Michael Griffith

Based on your questions, you obviously did not bother to listen to the podcast. But, I'll address your questions anyway. Did any of them bring up the point about Forrestal that I did? This is an example of the fact that you ignore most of Selverstone's evidence in your review. You cite Michael Forrestal's 1971 claim as if it were gospel, yet you ignore the fact that Selverstone documents that in Forrestal's November 1969 oral history interview for the LBJ Library, he stated that JFK probably did not know what he would do if faced with the imminent collapse of South Vietnam (which is exactly what Bobby Kennedy said in his April 1964 oral history interview). You keep ignoring such contrary facts. Furthermore, all Forrestal said in 1971 was that JFK told him before he left for Dallas that there would be a review of Indochina policy when he returned. That is miles away from claiming that JFK had decided to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Since Diem had just been assassinated, it makes perfect sense that JFK would have wanted to review Indochina policy, but you read deep between the lines and draw a baseless inference from Forrestal's comment. Did any of them bring up the distorting of Rakove's book like I did? Selverstone does not distort Rakove's book. You are misrepresenting how Selverstone uses Rakove's book. Did any of them bring up those missing 19 witnesses who JFK revealed his intent to like I did? How many times are you going to peddle these belated accounts and ignore the arguments against them? Let's take a look at your list. Your list includes Forrestal! Never mind that Forrestal did not even hint that JFK had decided on an unconditional withdrawal after the election, right? Incredibly, your list actually includes North Vietnamese war criminal General Vo Nguyen Giap! This is just pitiful and shameful. You include Giap on your list based on triple-hearsay. Your source for this triple-hearsay is a pro-Communist author named Mani Kang, who regarded the murderous thug Giap as, and I quote, "the greatest military figure of the twentieth century." Sickening. Anyway, Kang claimed that he interviewed Giap's youngest son, and that the son told Kang that General Giap told him that he knew that JFK "was withdrawing from Vietnam in late 1963"! This is what you consider to be "evidence"? Your list includes Robert McNamara! Oh, wow, now there's a reliable, believable source! After all we now know about McNamara and his two-faced and three-faced maneuverings, you still put him on your list? Again, why didn't McNamara mention his alleged "secret debrief" in his 1995 memoir? Your list includes Senator Mike Mansfield. Your use of Mansfield is misleadingly selective. You and your few allies never mention that Mansfield made a number of contradictory claims about what JFK supposedly told him about his Vietnam intentions. You only quote the one statement that you like, and you ignore all the others. At one point, Mansfield wrote that JFK never even mentioned the '64 election in relation to Vietnam. In another letter, Mansfield said that JFK only intended to withdraw "some" troops. But you never mention these statements. Your list includes Senator Wayne Morse. Yes, years later, Morse claimed that JFK told him he "wanted out" of Vietnam. One, that is not at all the same thing as an expressing an intention to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Two, it is odd that Morse never breathed a word about this statement in his two-hour oral history interview in November 1965. Not one syllable about any withdrawal plans, much less an unconditional withdrawal. This is especially odd because eight months earlier, in February 1965, Morse publicly "completely repudiated" LBJ's Vietnam policy and accused Johnson of misleading the people and waging an unconstitutional war. One would think that given this fact, if JFK had indeed told Morse that he "wanted out" of Vietnam, Morse would have emphasized this point in his February attack on LBJ's Vietnam policy, and would have at least mentioned it in his lengthy oral history interview (the transcript of which runs to over 80 pages). I won't bother repeating the statements made by JFK loyalists who rejected the idea that JFK had plans for an unconditional withdrawal, but I will note that these loyalists included Bobby Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Ted Sorenson, and Walt Rostow. Nor will I bother once again quoting all the statements that JFK himself made in which he made it clear that he had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam, that he opposed withdrawal, that he thought withdrawal would be a mistake, and that we had to be prepared to stay the course in Vietnam. You keep ignoring these statements. Did any of them bring up how JFK put back the withdrawal section into the McNamara/Taylor report like I did? This is a meaningless, ancillary point because it doesn't address the conditional nature of the withdrawal. Did any of them bring up the McNamara debrief like I did? You mean the debrief that McNamara inexplicably failed to mention in his memoir? You mean the debrief that McNamara's worshipful, adoring aides knew nothing about? This is not to mention the fact that given what we now know about McNamara, nobody in their right mind should be using him as a source, unless he was speaking against his own interest. Did any of them notice how he left out the November 27th meeting making McNamara the point man on Vietnam like I did? This is another ancillary, meaningless point given the evidence that Selverstone presents from the Kennedy White House tapes, wherein we hear JFK repeatedly reaffirming his determination to keep South Vietnam independent. You keep ignoring this inconvenient fact. See, if you leave all that out, then you can say, "Well its really hard to day what Kennedy would have done." This silly comment shows that you have no business passing judgment on Selverstone's book. You are not qualified to be reviewing it, much less to be talking about the larger issue of the Vietnam War. 99% of JFK and Vietnam War scholars agree that it's very hard to say what JFK would have done in 1965. Mike Swanson will have more to say on Selverstone soon. Oh, boy! So in response to all the scholars who have praised and recommended Selverstone's book, you cite Mike Swanson, whose book on the Vietnam War is loaded with grammatical, spelling, citation, and punctuation errors, not to mention numerous erroneous claims. Swanson doesn't seem to understand such basic things as the need to match verb tenses in a sentence; nor does he seem to understand things that college sophomores are expected to know when they write, such as what a subordinate clause is and how to punctuate it, what an introductory clause is and how to punctuate it, and when to use a semicolon. Here are just a few examples of the poor English and gaffes that one finds in Swanson's book on the Vietnam War (Kindle version): "Vietnam wasn't hardly even on the radar" (2532) "and in the 1950's most government officials" (2582) "What this meant is that importers were able to" (2636) "A US government report" (2640--he repeats this error throughout the book; the correct punctuation is U.S., not the all-caps version of the pronoun "us") "with their oppressive monopoly taxes" (272) "Only that way could they grow morally and learn personalism." (1915) "to position people he held in great trust into key positions inside of the bureaucracy that could act as his eyes and ears that had similar policy objectives" (2496) "the more drinks he drank the more mean he got" (3299) "Johnson responded by asking him why 150,000 men could not deal with only 10,000 Viet Cong?" (3337) "Secretary of State Robert McNamara had second doubts" (4096--shoot, all this time I thought McNamara was Secretary of Defense! And what exactly are "second doubts"? I've heard of "second thoughts," but not "second doubts.") "One reason why Robert McNamara . . . did not ask such questions is that there was no great incentive to do so." (4287-4291--a double whammy) "Secretary of State Robert McNamara's job was to" (4291--again, I could have sworn that McNamara was Secretary of Defense) I repeat that this is only a small sampling of the amateurish errors in Swanson's book. Yet, you're waiting anxiously to see what Swanson has to say about Selverstone's book! I'll be terribly blunt: Swanson's poor command of English suggests that his education was deficient, and that, needless to say, he is not qualified to be passing judgment on Selverstone's book.

I recommend that you read Dr. Marc Selverstone's historic new book The Kennedy Withdrawal. Using Kennedy White House tapes and numerous internal documents and other sources, Selverstone makes a strong case that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from South Vietnam until the Saigon government was stable and strong enough to resist Communist aggression on its own, and that even after withdrawal, military aid was going to continue.

Uh, Trump did not order a single lockdown. Each state's governor decided whether or not to order a lockdown in his/her state and what the provisions of the lockdown would be. After many blue states ordered draconian lockdowns, Trump quickly began urging that the lockdowns be lifted. Keep in mind that the CDC has no power to order a state to do a lockdown. That power is reserved exclusively to the governor of the state. Some red states imposed only mild lockdowns or practically no lockdowns, yet their numbers were not appreciably worse than states with harsh lockdowns. The provisions of the lockdowns varied considerably among the 50 states. Thankfully, we here in Virginia had a centrist Democratic governor in 2020-2021, and his lockdown provisions were less drastic than those in many other blue states, such as Michigan and California.

Moyar cites a boatload of primary sources in his endnotes. However, we need to understand that the President's signature will rarely be on a deployment order, if ever. The order will be discussed by the President and his NSC, etc., then he will give his approval, and then actual orders will be signed by someone else. Who signs the order will depend on the size of the deployment. In many cases, a deputy undersecretary or even his designee, such as a senior military officer, will sign the orders. The President will sign things like major policy statements, such as NSAMs, but he will rarely sign deployment orders.

JFK authorized all of those troop increases. Dr. Mark Moyar covers this in some detail in chapters 5 and 6 in his book Triumph Forsaken (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

I think it's worth repeating that even most liberal historians do not buy the claim that JFK was determined to abandon South Vietnam after the election no matter what. They've read the accounts of former JFK aides and associates that make this claim, but they don't buy the accounts, and they don't buy the claim. For example, Stanley Karnow, author of one of the most widely read books on the Vietnam War ever published, Vietnam: A History, and producer of the famous 1983 documentary series Vietnam: A Television History--even Karnow, despite his very liberal bent, did not buy the claim. In his 1995 book Past Imperfect, Karnow said the following about the Oliver Stone-Fletcher Prouty withdrawal claim: Nothing in Kennedy's public utterances, however, suggested that he even remotely envisioned scuttling Vietnam. During an interview with Walter Cronkite in early September 1963, he affirmed his faith in the domino theory, adding, "I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw." He echoed that line in a talk with Chet Huntley: "We are not there to see a war lost." Had he delivered the address he was slated to give in Dallas, he would have declared that the involvement in Southeast Asia might be "painful, risky, and costly . . . but we dare not weary of the task." Robert Kennedy repeated the same thesis in an oral history interview, saying that the president "felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam, and that we should win the war . . . . " When asked if his brother ever contemplated "pulling out," Bobby replied, "No". . . . President Kennedy had made it plain that the repatriation of the U.S. advisers depended on the performance of the South Vietnamese troops; unless they were trained to take over, the Americans would stay. Johnson carried out the U.S. withdrawal, though it was essentially an accounting exercise. As one thousand men returned home, another thousand arrived; by December 1963, the force was the same as it had been. (pp. 272-273) Or, take Dr. Edward Moise, who is arguably even more liberal than Karnow was. Even he does not buy the claim, as I documented earlier in this thread. To give you some idea of how liberal Moise his, he's even praised Robert Buzzanco's Vietnam War research. As I pointed out in a previous reply, Moise notes that the unconditional-withdrawal accounts of former JFK loyalists are not believable because they so markedly contradict JFK's own statements on the matter. (I might add that other 1961-1963 sources who knew JFK said he had no plans for an unconditional withdrawal.) Yet another very liberal scholar, Dr. Fredrik Logevall of Harvard University, likewise does not buy the idea that JFK would have abandoned South Vietnam no matter what after the election. Logevall contends that American intervention in Vietnam was arguably a "crime," which places him firmly in the left-wing anti-war camp, but he still strongly rejects the Stone-Prouty withdrawal claim. See, for example, his chapter “Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been,” in Mark J. White, editor, Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (New York: New York University Press, 1998). The point here is that the Stone-Prouty withdrawal claim is a fringe viewpoint that is shared by very few historians and/or Vietnam War scholars. We would do well to keep this mind when we talk about the top five books on JFK and Vietnam.

A few follow-up points: Whaley said nothing about his passenger wearing a jacket in any of his three police statements, nor did he mention a jacket when he described the passenger to the FBI. Yet, at one point in his WC testimony, Whaley said his passenger was wearing two jackets, one over the other. Clearly, something is very wrong with Whaley's WC testimony. If Oswald did in fact take a cab, this does not automatically mean that he took Whaley's cab. There were plenty of other cabs available. We're talking about the downtown area of a major city. An error of 17 minutes on a timesheet strikes me as a bit much, as a bit hard to believe, even making the questionable assumption that Whaley waited several fares before recording his pickup times. Again, his timesheet shows no indication that he used 15-minute increments. I suspect he said this because he was advised to say it or because he was trying to say what he thought the WC wanted to hear. Oswald probably resembled 10-15% of the male population of Dallas. His height and weight were in the average range. Nothing about the appearance of his hair stood out. It's entirely possible that Whaley's passenger bore some resemblance to Oswald, and that this general resemblance may have caused Whaley to think that he recognized his passenger when he saw a photo of Oswald in the newspaper.

I will simply repeat the self-evident point that if a lone-gunman theorist had closely associated with Holocaust deniers and other far-right extremists the way Prouty did, had defended Scientology and Ron Hubbard the way Prouty did, had made the kinds of bizarre claims that Prouty did (Princess Diana, FDR's death, Iron Mountain, etc.), and had so markedly back-peddled on several of his key longtime JFKA claims when questioned by a federal board, nobody in this thread would make any excuses for him but would justifiably reject him as a credible source.

I work as a technical editor in a job that deals with air and missile defense. I won't be one of those lucky people who are retired and have lots of free time on their hands for at least another five years. I used to be a Civil War buff, but I lost interest in the subject about three or four years ago. I still maintain my Civil War-related websites (one on Lincoln and the other on McClellan), but I'm not active on the subject anymore.

Here are four more endorsements of Dr. Selverstone’s new book The Kennedy Withdrawal, further supporting my belief that the book is the most definitive book to date on the subject. Mack Payne, a Vietnam veteran and chief editor of the Vietnam Veteran News (VVN) podcast, calls Selverstone’s book a “tremendous book” and recommends “everybody get a copy of it.” The VVN site is featuring Selverstone’s book as “Recommended Reading” (https://vietnamveterannews.com/episode-2430/#comment-935). Vietnamese-American and Vietnam War scholar Andy Pham (also of VVN), whose parents fled Vietnam because of the Viet Cong, likewise recommends Selverstone’s book (intro to podcast 2430, https://vietnamveterannews.com/?powerpress_pinw=181-podcast). Payne and Pham arranged to have two professors of history interview Selverstone about his book on the VVN podcast (podcast 2430), both of whom spoke favorably about the book. The two professors were Professor Meredith H. Lair (George Mason University) and Dr. Sean McLaughlin (Murray State University). The podcast was recorded just a few months ago (January 19). In the podcast, Professor Lair calls Selverstone’s book “an impressive and careful piece of scholarship” (https://vietnamveterannews.com/?powerpress_pinw=181-podcast). Similarly, Dr. McLaughlin voices strong agreement with Selverstone’s conclusions about the withdrawal. He notes that his reading of the primary sources has made him “very skeptical of the suggestion that he [JFK] was genuinely considering a withdrawal before military victory had been achieved on the battlefield” (https://vietnamveterannews.com/?powerpress_pinw=181-podcast). McLaughlin’s Q&A with Selverstone on the nature of the withdrawal is informative (starts at around the 18:00 point in the podcast). McLaughlin’s Q&A with Selverstone on what JFK would have done in 1964 and 1965 is also valuable. Selverstone specifies that “it’s really hard to say with any degree of certainty what he might have done” in 1965. Lair is an associate professor of history at George Mason University, and is a former Minerva Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy. She is the author of Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (2011). McLaughlin is the Special Collections and Exhibits Director at Murray State University. He is the author of JFK and de Gaulle: How America and France Failed in Vietnam, 1961-1963 (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).

I fear I've been a bit too sarcastic with you. On the off chance that you will take my failure to respond to your accusations about my background as proof that I have something to hide, I will address your questions. One, I've talked many times in this forum about my attendance at the Defense Language Institute (DLI). Leslie can verify this, as can several others. Or, you can do a forum search and find the many posts where I talked about my time at DLI. Two, I was not in the USAF (U.S. Air Force). I was in the Army. Perhaps you thought I was in the Air Force because I attended the U.S. Air Force Technical Training school, but that school was where all the Services sent personnel for that kind of technical training. Three, I don't live anywhere near McLean, Virginia, and have never had any association with the CIA.

I doubt that Whaley waited so long to enter pickup times on his timesheet. This doesn't make sense to me. I know he told the WC he did this, but his timesheet does not support his claim, and it would have been much easier to enter each pickup time as it occurred. We don't know what Oswald did and did not tell the police. The evidence relating to the bus ride is shaky at best. The cab-ride reenactments were unrealistic. They couldn't get the cab to Oswald's neighborhood in the required amount of time without rigging the reenactment. We'll have to agree to disagree about whether Whaley was trying to hint that there was something wrong with his identification of Oswald. I agree that he comes across as a simple man, but I also find it interesting that he volunteered such damning information about the police affidavits and about the lineup (Oswald's bawling out the police), and that he insisted that he chose the No. 2 man even after being confronted with the typed police statement that said he chose the No. 3 man. As you noted, at times Whaley was trying to say what he thought the WC wanted to hear. Yes, I agree. This fact alone calls into question his accommodating statements (waiting to record pickup times, the color of the jacket and of other clothing, where he dropped off his passenger). My bottom line about Whaley, getting back to my first reply in this thread, is that his identification of Oswald in the police lineup was not what one would normally call a "positive identification," and that given the overtly unfair nature of the lineup, there are serious questions about his identification.

More of your disingenuous nit-picking. I've already explained and modified my original statement about whom Whaley selected. My statement was too general in isolation. It was an over-generalization because I did not explain the basis for it. Without that explanation, the statement was subject to the kind of nit-picking you've been doing, which is why I revised it. If nothing else, your claim that Whaley "positively identified" Oswald in the lineup could certainly be viewed as over-generalization or an over-simplification, since it ignores the suspicious irregularities with the police statements taken from Whaley, and since it ignores Whaley's wandering, waffling, and contradictory WC testimony. Again, to all but the willfully blind, Whaley's WC testimony shows that he felt guilty about his identification, that--at a minimum--he was uncertain about it, and that he was hinting as far as he dared that he was pressured into it and that there were shenanigans involved with his police statements. Now, are you ever going to get around to defending the WC's specious explanation for the 12:30 pickup time documented in Whaley's timesheet?

The guy you quote above Mike, Mark Leepson, is utterly typical of why people like Logevall like Selverstone's book. You mean scholars who have actual credentials and who have studied the Vietnam War for years? You mean scholars who've actually read both sides and who've bothered to read primary source material on the war? Selverstone's book is an establishment project and they can now somehow say that see, we were not really wrong back then. Somehow you cannot see that. Your reading has been too limited and too one-sided for you to be passing judgment on Selverstone's book, much less on Selverstone himself. Your "review" of his book is an embarrassment, for some of the reasons I've discussed in this thread. You question Selvertone's motives and integrity, which is usually not done in a professional review. You come here citing downright quacks and hacks like Prouty and Turse, and then pretend that somehow you are qualified to review Selverstone's book. I will note again that your review simply ignores most of the evidence that Selverstone presents. And I for one am really getting sick of your personal smears of people like Jim Douglass, Mike Swanson and Fletcher Prouty. I mean did you even read Fletcher's earlier articles on Vietnam? Truth and fact are not "smears." Douglass is a 9/11 Truther. Maybe you don't think this disqualifies him as a valid source on the Vietnam War, but I do, not to mention that Douglass is a theologian by trade with no background or training in historical research and no military experience. If someone's analytical skills are so bad that they embrace the 9/11 Truther nuttiness, I will not use their research on any issue. Prouty was a nutjob and a fraud who palled around with Holocaust deniers and neo-N-azis, who appeared on a Holocaust-denying and neo-N-azi radio program 10 times in four years, who recommended that people read the anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying newspaper The Spotlight, and who even had one of his books republished by the Holocaust-denying IHR. This is the kind of garbage you bring to the table and then you presume to be qualified to attack and judge Selverstone's book? As for Mike Swanson's book Why the Vietnam War?, it is an amateurish work that repeats a host of debunked far-left myths about the war. When you read his book, did you happen to notice all of the typos and grammatical errors? Did you notice that he doesn't even know how to properly cite sources in endnotes? The first source that Swanson cites in his endnotes is a disgusting documentary that literally could have been produced by North Vietnam's Ministry of Propaganda: Peter Davis's film Hearts and Minds. Out of Swanson's 329 endnotes, 16 of them cite one of his other books (The War State)! Really? Over 50 of his 329 endnotes cite the Pentagon Papers, which are nothing but a selection of internal government documents about the Vietnam War that were cherry-picked by two McNamara disciples (McNaughton and Gelb) and that only run through 1967. When McNaughton and then Gelb were cherry-picking the documents, they didn't interview or consult with any senior military officers or other federal agencies, not even with the White House. If you ever decide to educate yourself on the war by reading the other side, you might start with Dr. Robert F. Turner's book Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered. Yet, you trumpet Swanson's amateurish work as an example of good scholarship on the Vietnam War and proudly note that Swanson told you that he thinks Selverstone's book is awful. Look MIke, whatever America was fighting for in Indochina, what was worth 5.8 million dead? Those people over there have a pretty nice country now and guess what, its not communist. And this comment brings you mighty close to qualifying as a wingnut. As I've documented for you previously, major human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, continue to identify Vietnam as one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, and the Communist party of Vietnam still maintains an iron grip on the government. Let's read the latest Human Rights Watch report on Vietnam, written just a few months ago: Vietnam’s human rights record remains dire in virtually all areas. The ruling Communist Party maintains a monopoly on political power and allows no challenge to its leadership. Basic rights are severely restricted, including freedoms of speech and the media, public assembly, association, and conscience and religion. Rights activists and bloggers face police intimidation, harassment, restricted movement, arbitrary arrest, and incommunicado detention. Farmers lose land to development projects without adequate compensation, and workers are not allowed to form independent unions. The police regularly use torture and beatings to extract confessions. The criminal justice system, including the courts, lacks independence, for example sentencing political dissidents and civil society activists to long prison terms on bogus national security charges. (https://www.hrw.org/asia/vietnam) And just so know, America was fighting in Indochina to try to prevent 18 million South Vietnamese from falling under Community tyranny. [2023 video of a Hanoi night market] Now before anyone says well this is today. Not so, it was like this back in the nineties. This is just shameful, not to mention misleading. Vietnam was worse in the '90s than it is now, and that's saying a lot, because, as mentioned, human rights groups still rate Vietnam as one of the most repressive nations on Earth. I provided several links in my previous reply that document the repressive conditions in Vietnam in the '90s. Len Osanic and I had a guest on who proved that. Further, when Hanoi swept through Saigon, they kept the business college there going. Holy cow. Whoever your "guest" was, you'd better have that guest read the dozens of reports and studies on Vietnam's horrible human rights record from 1975 to the present day. He could start with former Viet Cong leader Truong Nhu Tang's book A Viet Cong Memoir, in which he describes the "reign of terror" (his words) that the Communists imposed on South Vietnam after the war. Then, your "guest" could read the recent research done by Australian and Asian scholars on that reign of terror, which included tens of thousands of executions and sending hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to concentration camps where the death rate was at least 5%. I've cited some of this research in another thread (on the Vietnam War and the movie JFK). Then, your guest could read the Human Rights Watch reports on Vietnam from 1990 to last year. Have you also had "guests" who claimed that Russia and North Korea are "pretty nice" places to live? The way I look at it is this: whatever violence there was at that time was mostly caused by America's refusal to abide by the Geneva Accords. If that would have been done then unification would have been much more peaceful and the evolution to the above would have happened much sooner. This is Communist propaganda that even left-of-center historians such as Max Hastings have debunked. For the 33rd time, North Vietnam never had any intention of following the Geneva Accords and began violating them almost as soon as the ink was dry on them. Hastings covers this issue well in his book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, as have literally dozens of other scholars. America did a lot of horrible things in Vietnam. We did many more good things than bad things in Vietnam. For every one bad thing we did, the Communists did four or five bad things. But you refuse to talk about the horrible things that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong did. You cite a garbage source like Turse's book, which even Neil Sheehan condemned as shoddy, but you refuse to address the now-mountainous evidence of Communist atrocities and brutality in Vietnam. And for what? Kennedy understood that, which is why Selverstone leaves out so much of Kennedy's transformation in 1951 and distorts the meaning of Rakove's book. Only a tiny handful of far-left authors buy this nonsense. And, no, as I noted in a previous reply, Selverstone does not distort the meaning of Rakove's book. BTW, Leepson says that the message of Selverstone's book is that JFK would have done what LBJ did. Which is to stop the fall of Saigon, JFK would have escalated to combat troops and massive bombing like Rolling Thunder. To anyone who is serious about this, that is not just false, its a little loony. JFK was never going to commit combat troops. No, it's not "loony" at all, and 99% of those who "are serious about this" don't see it as "loony" either. You come to the table citing quacks and frauds like Prouty and Turse, and then you presume to call Leepson's mainstream position "loony." The overwhelming majority of scholars on this subject agree with Leepson. You think it's "loony" because you've only read a handful of books on the war and most of what you've read has been fringe stuff. Furthermore, Selverstone does not declare that "JFK wold have done what LBJ did." If you'd read his book with any care, you would know that Selverstone says that we simply cannot know what JFK would have done when faced with the situation that confronted LBJ in 1965. He does offer his opinion that he believes JFK may well have responded in a similar manner, but he stops well short of declaring this to be a certainty. What's truly "loony"--and sickening--is to claim that Vietnam is "a pretty nice country" and to whitewash the reign of terror that the Communists imposed on South Vietnam after the war. No, Vietnam is not "a pretty nice country." It's a brutal dictatorship that suppresses basic human rights, tortures and beats people, engages in arbitrary arrests, and confiscates private property whenever it pleases. And he understood that Saigon would likely fall once the withdrawal was over, but he was willing to take the heat. For JFK to withdraw those advisors, and then to reverse and send in tens of thousands of combat troops and seven million tons of bombs. You don't know that. Your only evidence for this specious theory is the self-serving claims made by some JFK loyalists many years after his death. You just don't care that these claims contradict every single public statement that JFK made on Vietnam (including those he made in the last few days of his life), and every single statement he made on Vietnam recorded on the White House tapes. Nor do you care that the earliest memoirs by JFK aides Sorenson and Schlesinger said nothing about an intent to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Nor do you care that Dean Rusk, JFK's Secretary of State, adamantly denied your theory. Nor do you care that Bobby Kennedy flatly rejected your theory when he was interviewed in April 1964 for the White House oral history project. And I repeat that your review ignores most of the evidence that Selverstone presents on this point. See, this is why I think Selverstone calls JFK a Cold Warrior. Which he was not, as opposed to LBJ who clearly was. This is why we did what we did in Stone's film, we showed this difference in several spots in the world like Indonesia. I've already answered this argument. Again, the handful of examples you cite in the film do not prove that JFK was not a Cold Warrior. They prove that he was anti-colonialist, and nothing more. There's a reason that the vast majority of historians who've written on the subject argue that JFK most certainly was a Cold Warrior.

Eee-gads. Chip Berlet most certainly is an ultra-liberal, and it is astonishing that you would deny this. You and Jeff don't consider him an ultra-liberal because he has exposed Fletcher Prouty as a fraud and a crackpot and because he accepts the lone-gunman theory. Similarly, it is erroneous to claim that Berlet's specialty is to "go after people" who back "controversial causes, like the JFK case." In point of fact, Berlet has spent most of his career studying and exposing extreme right-wing groups. He's a former vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, for crying out loud, and he has worked in support of the ACLU, AIM, and even the Socialist Workers Party. For more information on Berlet's stainless, undeniable left-wing credentials, see the Wikipedia article on him. It is troubling that you would get on a public board and make these comments about Berlet. You do this because you refuse to admit the truth about Fletcher Prouty.

Let's take a look at Prouty's response to the Esquire article: "Esquire magazine published an article, in which they just made up these things, I've never written for Liberty Lobby. I've spoken as a commercial speaker, they paid me to speak and then I left. They print a paragraph or two of my speech same as they would of anybody else, but I've never joined them. I don't subscribe to their newspaper, I never go to their own meetings, but they had a national convention at which asked me to speak and they paid me very, very well. I took my money and went home and that's it". I go to the meeting, I go home, I don't join. Why didn't Prouty mention that he appeared on Liberty Lobby's anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying radio show 10 times over a four-year period (as documented by the ADL)? Why didn't he mention that did not just speak at the convention but also took part in a panel discussion that included Bo Gritz? Why didn't he mention that he recommended Liberty Lobby's newspaper The Spotlight, as proudly documented by the newspaper itself? If John McAdams had spoken at a Liberty Lobby convention, appeared on their radio show 10 times, and recommended The Spotlight, would you be satisfied with the answer of "oh, shucks, I just spoke because they invited me and paid me, and then I went home. And never mind about the radio program and recommending the newspaper"? That sole speech was years ago and was no different than the speech I gave at the Holocaust Memorial Conference. I spoke my own words and ideas. I do admit to having been a rather active public speaker for all types of audiences, on a commercial except for Rotary, They're gratuitous from my point of view. That's a lie. Are we to believe that when he spoke at the Holocaust Memorial Conference, he gave a speech about the "Secret Team" and blamed the Israelis for high oil prices?! That's the speech he gave at the Liberty Lobby convention. I seriously doubt that he made the same comments at both gatherings. "The funny thing was two months earlier I had spoken at the Holocaust Conference for the second annual meeting of the Holocaust Group which I learned later the Liberty Lobby is completely opposed to. Dr. Littel, of the Holocaust Memorial organization invited me to attend and make a few comments,as others were requested. Oh, please. So Prouty only "learned later" that Liberty Lobby denied the Holocaust?! He had no idea about this during his years of associating with Carto and Marcellus, or when he talked with Carto and Marcellus about having the IHR republish The Secret Team? He never figured this out during the four-year period when he was appearing on Liberty Lobby's radio show, hosted by Holocaust-denier Tom Valentine, every five months?! Really? Col. Prouty has been asked to attend at the Holocaust Conference again later this year! And I'd bet the farm that if this really happened, it was because the Holocaust conference organizers had no knowledge of his close, prolonged relationship with Carto, Marcellus, Liberty Lobby, and the IHR. By the way, why didn't Prouty give a date for the speech he supposedly gave at the Holocaust Memorial Conference? I spent about 45 minutes Googling Holocaust conferences held in the 1980s and 1990s. I found articles/records for about two dozen such conferences, and I didn't find any mention of Prouty as speaking at any of them. I'll keep searching. Well, they put all this in this Esquire magazine but did it all backwards, as though I was a member, writing with these people or joining them. The only club I've joined is the Rotary Club!" See above. Also, why didn't Prouty address his disgraceful dodge that he gave when he was asked about Carto's Holocaust denial? The attempt of character assassination is a sign you have become a small threat. Others, at the levels I know of, have played up that as though I had been converted to something. It is just their "gentlemanly" tactic of dealing with people they can't handle otherwise.. In fact it is a CIA characteristic trait...as I well know. When they can't handle you, they attack your character. So the ADL and Chip Berlet were part of a CIA operation to discredit Prouty? Did they make Prouty appear on the Liberty Lobby's radio show 10 times in four years? Did they hypnotize him to recommend The Spotlight? Did they use mind-control drugs to get him to say "I'm no authority in that area" when asked about Holocaust denial? This classic was found on the internet; "An essay written from a leftist perspective by Chip Berlet, deals with the ties, and Mark Lane, and the extreme right-wing paranoid Liberty Lobby. Nothing here shows Prouty to be a National Socialist or an anti-Semite, but shouldn't he show better judgment in whom he associates with?" This implies I associate with National Socialists, or why else write it! But Prouty did associate with neo-N-azis and Holocaust deniers. This is beyond dispute. And where's the link to this essay? I searched for this essay every which way and could not find it. I searched for six verbatim excerpts with quotation marks from Prouty's quote from the essay and nothing came up. If the essay is real, I suspect Berlet wrote it before he learned of Prouty's "I'm no authority in that area" answer when asked about Holocaust denial, Prouty's argument that Israel was to blame for high oil prices, Prouty's numerous appearances on Liberty Lobby's radio show, and his having one of his books republished by the IHR, etc. The writings of Furhmann, Perry, Berlet, Posner, etc. are slick, cleverly written, but not based in the true facts. I wonder what they do for a living? where they work? Who pays them to write? My credentials are laid out for all to see. So Prouty didn't know what Berlet did for a living or where he worked? Really? He didn't know that Berlet was a fairly prominent ultra-liberal investigative journalist with stainless anti-fascist credentials? Really? Do you believe that?

Look, I'm still mad at your for blowing my cover. How dare you. I had a good gig going. However, my handlers have asked me to please get you to keep defending the 9/11 Truther claims in this JFK subforum, so I should thank you for your reply. Thank you. Since you accept the 9/11 Truther claims, surely you likewise recognize that the Moon landings were as phony as a three-dollar bill. Any thoughts? Finally, my handlers have asked that I try to get you to continue to defend Prouty and to keep claiming that all the documentation of his sleazy associations and nutty claims is just "McAdams/CIA disinformation." I'm counting on you.

Well, I'm still leery about some of statements regarding vaccination in general, but I definitely don't consider him to be a "quack" or a "kook" as most news outlets would have us believe. I believe he needs to squarely address his previous comments about vaccination, or else the news media is going to keep hanging them around his neck and using them to smear him.

I am very impressed that last week RFK Jr. spoke at Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian college, and praised the college for its defense of freedom during COVID-19. This tells me two things: RFK Jr. is not a rigid idealogue, and he is not a rabid partisan.

Well, based on many of the comments in this thread, the bar for being considered a valid source has now been lowered by several feet. The new standard seems to be that as long the person claims that JFK was killed because he was going to totally abandon the Vietnam War after the election, and that Ed Lansdale was part of the assassination plot, that person can do the following and still be considered a credible source: -- Appear on an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying radio show, not just once or twice, but 10 times over a four-year period (after all, the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying group that produced the show never admitted they were anti-Semitic and Holocaust deniers!) -- Reply "Well, shucks, I'm no authority in that area" when asked about Holocaust denial -- Recommend that people read an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying newspaper published by an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying group -- Have a book published by an anti-Semitic, neo-N-azi, Holocaust-denying group (gee, it was only a small printing run after all--of course it was, because the group catered to a very small audience) -- Publicly praise two prominent Holocaust deniers for having the vision and courage to have their Holocaust-denying publishing company republish his book -- Claim that the Israelis were responsible for high oil prices -- Viciously attack critics of a known cult and the crook who founded it (that's right, he can't attack the cult and its sleazy founder; he can only attack those who criticize the cult and its founder) -- Declare that he would not be a bit surprised to learn that the "Secret Team" assassinated Princess Diana (of course, makes perfect sense) -- Take seriously the claim that Winston Churchill had FDR poisoned ("the British are coming!") -- Suggest for years and years that he was sent on a sinister trip to the South Pole during the assassination to ensure he did not notice or change the lax security arrangements for the Dallas motorcade, but then back-peddle on this suggestion when questioned about it by a federal board -- Claim, in writing, that he possessed notes that he'd taken during an alleged "stand down" phone call from the 112th MI Group, and even pretend to quote from those notes, but then fail to produce the putatively historic notes when asked to do so by a federal board. Surely such a fraud and nutjob must have "remarkable" insights about the Vietnam War as well.

That contention has done great damage to the case for conspiracy. That contention, including its key component that JFK was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election no matter what, was the worst error in Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Critics pounced on this unfortunate blunder and hammered it so effectively that they got away with ignoring the valid parts of the film. Logically and historically, the contention makes no sense. First of all, it has long been known that LBJ, far from being chummy with the Joint Chiefs, not only distrusted them but spewed angry tirades at them, even in front of others. If the plotters killed JFK over Vietnam, they would never have let LBJ choose a dove like Hubert Humphrey as his VP. And if the plotters killed JFK over Vietnam, and if LBJ was part of the plot in any way, he surely would not have imposed insane, suicidal restrictions on the war effort in Vietnam. There is one reliable way to judge any book about the Vietnam War. If the book does not include the historic information revealed in the newly released/translated North Vietnamese sources, it is like a book on the JFK assassination that ignores the ARRB materials. It is not necessarily worthless, but it is missing a large amount of historic information, at the very least. If the book does not include this information and also argues that the war was unwinnable, that the South Vietnamese army was impotent, that the Saigon regime was as bad as the Hanoi regime, that U.S. forces routinely engaged in wanton destruction, etc., then the book is fatally flawed and misleading. Here is a summary of some of the things we have learned from the released/translated North Vietnamese sources: -- The North Vietnamese routinely exaggerated the damage done by American bombing to civilian areas. -- In at least two periods during the war, the North Vietnamese war effort was on the verge of implosion. -- By the end of the brief Linebacker II bombing campaign in 1972, North Vietnam's air defenses were on the verge of collapse. During Linebacker I and II, the Hanoi regime's ability to supply its forces was drastically reduced. If Lineback II had been continued for just two more weeks, North Vietnam would have been crippled, if not virtually shut down, and would have been unable to supply its troops or conduct meaningful military operations. -- The 1968 Tet Offensive was an act of desperation because Hanoi's leaders recognized that the war was going badly for them in 1967. Even hardliners such as Le Duan recognized that the protracted-warfare approach was not working against the Americans, and they concluded that time was no longer on their side. -- The Tet Offensive and the two subsequent mini-Tets later that year were horrendous military disasters that incurred gigantic losses in men and equipment. -- Hanoi's leaders were literally stunned when the Tet Offensive failed to induce a "general uprising" among the South Vietnamese. They were shocked that the vast majority of South Vietnamese stood by the Saigon regime, even during the brief period at the outset of the offensive when the Communists seemed to have the upper hand in many parts of the country. -- On many occasions, the South Vietnamese army and air force fought effectively, even ferociously. -- Even with all the restrictions that LBJ placed on American bombing through 1968, Rolling Thunder bombing raids were doing even more damage to Hanoi's war effort than American hawks believed they were doing at the time. -- American reports of progress in the war effort in 1963, 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969 to early 1972 were valid and justified. -- Hanoi's leaders intended to use any coalition-government arrangement as a means to impose Communist rule on South Vietnam. -- Hanoi's leaders used ceasefires and peace negotiations to resupply their forces and to move more forces into position, in violation of the conditions of the ceasefires. -- MACV's enemy casualty estimates were not wildly exaggerated but were usually in the ballpark of the Hanoi regime's own numbers. -- The Hanoi regime viewed the American anti-war movement and most American news outlets as valuable allies. -- Hanoi's leaders did all they could via propaganda to pressure Congress to reduce military aid to South Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords, and they privately cheered the anti-war members of Congress for repeatedly slashing that aid. Books that discuss the information revealed in the North Vietnamese sources include the books by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Truong Vu, Mark Moyar, Lewis Sorley, and George Veith. They're all available on Amazon. Briefly, another useful way to judge a book on the Vietnam War is whether or not it addresses the evidence that has emerged about the reign of terror that the Communists imposed on South Vietnam after the war. Important new research on this issue has come from Australian and Asian scholars, among others. We now know that instead of a few thousand random executions, many tens of thousands of executions were carried out after the war. We also now know that the original estimate that around 300,000 South Vietnamese were forced into concentration camps was markedly low and that closer to one million people were sent to those camps. We further know that the death rate in the camps was at least 5%, at the bare minimum. If a book fails to address these facts, it is probably trying to whitewash the aftermath of the war or its author is not well read on the war. Posting a video taken decades after the war that shows some Vietnamese celebrating, and then claiming that it was like this in the '90s (no, it was not: LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK), as Jim has done in this thread and in others, is misleading, if not shameful. That video reminds one of the N-azi propaganda films that showed concentration camp prisoners enjoying recreational games and eating hearty meals. Every single major human rights group rates Vietnam as one of the worst and most repressive regimes on the planet today (see, for example, World Report 2022: Vietnam | Human Rights Watch).

Wow. Really? You're still gonna pretend to be clueless about the problems with Whaley's "identification" and pretend that it was a "positive identification"? Anyway, here's my answer: I don't believe Whaley recognized Oswald as the passenger he picked up at 12:30. I believe he was pressured into eventually going along with an Oswald identification. I think this explains the suspicious issues with the police statements taken from him, and I think it explains his WC testimony. Again, to all but the willfully blind, Whaley's WC testimony shows that he felt guilty about his identification, that--at a minimum--he was uncertain about it, and that he was hinting as far as he dared that he was pressured into it and that there were shenanigans involved with his police statements. The core issue with Whaley is the fact that the 12:30 pickup time documented in his timesheet categorically rules out Oswald as the passenger. This explains his statements about the color of the jacket and the rest of the man's clothing. The WC's argument that Whaley picked up this passenger at 12:47 is bogus, but they had to make that claim because that was the earliest they could get Oswald to the spot where he allegedly entered Whaley's cab. The WC simply lied when it claimed that the 12:30 entry was not precise because Whaley supposedly entered his pickup times in 15-minute intervals. His timesheet itself refutes this lie. The timesheet includes entries for 6:20, 7:50, 8:10, 8:20, 9:40, 10:50, and 3:10. Furthermore, if the passenger had really entered the cab at 12:47 or 12:48 as the WC claimed, Whaley, according to Commission's own argument, would have entered the time as 12:45 or 1:00. Obviously, Whaley entered 12:30 as the pickup time because that's when he picked up the passenger. But the WC could not accept this because it couldn't get Oswald to the cab until 12:47. And we haven't even addressed the rigged reenactments of Whaley's drive from downtown Dallas to Oswald's neighborhood. Here, too, the Commission's timeline for Oswald's movements collapses like a house of cards.

Actually, not it's not, not at all. Again, he appeared on Liberty Lobby's fascist, Holocaust-denying radio show TEN TIMES IN FOURS YEARS. He recommended that people read the pro-N-azi, Holocaust-denying Spotlight. He had one of his books published by the IHR, another pro-fascist, pro-N-azi, Holocaust-denying group. He blamed high oil prices on the Israelis. He refused to condemn Carto's denial of the Holocaust. In fact, he praised Carto and Marcellus for having the vision and courage to republish his book. Why oh why can't you just admit the truth about Prouty? If Prouty was not a fascist, he certainly felt comfortable associating with fascists and accepting money from fascists for years. My heavens, if Trump, Steve Bannon, and Bill Regnery had spent so many years palling around with and profiting from Holocaust deniers and neo-N-azis, you guys wouldn't listen to any excuses for such conduct. Nor would I. As some here know, I was raised Jewish for part of my childhood; I speak Hebrew (learned in college, then at DLI, and then in Israel); I lived in Israel for a short time; and I'm proudly pro-Israeli and pro-Jewish. I happen to read Israeli newspapers fairly frequently. Several Israeli newspapers argued that Steve Bannon, far from being an anti-Semite, was a strong ally of Israel. The Israeli newspaper Ha Aretz reported on one Jewish group's findings (the Zionist Organization of America, or ZOA) about Bannon: "ZOA’s own experience and analysis of Breitbart articles confirms Mr. Bannon’s and Breitbart’s friendship and fair-mindedness towards Israel and the Jewish people,” the organization said in a statement. "To accuse Mr. Bannon and Breitbart of anti-Semitism is Orwellian. In fact, Breitbart bravely fights against anti-Semitism.” The organization added that it "welcomes" Bannon's appointment and wishes him success. About two years ago I looked into the charge that Breitbart was anti-Israeli and/or anti-Semitic. I have been an occasional reader of Breitbart, but not a regular one. When I heard the claim that Breitbart was anti-Semitic, I decided to investigate it because I had never seen any indication of this in the Breitbart articles I'd read. When I checked, I found no evidence whatsoever that Breitbart is anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli. Indeed, Breitbart is strongly pro-Israeli. I defy anyone to search the Breitbart site and find me one article that is the slightest bit anti-Israeli. And make no mistake, you will NEVER find an anti-Semite who is pro-Israeli. As for Trump, he has always been strongly pro-Israeli. Part of his family is Jewish. He has a daughter who is Jewish and Jewish grandchildren. He has invested in Israel. He was the one president who had the courage to move our embassy to Israel's capital city. Perhaps this is why public opinion polls in Israel have consistently showed Trump more popular in Israel than Obama. The substantial majority of Israelis viewed, and still view, Trump as a great friend and backer of Israel. In fact, Trump's popularity in Israel rose during his presidency.

Leslie, very interesting stuff. I don't agree with your conclusions about some of the conservative figures you mention, but I definitely agree with you about The Spotlight. Prouty's close and prolonged association with Carto, Liberty Lobby, and the IHR discredit him as a source and should cause us to repudiate him. And, just so you know, I'm not a huge Trump supporter. I think he did many good things for the country, but I believe he should have been prosecuted for purposely waiting to tell the 1/6 rioters to stand down. I have never thought highly of him as a person. I regard him as emotionally and morally unfit for high office. He was my fourth pick among the GOP candidates in the 2016 Republican primary (my picks were Carson, Rubio, Kasich, and then Trump--come to think of it, I would have voted for J. Bush over Trump if it had been a contest between the two). I think it is quite a reach to impugn tens of millions of Republicans because of a very small handful of unsavory people among them. There are equal numbers of unsavory characters among the Democrats too. To me, it makes no sense to drag modern politics into discussions on the JFK case. Plenty of conservatives believe JFK was killed by a conspiracy (and not a Soviet one). As I've said, when we drag politics into the JFK case, we risk alienating and driving away a large part of our reading audience.

More ducking and dodging, bobbing and weaving, and hemming and hawing. Anything but an honest facing of the facts. Do you really need an account of how poor, misguided, gullible, clueless Prouty "came into this orbit"? Sheesh, the guy appeared on Liberty Lobby's obscene radio show 10 times over a four-year period. He let the IHR republish one of his books. He recommended The Spotlight. Absolutist??? Again, how close and how long of an association with a bunch of lunatic Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and white supremacists is enough to discredit someone as a source? I'd say appearing on their radio show 10 times in four years, having them republish one of his books, speaking at one of their conventions, recommending their newspaper, sitting on a discussion panel with Bo Gritz, blaming Israel for high oil prices, etc., etc.,--I think that's a close enough and long enough association to thoroughly, totally discredit Prouty as a source. But that's just me.