Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[James DiEugenio]

delted, repeat.

Edited October 31, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Diem's brother Nhu, decided that the communists were the main foe in 1956.  Thousands were jailed or detained under house arrest.

Executions were frequent. Diem passed an edict that anyone considered a danger "to the defense of the state and public order" was to be thrown in jail or placed under house arrest. until "order and security " had been established.  In the Delta, government sponsored beheadings and disembowelings became common place. (Jacobs, p. 90)

Jacobs now gets to the main point of this brutal campaign.  Although it was successful in decreasing the number of members of the communist party, it did something that DIem apparently did not envision.  It now alienated the people who were willing to give Diem their allegiance and good will at first.  They now turned against him after members of their families suffered torture, imprisonment or execution.  Well before the establishment of the NLF in 1960; guerilla uprisings were now becoming common in the rural areas.

Jacobs writes that although DIem's supporters hailed him as a liberal reformer, his government in south Vietnam was absolutist. Diem appointed province chiefs and district administrators. This was an unprecedented intervention in village affairs.

Edited October 31, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

My point above is that there were two opportunities to unite the country.  The first was after the Geneva Accords.  The USA vetoed that.

The second one was by appointing a good and decent leader of the south who really was interested in building a democracy there. That way Saigon could talk to Hanoi as a true democracy about unification.  To put it mildly DIem was not that man: beheadings, executions, disembowelings, the infamous tiger cages.  What can one say?  Except what Lansdale once said: why do people criticize me for not building a democracy? That is not what I was assigned to do.

All of this, and I am only up to about late 1956, made it much harder to unify the country. The more the Nhu family used violence to subdue the perceived enemies of the state, the more the USA would have to help them. And the more this would aid the radicals in the north. Once the opportunities of the fifties were bypassed, it almost presaged a violent unification, because the extremes had now come to power.

Kennedy was acutely aware of this. He warned about  Vietnam becoming a white man's war. And he was very aware of all the problems that would cause.  And he was determined to avoid them.

Edited November 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Mike Griffith: Yes, it is clear that JFK had no intention of totally disengaging from South Vietnam regardless of the situation on the ground. He was determined to keep South Vietnam free, and he deserves praise for that position.

This is not what McNamara said in his last debriefing.  

I've already answered this lame argument twice now. Who cares what the lying, dissembling, deceiving, conniving, disgraced, and discredited McNamara said? How can you get on a public board and with a straight face cite McNamara as a reliable source on this issue of all issues, particularly given the information about him in McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty? You might also read what Admiral Sharp had to say about McNamara in Strategy for Defeat. 

Bobby knew nothing about any plan to totally abandon South Vietnam regardless of the consequences. He said nothing of the kind was planned and added that JFK was going to continue aid and would even provide air support if needed. Even James Galbraith agrees that JFK intended to continue giving South Vietnam aid and was going to leave behind a residual force of supply troops after 1965. Ted Sorenson knew nothing about a total disengagement plan either. Nor did Arthur Schlesinger. Nor did Dean Rusk. Nor did Walt Rostow. And every 1963 statement that we have from JFK himself, including remarks he made on the Texas trip and the remarks he was going to make at the Trade Mart on 11/22/63--every one of those statements indicates his determination to keep South Vietnam free.

But you brush aside all of this and cling to McNamara's last debriefing and the hearsay claims of a handful of other anti-war Democrats.

As for your arguments in another of your barrage of replies about the alleged chances for peace in Vietnam, I would simply refer interested readers to my previous replies on the subject. You just keep repeating the same leftist claims and keep ignoring the information we have from North Vietnamese and Soviet sources and from other primary materials. You could start with Dr. George Veith's book Drawn Swords in a Distant Land and Nghia Vo's book The ARVN and the Fight for South Vietnam, both of which include an excellent review of the events that preceded and followed the Geneva Conference, North Vietnam's violations of the Geneva Accords (they dwarfed South Vietnam's violations), China's massive aid to the Hanoi regime, the Hanoi regime's violent/coercive actions to prevent more North Vietnamese from leaving during the Geneva-Accords-mandated freedom-of-movement period, North Vietnam's (failed) propaganda efforts in the South (which dwarfed Lansdale's psyops campaign in the North), etc., etc.

Finally, as for your attacks on Ngo Dinh Diem in another reply, (1) much of what you say about Diem is wrong or exaggerated, and (2) it's just amazing how you refuse to discuss the far more egregious brutality and far more numerous atrocities committed by the Hanoi regime. I've covered some of these crimes in previous replies. Veith and Vo discuss more of them in their books, as does Dr. Geoffrey Shaw in The Lost Mandate of Heaven. Shaw's book is also one of the best defenses of Diem in print.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Mike, you better say the same about John Newman also. He interviewed McNamara twice at length.

You better say the same about Gordon Goldstein also. The biographer of McGeorge Bundy.  

You better say the same to Jamie Galbraith, the son of J. K. Galbraith.

McNamara, Bundy, Galbraith and also Taylor said Kennedy was never committing combat troops into Vietnam.

Fine, I guess you must be right and the people who were there were wrong.

 

[Joseph McBride]

Jim, what do you make of John Paul Vann's

claim that some of the "advisors" in Vietnam

during the Kennedy years were actively

participating in combat? (This is in Neil

Sheehan's book on Vann and the Vietnam War, A BRIGHT SHINING

LIE.)

Edited November 1, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

I really do not know what to make of that myself Joe.

Because I never really trusted Sheehan for a lot of different reasons.

But I do know that according to Newman, Kennedy really did not want this to happen and he asked a lot of questions about it.  So if it did occur, they kept it away from him.

[Michael Griffith]

I think this is a good point to summarize some important facts and to introduce some facts I haven't discussed yet:

-- In 1957, the Soviet Union proposed that both South Vietnam and North Vietnam be admitted to the United Nations.

-- There would have been no Vietnam War if North Vietnam had been willing to let South Vietnam remain independent. There would have been peace in Vietnam the moment North Vietnam decided to stop trying to conquer South Vietnam. As none other than Adlai Stevenson pointed out in a magnificent speech to the UN in 1964, North Vietnam was the aggressor and South Vietnam was the victim.

-- South Vietnam never sent large forces into North Vietnam, but North Vietnam sent large forces into South Vietnam year after year, starting in 1964, along with thousands of tons of weapons and supplies. Hanoi began sending forces into South Vietnam in 1960, but did not send large forces to the South until 1964.

-- When asked about the claim that JFK planned on an unconditional withdrawal from South Vietnam, JFK’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, said,

          I talked with John Kennedy on hundreds of occasions about Southeast Asia, and not once did he suggest or even hint at withdrawal. Kennedy liked to bat the breeze and toss ideas around, and it is entirely possible that he left the impression with some that he planned on getting out of Vietnam after 1965. But that does not mean that he made a decision in 1963 to withdraw in 1965. Had he done so, I think I would have known about it. (Frederik Logevall, Choosing War, University of California Press, 1999, p. 71; Greg Olson, Mansfield and Vietnam, Michigan State University Press, 1995,  p. 118)

-- If JFK had planned on abandoning South Vietnam, surely Bobby Kennedy would have known about it. Even Greg Olson, author of Mansfield and Vietnam, admits that “If Kennedy had really committed to withdrawal after reelection, it seems likely that Robert would have known” (p. 118). Yet, Bobby, in an April 1964 oral history interview, flatly rejected the idea that JFK had planned on pulling out of Vietnam. Bobby added that JFK intended to continue aiding South Vietnam and that he was even willing to provide air support if needed. What’s more, Bobby made it clear that the option of large-scale escalation, as much as JFK wanted to avoid it, was not off the table.

-- We now know that North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union suspected that the 1956 elections stipulated in the Geneva Accords might not occur because they suspected that South Vietnam would collapse before then, making the election unnecessary. And, Pham Van Dong told a fellow diplomat that “You know as well as I do that there won’t be elections.” Revealingly, when South Vietnam repeatedly called for elections after the U.S. withdrew, North Vietnam refused.

-- North Vietnamese Communist leaders were a gang of murderous, cruel thugs who used every form of violence and oppression to gain and keep power. They were not the legitimate rulers of northern Vietnam but gained control through terror and subterfuge, and with the help of Chinese and Soviet assistance.

-- In 1956, Hanoi’s leaders found it necessary to use the army against their own people. Historian Lien Nguyen notes in her award-winning book Hanoi's War, "By 1956, however, the North Vietnamese people, who were subjected to the wave of terror in the countryside, rose up against the excesses of the campaigns, prompting the government to send its armed forces to quell the demonstrations” (p. 34). That’s putting it diplomatically.

-- The Hanoi regime imposed a police state on North Vietnam that made the Saigon regime look mild in comparison. While the Saigon regime allowed some freedom of the press, the Hanoi regime allowed none. While the Saigon regime allowed private schools, allowed local authorities some discretion in education curriculum, and usually respected the right of private property, the Hanoi regime banned all private schools, rigidly controlled education curriculum, and placed all property under the control of the state. While the Saigon regime held legislative elections that produced a vocal opposition block in the national assembly, the Hanoi regime tolerated no public opposition from any quarter. While the Saigon regime allowed opposition leaders to hold press conferences, to speak with journalists, to speak with foreign diplomats, to hold meetings, etc., the Hanoi regime allowed no such public opposition.

-- Every argument that can be made against South Vietnam and the Vietnam War can be made against South Korea and the Korean War. The South Korean war resulted in more civilian deaths as a percentage of the population than did the Vietnam War. South Korea’s regime was arguably worse than the Saigon regime. South Korea was ruled by an autocratic government well into the 1980s. Yet, no sane person disputes the fact that the South Korean regime was far less oppressive than the North Korean regime. Similarly, the Saigon regime was far less oppressive than the Hanoi regime. And no sane person wishes that North Korea had won the Korean War, nor does any sane person deny that South Korea is a much freer, more tolerant, and more prosperous place than North Korea.

-- After 1962, if not a bit earlier, Ho Chi Minh was a figurehead because he was pushed aside by the far more radical Le Duan. As bad as Ho Chi Minh was, Le Duan was worse. Ho, to be sure, could be vicious and despotic, but in some cases Ho tried to curb government abuse of the people, and he opposed the shift to large-scale conventional warfare against the U.S. Le Duan preferred to let Ho be the face of North Vietnam to the world, but Ho had little influence on major decisions after 1962. Similarly, General Giap was largely sidelined after Le Duan seized power, since Le Duan disliked and distrusted Giap. Giap opposed both the Tet Offensive and key aspects of the Easter Offensive, and did not lead either operation but was out of the country while they were carried out. These facts are discussed in great detail in Nguyen’s book Hanoi’s War.

-- In terms of its willingness to sacrifice its own troops in staggering numbers to achieve war aims, the Hanoi regime may well have been the most barbaric despotism in the modern era. The Hanoi regime’s willingness to use its troops as cannon fodder rivaled that of Japan’s militarist-dominated 1932-1945 regime, if not exceeded it.

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Let me just take the example of Dean Rusk.

When Gordon Goldstein, Bundy's biographer, started showing Bundy the declassified transcripts of the meetings about Vietnam in September and October of 1963, Bundy was surprised when he saw the conversation between Kennedy, himself and McNamara.

Why?

Because JFK and McNamara were talking about withdrawing from Vietnam.  Bundy was so sideswiped by this back in 1963 that, on the tape you can hear him ask  why McNamara was talking about it.  McNamara replies because this provides us a way to get out of Vietnam.

When Bundy saw this transcript over three decades later, Goldstein asked him about it. Because it surprised him also. Bundy then realized what had happened.  He told Goldstein that Kennedy had gone around him as National Security Advisor on the withdrawal plan because he thought he was too hawkish.  And he had made McNamara his stalking horse on the issue. 

BTW, when Jamie Galbraith read these conversations he understood this also because his father had told him about it.  Since John Kenneth Galbraith actually started the withdrawal plan.  When he was in Washington in April of 1962, Kennedy told him to give his report, recommending no further involvement in Vietnam, to McNamara.  He did, and Galbraith told Kennedy that McNamara had gotten the message.

Which he did.  Since at the next SecDef meeting, he told Harkins that he wanted the whole in country team to arrange withdrawal schedules for the next meeting. 

Now, Rusk was probably even more hawkish than Bundy was.  So it would make perfect sense he would be the last guy on the deal team.

Edited November 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Its startling to me how Doug is willing to, more or less, give what the CIA did with the Nhu family more or less a free pass; but yet he wants to condemn with ferocity what Hanoi did to unify their country. In other words, we were bringing freedom and democracy to south Vietnam with a family that was really kind of brutal: beheadings, executions, tiger cages etc. But that's OK.  Why?

And then he downplays the end result. Namely that Vietnam has a billionaire today who built an 81 story skyscraper on the second skyline in Saigon. That not just Saigon, but Hanoi, is more or less like LA today with all kinds of domestic and foreign businesses. And the people dress like Westerners and drive around in motor bikes, wear Nikes, and the country has its own car line now. I mean could I have been more clear about this with more powerful evidence from Gary Dean, plus films etc. I mean I do not see a brutal Marxist regime in any of those films nor in what Gary has said. And recall, after the north invaded and conquered the south, they left the college of business and finance going in Saigon.

And Mike sees no connection between the two.  Namely that this would have happened sooner except for direct American intervention. Yet, as far as I can see, direct American intervention in Vietnam was about as successful as it was later in Iraq and Libya. 

And what about the utter hypocrisy of what people like Eisenhower and Foster Dulles were selling the American public about what we were doing in Vietnam? We were not bringing democracy, freedom and progress to South Vietnam.  South Vietnam was a dictatorship run by the royalist Nhu family.  Who did not give a hoot about democracy, freedom and progress. I proved this in spades from two credible sources, Anderson and Jacobs. (IMO, the Jacobs book is the best biography of Diem.) The Nhu family ran the country for a decade and built exactly nothing.  They actually repressed freedom of speech and free elections.  The Dulles brothers essentially propped up a tyranny just so Ho Chi Minh would not win a unification ballot. It was this that caused the revival of the Viet Minh in the countryside as the peasantry saw that the Nhu family cared about as much about them as the French did.  The decisions to cancel the unification elections and to install the Nhu family almost guaranteed a civil war.

Edited November 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

One last point.

Are we to think that the authors of all these revisionist books that Mike quotes, are we to think that none of them are aware of what Vietnam is like today? And has been for decades. That somehow they do not know how wealthy the country has become?  Both north and south.  That they are somehow blind to all the economic progress that has spawned things like an 81 floor skyscraper and their own car company.  

Does anyone really think that they do no know any of this? But do they factor it into their studies?  Rather unlikely right.  If they did, they would not get the book contracts they do.

[Benjamin Cole]

Counter-factual histories are, of course, speculative. 

But it seems likely a united Vietnam would have welcomed American relations, as the Vietnamese resented Han hegemony--that is, if the US had just stayed out of their civil war.  

Vietnam, like other SE Asian nations, would likely have modernized but far sooner, and then developed heavy trade with the US. 

See China for an example of what happens when globalists discover cheap manufacturing platforms. 

No one in establishment Washington seems to have much problem with US multinationals doing heavy heavy business in China, a very Communist nation. 

Obviously, the US establishment cares 100 times more about profits that human rights. 

The crazy thing is, the Vietnam War, even if the US had prevailed, benefitted almost no one in the US, except for the narrow range of companies associated with the war effort.

Millions were killed and trillions spent--for a nation of 15 million on the other side of the Pacific? This was the template for Afghanistan--a war not for the good of US taxpayers or citizens. 

You know the most naive, preposterous do-gooders you meet on domestic issues? The kind that want to let everybody out of prison or give everyone free money? 

They look like hard-headed realists next to the globalist do-gooders in the US foreign-policy community.

Let's fix Lebanon or Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam. A few trillion dollars here and a few trillion there...and maybe a few million dead...

Discretion is the better part of valor. 

[Michael Griffith]

First, let me quote what a former Viet Cong colonel, Pham Xuan An, had to say about the North Vietnamese Communists and Communist Vietnam decades after the war, and then I’ll discuss more problems with McNamara’s “secret debrief.” Colonel Pham Xuan An:

          All that talk about “liberation” twenty, thirty, forty years ago, all the plotting, and all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists. (Lewis Sorley, Review of A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, Simon & Schuster, 2000, in Parameters: U.S. Army War College Quarterly, Autumn 2001, p. 169)

In addition to the strong evidence that JFK had no intention of abandoning South Vietnam regardless of the consequences, I see other problems with the claim in McNamara’s “secret debrief.” For example, why didn’t McNamara repeat the claim in his memoir? If JFK had truly told him he was going to withdraw even if it caused South Vietnam to fall to the Communists, you’d think that McNamara would have mentioned this monumental revelation in his memoir. But he says nothing about it therein, not even in the segment (in the appendix) where he argues that JFK planned on withdrawing all of our troops by the end of 1965 (In Retrospect, p. 399). You'd think that he would have mentioned JFK's alleged statement to bolster his argument.

Not only is there no mention of McNamara’s doubtful claim in his own memoir, but his ideological soul mate and primary deputy, John McNaughton, said nothing about the claim in his diary. In fact, not a single one of McNamara’s devoted “whiz kids” ever mentioned hearing McNamara claim that JFK had told him he was going to withdraw regardless of the consequences.

There is also the fact that there is no trace of any evidence that McNamara ever raised this issue with LBJ or with LBJ’s advisers. You would think that if JFK had truly said to McNamara what McNamara claimed he said, McNamara would have at least once argued, “Hey, JFK told me he intended to pull out even if South Vietnam was ‘going to be defeated.’ So how can we abandon that policy? Shouldn’t his former vice president honor that policy?”

Certainly one would expect that during McNamara’s famous/infamous recorded phone call with LBJ when LBJ criticized JFK and McNamara for having announced the 1,000-man withdrawal, McNamara would have replied, “Hey, look here. JFK told me that he was going to withdraw from South Vietnam no matter what. He didn’t just want to withdraw 1,000 troops. He wanted to withdraw all the troops, no matter what happened to South Vietnam after that.”

Of course, JFK was much closer to Bobby than he was to McNamara, and Bobby clearly knew nothing about any intention to abandon South Vietnam regardless of the consequences. In fact, Bobby denied there was any such plan in his April 1964 oral interview. The idea that JFK made such a crucially important statement to McNamara but never told Bobby is simply not credible.

The problem is that so many of my fellow conspiracy theorists have created this huge myth that JFK was killed because he was going to abandon South Vietnam no matter what. This was one of the key claims in Stone's 1991 movie, and, sadly, it is repeated in Stone's recent documentaries. It is hard to retract a major claim that you've made for decades, but if you care about the facts and about accurately portraying JFK's views and legacy, it must be done. 

[David G. Healy]

MG wrote: "... The problem is that so many of my fellow conspiracy theorists have created this huge myth that JFK was killed because he was going to abandon South Vietnam no matter what." (emphasis mine)

Your pronouncement, a bit over the top, yes? Abandon? It doesn't require a rocket scientist to determine what was going to happen when the The Big Green Machine arrived at that southeast asian paradise in 1965... I suspect JFK knew exactly what was going to happen if the Green Machine got serious boots on the ground and Curtis LeMay buzzing around Hanoi and other spots... some early military advisors to the ARVN might say, JFK was murdered (has a truer ring to it) because he, JFK would not give the general's the war they wanted?

Facts being what they are and all....

[Michael Griffith]

1 hour ago, David G. Healy said:

MG wrote: "... The problem is that so many of my fellow conspiracy theorists have created this huge myth that JFK was killed because he was going to abandon South Vietnam no matter what." (emphasis mine)

Your pronouncement, a bit over the top, yes? Abandon? It doesn't require a rocket scientist to determine what was going to happen when the The Big Green Machine arrived at that southeast asian paradise in 1965... I suspect JFK knew exactly what was going to happen if the Green Machine got serious boots on the ground and Curtis LeMay buzzing around Hanoi and other spots... some early military advisors to the ARVN might say, JFK was murdered (has a truer ring to it) because he, JFK would not give the general's the war they wanted?

Facts being what they are and all....

If you want to advance that theory, that's fine, but that's not the theory put forward by Oliver Stone et al in JFK and in Stone's two recent documentaries.

One big problem I see with your theory is that LBJ certainly did not "give the generals the war they wanted." The generals were furious with LBJ for all the senseless, suicidal restrictions he was placing on our air and ground operations--giving the NVA huge sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, refusing to hit NVA supply and massing points in the DMZ, refusing to mine Haiphong Harbor, refusing to allow our pilots to fire at MIG bases until MIGs took off from the bases and fired at them first, refusing to allow our fighters to hit SAM sites until the sites fired SAMs at them, placing hundreds of key logistical and infrastructure targets off limits, etc., etc., etc. 

Admiral Sharp spends over 200 pages documenting and discussing these insane restrictions in Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Michael Griffith