Donald Trump (41%)
Barack Obama (21%)
Richard Nixon (10%)
Jimmy Carter (8%)
George W. Bush (6%)
Bill Clinton (4%)
Lyndon B. Johnson (tie) (2%)
Ronald Reagan (tie) (2%)
Gerald R. Ford (1%)
Harry S. Truman (1%)
Dwight Eisenhower (tie), John F. Kennedy (tie) (less than 1%)
As Richard Mahoney depicted in his landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Kennedy began to make formal speeches attacking the orthodoxies of both political parties. He became a veritable one-man band warning that the United States had to stand for something more than just anti-communism in the Third World. He did this at the risk of alienating the leaders of his own party, e.g., Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson. He specifically attacked Acheson’s State Department for not recognizing the needs and aspirations of the people they were supposed to be serving in the areas of Africa and Asia. About one month before Dien Bien Phu fell, Kennedy took the floor of the Senate to make a long speech about America in Indochina. He began by saying the US could not declare war on nationalism: "To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile… no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an enemy of the people, which has the sympathy and covert support of the people." It’s important to note that although Burns and Novick use Kennedy’s phrase about the Viet Minh being everywhere and nowhere, they do not attribute it to him.
JFK’s opposition to the Dulles/Eisenhower backing of French colonialism in the Third World culminated in 1957. In a famous Senate speech, Kennedy assailed the administration for its backing of another French colonial war, this time in Algeria. In that speech, Kennedy reminded his colleagues of two things. First, that what had happened in Indochina three years previous was now repeating itself on the north coast of Africa: We were backing a fey French effort to preserve the remnants of an overseas empire. And second, we were not being a true friend to our French ally. A true friend would have counseled Paris to negotiate an Algerian settlement allowing for an orderly departure, thus sparing more bloodshed in Africa and further polarization. It is hard for this writer to believe that Burns and Novick are not aware of that speech, for the simple reason that it created a firestorm in both the press and at the White House. There were 138 editorial comments on the speech, over 2/3 of them negative. Kennedy was not just personally counter-attacked by Foster Dulles and Nixon, but by Stevenson and Acheson—members of his own party. The reaction was so violent that Kennedy told his father that he might have made a costly error. But Joe Kennedy replied to his son that he did not know how lucky he was. Algeria was going to get worse, and he would then look like a prophet.
Which is what happened. Kennedy's speech dealt with one of the same subjects that The Vietnam War deals with: the perils of America allying itself with French imperialism. One would therefore think that Burns and Novick should have noted it, especially because it fills in the background of what Kennedy did in Vietnam once he became president. It is not noted at all. Kennedy’s lonely six-year campaign to alert members of each political party to the importance of this issue, and the folly of what Eisenhower and his administration were doing—all this is reduced to one letter. I began to wonder what Burns and Novick were going to do with the pile of hundreds new documents that had been released on the Kennedy administration and Vietnam since 1994 and the advent of the Assassination Records Review Board. As Kennedy himself noted on the eve of the Democratic convention in 1960, if he lost, and either Lyndon Johnson or Stu Symington won, it would just be more of John Foster Dulles' planning. George Ball, the iconoclast diplomat who worked for Kennedy in the State Department, later commented on the president’s reformist ideas by saying that JFK wanted to change the dynamic in the Third World. He thought that we should not cede the nationalist cause to the Soviets, and we should not automatically befriend the status quo. By doing that we gave the advantage to the Russians. Authors like Mahoney, Philip Muehlenbeck, Robert Rakove, and Greg Poulgrain have written entire books based upon new research into this subject. Burns and Novick present not a word of it. What do they present instead? Kennedy as some kind of conflicted Cold Warrior. In doing so, they eliminate the entire two-week debate in the White House where Kennedy faced off against virtually his entire cabinet and foreign policy advisors.
As authors like James Blight have noted, for those two weeks, virtually every other voice in the room wanted to commit combat troops into Vietnam. The president was the only person holding the line against it. In Blight’s book Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived—co-edited with Janet Lang and David Welch—he spends over forty pages dealing with this landmark episode. And he produces the memorandum by Colonel Howard Burris (Johnson’s military aide) which memorialized Kennedy’s arguments against inserting combat troops. (Blight, pp. 281-83) These arguments included the facts that Vietnam was not a clear cut case of aggression as was Korea; America’s most important allies—like England—would not support such a move; the French effort, with hundreds of millions of dollars by USA, had failed; combat troops would not be effective against guerillas. To say the least, Kennedy’s arguments look prescient today. As Gordon Goldstein pointed out in his valuable book on McGeorge Bundy, this was not the first time Kennedy had turned down a request to send combat troops into Vietnam. Goldstein listed no less than nine previous instances in which Kennedy had rejected such proposals before the November debates.
Lessons in Disaster (2009) by Gordon Goldstein: As both Blight and Goldstein concluded, this was a Rubicon that Kennedy simply would not cross. And, in fact, National Security Advisor Bundy agreed with his biographer Goldstein on this issue: Kennedy was not going to commit American combat troops to fight a guerilla war in the jungle. Of further note, when George Ball heard about this debate and Kennedy’s lonely stance against the interventionists, he thought the president might be weakening and warned him of what happened to France in Vietnam the decade before. Kennedy replied, “You’re crazier than hell George. That just isn’t going to happen again.” And McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor—Kennedy’s three chief military advisors—all later wrote that Kennedy was never going to send the military in the form of combat troops into Vietnam. (Blight, p. 365; Goldstein, pp. 231, 238) There is a parallel here with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. After the first day of that doomed venture, when it was apparent all was lost, Kennedy was asked by both the CIA and the Pentagon to send in the navy to save the day. He refused. The film does not acknowledge that symmetry. Or the message implicit in Kennedy’s limited aid package: the US could help Diem, they could extend weapons and supplies. But they could not fight his war for him.
There is a famous quote about how strongly Kennedy framed this question to Arthur Schlesinger. What the film does with this key quote is revealing. It includes only the first part of it, where JFK told Schlesinger that committing combat troops would be like taking a sip of alcohol: the effect would wear off and you then had to take another. But it eliminates Kennedy’s much stronger punch line: “The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.” (Goldstein, p. 63) Could anything make the issue more clear? Congressman Kennedy had seen the folly of our effort to aid the French position in their war in Indochina. But he saw that France had overextended itself: that they had no real political base and therefore had to send in a land army to fight Giap’s guerilla war. He was not going to repeat that mistake with American troops. As James Blight has noted, all the indications are that Kennedy was shaken by the fact that he was alone in resisting the siren song of inserting the Army and Marines into Indochina as the main fighting force. McNamara had to be convinced upon Kennedy’s orders to begin a withdrawal plan. It was Kennedy’s plan, not McNamara’s. Kennedy told his two trusted advisors, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, that he had to delay his withdrawal plan and design it around the 1964 election, and complete it in 1965.
Otherwise JFK would be decried by the right wing as a communist appeaser and that would endanger the election. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126) Obviously, if Kennedy thought the ARVN were going to win, he would not have expressed it that way. Further, researcher Malcolm Blunt recently sent this author a document Kennedy requested in the fall of 1963 and which was returned to the president in November, about two weeks before his death. This was an evacuation plan for American government employees in Saigon. John Newman has argued of late that Kennedy and McNamara feared that Saigon would fall before their original final withdrawal date, which was autumn of 1965. Kennedy likely ordered this plan for that reason. For as Kennedy told NSC assistant Mike Forrestal in 1963, the probability of Saigon winning was about 100-1. In fact, General Earle Wheeler wrote that he understood that any request for any overt action would be denied by the president. These documents were so compelling that even The New York Times bannered a story with the headline: “Kennedy Had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam.” One would think that if it were good enough for that paragon of the MSM, it would be good enough for Burns and Novick. Needless to say, none of these documents are shown in The Vietnam War.
Neither is NSAM 263 exhibited. This was the order drawn up in early October of 1963 that delineated the withdrawal plan and mandated that a thousand men be returned from Vietnam by the end of 1963. The story of how the order and the report it was attached to were created is revealing, and would have been informative to the viewer. By the autumn of 1963, JFK now had everything in place to activate his withdrawal plan. But he wanted to send his two highest military advisors to Saigon, that is, McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor. Therefore, while those two were in Vietnam, Pentagon higher ups General Victor Krulak and Colonel Fletcher Prouty were invited to the White House.
Bobby Kennedy met the duo. He instructed them, upon orders of the president, that they would actually edit and compose the Taylor/McNamara report at his direction. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 401) Then it was shipped out to Hawaii and given to Taylor and McNamara in bound form. Kennedy was not allowing for any alterations. That report became the basis for NSAM 263. Presidentially designed, the report was used by him to ram 263 through his foreign policy advisors—some of whom were reluctant to sign on to it. But, reluctant or not, they ultimately did. McNamara was then sent out to announce the withdrawal plan to the press. As he was walking to meet the reporters, Kennedy instructed him with the following: “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too.” One would think that if a filmmaker were trying to assemble the latest scholarship on Vietnam for an American audience—if one were really trying to enlighten them with the best and newest information—then at least some of this would be included in the presentation. Or at least they would communicate some of the (at least) nine sources that Kennedy or McNamara confided in about the withdrawal plan. Or perhaps play the October 2, 1963 taped conference where McNamara actually says that they have to find a way to get out of Vietnam. (Blight, p. 100) But as Burns pronounced on Marc Maron’s radio podcast of September 11th : History is malleable. Sort of like bubble gum, right Mr Burns? Although some critics stated that there was no public announcement of NSAM 263, and Kennedy was keeping it quiet, there are two Newsweek articles that published it on October 14, 1963. It was a public policy, and Kennedy had sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to brief the press on it after he had adopted it in October, 1963.
When David Halberstam got to Vietnam—actually on his second day there—he lunched with the CIA’s station chief in Saigon. (Prochnau, p. 133) As the weeks went by, many of his CIA contacts from Congo migrated there. As author William Prochnau wrote, “By now his CIA contacts from the Congo had begun to flock to the hot new action in Southeast Asia like bees to honey; Vietnam was a spook’s dream and the Agency forever had a better fix on Vietnamese reality than the American military.” Halberstam admitted this in The Making of a Quagmire, where he wrote, “But many CIA agents in Saigon were my friends, and I considered them among the ablest Americans I had seen overseas or at home.” Both Halberstam and Sheehan were enamored with Colonel Vann, even though they understood he was an “essentially conservative, at times a reactionary man.” Burns and Novick have Sheehan tell us that, upon his own arrival in Saigon in 1962, he believed in American ideals and the alleged US mission in South Vietnam. He also believed in the dangers of the “international communist conspiracy”. Sheehan then adds that he was there to report the truth in order to help win the war for the betterment of the United States and the world. Vann was shipped out of Vietnam in 1963 and served in the Pentagon as a procurement officer. He began to file formal reports that appealed to General Edward Lansdale because they clearly projected the fact that unless American ground troops were committed to Vietnam, Saigon would fall.
And this is the message Kennedy had listened to in November of 1961—and had rejected. Kennedy was aware of what Colonel Vann was doing. Edward Lansdale had been the first to advise Kennedy to insert combat troops into Vietnam. Sure enough, after Kennedy’s death, when Lansdale returned to the White House, he recommended sending Vann back to Vietnam. Vann did return in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson overturned Kennedy’s policy and committed tens of thousands of American combat troops to Saigon. The reason that Sheehan and Halberstam admired Vann was simple: like him, they were Hawks. And like him—and opposed to Kennedy—they wanted more American involvement. This is discernible by reading Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire. That volume is perhaps the single most complete and coruscating condemnation of America’s Vietnam policy published to that point. It attacks every element of the American mission and also the policies and personages of the Diem regime. (See Chapters 3-5) It then goes on to expose the ineptness of the ARVN (Chapters 5-7), in particular how terrible Colonel Hunyh Van Cao was. Of course, when the wishes of this troika—Sheehan, Vann and Halberstam—were fulfilled, we saw what happened. Direct American involvement ended up being an epic debacle. All in pursuit of a false goal that was not possible to attain. In other words, Kennedy was right and Vann, Sheehan and Halberstam were wrong. And further, that the American army was self-destructing in the jungle, as Kennedy had predicted it would back in 1961. By 1971, even the army understood this. Colonel Robert Heinl wrote a long essay on its collapse at that time, and traced it from at least 1969. (Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”) Source: kennedysandking.com
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