Noam Chomsky vs. Oliver Stone

[James DiEugenio]

After listening to 45 minutes of one of the stupidest rants i can recall, I think I should respond to an Apple podcast of January 6th on the show Green and Red  by host Bob Buzzanco.

Clearly, Oliver going on Breaking Points and Useful Idiots was the cause of this.  In fact, Buzzanco refers to this near the end. He and Chomsky do not like the idea that Stone is reaching out to the younger generation of the Left, and they see this as a battle over leadership through Kennedy.  But yet, in the entire 45 minutes, they do not address one single forensic point that the film brings up.  Not one! Yet, this is the heart of this version of the film.  What this tells me is that they do not want to admit Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, one that was covered up by both the Warren Commission and the HSCA.  For instance, if you expose CE 399 as a hoax, then where is the Commission? And the film does that. 

But they do not want to confront this issue because then that would lead to the questions of: 1.) well why did a group of people have him killed? and 2.) why was there this multi generational cover up?  Yet this is the whole point of JFK Revisited.  The uncovering of all this concealed data by the ARRB.  Which is why the film features John Tunheim, Tom Samoluk and Doug Horne.  Because they all worked for the Board.  Again, in a recurring theme in discussions of the film, these two NEVER MENTION the Review Board. Or the 60,000 documents they declassified making up 2 million pages. If the Warren Commission was correct about Oswald, then why did there have to be a Review Board at all? And why did Louis Stokes of the HSCA meet with the ARRB and tell them to do a special inquiry into the JFK autopsy, since he, and others, were not satisfied with the HSCA version of this subject.   And as the film shows, he was correct e.g. the Doug Horne and Jeremy Gunn deposition of John Stringer, where he denies he took the brain photographs of JFK in the Archives

To me, as with the MSM, their refusal to confront the new information in the film, this is a dead giveaway. They do not want to admit Kennedy was killed by a well organized conspiracy and that a powerful cover up then followed, one in which Allen Dulles and LBJ played prominent roles.

These excisions from what is in the film tells us that what will follow will not be criticism.  It will be Maytag dryer spin. And it is.

 

Edited January 11, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Guest]

There is a history here; didn’t Chomsky originally suspect the JFKA was a conspiracy, then mysteriously u-turned and attacked those that believed it? Something like that anyway. 
 

FYI I agree with Chomsky on a lot of other things but, the above seems curious. 
 

If you did a podcast calling out Chomsky, it would get a ton of traffic or an article on K&K would be cool.

[James DiEugenio]

Much of this Apple Podcast concerns Vietnam.  But there is some discussion by Buzzanco of the issue of Oswald and the CIA and the FBI.  If you can believe it he uses the HSCA version on this topic. Recall, that report was written in 1979.  So again, its like the Review Board did not exist.

JFK Revisited uses two of the foremost experts on this topic and they are both quite familiar with what the ARRB unearthed on this important issue. And like Stringer denying his brain photographs, it is not in the HSCA volumes.

John Newman wrote a book in 1995 titled Oswald and the CIA.  Jeff Morley has written three books on three important figures dealing with Oswald: Our Man in Mexico (Win Scott), Ghost (James Angleton) and Morley vs CIA (George Joannides).  All of these works came after the HSCA.  And they include important information about Oswald and the FBI and Oswald and the CIA that is not in the HSCA volumes. So for Buzzanco to rely on the HSCA is simply ignorant.  Its like he does not know that the HSCA collection  the ARRB declassified made up over 400,000 pages of documents.

For instance, in this two hour version of JFK Revisited, John reveals that FBI agent Marvin Gheesling took the Bureau's FLASH warning off of the Oswald file six weeks before the assassination. As John notes in the 2008 update to his book, Gheesling was never deposed by the HSCA.  So no one asked him why--after four years-- he did this. But as John notes in the film and in his book, this removal from the watch list allowed Oswald's name to be absent from the Security Index passed by the FBI to the Secret Service. Therefore he was not removed from the motorcade route in Dallas. (Newman, 2008 version, p. 630)

Secondly, as Newman's book also revealed, both the FBI and the CIA had anti-FPCC operations going on as early as 1961. That campaign was ordered up by James McCord. (ibid, p. 95) And it was participated in by McCord and David Phillips.  Now, the film shows that in New Orleans Oswald had on some of his flyers the address of 544 Camp Street. Morley points out that the CRC had been housed there.  John notes that the FBI attempted to remove the address from messages to Washington so that the Commission would not realize what the FBI knew: that former G man Guy Banister had an office there. (Ibid, p. 310) The film also notes that in addition to Banister, Oswald was seen with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.  Which leads to the question, what on earth would a Marxist like Oswald be doing associating with such men? Well, if Oswald was part of the anti-FPCC program being run by both the CIA and FBI, that would explain it.

In the film, Morley also explains that during the HSCA inquiry, former CIA officer George Joannides was called out of semi retirement to perform duties as a liaison officer for the Agency. The HSCA asked him if he was operational or had anything to do with the JFK case in 1963. He said no.  He lied. He was supervising the DRE in the USA at the time. In other words, in the street theater going on in New Orlean that summer, with Carlos Bringuier punching Oswald and their court appearance-- in all probability, you had the CIA and FBI managing both sides.  Mr. Buzzanco, if the HSCA employed George J how could this be in the HSCA volumes?  But is it not important?  After all, as Morley revealed in his book, the DRE put out the first cover story: about Oswald killing Kennedy for Castro, in a broadsheet paid for by the CIA.

In the long version of the film, John will relate a story told to him by Malcolm Blunt. When former Counter intelligence officer Pete Bagley saw the routing system of Oswald's files into the CIA, he immediately declared that Oswald was a false defector to the USSR. Betsy Wolf originally discovered this for the HSCA, but her reports were never even typed up, let alone included in the HSCA volumes. In the long version of the film, Doug Horne will state other evidence of paramount importance in regards to this issue. Again, none of it this is in the HSCA volumes Mr. Buzzanco.

 

Edited January 11, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

But most of the discussion deals with Kennedy's foreign policy in general and, more specifically, Indochina.

In the four hour version of the film, we deal with the evolution of Kennedy's ideas on foreign policy from 1951 to 1958, and how these ideas were implemented once he was in the White House.  In the two hour version, we only deal specifically with Vietnam and Congo.  In a revealing tell, neither man talks about what Richard Mahoney reveals about the latter.  But this whole issue of Africa and Congo will be dealt with at even more length in the longer version of the film.

In one of the truly moronic statements in a sea of such statements, Buzzanco calls Kennedy a classic Cold Warrior.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this.  Anyone who knows the subject understands that after Kennedy met with Edmund Gullion and Seymour Topping  in Saigon in 1951 he began an eight year campaign to find an alternative to both Republican and Democratic orthodoxies about the Cold War. The best short version of this influence on JFK was written by James Norwood. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/edmund-gullion-jfk-and-the-shaping-of-a-foreign-policy-in-vietnam) Mahoney's book is the best long version. The point is that after this meeting Kennedy became a sharp opponent of the Dulles/Eisenhower "for us or against us" attitude in the Third World.  For instance, in 1953 he wrote a letter to Foster Dulles asking him what he was going to do in Vietnam. The answer ended up being Operation Vulture, which Kennedy harshly opposed. And more recent scholars like Robert Rakove and Philip Muehlenbeck have written books on this subject backed up with new evidence to argue Kennedy's alternative policy. In fact, Kennedy got so vehement on this issue that in 1956, Stevenson's office told him not to make any more speeches on the subject. 

This all leads to the 1957 Algeria speech.  Kennedy was opposed to American intervention at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. And he was also opposed to American support for the French empire in Algeria. He studied the issue for a year. And then made a barn burner of a speech in the summer of 1957. He said words to the effect, did we not remember what just happened 3 years ago in Indochina?  The same thing is going to happen here. If we were a true friend to Paris, we would be escorting France to the negotiation table to find a graceful exit from this ugly colonial war. We should not be on the wrong side of history again. We need to save the French nation and to free Africa.  (What he meant by the first aim was to prevent a coup attempt  in France--which did come later.)

If Buzzanco and Chomsky can show me any other American senator who made such a speech on the floor at this time, i would be quite interested in reading it.  In fact, according to Mahoney, the place was pretty much deserted. When Kennedy realized that everyone had jumped ship, he filmed part of his speech in advance and we have that in the long version of the film. Now, if anything shows that Kennedy was not a classic Cold Warrior it was the reaction to this speech. To put it mildly, he got bombed.  About 70 per cent of the editorials and articles opposed it. Both Acheson and Stevenson, the two Democratic gurus of foreign policy, attacked it. Foster Dulles, Eisenhower and Nixon all assaulted Kennedy over it. Which proved JFK's point, that there was little difference between Democrats and Republicans on Third World nationalism and the Cold War. And they were both wrong.

The next year, The Ugly American came out, and Kennedy loved the book. He bought 100 copies and sent one to each senator and bought an ad in the NY TImes for it.  Why? Because the message of the book was that if all America had to offer in the Cold war was anti-communism then we might as well fold up our tents and go home.

This is a classic Cold Warrior Mr. Buzzanco?

Edited January 11, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

The conversation on Indochina between Chomsky and Buzzanco was sort of like a Folie a deux, each of them goading each other to more extreme fruitiness.

At one point toward the end Buzzanco actually said that the military did not want to go into Vietnam! Which is utterly inane.  In Gordon Goldstein's fine book, Lessons in Disaster, he identifies nine separate attempts  to try to get Kennedy to insert combat troops, some of them from the Pentagon e.g. Max Taylor. (See Goldstein, pp. 52-60) Let me quote part of my review for one reply by Kennedy to Taylor as recorded by McGeorge Bundy:

"Gen. DeGaulle, out of painful French experience, had spoken with feeling of the difficulty of fighting in this part of the world." Vice-President Johnson then called for a firmer military commitment to the region, including Laos. Kennedy resisted by saying, "Nothing would be worse than an unsuccessful intervention in the area, and that he did not have confidence in the military practicability of the proposal which had been put before him." (pp. 56-57)

The date of this dialogue is July 15, 1961. I don't see how it gets more clear than this.  Kennedy is against military intervention in both Laos and Vietnam. As Goldstein later notes, at the  meetings in November, the entire JCS was for insertion of combat troops.  Again, Kennedy refused. (ibid, p. 60) But this is what is central--he was warned that Saigon would likely fall if combat troops were not inserted. Yet in the face of that, Robert Kennedy specifically stated that there would be no combat troops in Vietnam. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 113) Which undermines Chomsky's old chestnut about withdrawal of American advisors being reliant on winning the war. If Kennedy is being warned the country will fall, and his brother is saying there will be no American direct intervention, then what is the conclusion to be drawn from that?

As Goldstein notes, there were only two people siding with Kennedy during these November debates: George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith.  Kennedy agreed to send Saigon more advisors and equipment, but as James Galbraith says in the film, a line had been drawn that Kennedy was not going to cross.  In fact, after his death, in 1964, RFK made a speech at the University of Virginia where he was asked about this issue.  He said that even though the war was going poorly, he did not think we should  send in American combat troops.

But the main result of Kennedy facing down the hawks was this: He now sent Galbraith to Vietnam. He wanted a different view of the conflict-- which he knew he would get from his mentor.  He also retired Walt Rostow, one of the worst hawks, to the Policy Planning Department.

Edited January 11, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Bulman]

After the 2016 election I wasted several dollars on three books by Chomsky looking for some sort of hope in my disgust.  I'd never read him and thought he was supposed to be somewhat of a left of center savant.  The books are in the to be disposed of box.  I hate throwing out books but don't want them left around to influence anyone else who comes across them.

Jim, you're coming down mainly on Buzzanco above.  I wonder if at this point in time Chomsky is not maybe a prop so to speak for the M$M.

[James DiEugenio]

The above moves, retiring Rostow and sending Galbraith to Vietnam marked a significant milestone.  One not noted by either man in the podcast.  Because it signaled that Kennedy was not going to listen to the hawks anymore. Galbraith filed a total of three reports on Vietnam, and then when he was in town in April of 1962, Kennedy sent him over to see McNamara about his cables.  (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/galbraith-and-vietnam/) This was the beginning of Kennedy's withdrawal plan.

Why? Because as noted above, the next month, at a SecDef meeting, Galbraith told Commanding General Harkins to stay after.  At this time, McNamara now proposed to him to begin to set up a plan for removing American forces from Vietnam. What was Harkins' reaction? "Harkins' chin nearly hit the table." (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120) Does this sound like the military wanted out of Vietnam? Sure does not sound that way to me.  As Jim Douglass notes in his fine book, the Pentagon did not want to do this so they delayed it as much as they could, until finally the withdrawal schedules were specifically requested by McNamara.  And they were submitted to him. How do we know this?  Because in one of the most important finds of the ARRB, they located and declassified the records of the May 1963 Sec Def Conference in Hawaii. Those records made it so crystal clear that Kennedy was getting out that even the NY Times could not deny it anymore.  Tim Weiner wrote a story on December 23, 1997 headlined "Kennedy had Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam."  This was one of the declassified files that we display in the film.  Now if it was enough to convince the New York Times , would it not be enough to convince a historian? Nope.  Because  Chomsky in not an historian.  He is a polemicist.  When he and Howard Zinn were editing the Gravel version of the Pentagon Papers--as Peter Scott relates in Aaron GOod's American Exception: Destiny Betrayed podcast--Chomsky and Howard Zinn did not want him to write his original essay on indications that Kennedy was going to withdraw from Vietnam. Why?  Because that would mean that who was president mattered. In my view, this is not how you write history.  It should not have any kind of ideological slant. But Chomsky cannot write without an ideological slant, which is why he is a polemicist.

 But it gets worse.  When Zinn was later writing back and forth with Ray Marcus, he told Ray that even if Kennedy was killed in a coup, the plotters were wrong about it.  I wish I was kidding on both scores but I am not.  Ray actually showed me the Zinn letter.  

Edited January 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Just now, Ron Bulman said:

After the 2016 election I wasted several dollars on three books by Chomsky looking for some sort of hope in my disgust.  I'd never read him and thought he was supposed to be somewhat of a left of center savant.  The books are in the to be disposed of box.  I hate throwing out books but don't want them left around to influence anyone else who comes across them.

Jim, you're coming down mainly on Buzzanco above.  I wonder if at this point in time Chomsky is not maybe a prop so to speak for the M$M.

As you can see from the above, I am getting to Chomsky.  But Buzzanco was leading him on.  Recall, Noam is 93 years old.  IMO he belongs in a nursing home.

[Benjamin Cole]

To be sure, JFK was not perfect, but his world view was that the developed nations could not "win" by supporting colonialism or other overbearing interventionism in the lesser developed world.  We would inevitably be the "interloping bad guys" in the eyes of the public of those nations. Also, JFK had actually been in combat and war, and knew of the horrors firsthand.  

Those two aspects of JFK assured that he would not pursue the Vietnam War and likely would seek accommodation with Cuba. Exchanging a few nukes over Cuba was not worth it, and Cuba was not essential, or even important, to US prosperity. 

Noam Chomsky has had a brilliant career...but seems to have been coopted by the modern Donk crowd. For whatever reason, the Rolling Stones, the New Yorkers, the WaPos are intent on re-fabricating the JFKA researchers as a bunch of kooks. 

Dick Russell has written about the CIA coopting modern media, as has Glenn Greenwald. 

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/the-daily-beast-ties-to-cia/

The media world has changed. 

[James DiEugenio]

BTW Ben, we deal with Kennedy's evolution at length in the four hour version.  These two never mentioned one word about it.

Once the withdrawal schedules were handed in, the next step was to make a report and attach an NSAM to it for purposes of activating the schedules. So Kennedy sent McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam for the purpose of writing a report. There is a debate over when this report was written, Howard Jones says it was actually written before the departure, Fletcher Prouty says it was written during the visit.  But there is no doubt as to what Kennedy wanted it to say. Upon his return, when McNamara declared to Bundy, in Kennedy's presence, that things would be fine for us to leave in 1965 since the training would all be over, Bundy replied with a question about doing such a thing.  McNamara said, "We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they're not needed, I think is wasteful and complicates both their problems and ours."   McNamara then said, "I think Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from his area." (Goldstein, pp. 82-83)

Does this sound like Kennedy and McNamara are only withdrawing reliant on victory?  But see, this audio tape was not declassified until the late nineties.  And Chomsky seems completely unaware of it in this podcast.  But the evidentiary point of this dialogue in 1963 is that it matches McNamara's debriefs when he left office.  Where he said that he and Kennedy had agreed on this point.  That America could help Saigon, we could train their army and supply equipment, but we could not fight the war for them. (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd Garner and Ted GIttinger, pp. 164-65) At this October meeting, Kennedy made clear that he was getting out.  In fact when attempts were made to pull the withdrawal plan from the Taylor/McNamara report Kennedy demanded it be put back in. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 2017 version, p. 411). Once this was made clear Kennedy had more or less cleared the field. As Goldstein writes, "The withdrawal statement--including the pullout of one thousand advisers and completion of the entire US million by the end of 1965--would become official administration policy and would be announced publicly." (p. 83). Which McNamara then did.

There is no doubt today that the White House knew they were losing the war.  In fact in the tape we played in the film, Johnson berates McNamara over this issue. He says how could you announce a withdrawal when you knew America was losing the war? (Virtual JFK, edited by James Blight, p. 310) In other words, both men understood what was really happening. Because there was one set of Pentagon reports which was telling the truth, and also because the CIA and Pentagon had now turned their reports negative to counter the fact that JFK was getting out. But as Goldstein notes, none of this stopped Kennedy, as neither the overthrow of Diem did.  The last thing he said about Vietnam was to Mike Forrestal.  He said that when he got back from Dallas, there would be a complete Vietnam policy review, including how we got there and if we should be there. Because Kennedy said we had a 100-1 shot at winning. (Douglass, p. 183)

In other words, Kennedy understood that it was a lost cause. Which, again, vitiates Chomsky's argument.

Edited January 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

The truly shocking thing is that these two so called experts now ignore every alteration and wholesale revision that Johnson made to Kennedy's Vietnam policy.  I am not kidding.  Every single one.  

As the tape quoted above proves, LBJ knew Kennedy was withdrawing and he knew the USA was in a losing situation. And he said he did not agree with that policy from the get go.  So the following things happen, all of them violations of Kennedy's intent.

1. LBJ does not fire Henry Cabot Lodge as Kennedy was going to do. He keeps him.

2. Johnson has Bundy modify NSAM 273 in more than one way, but one major way is it allowed the US Navy to directly be involved with both aspects of the OPLAN 34 DeSoto patrols, this had been suggested by Taylor to McNamara.

3. LBJ now sends McNamara to Vietnam after reading him the riot act.  Suddenly, McNamara now finds the contrary reports and he says "The situation is very disturbing.  Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months , will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a communist controlled state." (Goldstein, p. 107)

4. NSAM 288 is composed in March, which alters the complete calculus of the war and completely negates any hope for withdrawal and begins planning for a huge air war in Vietnam, picking something like 95 targets.  As Fredrik Logevall has written, there is no way to exaggerate its importance to the militarization of the war in 1965.(Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129) In other words, what Kennedy would not do in three years, LBJ had done in three months.

5. Johnson puts together a secret study team to begin planning for a massive American war in Vietnam, this includes people like Bill Bundy and William Sullivan.  This team drafts the Tonkin Gulf Resolution three months before it was implemented. In fact, it was part of a specific escalation plan ordered up by LBJ through the Pentagon in May. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. p. 27) Again, no such plan existed under JFK.  Since he was planning to get out.

6. Tonkin Gulf incident occurs in August. LBJ lies his head off about it and uses the months old draft to arrange an attack on Hanoi, the early forerunner of Rolling Thunder.  About 70 air sorties over one bullet through one hull.

7. Once the air war starts, it becomes necessary to bring in troops to guard the air fields. Which Johnson does at DaNang in March of 1965. He actually has this moment photographed. By the end of 1965, there will be 175,000 American combat troops in Vietnam. On the day Kennedy was killed, there were none.

Every single one of the above is a violation of Kennedy's policies.  The last one of course violating JFK's line in the sand of no American combat troops. And LBJ lied about it all by saying in the summer of 1964 that he would not send American boys to do what Asian boys should be doing. And he also lied in saying that he was continuing Kennedy's policies there.  He knew both of these were lies when he uttered them. Chomsky does not wish to admit any of this because it undermines his BS  about Kennedy. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

The truly shocking thing is that these two so called experts now ignore every alteration and wholesale revision that Johnson made to Kennedy's Vietnam policy.  I am not kidding.  Every single one.  

As the tape quoted above proves, LBJ knew Kennedy was withdrawing and he knew the USA was in a losing situation. And he said he did not agree with that policy from the get go.  So the following things happen, all of them violations of Kennedy's intent.

1. LBJ does not fire Henry Cabot Lodge as Kennedy was going to do. He keeps him.

2. Johnson has Bundy modify NSAM 273 in more than one way, but one major way is it allowed the US Navy to directly be involved with both aspects of the OPLAN 34 DeSoto patrols, this had been suggested by Taylor to McNamara.

3. LBJ now sends McNamara to Vietnam after reading him the riot act.  Suddenly, McNamara now finds the contrary reports and he says "The situation is very disturbing.  Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months , will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a communist controlled state." (Goldstein, p. 107)

4. NSAM 288 is composed in March, which alters the complete calculus of the war and completely negates any hope for withdrawal and begins planning for a huge air war in Vietnam, picking something like 95 targets.  As Fredrik Logevall has written, there is no way to exaggerate its importance to the militarization of the war in 1965.(Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129) In other words, what Kennedy would not do in three years, LBJ had done in three months.

5. Johnson puts together a secret study team to begin planning for a massive American war in Vietnam, this includes people like Bill Bundy and William Sullivan.  This team drafts the Tonkin Gulf Resolution three months before it was implemented. In fact, it was part of a specific escalation plan ordered up by LBJ through the Pentagon in May. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. p. 27) Again, no such plan existed under JFK.  Since he was planning to get out.

6. Tonkin Gulf incident occurs in August. LBJ lies his head off about it and uses the months old draft to arrange an attack on Hanoi, the early forerunner of Rolling Thunder.  About 70 air sorties over one bullet through one hull.

7. Once the air war starts, it becomes necessary to bring in troops to guard the air fields. Which Johnson does at DaNang in March of 1965. He actually has this moment photographed. By the end of 1965, there will be 175,000 American combat troops in Vietnam. On the day Kennedy was killed, there were none.

Every single one of the above is a violation of Kennedy's policies.  The last one of course violating JFK's line in the sand of no American combat troops. And LBJ lied about it all by saying in the summer of 1964 that he would not send American boys to do what Asian boys should be doing. And he also lied in saying that he was continuing Kennedy's policies there.  He knew both of these were lies when he uttered them. Chomsky does not wish to admit any of this because it undermines his BS  about Kennedy. 

James D-

 

Yes, not only JFK's world view, but actual and concrete documents and recorded conversations confirm JFK wanted out of Vietnam and Third World interventionism in general.

Why does it take a James D., and not the community of US historians, to declare this obvious truth?  

The right characterization is not that JFK was "losing the war" but that he recognized it as a "losing situation."  I suspect he regretted even getting a little bit in.

It was not in the US national interest to kill enough people and spend enough money to "win" in Vietnam, and even if a "win" could be achieved, we would "win" only by stomping on millions of Vietnamese and maybe for decades at a stretch. 

The sad, sad story of 6 million SE Asians dead and oceans of misery is that...the US prospered after we got out of Vietnam. It was not important. 

Then...Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The loss of JFK and his world view has cost the US trillions upon trillions of dollars, and mangled who knows how many people globally. And for what? 

US foreign-military-trade policy is not made in the national interest---it is made by the multinationals and globalists.

The US military as a global guard service for multinationals. 

Smedley Butler had it right. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Ben, I agree that the reversal of Kennedy's policy did lead to the utter debacle in Indochina, in not just Vietnam, but Cambodia and Laos.  And let us not forget, Chomsky actually argued in favor of Pol Pot for awhile.

Let me wrap up some of the things these two clowns said in their orgy of character assassination about Kennedy.  When you don't have the declassified record in your favor, or are just ignorant of it, this is what you do.

Chomsky tried to group Kennedy with Trump and Reagan.  If Noam can show me where Reagan or Trump favored Medicare, health care, and racial equality at that time, then I would like to see it.  (Chomsky literally slides into sci-fi when he compares the coming to power of Kennedy to Germany in the twenties and the rise of the Nazis. I listened to that part twice since I didn't believe he said it at first. I guess his excuse is he is 93 years old and getting a little you know... )

In reference to Latin America, Chomsky fails to mention the Alliance for Progress but does mention Plan Colombia.  That did not come in until Clinton.

In regards to Vietnam, Chomsky tries to say that somehow people in the Kennedy White House changed their tune about JFK and Vietnam after the Tet offensive. Again, this is a polemical argument that has been negated by the declassified record. The three main advisors on Indochina were McNamara, Taylor and McGeorge Bundy. Anyone can see from the new records that all three were aware that Kennedy was withdrawing at the time.  And he would brook no dissent. (See above, plus Goldstein, pp. 82-83) So when they later said the same in public there was no inconsistency. And they were the chief advisors on Vietnam, not Sorenson or Schlesinger. Chomsky also fails to notice the great migration out of the White House after LBJ took office: Salinger, Sorenson, Schlesinger, Ball, Bundy, Taylor and then McNamara ( the last was so shell shocked by the end of 1967 he did not know if he quit or was fired.). As author Ken Hughes notes, Bundy was do disgusted with Johnson's conduct of the war, he and his brother began leaking information to Humphrey during the 1968 campaign.

Of course, Buzzanco tries to say that somehow JFK designed the overthrow of Diem. Again, the whole imbroglio of the plot was designed by the cabal in the State department--Harriman, Forrestal and Hilsman--and they deceived Kennedy in two ways. When he got back to DC he was enraged and tried to cancel the cable, but Lodge had already shown it to the dissident generals. (Douglass, pp. 163-67) It also appears Lodge was in on this from the beginning.. He got rid of the CIA station chief in order to replace him with Conein, who he knew would cooperate with him. Lodge then moved into Richardson's former home. (Douglass, p 426 note 60)This is why Kennedy was going to fire Lodge in November. Buzzanco also mentions Nhu's messages to Hanoi for a settlement--which Nhu himself said were going nowhere since Hanoi demanded all Americans leave first.  Nhu replied with "That was out of the question." (Douglass, p. 191) For the simple reason the south would have been overrun, which is what happened in 1975.

Finally, Chomsky says that Kennedy spurned detente and arms reduction with Moscow.  This is the kind of thing that really makes me wonder about Chomsky. Anyone who studies the Vienna summit of 1961 will understand that Kennedy was taken aback by how belligerent Khrushchev was. How he insisted on making Berlin the focus of east/west relations. And how he wanted the city itself as part of East Germany. Kennedy felt that was out of the question, which led to the Berlin Crisis. We also know that the Russians then tried to place a first strike atomic force in Cuba, against Kennedy's explicit wishes, and then lied to JFK about it. That led to the Missile Crisis. It was after this that Kennedy pursued the test ban treaty and non proliferation and a dual space exploration deal. And he was also arranging a back channel  with Castro through Jean Daniel.

This last angle does not get brought up. At all.

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Greg Doudna]

The link to Chomsky and Buzzanco, Jan. 6, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nd0cN7MVHk.

"What Does Noam Chomsky Say About the JFK Assassination?" on the "22 November 1963" site (Jeremy Bojczuk), http://22november1963.org.uk/noam-chomsky-jfk-assassination.

 

[James DiEugenio]

I have saved the worst for last, and with Chomsky it always gets worse.  

Chomsky knows Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. And we know this firsthand from a quite reliable witness, namely Ray Marcus. Back in the mid to late sixties, Ray was trying to drum up support on the left for a movement to expose the JFK case.  And he visited with a few of the leading academics of liberal persuasion.

Well, one of them was Chomsky. This was when he was at MIT.  When Ray first approached him, the professor was willing to give him a relative short period of time, like 30 minutes to an hour.  Ray said that he only brought three pieces of evidence so he could fit it all in in a short time span.  

The 3 pieces ended up being more than enough.  Way more. Chomsky was so engrossed by just those that he told his secretary to clear his schedule.  The meeting went on for hours. Ray was now convinced that Chomsky would join his cause. But something happened as one of Chomsky's fellow academics was driving him to the airport. The driver voiced ominous warnings about the whole thing being so big that it would be like taking on Goliath. In other words, poor career management. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-left-and-the-death-of-kennedy-ray-marcus) Yet Chomsky was still in the conspiracy corner in 1975 since he signed a petition to reopen the Kennedy case that year. 

From Peter Scott and now Ray Marcus, we know that Chomsky makes decision about Kennedy and his death, and JFK and Vietnam not from the evidence, but from a political angle. In other words, he is a secret hypocrite. In my view, if there is any hope for any kind of political reconstitution in this country--and there does not seem to be much--there has to be some kind of reconciliation and reckoning with the past.  Which would mean not just Vietnam but also the assassinations of the sixties. Chomsky is utterly useless on both. Which is why his career as some kind of political savior and savant has ended in utter failure. I mean the GOP and the Democrats are worse now than when he started.

 

Two last points.  Chomsky tries to place all the intellectual and scholarly digging on this issue of JFK and his intent to withdraw on John Newman. Which shows that he is living in 1992. The new documentation on this issue has convinced scholars like Howard Jones, Gordon Goldstein, David Kaiser, James Blight and David Welch, among others, that Kennedy was leaving. None of them pays any credit to Chomsky. And in Virtual JFK, Blight 's book, a poll of over 20 scholars was taken on the issue after a two day debate.  A plurality agreed that JFK was withdrawing and that his decision was reversed.

Finally, Chomsky and Buzzanco talk about demonstrations against the war in 1961 and 62.  If you go to the Wikipedia page on this, there were no such visible demonstrations at that time. They began in 1963 and the very small amount then was not over the actual war.  It was over the oppressive Diem regime and their treatment of the Buddhist crisis. The demonstrations took off in both size and frequency in 1964 and 1965 during Johnson's escalations. 

In other words, when it comes to the factual record, these two were incorrect on every score.

Edited January 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio