John Newman: Excerpt from 2017 edition of "JFK and Vietnam"

[Douglas Caddy]

John Newman wrote this on Facebook today:

 

EXCERPT FROM 2017 EDITION OF "JFK AND VIETNAM":

What McNamara did not tell me during our March 1993 discussion was that he had spoken with a journalist about Vietnam in 1992. A Washington reporter, Deborah Shapley, had secured a meeting with him at which she announced she was writing a book about him, wanted a series of one-on-one interviews with him, and wanted access to his still secret Pentagon oral histories. He had agreed. The publication date was January 1993, some months before my meeting with McNamara. I did not notice Shapley’s book, Promise and Power, until, by chance, I saw it in a book store around June 1993.
It was my turn to be irate. I called McNamara right away and he took the call. I told him how upset I was that he had not allowed a credentialed historian on the Vietnam War to see his oral histories. There was extraordinarily important material on Vietnam in his oral histories that Shapley blew off as just something McNamara had made up— “arranged”—to make Kennedy look good for the 1990s. “Okay, alright,” McNamara interrupted me, “You can look at it too.” I wasn’t going to give him an opportunity to have any second thoughts and was on my way to the Pentagon within minutes to see his oral history interviews for myself.
Alfred Goldberg opened the door when I knocked at the Office of the Historian, Secretary of Defense. As it turned out, this was the same Alfred Goldberg that Chief Justice Earl Warren asked to help write the Warren Report. I was in uniform. I told him who I was and that I was there to see McNamara’s oral histories. “Oh no you’re not,” he shot right back. When I insisted that McNamara had just given me his permission, Goldberg refused to believe me. So I asked him to call McNamara’s office as he was there. Goldberg did call McNamara, who then ordered Goldberg to let me see the oral history material.
Goldberg became very angry but he had no choice as McNamara was the originator and agency principal in the matter. Goldberg showed me into a conference room, gave me a yellow legal pad of paper, a pencil, and the four stapled sections of the interviews he and his colleagues had done with McNamara in 1968. I sat down and began copying, in longhand, from page one of the first interview. My left forearm was shot after forty minutes. I came out of the conference room to find Goldberg at a desk. I said nothing to him as I picked up the phone and called McNamara to complain. I told him this would not work. McNamara got Goldberg on the phone and gave him a direct order to let me copy what I wanted. At this, Goldberg angrily gestured at the copy machine and walked out of the office in a huff.
And there I was, alone in a room with a copy machine and McNamara’s compete oral history. Vietnam, Cuba, Soviet Union, nuclear weapons—everything. It was another one of those unexpected and even surreal moments. My access to McNamara’s Pentagon oral histories turned out to be right on time. I had been invited to make a presentation of the case for policy reversal between the JFK and LBJ administrations at an important weekend conference at the LBJ Library just three months hence in October 1993. I was to be on the final panel on Sunday, facing two important opponents: William Gibbons from George Mason University and Larry Berman of the Political Science Department of the University of California at Davis.
One of the most significant things to emerge from McNamara’s oral histories was the extent of the evidence that McNamara (and thus Kennedy) was indeed fully prepared to execute a withdrawal in the face of a battlefield defeat:
I think that early on in, say, 1961– 62, there was reason to accede to Diem’s request for assistance to help train his forces. I believed that to the extent we could train those forces, we should do so, and having done it, we should get out. To the extent those trained forces could not handle the problem—the subversion by North Vietnam—I believed we should not introduce our military forces in support of the South Vietnamese, even if they were going to be “defeated.” [END EXCERPT]

The evidence for JFK's intent to withdraw from Vietnam is overwhelming--no matter how hard Ken Burns tries to spin it the other way in his new documentary:

http://www.capjournal.com/…/article_cbb416d4-78d3-11e7-821d…

[Douglas Caddy]

And also this from John Newman:

 

[Michael Clark]

Excellent Video. It would take a lot of time for me to get my head around a lot of this.

A couple takeaways, for me.

- @ 8:40 In 1963 there was a CIA Oswald program in place, to embarrass the FPCC. Newman didn't say so but I am assuming this would be McCord. If I could ask Newman a question I would ask him if that is so.

-All plans to assassinate Castro and Kennedy actually were meant to leave Castro alive

        - I did not understand why Newman says this is so, although it fits my working pet CT, which is that Far-right and industrial elements were not interested in a free independent Cuba, with a Mafia presence, and that a US Guantanamo bay facility could be more easily assured in an adversarial situation (boycott).

Does Newman explain why he believes the plotters wanted Castro alive? I missed it.

-Was it because the plotters wanted Vietnam, or simply hated Kennedy?

The above elements are intertwined, but I missed an explanation for this.

*****edit so I don't have to bump it

-He says the plot counted on Castro Being alive after the assassination of Kennedy

-He says the plot counted on Oswald being the assassin and Castro and the Soviet Union being behind the assassination.

-He says elsewhere (and briefly mentions it here) that it is the WW3 virus that prevents the invasion of Cuba.

-I am toying with the idea that Oswald being the lone assassin was never part of the plotters plans. Oswald was to be implicated in a conspiracy. It was not the WW3 virus that thwarted the invasion but the intentional failure of Dallas and Texas operatives to come up with, in deed to suppress, the evidence of conspiracy. The suppression of Mexico City/LHO indicates that someone with the ability to supress that evidence was in on the conspiracy suppression angle and was not part of the strictly local Dallas conspiracy suppression operation (guns, erestees and detainees, body disappearances). Who would that be? I don't really know right now but I don't think it was Hunt. It might have been Phillips. I will be looking to see if I can make sense of Phillips wanting-to and being capable of suppressing the MC evidence with very few, if any, helpers.

Edited August 11, 2017 by Michael Clark