History Betrayed - DiEugenio rewrites history.

[Len Colby]

History Betrayed - DiEugenio rewrites history.

On page 23 of Destiny Betrayed book DiEugenio wrote:

The operation [Vulture] was to be topped off by theuse of three tactical atomic weapons. When Senator Kennedy got wind of this, he again took to the floor of the senate and had what was perhaps his first defining national moment. He wanted to know how "the new Dulles policy and its dependence upon the threat of atomic retaliation will fare in these areas of guerrilla warfare." Then, during the actual siege, he again took the floor and said, "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 of the people which has the sympathy and covert support of the people."

For those of you who don't know Operation Vulture was the proposed US response to the French getting their butts kicked in Dien Bien Phu. The battle began March 13, 1954 and the French asked for aid 10 days later. BUT the 1st JFK quote (underlined) was from a speech at the Cathedral Club, Brooklyn, NY not on the Senate floor, there is no indication John Foster Dulles (or his brother) were present as he indicated in other account. The speech was delivered January 21, 1954, thus 2 months before the beginning of the siege.

SOURCES:

Destiny Betrayed - https://books.google.com.br/books?hl=pt-BR&id=Gcf19iJnAk4C&q=vulture#v=onepage&q=vulture&f=true

Wikipedia article on Operation Vulture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vulture

Remarks by Senator John F. Kennedy at the Cathedral Club, Brooklyn, New York, January 21, 1954 -

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Brooklyn-NY_19540121.aspx

[Pat Speer]

Not to take sides on this, Len, but did you double-check the congressional record on this? Sometimes politicians repeat old speeches on the Senate floor to put them into the record, and sometimes they insert things into the record that were never actually said on the floor.

[Len Colby]

Well I guess anything is possible Pat. But I've found a few hits to the quote all but DiEugenio attribute them to the speech or at least date them to January 1954. Unfortunately the Congressional Record that far back is only available on microfilm. Even if I lived in city with a library that had it I would have to go through about a month of records because Jim never told his readers the date in any of his various retellings.

In one of those he wrote:

Kennedy's opposition to Operation Vulture is simply absent from Dallek. In fact, you will not find it in the index to either book. Vulture was the Dulles brothers' solution to lift the siege of Dien Bien Phu and save the French empire in Indochina. It was a giant air armada of well over 200 planes designed to bomb North Vietnamese General Giap's army, which was closing in on Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That mission included the dropping of three atomic bombs. Senator Kennedy rose on the senate floor twice to object to this mission and ask John Foster Dulles how atomic weapons are meant to be used within the tactics of guerilla [sic] warfare. (ibid, p. 23)

The odd thing about that is that Dallek DID mention the quote in question in An Unfinished Life (see link below) one of the historian's JFK bios DiEugenio was reviewing. But the former unlike the latter corrected dated the comment to January.

DiEugenio -- http://www.ctka.net/2014_reviews/dallek.html

Dallek --

https://books.google.com.br/books?id=w3oiOriupLwC&pg=PT155&lpg=PT155&dq=%22the+new+Dulles+policy+and+its+dependence+upon+the+threat+of+atomic+retaliation%22&source=bl&ots=u63eUblJrW&sig=wxPQ_tznM5mQmC2NOytTFpjVHyc&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22the%20new%20Dulles%20policy%20and%20its%20dependence%20upon%20the%20threat%20of%20atomic%20retaliation%22&f=true

Edited July 31, 2015 by Len Colby

[Len Colby]

And it turns out the 2nd JFK quote from the DiEugenio excerpt in my 1st post WAS given during the siege as he indicated. But there is no indication in the text that it had anything to with Operation Vulture, as opposed to the administration Vietnam policy in general. Dallek did spend several pages on the topic and the 2nd quote appears on the same page of An Unfinished Life linked above.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/United-States-Senate-Indochina_19540406.aspx

Edited July 31, 2015 by Len Colby

[David G. Healy]

Well I guess anything is possible Pat. ...

it's done frequently on the floor(s) of congress as well as committee meetings and investigations...

[Len Colby]

It's possible but not probable. JFK made his remarks in response to a speech Dulles had given to the CFR just 9 days earlier in the same city [2]. The senator's comments were published in the Feb. '54 issue of a journal called the New Leader [1]. Why would Kennedy repeating comments he'd made and published months earlier be "what was perhaps his first defining national moment"? DiEugenio claimed that the 2 statements represented "Kennedy's opposition to Operation Vulture" which he claimed "is simply absent from Dallek" but both appeared on the same page of one of the historian's books he was reviewing.

The ball is in DiEugenio's court, if JFK repeated the comment in the circumstances he claimed he should post his evidence here.

1] http://ip-97-74-195-143.ip.secureserver.net/Summary/TNL/V37I7P3-1.htm

2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Look_%28policy%29#Massive_Retaliation_and_the_New_Look

Edited August 1, 2015 by Len Colby

[Pat Speer]

IF it turns out Jim did in fact place an accurate quote in a slightly different historical context, and thereby add fuel to his narrative, he would be in pretty good company. A few years back, I conducted a study of the different historical perspectives on what happened on Air Force One after the shooting. While doing so, I came to realize that even the great Robert Caro is not above omitting a fact or two, and misrepresenting a quote or two, to push his narrative.

From patspeer.com, chapter 21:

The Rorschach Blot As Seen By Robert Caro

Johnson's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert Caro is clearly among the fact-shy. In his massive and supposedly immaculately-researched work The Passage of Power, published 2011, he makes a number of mistakes. Most are errors of omission. While he acknowledges Johnson's and Kennedy's accounts of their phone calls differ, for example, he writes "The only witnesses to the calls--Rufus Youngblood and Marie Fehmer--heard only one side of them." He fails to acknowledge that Manchester interviewed Guthman, and that Guthman was reported to have claimed he'd heard Kennedy's side of the call, and that Kennedy hadn't told Johnson he should be sworn in in Dallas, as later claimed by Johnson. He fails to mention even that McCone had also claimed to hear Kennedy's side of the call, and to have told Manchester the opposite--that Kennedy had in fact told Johnson he should be sworn in. More pointedly, however, Caro fails to cite Johnson's 1966 call to Bill Moyers, in which he as much as admitted Kennedy hadn't told him he should be sworn in in Dallas. While Caro does cite Marie Fehmer's Oral History, in which she admitted Johnson was in the bedroom when Mrs. Kennedy came on the plane, for that matter, he fails to note the disturbing fact this ran counter to the narrative pushed in the notes written by Fehmer while still aboard the plane. These may have all been innocent over-sights, of course.

But some of Caro's mistakes are not so easily dismissed. Caro relates that, after O'Donnell told Johnson he should leave the hospital immediately, and that Mrs. Kennedy would not leave Dallas without her husband's body, "Johnson said in that case he would leave the hospital but not Dallas; he would go to the plane, but he would wait aboard it for the coffin, and the widow, to arrive. A contrary course continued to be urged. A new adjective entered the descriptions of Lyndon Johnson. He was, Youngblood says 'adamant.'" A look at Caro's end notes, furthermore, shows that he got this last quote from page 117 of Rufus Youngblood's 1973 book 20 Years in the Secret Service.

The problem is that Caro--as respected an historian as ever graced the best-seller lists--was blowing smoke. The sentence from which Caro cherry-picked his line about Johnson being "adamant" reads as follows: "He remained adamant about staying put until there was some definitive word on the President." That's right. Caro had taken Youngblood's description of Johnson's demeanor before the President's death had been announced, and had used it to shore up Johnson's position that he'd told O'Donnell he would wait for Mrs. Kennedy on the plane.

The evidence suggests, moreover, that Caro's mistake was not entirely innocent. In Caro's 5 volume biography, Johnson is very much an anti-hero, a flawed politician who rose to greatness when his predecessor was unexpectedly murdered. It is important to Caro's thesis, then, that Johnson's first actions as President be noble ones. It seems likely, then, that Caro's overwhelming belief in his thesis had led him to crawl around some mighty inconvenient facts.

Caro's anti-hero president was not heroic, at least not at the outset of his presidency. He'd manipulated people and events so he could fly back to Washington with his predecessor's widow at his side...

(He'd left for the airport without telling O'Donnell he was going to take Kennedy's plane, and wait for the arrival of Mrs. Kennedy and the body before departure. He'd been so secretive about his plan to do this, moreover, that he'd failed to tell this to the Secret Service agent in charge of the Presidential detail, Roy Truly, who was trying to change shifts, but who had sent the next shift to the plane normally flown by Johnson.)