relations between the United States and Cuba. "It's unfortunate," said Castro, that "things happened as they did, and he could not do what he wanted to do."

Would John F. Kennedy, had he lived, have been able to establish a modus vivendi with Fidel Castro? The question haunts almost 40 years of acrimonious U.S.-Cuba relations. In a Top Secret--Eyes Only memorandum written three days after the president's death, one of his White House aides, Gordon Chase, noted that "President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic heat"-- because of his track record "of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists" during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Castro and his advisers believed the same. A CIA intelligence report, based on a high-level Cuban source and written for National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1964, noted that "Fidel Castro felt that it was possible that President Kennedy would have gone on ultimately to negotiate with Cuba... acceptance of a fait accompli for practical reasons."

(...)

Unbeknownst to all but his brother and a handful of advisers, however, in 1963 John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on Cuba: a secret dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro. To a policy built upon "overt and covert nastiness," as Top Secret White House memoranda characterized U.S. operations against Cuba, was added "the sweet approach," meaning the possibility of "quietly enticing Castro over to us." National Security Council officials referred to this multitrack policy as "simil- opting"--the use of disparate methods toward the goal of moving Cuba out of the Soviet orbit.

(...)

In March 1963, Cuban minister Raul Roa Garcia sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General U Thant hinting that Cuba was interested in friendly relations with the United States. European businessmen returning from Havana told CIA sources that Castro wanted to deal with Washington. By June 5, the CIA had accumulated a half-dozen intelligence reports, according to a secret summary by Deputy Director Richard Helms, "suggesting Cuban interest in a rapprochement with the United States."

(...)

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,320,00.html

MIGHTY BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WAY JFK APPROACHED MAKING WAR AND HOW GEORGE BUSH WENT TO WAR. JFK OPPOSED HIS TEAM. BUSH’S TEAM TOLD HIM WHAT TO DO.

Galbraith and Vietnam

by RICHARD PARKER
The NATION


In the fall of 1961, unknown to the American public, John F. Kennedy was weighing a crucial decision about Vietnam not unlike that which George W. Bush faced about Iraq in early 2002--whether to go to war. It was the height of the cold war, when Communism was the "terrorist threat," and Ho Chi Minh the era's Saddam Hussein to many in Washington. But the new President was a liberal Massachusetts Democrat (and a decorated war veteran), not a conservative Sunbelt Republican who claimed God's hand guided his foreign policy. JFK's tough-minded instincts about war were thus very different. Contrary to what many have come to believe about the Vietnam War's origins, new research shows that Kennedy wanted no war in Asia and had clear criteria for conditions under which he'd send Americans abroad to fight and die for their country--criteria quite relevant today.

But thanks also in part to recently declassified records, we now know that Kennedy's top aides--whatever his own views--were offering him counsel not all that different from what Bush was told forty years later. Early that November, his personal military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and his deputy National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, were on their way back from Saigon with a draft of the "Taylor report," their bold plan to "save" Vietnam, beginning with the commitment of at least 8,000 US troops--a down payment, they hoped, on thousands more to follow. But they knew JFK had no interest in their idea because six months earlier in a top-secret meeting, he had forcefully vetoed his aides' proposed dispatch of 60,000 troops to neighboring Laos--and they were worried about how to maneuver his assent.

Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake. For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty. Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics.

Early that November, just as Taylor and his team arrived back in Washington, Galbraith arrived from New Delhi for the state visit of Prime Minister Nehru. Hoping to gain a quick upper hand over Taylor and his mission, he arranged a private luncheon for Kennedy and Nehru at the Newport estate of Jacqueline Kennedy's mother and stepfather. No one from the State Department--to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's great consternation--was invited, save Galbraith. Ten days earlier, Galbraith, in one of his back-channel messages, had shared with Kennedy his growing concerns about Vietnam. From India, he'd played a role in defusing the Laos situation that spring, but over the summer, the Berlin crisis had sent a sharp chill through relations with the Soviets, with the risks of nuclear confrontation for a time all too real. About this, Galbraith now told the President:

Although at times I have been rather troubled by Berlin, I have always had the feeling that it would be worked out. I have continued to worry far, far more about South Viet Nam. This is more complex, far less controllable, far more varied in the factors involved, far more susceptible to misunderstanding. And to make matters worse, I have no real confidence in the sophistication and political judgment of our people there.

This was advice Kennedy was hearing from no one else in his Administration, but clearly welcomed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050314/parker/2

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
Chapter 8.2.3: Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs
The history of the Harriman-Walker-Bush clan during the 20th century
by Webster Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, 1991

(...)

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago , a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young President that there were elements inside the U.S. government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house." <10>. At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur "warned against the committment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice." <11>. This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that "MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland should have his head examined." <12>. MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along.

At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman / Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to "muster the courage" to try a second invasion of Cuba.

(...)

http://www.tarpley.net/bush8b.htm

Sources:
10. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 329.
11. Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 723.
12. Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), p. 339.

INTERVIEW WITH WALT ROSTOW

INTERVIEWER: I'll just introduce you first of all so that we.. have an ident on the tape. This is Friday June 7th and I'm interviewing Dr Walt Rostow for the Vietnam War program in the Cold War series. If I could start by asking you, sir, going back to 1961, why do you think that Kennedy chose you and Taylor to go to Vietnam, to look at the situation there?

WALT ROSTOW: Well, to start with Kennedy, he met with Eisenhower the day before his inaugural and Eisenhower spoke to him about balance of payments and (unintelligible)...

INTERRUPTION

BREAK IN TAPE

WALT ROSTOW: Well, at the meeting that Eisenhower had with Kennedy the day before the inaugural, he talked at length about the balance of payments -- which was much on his mind -- and Laos, which was much on his mind. But he never mentioned the word Vietnam. 'Bout the second Thursday after I came to work with Kennedy, we had we received a document from Ed Lansdale which was a pic.. a picture of Vietnam as he saw it on a visit back to Vietnam, he'd been there before, and it portrayed the situation disintegrating and it was.. and Kennedy looked up after I'd made him read the whole text, he said 'this is the worst one we've got, isn't it'. Eisenhower never mentioned La.. uh, the word Vietnam to him. But the truth was that since '58, they had been in... infiltrating South Vietnamese who had been taken to the North trained and re-infiltrated along with certain North Vietnamese. And the situation within Vietnam was very slowly disintegrating. Uh, this was not unexpected because if you gave anybody access -- as we gave access via Laos to the North Vietnamese -- it takes roughly 15 soldiers to control 1 guerrilla and so long as the war was a guerrilla war, that's the way it was. Yeah, so, he.. wanted Maxwell Taylor, who was a great solider, to go out to Vietnam and he wanted me also to go out with him and we had a team of about 12 and but he assigned the.. Asia, Southeast Asia to me. Mac Bundy had his assignments in Germany and Cuba and so on.

INT: Now when you went to Vietnam in '61, what did you find, what was your assessment and what did you...?

WR: (overlap) Well, the assessment was that.. it was a.. they were slow.. slowly disintegrating, they needed help to meet.. to meet the infiltrators but it was a interesting generational split between Diem and his brother Nu -- and I spent a whole afternoon with Nu and really got to know him -- and the young fellas coming ..(unintelligible).. in the military, in agriculture, in the universities and so on who were part of a new generation. And it was age split. It was very much like the age-split in Korea. Syngman Rhee, a man of integrity who.. survived against the Japanese and just as Diem had survived against the French, had been a.. in a monastery in New Jersey most of the time. But the it was very much a split of generations and Diem didn't know how to handle, in my view at least, this younger group of technocrats in the Army and in the agriculture and so on. But he turned to me, partly as a.. I think as an expert so-called on the under-developed countries which arose out of a book I write, was 'Ages of Economic Growth' and he's.. he said 'what is your advice?'. And I had a long colloquy with him, the only time I spoke up at this meeting with Taylor and the.. was.. the advice was 'rely on the younger generation of technocrats' and I went on to.. give.. explain the virtues I saw in these.. these men. And he said 'they talk a good game but they don't do anything. So the only way you could run this country is this way' -- and he picked up the phone, held it to his ear -- and I wanted Lansdale to stay there as an adviser to Diem because he had a wonderful gift of treating people from under-developed... developed countries with dignity so that they didn't feel snowed by the West and all this. He really felt their problems were as complicated as being, let's say, president of the United States. And the long and short of it was I lost on that to the bureaucracy.

INT: Would you stop there..

BREAK IN TAPE

INT: Can you just explain.. what do you mean, 'you lost to the bureaucracy'?

WR: Well, they did not send Lansdale out as an.. uh, adviser to Diem. That would have, indeed, created a complication for the b.. bureaucracy which is the.. that... that's what the ambassador was meant to be. But I felt that the only way to heal this be.. this gap between Diem and the technocrats, the younger generation, was to have an American adviser, because he had shown that he had quite a lot of influence over Diem and Diem trusted him and this personal trust was a great asset.

INT: As a result of your report.. I mean, it put Vietnam much higher up the political timetable, lot more in the center of the agenda, and you did recommend increasing aid to advisers to Vietnam, did you not?

WR: We.. we.. aid.. military aid, advisers and we recommended that we put some troops in case they did what we... they shouldn't do in Tukor which is cut the country in half and if they did this.. if they did that, they came.. they came down from the mountains to.. to the sea, we wanted some American troops to be flown in. Uh, Kennedy, who was much influenced by McArthur and generally took the view that he didn't want to put troops in unless he was forced to made a compromise and had a.. battalion of marines put offshore. In... in other words, he missed the point that was.. that Taylor and made it, that without putting men.. additional men -- aside from the trainers and the advisers, military advisers - uh, he didn't put any regular troops in at that time.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-9/rostow1.html

Bush's Conspiracy to Riot

By Robert Parry
August 5, 2002

EXCERPT...

After the Miami “Brooks Brothers Riot” – named after the protesters’ preppie clothing – no government action was taken beyond the police rescuing several Democrats who were surrounded and roughed up by the rioters. While no legal charges were filed against the Republicans, newly released documents show that at least a half dozen of the publicly identified rioters were paid by Bush’s recount committee.

The payments to the Republican activists are documented in hundreds of pages of Bush committee records – released grudgingly to the Internal Revenue Service last month, 19 months after the 36-day recount battle ended. Overall, the records provide a road map of how the Bush recount team brought its operatives across state lines to stop then-Vice President Al Gore’s recount efforts.

The records show that the Bush committee spent a total of $13.8 million to frustrate the recount of Florida’s votes and secure the state's crucial electoral votes for Bush. By contrast, the Gore recount operation spent $3.2 million, about one quarter of the Bush total. Bush spent more just on lawyers – $4.4 million – than Gore did on his entire effort.

Extended Deadline

The new evidence was submitted by the Bush recount committee to the IRS under an extended deadline for disclosures of soft-money spending by so-called “527 committees,” which are not directly related to a candidate’s campaign. Bush lawyers had argued that they were not obligated legally to disclose how they had raised and spent their money.

The Bush committee finally reversed itself and filed the records on July 15. The records were released to the public on the IRS Web site in late July. Gore's committee submitted its records in line with the original IRS deadlines.

The documents show that the Bush organization put on the payroll about 250 staffers, spent about $1.2 million to fly operatives to Florida and elsewhere, and paid for hotel bills adding up to about $1 million. To add flexibility to the travel arrangements, a fleet of corporate jets was assembled, including planes owned by Enron Corp., then run by Bush backer Kenneth Lay, and Halliburton Co., where Dick Cheney had served as chairman and chief executive officer.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2002/080502a.html

"Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam"

James K. Galbraith,
Boston Review, October/November, 2003

EXCERPT...

Did John F. Kennedy give the order to withdraw from Vietnam?

Certainly, most Vietnam historians have said “no”—or would have if they considered the question worth posing. They have asserted continuity between Kennedy’s policy and Lyndon Johnson’s, while usually claiming that neither president liked the war and also that Kennedy especially had expressed to friends his desire to get out sometime after the 1964 election.

The view that Kennedy would have done what Johnson did—stay in Vietnam and gradually escalate the war in 1964 and 1965—is held by left, center, and right, from Noam Chomsky to Kai Bird to William Gibbons. It was promoted forcefully over the years by the late Walt Rostow, beginning in 1967 with a thick compilation for Johnson himself of Kennedy’s public statements on Vietnam policy and continuing into the 1990s. Gibbons’s three-volume study states it this way: “On November 26 <1963>, Johnson approved NSAM 273, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to Vietnam and the continuation of Vietnam programs and policies of the Kennedy administration.”

Equally, Stanley Karnow writes in his Vietnam: A History (1983) that Johnson’s pledge “essentially signaled a continuation of Kennedy’s policy.” Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, while writing extensively on the Saigon coup, makes no mention at all of the Washington discussions following Johnson’s accession three weeks later. Gary Hess offers summary judgment on the policy that Johnson inherited: “To Kennedy and his fellow New Frontiersmen, it was a doctrine of faith that the problems of Vietnam lent themselves to an American solution.”

Kai Bird’s 1998 biography of McGeorge and William Bundy briefly reviews the discussions of withdrawal reported to have occurred in late 1963 but accepts the general verdict that Kennedy did not intend to quit. So does Fredrik Logevall, whose substantial 1999 book steadfastly insists that the choices Kennedy faced were either escalation or negotiation and did not include withdrawal without negotiation.

All this (and more) is in spite of evidence to the contrary, advanced over the years by a tiny handful of authors. In 1972 Peter Dale Scott first made the case that Johnson’s NSAM 273—the document that Gibbons relied on in making the case for continuity—was in fact a departure from Kennedy’s policy; his essay appeared in Gravel’s edition of The Pentagon Papers. Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times tells in a few tantalizing pages of the “first application” in October 1963 “of Kennedy’s phased withdrawal plan.”

A more thorough treatment appeared in 1992, with the publication of John M. Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.1 Until his retirement in 1994 Newman was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is deciphering declassified records—a talent he later applied to the CIA’s long-hidden archives on Lee Harvey Oswald.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/exit.htm

Radio And Television Address to the American People on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

The White House
July 26, 1963

Good evening my fellow citizens:

I speak to you tonight in a spirit of hope. Eighteen years ago the advent of nuclear weapons changed the course of the world as well as the war. Since that time, all mankind has been struggling to escape from the darkening prospect of mass destruction on earth. In an age when both sides have come to possess enough nuclear power to destroy the human race several times over, the world of communism and the world of free choice have been caught up in a vicious circle of conflicting ideology and interest. Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension.

In these years, the United States and the Soviet Union have frequently communicated suspicion and warnings to each other, but very rarely hope. Our representatives have met at the summit and at the brink; they have met in Washington and in Moscow; in Geneva and at the United Nations. But too often these meetings have produced only darkness, discord, or disillusion.

Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. For the first time an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control--a goal first sought in 1946 when Bernard Baruch presented a comprehensive control plan to the United Nations.

That plan, and many subsequent disarmament plans, large and small, have all been blocked by those opposed to international inspection. A ban on nuclear tests, however, requires on-the-spot inspection only for underground tests. This nation now possesses a variety of techniques to detect the nuclear tests of other nations which are conducted in the air or under water, for such tests produce unmistakable signs which our modern instruments can pick up.

The treaty initialed yesterday, therefore, is a limited treaty which permits continued underground testing and prohibits only those tests that we ourselves can police. It requires no control posts, no onsite inspection, no international body.

We should also understand that it has other limits as well. Any nation which signs the treaty will have an opportunity to withdraw if it finds that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of the treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests; and no nation's right of self-defense will in any way be impaired. Nor does this treaty mean an end to the threat of nuclear war. It will not reduce nuclear stockpiles; it will not halt the production of nuclear weapons; it will not restrict their use in time of war.

Nevertheless, this limited treaty will radically reduce the nuclear testing which would otherwise be conducted on both sides; it will prohibit the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and all others who sign it, from engaging in the atmospheric tests which have so alarmed mankind; and it offers to all the world a welcome sign of hope.

For this is not a unilateral moratorium, but a specific and solemn legal obligation. While it will not prevent this Nation from testing underground, or from being ready to conduct atmospheric tests if the acts of others so require, it gives us a concrete opportunity to extend its coverage to other nations and later to other forms of nuclear tests.

This treaty is in part the product of Western patience and vigilance. We have made clear--most recently in Berlin and Cuba--our deep resolve to protect our security and our freedom against any form of aggression. We have also made clear our steadfast determination to limit the arms race. In three administrations, our soldiers and diplomats have worked together to this end, always supported by Great Britain. Prime Minister Macmillan joined with President Eisenhower in proposing a limited test ban in 1959, and again with me in 1961 and 1962.

But the achievement of this goal is not a victory for one side--it is a victory for mankind. It reflects no concessions either to or by Soviet Union. It reflects simply our common recognition of the dangers of further testing.

This treaty is not the millennium. It will not resolve all conflicts, or cause the Communists to forego their ambitions, or eliminate the dangers of war. It will not reduce our need for arms or allies or programs of assistance to others. But it is an important first step--a step towards peace--a step towards reason--a step away from war.

Here is what this step can mean to you and to your children and your neighbors:

First, this treaty can be a step towards reduced world tension and broader areas of agreement. The Moscow talks have reached no agreement on any other subject, nor is this treaty conditioned on any other matter. Under Secretary Harriman made it clear that any nonaggression arrangements across the division in Europe would require full consultation with our allies and full attention to their interests. He also made clear our strong preference for a more comprehensive treaty banning all tests everywhere, and our ultimate hope for general and complete disarmament. The Soviet Government, however, is still unwilling to accept the inspection such goals require.

No one can predict with certainty, therefore, what further agreements, if any, can be built on the foundations of this one. They could include controls on preparations for surprise attack, or on numbers and type of armaments. There could be further limitations on the spread of nuclear weapons. The important point is that efforts to seek new agreements will go forward.

But the difficulty of predicting the next step is no reason to be reluctant about this step. Nuclear test ban negotiations have long been a symbol of East-West disagreement. If this treaty can also be a symbol--if it can symbolize the end of one era and the beginning of another--if both sides by this treaty can gain confidence and experience in peaceful collaboration--then this short and simple treaty may well become an historic mark in man's age-old pursuit of peace.

Western policies have long been designed to persuade the Soviet Union to renounce aggression, direct or indirect, so that their people and all people may live and let live in peace. The unlimited testing of new weapons of war cannot lead towards that end--but this treaty, if it can be followed by further progress, can clearly move in that direction.

I do not say that a world without aggression or threats of war would be an easy world. It will bring new problems, new challenges from the Communists, new dangers of relaxing our vigilance or of mistaking their intent.

But those dangers pale in comparison to those of the spiralling arms race and a collision course towards war. Since the beginning of history, war has been mankind's constant companion. It has been the rule, not the exception. Even a nation as young and as peace-loving as our own has fought through eight wars. And three times in the last two years and a half I have been required to report to you as President that this Nation and the Soviet Union stood on the verge of direct military confrontation--in Laos, in Berlin, and in Cuba.

A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, "the survivors would envy the dead." For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world's slide toward final annihilation.

Second, this treaty can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout. Our own atmospheric tests last year were conducted under conditions which restricted such fallout to an absolute minimum. But over the years the number and the yield of weapons tested have rapidly increased and so have the radioactive hazards from such testing. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe.

Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard--and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby--who may be born long after we are gone--should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.

Nor does this affect the nuclear powers alone. These tests befoul the air of all men and all nations, the committed and the uncommitted alike, without their knowledge and without their consent. That is why the continuation of atmospheric testing causes so many countries to regard all nuclear powers as equally evil; and we can hope that its prevention will enable those countries to see the world more clearly, while enabling all the world to breathe more easily.

Third, this treaty can be a step toward preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to nations not now possessing them. During the next several years, in addition to the four current nuclear powers, a small but significant number of nations will have the intellectual, physical, and financial resources to produce both nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them. In time, it is estimated, many other nations will have either this capacity or other ways of obtaining nuclear warheads, even as missiles can be commercially purchased today.

I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament. There would only be the increased chance of accidental war, and an increased necessity for the great powers to involve themselves in what otherwise would be local conflicts.

If only one thermonuclear bomb were to be dropped on any American, Russian, or any other city, whether it was launched by accident or design, by a madman or by an enemy, by a large nation or by a small, from any corner of the world, that one bomb could release more destructive power on the inhabitants of that one helpless city than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War.

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union nor the United Kingdom nor France can look forward to that day with equanimity. We have a great obligation, all four nuclear powers have a great obligation, to use whatever time remains to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to persuade other countries not to test, transfer, acquire, possess, or produce such weapons.

This treaty can be the opening wedge in that campaign. It provides that none of the parties will assist other nations to test in the forbidden environments. It opens the door for further agreements on the control of nuclear weapons, and it is open for all nations to sign, for it is in the interest of all nations, and already we have heard from a number of countries who wish to join with us promptly.

Fourth, and finally, this treaty can limit the nuclear arms race in ways which, on balance, will strengthen our Nation's security far more than the continuation of unrestricted testing. For in today's world, a nation's security does not always increase as its arms increase, when its adversary is doing the same, and unlimited competition in the testing and development of new types of destructive nuclear weapons will not make the world safer for either side. Under this limited treaty, on the other hand, the testing of other nations could never be sufficient to offset the ability of our strategic forces to deter or survive a nuclear attack and to penetrate and destroy an aggressor's homeland.

We have, and under this treaty we will continue to have, the nuclear strength that we need. It is true that the Soviets have tested nuclear weapons of a yield higher than that which we thought to be necessary, but the hundred megaton bomb of which they spoke 2 years ago does not and will not change the balance of strategic power. The United States has chosen, deliberately, to concentrate on more mobile and more efficient weapons, with lower but entirely sufficient yield, and our security is, therefore, not impaired by the treaty I am discussing.

It is also true, as Mr. Khrushchev would agree, that nations cannot afford in these matters to rely simply on the good faith of their adversaries. We have not, therefore, overlooked the risk of secret violations. There is at present a possibly that deep in outer space, that hundreds and thousands and millions of miles away from the earth illegal tests might go undetected. But we already have the capability to construct a system of observation that would make such tests almost impossible to conceal, and we can decide at any time whether such a system is needed in the light of the limited risk to us and the limited reward to others of violations attempted at that range. For any tests which might be conducted so far out in space, which cannot be conducted more easily and efficiently and legally underground, would necessarily be of such a magnitude that they would be extremely difficult to conceal. We can also employ new devices to check on the testing of smaller weapons in the lower atmosphere. Any violations, moreover, involves, along with the risk of detection, the end of the treaty and the worldwide consequences for the violator.

Secret violations are possible and secret preparations for a sudden withdrawal are possible, and thus our own vigilance and strength must be maintained, as we remain ready to withdraw and resume all forms of testing, if we must. But it would be a mistake to assume that this treaty will be quickly broken. The gains of illegal testing are obviously slight compared to their cost, and the hazard of discovery, and the nations which have initialed and will sign this treaty prefer it, in my judgment to unrestricted testing as a matter of their own self-interests for these nations, too, and all nations, have a stake in limiting the arms race, in holding the spread of nuclear weapons, and in breathing air that is not radioactive. While it may be theoretically possible to demonstrate the risks inherent in any treaty, and such risks in this treaty are small, the far greater risks to our security are the risks of unrestricted testing, the risk of a nuclear arms race, the risk of new nuclear powers, nuclear pollution, and nuclear war

This limited test ban, in our most careful judgment, is safer by far for the United States than an unlimited nuclear arms race. For all these reasons, I am hopeful that this Nation will promptly approve the limited test ban treaty. There will, of course, be debate in the country and in the Senate. The Constitution wisely requires the advice and consent of the Senate to all treaties, and that consultation has already begun. All this is as it should be. A document which may mark an historic and constructive opportunity for the world deserves an historic and constructive debate.

It is my hope that all of you will take part in that debate, for this treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington. This debate will involve military, scientific, and political experts, but it must not be left to them alone. The right and the responsibility are yours.

If we are to open new doorways to peace, if we are to seize this rare opportunity for progress, if we are to be as bold and farsighted in our control of weapons as we have been in their invention, then let us now show all the world on this side of the wall and the other that a strong America also stands for peace. There is no cause for complacency.

We have learned at times past that the spirit of one moment or place can be gone in the next. We have been disappointed more than once, and we have no illusions now that there are shortcuts on the road to peace. At many points around the globe the Communists are continuing their efforts to exploit weakness and poverty. Their concentration of nuclear and conventional arms must still be deterred.

The familiar contest between choice and coercion, the familiar places of danger and conflict, are all still there, in Cuba, in Southeast Asia, in Berlin, and all around the globe, still requiring all the strength and the vigilance that we can muster. Nothing could more greatly damage our cause than if we and our allies were to believe that peace has already been achieved, and that our strength and unity were no longer required.

But now, for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring. No one can say whether the time has come for an easing of the struggle. But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action, and this is the place to begin. According to the ancient Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.

Thank you and good night.

SOURCE:

http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/history/us1945/docs/j072663.htm

More important speeches and documents...

http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/history/us1945/prez/kennedy.htm

More on JFK and the NTBT:

http://www.clw.org/archive/coalition/brief15.htm

THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

by Michael Morrissey

The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson
merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the
assassination.

1. JFK's policy

In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime,
though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised
withdrawal at that early date:

The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to
it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with
Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself
because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with
Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts
about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on
the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

'But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected,' Kennedy told Mansfield....

After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, 'In 1965 I'll become
one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a
Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from
Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do
it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected'
(O'Donnell, p. 16)."

CONTINUED...

http://eserver.org/govt/gulf-war/jfk-lbj-and-vietnam.txt

Vietnam Withdrawal Plans

The 1990s saw the gaps in the declassified record on Vietnam filled in—with spring 1963 plans for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. An initial 1000 man pullout (of the approximately 17,000 stationed in Vietnam at that time) was initiated in October 1963, though it was diluted and rendered meaningless in the aftermath of Kennedy's death. The longer-range plans called for complete withdrawal of U. S. forces and a "Vietnamization" of the war, scheduled to happen largely after the 1964 elections.

The debate over whether withdrawal plans were underway in 1963 is now settled. What remains contentious is the "what if" scenario. What would Kennedy have done if he lived, given the worsening situation in Vietnam after the coup which resulted in the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem?

At the core of the debate is this question: Did President Kennedy really believe the rosy picture of the war effort being conveyed by his military advisors. Or was he onto the game, and instead couching his withdrawal plans in the language of optimism being fed to the White House?

The landmark book JFK and Vietnam asserted the latter, that Kennedy knew he was being deceived and played a deception game of his own, using the military's own rosy analysis as a justification for withdrawal. Newman's analysis, with its dark implications regarding JFK's murder, has been attacked from both mainstream sources and even those on the left. No less than Noam Chomsky devoted an entire book to disputing the thesis.

But declassifications since Newman's 1992 book have only served to buttress the thesis that the Vietnam withdrawal, kept under wraps to avoid a pre-election attack from the right, was Kennedy's plan regardless of the war's success. New releases have also brought into focus the chilling visions of the militarists of that era—four Presidents were advised to use nuclear weapons in Indochina. A recent book by David Kaiser, American Tragedy, shows a military hell bent on war in Asia.

CONTINUED with very important IMFO links:

http://www.history-matters.com/vietnam1963.htm

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq

The evidence is clear: JFK decided to withdraw from Vietnam a month before he was assassinated. Setting the record straight is crucial as Baghdad continues to explode.

By James K. Galbraith
Slon.com

EXCERPT...

Newman received early support from a figure who had, up to that moment, remained silent on Vietnam for nearly 30 years. In 1993, Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense to both Kennedy and Johnson, gave Newman the relevant part of an oral history he had recorded in 1986. In that document -- of which McNamara had made no public use -- McNamara states that Kennedy had made a decision to withdraw in spite of growing pessimism over the conduct of the war. Neither then nor later has McNamara ever tried to use this history to change the perception of his own responsibility for how the war was eventually conducted.

McNamara's book, "In Retrospect," appeared in 1995. I bought a copy the day it hit Austin, Texas, as I knew it would test McNamara's capacity for candor on this point. The statement that Kennedy made a "decision" to begin a withdrawal appears flatly in the table of contents. And there are several matter-of-fact pages that report on the decision meeting of Oct. 2, 1963, at which McNamara recommended, and Kennedy agreed to, the withdrawal plan. But how well could McNamara document his case?

An opportunity to find out came soon. On April 1, 1995, McNamara came to Austin to speak at the LBJ Library, to an enormous crowd. I drafted a question (of which, sadly, no copy survives) referring very specifically to the passages on Kennedy's withdrawal decision and asking for details. I printed it on a full page in large type and sent it up to the panel of screeners who were assigned to sort through scribbled questions from the audience -- a system designed, no doubt, to protect McNamara from verbal abuse.

My question ended up in front of Neal Spelce, then anchorman for the local CBS affiliate. I suppose Neal assumed that it had been planted by the chair. He started to read it, seemed to realize that his inference was incorrect, and swallowed the rest. But McNamara understood where my question had been leading. He confirmed the "decision" to withdraw, and gave an account of Kennedy's taping system and of how he had gotten access to these tapes. The scene was recorded on a videotape, which I possess. I wrote an account for the Texas Observer, modestly neglecting to mention my own slightly subversive part:

"Why is this issue explosive? Because with only two obscure exceptions none of the dozens of books on the history of Vietnam decisionmaking over the past thirty years has winkled out the story of Kennedy's decision to withdraw. It is not in David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest", not in Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam", not in Richard Reeves' "President Kennedy," not in any of the scholarly volumes. ...

Now comes McNamara, with confirmation of Newman's argument and the flat statement that there exists a tape as proof. ... . It might be added that McNamara is on record as far back as July, 1986 confirming Kennedy's decision to withdraw, in an oral history closely held since then by the Kennedy Library. McNamara's oral history also makes plain, though his book fudges the issue, that Kennedy's decision was based on McNamara's own recommendation to withdraw in spite of the fact that the U.S. was losing the war."

CONTINUED...

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/11/22/vietnam/index.html

THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

by Michael Morrissey

The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson
merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the
assassination.

SNIP...

Just before he was killed he repeated this commitment:

"'They keep telling me to send combat units over there,' the President said to us one day in October (1963). 'That means sending draftees, along with volunteer regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I'll never send draftees over there to fight'." (O'Donnell, p. 383).

CONTINUED...

http://eserver.org/govt/gulf-war/jfk-lbj-and-vietnam.txt

The Secret History of the CIA

by Joseph Trento:

EXCERPT…

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest accompanying them? To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy. So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.”

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960, President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate “with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy.” By 1963, according to Corson, Harriman was running “Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.”

The president had begun to suspect that not everyone on his national security team was loyal. As Corson put it, “Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president. He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

At the heart of the murders was the sudden and strange recall of Saigon Station Chief Jocko Richardson and his replacement by a no-name team barely known to history. The key member was a Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, who took his orders, not from the normal CIA hierarchy but from Harriman and Forrestal.

According to Corson, “John Michael Dunn was known to be in touch with the coup plotters,” although Dunn’s role has never been made public. Corson believes that Richardson was removed so that Dunn, assigned to Ambassador Lodge for “special operations,” could act without hindrance.

SOURCE:

“The Secret History of the CIA.” Joseph Trento. 2001, Prima Publishing. pp. 334-335.

WATERGATE CHRONOLOGY

EXCERPT...

THE WATERGATE CRIME LIST:

EXCERPT...

3. "Dirty Tricks"

Like the "plumbers," the "Dirty Tricks" team was set up in the White House for the purpose of damaging and embarrassing key Democrats. In fact, the Democrats didn't need any help--they were doing just fine by themselves. The activities ranged from ordering pizzas delivered to Democratic campaign offices to forging letters that were used to discredit and embarrass Democratic leaders like Senator Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson. Using materials he culled from the Pentagon Papers, E. Howard Hunt forged cables accusing President John Kennedy of ordering the toppling and assassination of Vietnam's Prime Minister Diem in 1963. (The assassination certainly was aided by the CIA, but JFK's direct involvement has never been proven). Hunt then tried unsuccessfully to plant these cables with major news magazines. An "enemies list" was created, an extensive collection of opposition politicians, entertainers, newsmen, and other prominent public figures deemed disloyal by the White House. The list was used to target the people that the White House wanted to "screw" through the use of selected federal agencies. The list included Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, and CBS newsman Daniel Schorr.

Source: http://cas.memphis.edu/~sherman/chronowa...

JFK informed Diem on August 14, 1963 that the U.S. government would be unable to continue their present relationship, if Diem did not issue a statement reaffirming a conciliatory policy towards the Buddhists and other critics of his regime.

To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy (1). The news reached Kennedy the following day and according to David Kaiser, Kennedy left the room in shock (4).

On November 4, 1963 there is a recorded conversation in the White House about the "suicide" and it becomes clear during the conversation that there was more to it. John F. Kennedy says the following:

"I think one of the problems…is how we square a military revolt against a constitutionally elected government which we approve as opposed to our position on Honduras and the Dominican. How do we square that?" (5)

And they express their worries about the possible involvement of the U.S. Government especially since Hilsman previously wrote a memo: "tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in an interim period of breakdown (in the) central government." (5)

Kennedy immediately ordered William R. Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: "On instructions from Averell Harriman... The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant." (1)

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960, President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate "with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy." By 1963, according to Corson, Harriman was running "Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.” (1)

(...) At the heart of the murders was the sudden and strange recall of Sagon Station Chief Jocko Richardson and his replacement by a no-name team barely known to history. The key member was a Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, who took his orders, not from the normal CIA hierarchy but from Harriman and Forrestal. (1)

According to Corson, "John Michael Dunn was known to be in touch with the coup plotters," although Dunn’s role has never been made public. Corson believes that Richardson was removed so that Dunn, assigned to Ambassador Lodge for "special operations," could act without hindrance. (1)

During the Nixon administration cables were released by the State Department which said that the Diem assassination was ordered by John F. Kennedy, however during the second Hunt v. Liberty Lobby trial, E. Howard Hunt testified the following under oath:

EXCERPT...

JFK and the Diem Coup

by John Prados

EXCERPT...

There were two major episodes where the American involvement in these Vietnamese political events would be the most intense, although the U.S. remained heavily engaged in Vietnam throughout. We have for the most part selected documents that reflect high level action by the United States government-meetings with President Kennedy and his chief lieutenants. Our document selections reflect these intense sequences, but they are drawn from a much larger set of materials in the National Security Archive's U.S. Policy in the Vietnam War, Part I: 1954-1968. The first period of intense activity occurred in August 1963, when South Vietnamese military officers initially planned to secure American support for their coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. This period included an incident that became very well-known in U.S. government circles, in which State Department official Roger Hilsman originated a cable giving the South Vietnamese generals the green light for a coup against Diem (Document 2). Much of the succeeding U.S. activity revolved upon making it seem that policy had been rescinded without in fact changing it. The second high point came in October 1963, when final preparations were made for the coup that was carried out.


In the wake of the coup against Diem and the assassination of the Saigon leader and his brother, many observers have wrestled with the question of President Kennedy's involvement in the murders. In 1975 the Church Committee investigating CIA assassination programs investigated the Diem coup as one of its cases. (Note 8) Kennedy loyalists and administration participants have argued that the President had nothing to do with the murders, while some have charged Kennedy with, in effect, conspiring to kill Diem. When the coup did begin the security precautions taken by the South Vietnamese generals included giving the U.S. embassy only four minutes warning, and then cutting off telephone service to the American military advisory group. Washington's information was partial as a result, and continued so through November 2, the day Diem died. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recounts that Kennedy was meeting with his senior advisers about Vietnam on the morning of November 2 (see Document 25) when NSC staff aide Michael V. Forrestal entered the Cabinet Room holding a cable (Document 24 provides the same information) reporting the death. (Note 9) Both McNamara and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a participant as White House historian, record that President Kennedy blanched at the news and was shocked at the murder of Diem. (Note 10) Historian Howard Jones notes that CIA director John McCone and his subordinates were amazed that Kennedy should be shocked at the deaths, given how unpredictable were coups d'etat. (Note 11)

Records of the Kennedy national security meetings, both here and in our larger collection, show that none of JFK's conversations about a coup in Saigon featured consideration of what might physically happen to Ngo Dinh Diem or Ngo Dinh Nhu. The audio record of the October 29th meeting which we cite below also reveals no discussion of this issue. That meeting, the last held at the White House to consider a coup before this actually took place, would have been the key moment for such a conversation. The conclusion of the Church Committee agrees that Washington gave no consideration to killing Diem. (Note 12) The weight of evidence therefore supports the view that President Kennedy did not conspire in the death of Diem. However, there is also the exceedingly strange transcript of Diem's final phone conversation with Ambassador Lodge on the afternoon of the coup (Document 23), which carries the distinct impression that Diem is being abandoned by the U.S. Whether this represents Lodge's contribution, or JFK's wishes, is not apparent from the evidence available today.


A second charge has to do with Kennedy administration denials that it had had anything to do with the coup itself. The documentary record is replete with evidence that President Kennedy and his advisers, both individually and collectively, had a considerable role in the coup overall, by giving initial support to Saigon military officers uncertain what the U.S. response might be, by withdrawing U.S. aid from Diem himself, and by publicly pressuring the Saigon government in a way that made clear to South Vietnamese that Diem was isolated from his American ally. In addition, at several of his meetings (Documents 7, 19, 22) Kennedy had CIA briefings and led discussions based on the estimated balance between pro- and anti-coup forces in Saigon that leave no doubt the United States had a detailed interest in the outcome of a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. The CIA also provided $42,000 in immediate support money to the plotters the morning of the coup, carried by Lucien Conein, an act prefigured in administration planning Document 17).

CONTINUED (with PDF downloads of import)...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm

JFK Cuba crisis tapes released

By Jon Marcus
A ssociated Press

BOSTON (AP) -117 ‹ At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, one of President John F. Kennedy's top military commanders warned him that failing to invade the island would be like backing down to Hitler's initial demands in Europe.

"This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay told Kennedy on Oct. 19, 1962, according to newly declassified White House tape recordings released Thursday.

LeMay's comment "was an amazing thing to say to any president, but it was a particularly amazing thing to say to this president," said Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where the tape recordings were released. "It's a deep personal insult."

Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time of the 1938 Munich conference, where the British and French agreed to let Nazi Germany take land from Czechoslovakia in exch ange for a short-lived promise of peace. The elder Kennedy's support of appeasement later was strongly criticized and may have cost him any hope of running for national office.

LeMay, like other military leaders, advocated immediate military intervention to destroy the Soviet missiles and unfinished silos that had been detected by aerial reconnaissance in Cuba. He said blockading ships bound for Cuba, as other presidential advisers urged, would lead to war anyway.

President Kennedy, who privately called LeMay "field marshal," did not respond to the remark and the meeting went on to cover other military and diplomatic issues.

CONTINUED...

http://www.jhu.edu/~newslett/10-25-96/News/JFK_Cuba_crisis_tapes_released.html

JFK, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone

Gary Aguilar
November, 2005

EXCERPT...

The years that followed have not been kind to those who had stoned the director. “Received wisdom” has been swamped by a tsunami of new and credible scholarship brought about by the declassifications of literally millions of pages of government secrets. The impetus for their release came directly from Stone, who publicly nagged about the absurdity of the government saying the case was “open and shut” while suppressing mountains of the evidence.

SNIP...

University of Alabama historian Howard Jones said that when he began his study he “was dubious” about the assertions of “Kennedy apologists he would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam and America’s longest war would never have occurred.” But “what strikes anyone reading the veritable mountain of documents relating to Vietnam,” Jones admitted to his own surprise, “is that the only high official in the Kennedy administration who consistently opposed the commitment of U.S. combat forces was the president.”<13> “The materials undergirding this study demonstrate that President Kennedy intended to reverse the nation’s special military commitment to the South Vietnamese made in early 1961.”<14>

Echoing Jones, journalist Fred Kaplan wrote that, “the argument that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam becomes truly compelling only when you place skepticism about the war in the context of his growing disenchantment with his advisers … .”<15>

SNIP...

Once-secret records demonstrate a pattern in Kennedy we are unaccustomed to seeing in presidents: rather than JFK following his senior advisers on critical issues – the way “good” presidents usually do, the way LBJ did – Kennedy often ignored it.

He withstood pressure from the CIA and the military to follow-up the foundering Bay of Pigs invasion with a military assault on Cuba.<18> He rejected advice to use force in Laos, pushing against the defense establishment to achieve an ultimately successful negotiated settlement.<19> He shouldered aside the defense and intelligence establishments to advance a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.<20> And as historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikov discovered from live voice recordings made during the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK was often “the only one in the room who is determined not to go to war.”<21>

This is the same Kennedy we discover in Perils of Dominance, an important new book by Gareth Porter.<22> Porter documents in chilling detail that, in isolation and with virtually no real allies to help him, Kennedy orchestrated numerous Machiavellian ruses to frustrate the “national security bureaucracy’s” determination to march headlong into war.

CONTINUED...

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vietnam/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone.htm

Nixon tape blame JFK for Vietnam

Presidential Tapes: Nixon Wanted to Show Up JFK

Here are some newly released Nixon tapes, which were kept secret for years on the grounds of national security. The tapes were released last week by the National Archives, and transcripts of them were prepared by the privately financed Nixon Presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif.

July 1, 1971, the Oval Office. The president sees a silver lining in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which undermined support for the war:

Nixon: Murder of Diem -- Kennedy decided to go forward and got us involved, and it shows that Kennedy was the one who got us in the damn war. We got the Kennedys in this thing now.

Oct. 8, 1971, the Oval Office. John Ehrlichman, the domestic policy chief, suggests that presidential aide Charles Colson be given the job of digging up embarrassing files:

Ehrlichman: Suppose we get all the Diem stuff and supposing there's something we can really hang Teddy ((Kennedy)) or the Kennedy clan with. I'm going to want to put that in Colson's hands.

Nixon: Yep.

Ehrlichman: And we're going to really run with it.

Aug. 11, 1971, the Oval Office. The president and Colson discuss possible congressional hearings in the wake of the Pentagon Papers' release:

Colson: Can you imagine Averell Harriman ((ambassador at large under Kennedy)) before that committee, explaining why he didn't get Diem out of Vietnam when he had the chance?

Nixon: I want that out. I want him before the committee. ... I said that he was murdered, that they murder. ... I knew what the bastards were up to.

Sept. 18, 1971, the Oval Office:

Nixon: We've got all these people who were involved in this -- and they're all, in one way or another, involved in the assassination of Diem. ... The Diem incident is perhaps the best ((unintelligible)), because it involves Harriman, who is ((Sen. Edmund )) Muskie's adviser ((in the 1972 presidential election campaign)), and it involves Kennedy. ...

Ehrlichman: ((Richard)) Helms ((director of Central Intelligence)) would have a pluperfect fit.

Nixon: That doesn't bother me a bit. We owe Helms nothing. He owes us everything -- we kept him on. And we're going to let the CIA take a whipping on this. That doesn't bother me a bit and I'm not going to hear that argument from Henry ((Kissinger, the national security adviser)) or anyone else. This Diem incident's got to get out. It's just got to get out. ... I want the story of the Diem thing, everything in it -- I want it by the end of next week. That's an order. They will get it to me. I will personally ((tell)) the whole story -- I intend to have it -- on the Diem incident. ... The entire file on the Diem incident.

Ehrlichman: There's some CIA stuff on the Bay of Pigs, apparently, that they will die first before they give us that, I understand. There's also some other stuff, some internal stuff over there --

Ehrlichman: -- that we know about, but getting to it is like that big black block in Mecca, you know. ... If we could just get a friend in the hierarchy over there who would let us in. ...

Nixon: I consider it a top priority that I want the Diem story. Also on the Bay of Pigs thing, just -- I want an order to Helms and ((deputy CIA director Robert)) Cushman that for my purposes, not for public release, I am to have the Bay of Pigs story. Now that's an order. And I expect it in one week, or I want his resignation on my desk. Put it as coldly as that. The Bay of Pigs story, the total story. Tell him I know a lot about it myself. But I've got to have it -- just because I'll be questioned about it myself, and I want to be able to know what to say. The Bay of Pigs story and the Diem story. ... The whole folderol -- the way it happened, I've just got to know. ... I will not brook any opposition on this. I've screwed around long enough. I've told Henry ((Kissinger)) and he has really dropped the ball on this.

March 28, 1973, the Executive Office Building. Despite Nixon's insistence, secret CIA and State Department files on the Diem assassination and the Bay of Pigs are not made public. The President's frustration continues for months, and years:

Nixon: Did you get the word on the declassification of everything over 10 years? That's got to move fast. And not only ((unintelligible)) but the other one's important -- on the Bay of Pigs. Just get the damn thing out, will you? That's going to be quite a story -- a few little morsels. Do you agree?

Haldeman: Yeah.

Nixon: Also gets into the Diem murder and the whole Diem thing. Now the war is over and we're not going to take Henry's crap. Henry's a little bit involved in that himself. That's why he doesn't want some of it declassified.

May 13, 1973, the White House. A telephone conversation between the president and Gen. Alexander Haig, his military adviser. The president, still harping on Diem and the Bay of Pigs, mentions the White House operative E. Howard Hunt, who fabricated diplomatic cables and documents implicating Kennedy:

Nixon: I think we should just declassify everything going back -- everything that's 10 years old, and declassify the whole Bay of Pigs, plus the Diem thing. Goddammit, you know, that's -- that can only be helpful. Now you say, "Well, it'll stir things up in Vietnam." The hell with it. You don't like that, huh?

Haig: I'm not sure, sir. I think it's a thing that should be considered. ...

Nixon: Doggone it, I'd like to do it, because -- look, I have not looked at the Bay of Pigs stuff, but I know there's stuff in there that makes ((McGeorge)) Bundy ((Kennedy's national security adviser)) look like a goddamn -- uh, you know, terrible. ... Goddammit, you know what happened is, they set in motion a chain of events which resulted in the murder of Diem.

Haig: Oh, there's no question about that. None. ... In fact, you know, the vice president's aide was there. He was Lodge's assistant ((when Henry Cabot Lodge was ambassador to South Vietnam)). I talked to him some years ago about that.

Nixon: What'd he say?

Haig: He said ... the poor guy called Lodge on the phone, and said, "They're going to kill me, for God's sake, send some Marine guards up here."

Nixon: This is a good juicy thing to get out. ... I mean, that was what Hunt was looking into, you know, and screwed it up. But the point is, there's a hell of a record there. Now, somebody -- have you got some trusted person that can look at that goddamn thing, and let's declassify it. It's 10 years old, huh?

Haig: Yes, I can get somebody to do it.

May 14, 1973, the Executive Office Building:

Nixon: I want the Diem, and the Bay of Pigs totally declassified, and I want it done in 48 hours. Now you tell Haig that. It'll drive him up the wall, too. But I want it done. Do you understand? This is 10 years old! Declassify it. We've got a couple of ((expletive)) working on this thing. Do you see any reason why it shouldn't be declassified, Ron?

Ronald Ziegler, press secretary: No, I see no reason.

Nixon: I want them to get off -- now, Haig is disturbed because of the ironies involved in the murder of Diem. Now listen, this government murdered him. I know it and you know it too.


http://www.anusha.com/nixontap.htm

Papers reveal JFK efforts on Vietnam

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | June 6, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Newly uncovered documents from both American and Polish archives show that President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union secretly sought ways to find a diplomatic settlement to the war in Vietnam, starting three years before the United States sent combat troops.

Kennedy, relying on his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, planned to reach out to the North Vietnamese in April 1962 through a senior Indian diplomat, according to a secret State Department cable that was never dispatched.

Back-channel discussions also were attempted in January 1963, this time through the Polish government, which relayed the overture to Soviet leaders. New Polish records indicate Moscow was much more open than previously thought to using its influence with North Vietnam to cool a Cold War flash point.

The attempts to use India and Poland as go-betweens ultimately fizzled, partly because of North Vietnamese resistance and partly because Kennedy faced pressure from advisers to expand American military involvement, according to the documents and interviews with scholars. Both India and Poland were members of the International Control Commission that monitored the 1954 agreement that divided North and South Vietnam.

The documents are seen by former Kennedy aides as new evidence of his true intentions in Vietnam. The question of whether Kennedy would have escalated the war or sought some diplomatic exit has been heatedly debated by historians and officials who served under both Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.

CONTINUED...

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/06/papers_reveal_jfk_efforts_on_vietnam/

The War Room

What Robert Dallek's new biography doesn't tell you about JFK and Vietnam.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, May 19, 2003, at 7:31 PM ET

Would John F. Kennedy have gone to full-scale war in Vietnam, like his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson? This may be the most haunting question of the past 40 years. Certainly it accounts for whatever traces still survive of the "Camelot myth." For all the revelations of scandal that have tainted the image of JFK, there remains the monumental what if: Had Kennedy dodged the bullets in Dealey Plaza, might America have dodged the nightmare of the subsequent decade—the 50,000 body bags, the Chicago riots, the election of Nixon, the cynicism of a generation?

The historian Robert Dallek doesn't state the matter this dramatically, but his new book, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, argues that JFK would not have waged war in Vietnam. I agree. But if I didn't, this book would not have persuaded me. There's a compelling case to be made, but Dallek doesn't nail it.

SNIP...

What, then, is the compelling case for why JFK wouldn't have gone to war? Those who argue that JFK would have gone into Vietnam just as LBJ did make the point that Kennedy was every bit as much a Cold Warrior as Johnson. They also note that the advisers who lured Johnson into war—Bundy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and the rest—had been appointed by Kennedy; they were very much Kennedy's men.

But this is where there is a crucial difference between JFK and LBJ—a difference that Dallek misses. Over the course of his 1,000 days as president, Kennedy grew increasingly leery of these advisers. He found himself embroiled in too many crises where their judgment proved wrong and his own proved right. Dallek does note—and very colorfully so—Kennedy's many conflicts with his military advisers in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But he neglects the instances—which grew in number and intensity as his term progressed—in which he displayed equal disenchantment with his civilian advisers. Yet Kennedy never told Johnson about this disenchantment. It didn't help that Johnson was a bit cowed by these advisers' intellectual sheen and Harvard degrees; Kennedy, who had his Harvard degree, was not.

SNIP...

However, Dallek fails to note the key revelation of those tapes—that on Saturday, Oct. 27, the last day of the crisis, when Khrushchev offered the Cuba-for-Turkey trade, every U.S. official in the room was virulently opposed to the deal and wanted to bomb the Russian missile sites—everyone but JFK and Undersecretary of State George Ball. (Not insignificantly, Ball became the top internal dissident on Vietnam policy during LBJ's presidency.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.slate.com/id/2083136

Robert McNamara

The Observer

EXCERPT...

The Cuban Missile Crisis is never far from his mind. "We came very, very close" McNamara confides slowly, "closer than we knew at the time". He treats it as a near death experience, constantly replaying the options and going over what might have happened. As the sole surviving member of Kennedy's Cabinet during the crisis, he feels that this is knowledge that he is duty bound to pass on. Living up to his reputation as the 'Human IBM machine' he has dissected the experience in minute detail - taking part in a five year research project that interviewed protagonists on either side. He seems to have a near perfect recollection of conversations that happened over forty years ago - complaining that Hollywood's recent version of the Cuban Missile Crisis crisis, Thirteen Days, put many of his best lines, gleaned from contemporary tapes, into Kennedy's mouth.

That film presents McNamara stopping the Pentagon bullet-heads from firing shots at Russian submarines on the edge of the blockade area. Did this happen? "They made the chiefs appear much more belligerent than they were. I think that's unfortunate. But we ultimately removed the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Anderson. He was the only chief of staff in the history of the country who has ever been removed in service by presidential action and the movie shows some of the reasons why". He describes the crucial exchange in a room with 30 admirals: "At one point Anderson and I were having an argument and he said: 'Mr Secretary, the navy's been handling blockades successfully since John Paul Jones. If you let us handle this one, then we'll handle it successfully'. I replied 'have you heard what I said? There won't be a shot fired without my permission, is that understood?' Then I walked out of the room".

McNamara did not realise how crucial that exchange had been until forty years later when, a few months ago, he travelled to Moscow for a showing of the film. Afterwards a "man with a straggly beard who looked like Bin Laden" got up to ask a question. It turned out to be one of the Russian submarine commanders, who revealed that the subs approaching the blockade were carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes. He claimed that they had orders to shoot 'when they thought it was desirable' if they were out of radio contact. Several did lose touch with Moscow, and continued preparing to launch for days after Kruschev had ended the crisis. McNamara has since discovered that when these submarine crews returned to the USSR they were severely criticised and disciplined because they had not launched nuclear weapons. He is visibly shaken by this recent discovery: "We had never heard of that until that time. And I was so shocked I lost my cool".

CONTINUED...

http://markleonard.net/journalism/mcnamara/

Vietnam Withdrawal Plans

The 1990s saw the gaps in the declassified record on Vietnam filled in—with spring 1963 plans for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. An initial 1000 man pullout (of the approximately 17,000 stationed in Vietnam at that time) was initiated in October 1963, though it was diluted and rendered meaningless in the aftermath of Kennedy's death. The longer-range plans called for complete withdrawal of U. S. forces and a "Vietnamization" of the war, scheduled to happen largely after the 1964 elections.

The debate over whether withdrawal plans were underway in 1963 is now settled. What remains contentious is the "what if" scenario. What would Kennedy have done if he lived, given the worsening situation in Vietnam after the coup which resulted in the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem?

At the core of the debate is this question: Did President Kennedy really believe the rosy picture of the war effort being conveyed by his military advisors. Or was he onto the game, and instead couching his withdrawal plans in the language of optimism being fed to the White House?

The landmark book JFK and Vietnam asserted the latter, that Kennedy knew he was being deceived and played a deception game of his own, using the military's own rosy analysis as a justification for withdrawal. Newman's analysis, with its dark implications regarding JFK's murder, has been attacked from both mainstream sources and even those on the left. No less than Noam Chomsky devoted an entire book to disputing the thesis.

But declassifications since Newman's 1992 book have only served to buttress the thesis that the Vietnam withdrawal, kept under wraps to avoid a pre-election attack from the right, was Kennedy's plan regardless of the war's success. New releases have also brought into focus the chilling visions of the militarists of that era—four Presidents were advised to use nuclear weapons in Indochina. A recent book by David Kaiser, American Tragedy, shows a military hell bent on war in Asia.

The Vietnam war, instead of ending before it began in earnest, bloomed in the mid-1960s into a nightmare conflict that consumed 58,000 American lives and an unknown number of Vietnamese in the millions. Within America, the divide over the war existed not only in the streets but also within the halls of power, where many decided that the cost was too high.

CONTINUED...

http://www.history-matters.com/vietnam1963.htm

Cooking the Books:
A Requirement for Aggressive War

by Gareth Porter

The controversy over "cooking the books" on Iraq intelligence to promote an aggressive war might make one think that Dick Cheney and his minions were somehow breaking new ground. But the precedent for fabricating a threat to justify the use of military force was set by the high-ranking national security officials who brought us the Vietnam War more than four decades ago. The Vietnam hawks wrote the book on how to get around inconvenient intelligence analysis.

I'm not referring to the well-known fact that the second alleged attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened. The Vietnam-era equivalent of today's neocon cabal created a Communist threat to all of Southeast Asia out of whole cloth, because the intelligence analysis of the issue said the opposite of what they wanted.

The story of that first conspiracy to fake an external threat, which I discovered in writing a book on how and why the United States went to war over Vietnam, suggests that "cooking the books" is a fundamental characteristic of U.S. national security elites bent on war.

Just as the Bush war party believed it had to demonstrate a WMD threat from Iraq and links between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks to sell the invasion of Iraq, the top national security officials of the early 1960s felt the need to concoct a Communist threat to all of non-Communist Southeast Asia.

Inconveniently for that cabal, however, outside of South Vietnam and Laos, the non-Communist Southeast was still enjoying a period of relative calm and stability that had begun in the mid-1950s. Communist insurgencies in Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines had long since died out, and the threat of internal Communist subversion was remote at best.

Reflecting that reality, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in the very first weeks of the Kennedy administration asserting that, even if the Communist movements took power in South Vietnam and Laos, the rest of non-Communist Southeast Asia would remain independent. The worst that could happen, according to the estimate, was that Thailand and other states in the region would "take a neutralist position between the two power blocs."

CONTINUED...

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8348