John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

[James DiEugenio]

Galbraith was a truly underrated character in the Kennedy White House.

This began with that misleading and pernicious book by David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.  The fact that the morons at Daily Kos  idealized that book is one of the reasons I left the so called liberal blogosphere. 

In his book, Halberstam says that Galbraith was on the periphery of Kennedy's thinking on Vietnam policy. What utter BS.

It turns out that Galbraith was at at the center of the story.  And in 1962 he offered two alternatives to get out.  One may or may not have worked but was stymied by Harriman.  But the second one did work.  And its what Kennedy was using when he was killed.  

Not even John Newman told the whole story about this amazing figure.  Thanks to Richard Parker we now have it.

https://kennedysandking.com/articles/john-kenneth-galbraith-a-hero-in-our-time

[W. Niederhut]

Fascinating article about John Kenneth Galbraith, who really seems to have been a JFK era Man for All Seasons.  I have only read one of his many books over the years-- The Great Crash-- but I remember it as a well-written history of 1929, and a primer on Keynesian economics.

Galbraith, with his deep understanding of history, seems to have played a major role in convincing JFK that the conflict in Indochina was, in essence, anti-colonial.

But, what is also striking in your article are the accounts of Galbraith's nemeses, the Cold War hawks (including Rostow and Harriman) who were determined to sabotage JFK's evolving plans to de-escalate the Cold War, and get out of Vietnam.

I haven't read Galbraith's accounts of the WWII bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan, (and didn't even know about them before reading your article) but he must have despised General Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay, another thorn in JFK's side, long after the fire-bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and Pyong Yang.

LeMay seems to have been a major figure in the history of the concept of bombing people back to the Stone Age, during and after WWII.

I remember Jim Lehrer asking George W. Bush and John Kerry, in one of their 2004 Presidential debates, what they believed to be the "lessons of Vietnam."

(And, of course, we were, by then, already horribly bogged down in the U.S. invasion-induced Iraqi civil war.)

Dubya completely ducked the question.

 

Edited October 15, 2018 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

The relationship Galbraith had with Kennedy was really something.

 I mean I cannot think offhand of anyone in the Administration, except for RFK, who had this kind of rapport with the president. I think it must go back to the fact that he was his tutor at such a young age.  

Is that something about that crazy firebombing.  Sixteen square miles means they incinerated 1600 blocks.  Subdivide that by say, minimum, twenty homes per block--excluding ones with apartment houses-- and you are talking about mass devastation.  I actually think in one of the cities the effect of the firebombing was worse than the atomic bomb. 

Rostow was a dedicated Cold Warrior.  Harriman was a different case.  He negotiated the Laos neutrality deal, and later on the Test Ban Treaty.  But something was really up with him about Vietnam. 

As I said, the biggest regret is what would have been possible if Galbraith had taken the job as ambassador to Russia and Kennedy had lived.  If that had happened, I think Khrushchev may have survived.  And you really would have had a chance at detente. Remember, when Kennedy died, Khrushchev was one of the first to sign his condolences at the US embassy and he was choking back tears.

[W. Niederhut]

I wonder if Galbraith talked, or wrote, about his opinions regarding JFK's assassins.

He must, surely, have wondered about a conspiracy involving the Cold Warriors who had opposed JFK's plans in Southeast Asia, (and his decisions during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

[Joe Bauer]

I would also like to know if Galbraith ever shared any thoughts on JFK's assassination. Privately or publicly.

[James DiEugenio]

If he did, they are not in the Parker biography.  

At least I did not see them, but I admit I did not read the whole book which is pretty long.

 

[Andrew Prutsok]

In a June 6, 2006 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of The Daily Kos, stated that he had spent between six months and two years training at the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC. In this speech Kos said began in 2001, before he started DailyKos,^[5] and continued until the beginning of his involvement with the Howard Dean presidential campaign (late 2003/early 2004), which would mean that Zúniga was in training with the US CIA for as much as two years.^[6]

 

Ever since Daily Kos came out against Dennis Kucinich during one of his presidential runs, I always suspected that with Zuniga's intelligence background, Daily Kos might have been an intelligence-sponsored site designed to limit the parameters on what is acceptable liberal opinion/discussion.

[James DiEugenio]

I did not know it might have  been that long.  

Hard to buy that he does not recall the exact time.  That web site started some time in 2002.

Hmm. Well that explains why I do not go there anymore.  

When I saw how they thought Halberstam's book was the be all and end all on Vietnam, that was it for me.  That book is clearly a relic of the past with little if any use today.  I am still trying to figure out if it was a deliberate put up job.  And his complete misfire on JKG is a part of it.

[Michaleen Kilroy]

Not sure how John Galbraith felt about the JFK assassination, but his son is fairly clear about his POV:

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

https://www.statesman.com/news/20131109/advisers-son-reflects-on-jfk-after-50-years

Great article, btw, Jim.  I'll be sure to check out the book.

Edited October 16, 2018 by Mike Kilroy

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Mike.

Is it not a travesty that we had to wait for Jamie Galbraith to open his mouth about this to tell us how important his father was?  And that was only done on the occasion of Newman's book being published.

I mean that is how bad our so called historians are.  Halberstam set the mold, and everyone followed like lemmings. Somehow Vietnam was some kind of inevitable tragedy out of a Greek Homeric poem.

Complete and utter baloney.  And one of the reasons everyone fell for it was secrecy. It was the ARRB which finally put the kabosh on that.  But the Pentagon Papers also shed some light on it.  They have a section called Phased Withdrawal 1963-64.

But very few people who read the PP picked up on this. But even with that, one can see that Johnson was not continuing JFK's policy in Indochina.

Mike Morrisey once wrote that the biggest lie ever told in the second half of the 20th century was Oswald shot Kennedy.  The second biggest lie was that Johnson continued Kennedy's policy in Vietnam.

 

Edited October 16, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

        I'm many years behind the curve on this kind of historical research, but one of the first books that I read on the subject of Vietnam and the JFK assassination was Col. L. Fletcher Prouty's book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, which I found on Amazon two or three years ago, after re-watching Oliver Stone's film, JFK, and reading somewhere that Mr. X (played by Donald Sutherland) in the film was based loosely on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty.

     Prouty, certainly, believed that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy involving his former boss, Ed Lansdale, and a number of other high-level U.S. government officials who were opposed to JFK's policy decisions in Vietnam (and at the Bay of Pigs.)

    I don't recall whether Prouty was aware of Galbraith's major influence on JFK's foreign policy decisions in Southeast Asia, but his direct observations as the Joint Chiefs Liaison to the CIA are consistent with the history described in Galbraith's (and John Newman's) writings.

   I also noticed, around the time I read his book(s), that Prouty was being maligned on several internet sites as a conspiracy nut, anti-Semite, and pseudo-historian-- which is an odd thing to say about a guy who was a firsthand observational source for many of the "historical" events of that time.

Edited October 17, 2018 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

Prouty I thought was quite insightful as an insider into what Kennedy was trying to do.  Especially in Vietnam, since Krulak and he wrote the Taylor/McNamara report which backed up NSAM 263.

Yes, Robert Sam Anson began the attack on Prouty, and then Chip Berlet picked it up and then it got into the MSM with that asset Ed Epstein.

Prouty wrote for some men's magazines in the seventies as many other people did since they paid well and he could get mass circulation.

He then wrote for some rightwing journals in the eighties and he did a paid speech for Liberty Lobby.  And for this he i stabled an anti semite.  Its pure guilt by association.

Here is an expose of this crap and Epstein.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-abstract-reality-of-edward-epstein