Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[James DiEugenio]

The guy you quote above Mike, Mark Leepson, is utterly typical of why people like Logevall like Selverstone's book.

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.

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?

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.

 

Edited April 15, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Now before anyone says well this is today.  Not so, it was like this back in the nineties.

Len Osanic and I had a guest on who proved that.  Further, when Hanoi swept through Saigon, they kept the business college there going.

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.  

America did a lot of horrible things 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.

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.  And he understood that Saigon would likely fall once the withdrawal was over, but he was willing to take the heat. 

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.  

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.

I mean please.

Edited April 15, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

Here is another scholarly review of Selverstone's The Kennedy Withdrawal. It was published in the New York Journal of Books and was written by Francis Sempa. Sempa is a professor of political science at Wilkes University, a former contributing editor to the journal American Diplomacy, and a widely respected authority on American foreign policy with articles published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Strategic Review, Human Rights Review, and Joint Force Quarterly. Sempa's review is interesting because Sempa is a conservative:

          Ever since the political left in this country turned against the Vietnam War, partisan and scholarly debates have raged about whether President John F. Kennedy, assuming he had not been assassinated and won a second term, would have escalated U.S. military involvement in Vietnam like his successor Lyndon Johnson did. Marc J. Selverstone of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center begins his new book on this subject by calling this debate “The great ‘What If?’”

          Unfortunately, Selverstone’s The Kennedy Withdrawal does not definitively answer that question, but it does give us greater insight into the motives of Kennedy and his advisers in their efforts to “succeed” in Vietnam. And success was defined as preventing South Vietnam and the other Southeast Asian “dominoes” from falling into the hands of the communists.

          Selverstone depicts Kennedy and his national security team as believers in the “domino theory” that was first explicated by President Eisenhower in the 1950s. This theory held that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, other nations in the region would also fall like dominoes—one after the other. And in the “long twilight struggle” (Kennedy’s words) known as the Cold War, the fall of those Asian dominoes would undermine American credibility throughout the world.

          Selverstone challenges what he calls the “Camelot” view of the Kennedy withdrawal—the notion promoted by Kennedy court historians and partisans that Kennedy was determined to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, thus avoiding the quagmire that President Johnson supposedly created in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. Very little in history or politics, and very little about the machinations of the Kennedys, is that simple. 

          As a Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy, Selverstone notes, took public positions that “were sharply critical of the Truman administration--for its handling of the Chinese civil war . . . and for its handling of the Korean War.” Senator Kennedy was a foreign policy “hawk” who criticized Eisenhower for not spending enough on conventional defenses and for negligently allowing a “missile gap” to develop in favor of the Soviet Union. Kennedy ran to the “right” of Vice President Richard Nixon on foreign policy issues during the 1960 presidential campaign.

          As President, Kennedy in his inaugural address promised to “bear any burden” and “pay any price” to defend liberty, and he significantly increased the numbers of U.S. military forces in South Vietnam. Kennedy and some of his advisers characterized the defense of South Vietnam as a “vital” or “significant” U.S. interest. Selverstone identifies the considerations that shaped JFK’s approach to Vietnam as “modernization, foreign aid, counterinsurgency, . . . flexible response . . . [and] general concerns about credibility and falling dominoes.”

          Domestic politics was never too far away from Kennedy’s consideration on Vietnam or, for that matter, any other issue. And it was here that Kennedy and his advisers formulated plans for a symbolic withdrawal of 1000 troops for sometime in 1964 or 1965. But Kennedy did not want to be the president who “lost” Vietnam the way Truman “lost” China. Truman suffered politically both for the “loss” of China and the stalemate of the Korean War.

          Selverstone notes that the key national security document on U.S. policy toward Vietnam produced by Kennedy’s task force on Southeast Asia was NSAM 52, which “pledged the administration ‘to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam; to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society; and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective.’” Pursuant to this plan, the Kennedy administration sent U.S. servicemen “streaming into South Vietnam.”

          Selverstone criticizes the Kennedy team for their “reluctance to distinguish between peripheral and vital interests” and for developing a habit of using U.S. military forces to “send signals” of American resolve. Kennedy’s military “advisers,” Selverstone notes, were engaging in combat, regularly accompanying South Vietnamese forces into the field against the Viet Cong.

         Kennedy consistently portrayed his administration’s actions as helping South Vietnam “win its own fight.” Kennedy understood the political danger of over-committing American forces in a country most Americans knew little about. But he also understood the political minefields of the “falling dominoes” and another Korean War-like stalemate. Kennedy was nothing if not politically cautious.

          Selverstone provides plenty of evidence for a token Kennedy withdrawal of forces, but very little evidence—other than self-serving recollections of Kenneth O’Donnell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the egregious Robert McNamara--that Kennedy intended to withdraw U.S. military forces from Vietnam. The “Camelot” version of the Kennedy presidency is as fictitious as the English legend.

          The best Selverstone can do is to speculate about JFK’s real intentions in Vietnam. And he suggests that Kennedy and his national security team would probably have acted on the basis of the military situation on the ground as it evolved over the next several years. And it is worth remembering that most of the people advising Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam after Kennedy’s death were Kennedy’s people.

          “Rather than signal an eagerness to wind down the U.S. assistance effort,” Selverstone concludes, “the policy of withdrawal—the Kennedy withdrawal—allowed JFK to preserve the American commitment to Vietnam.” The rest, as they say, is history.

 

[Michael Griffith]

On 4/7/2023 at 5:46 PM, Gerry Down said:

Trying to understand JFKs Vietnam policy in order to see if it is what led to his assassination. That's John Newman and Jim Ds main contention - the whole assassination leads back to his Vietnam policy.

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).

Edited April 18, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Gerry Down]

6 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

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).

What do you think of William Colby's "Lost Victory"?

[James DiEugenio]

The reason Newman and Prouty and Stone got jumped on was not at all because of the above.

They got jumped on because they exposed two things that had been ignored by all the msm, and the traditional academic hack historians.

1. Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his death.

2. LBJ knew this and he consciously reversed policy and then tried to cover up the break.

Just go back and look at the editorials and the columns on the subject.  They are collected in JFK: The Book of the Film.

Writers reacted to the Newman/Prouty thesis like it was utterly new. Which in a way it was.  You had to be really into this case to be able to locate the little that had been written about the subject prior to the film.  But there were some sources like Peter Scott, Fletcher Prouty, O'Donnell and Powers.  Archivally you could find it in the Pentagon Papers.  The Gravel Edition has a whole section called Phased Withdrawal. You could also find it in the papers of Mike Mansfield and John K. Galbraith.

But the combination of Newman's book plus the film, this created a mini-earhquake since both academia and mass media did not want to be reminded that they had missed a huge story.  After all, Rolling Thunder began 2 months after the 26 volumes were published, and the first combat troops went to DaNang 3 months after the 26 volumes were published. Those are two operations that Kennedy would not allow.  He did not even want to hear about it.  I should add, some of the bitterest and most vituperative  attacks on the withdrawal evidence were on the left, by Cockburn and Chomsky.  But it came from all across the spectrum. 

And they were all proven wrong with finality in the fall of 1997 when the ARRB released about 800 pages on Kennedy's Vietnam policy.  These papers were so compelling that even the MSM threw in the towel.  The NY Times and Philadelphia Inquirer actually wrote that this new material showed that JFK had a plan to exit Vietnam when he died.  They could not deny it since now it was shown that McNamara was collecting withdrawal schedules on JFK's orders at the May 1963 Sec Def conference. And everyone there knew Kennedy was getting out. Wheeler even wrote that any objection would be met with a negative response. In fact when all the schedules were handed in, McNamara looked up and said: these are too slow, it has to be faster.

 I asked Newman: Why do you think McNamara took so long to write about this in light of all the evidence that he was JFK's right hand man on getting out.  John, who met with him, said: Jim, if you had been responsible for the deaths of about 2 million people, would you want to talk about it?  See, this was the horrible predicament that LBJ left the guys who stayed behind from Kennedy in.  And this is why, one by one, they all left--Salinger, Powers, O'Donnell, Ball, Bundy and finally McNamara.

McNamara's is a very interesting case.  As early as 1966, just a bit over a year after the above escalations, he was showing signs of instability, and depression over what Johnson had done. He called a dinner of the Kennedy people, like Goodwin and Galbraith, and he said Johnson had become irrational about Vietnam.  He said that as early as then he knew the escalations would not work.  He was almost incoherent, which as anyone would know, is the last thing McNamara was in public.

I am convinced that this is what caused McNamara to commission the Pentagon Papers and to keep them a secret from LBJ.  And to include the Phased Withdrawal section which the New York Times cut out of their version. In order to show what Johnson had done to Kennedy's plans.

Know how bad it got for McNamara?  His son had an upside down miniature American flag on one side of his room and a full sized right side up NLF flag on the other. This is how divisive, how polarizing, that war was. It split families asunder.

Edited April 18, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

On 4/15/2023 at 4:04 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 

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. 

 

Edited April 19, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Anyone who says that Kennedy would have completely reversed his plans and done what LBJ did, that person cannot be trusted.  JFK said he would be branded afterwards, but he was getting out after the election.  He said that several times to a diverse amount of people.  And anyone who can equate LBJ and JFK on the Cold War again, that is simply and utterly false.

Secondly, I fail to see what the USA did in Vietnam that was of any real and lasting value.  The first false step was sending Lansdale to Vietnam to install Diem and his family.  Those two choices were like the first steps in making the film Heaven's Gate. But I would go back even further.  In my view the big mistake was the control that Foster Dulles had over the Geneva Conference.

This is not hard to understand.  See, Hanoi had won the French Indochina war.  They had defeated France. They really did not even have to agree to the conference. But it was China who pressured them into doing so.  Dulles played them both for suckers. He faked like he agreed to the Accords but was already planning for the USA to take control in the south.  China said that they really did not want to fight the USA again so soon after Korea.  So they made Hanoi agree to the phony Geneva Accords, which the USA had no intention of honoring.  At the conference the USA orally agreed but did not sign them.  Aa a lawyer will tell you, an oral agreement is legally binding.

From there it was just as Gullion told Kennedy.  The USA would lose just like the French did.  And that is what made the difference between JFK, against Ike, LBJ and RMN.  None of the last three could understand or accept that it was a nationalist war for independence, not a showdown vs the USSR.  But Kennedy did know that. Because of Gullion and Topping in 1951.  Secondly, because of that, Kennedy did not see Vietnam as being integral to American security.  How could any rational person think that? I mean Lansdale created South Vietnam.  And as Kennedy said, it was not like Korea which was invaded from the north. It was much more complex.  How could you possibly make the average congressman understand it, let alone the public?  All of this came from his  actually being there.

This is why Kennedy was the only one of those four presidents who was not going to spend an immense amount of blood and treasure on a conflict which Dulles and Lansdale had created out of artifice. But beyond the horrible price for Vietnam--as I noted above--it was the most divisive, polarizing conflict since the Civil War for America.  It was so bad that, as Mike Swanson said about the Burns/Novick series, that was not really about the war. It was about the Culture Wars that came about after, to explain how we really did not lose.  And Selverstone's book is really about that. Recall Reagan saying that Vietnam was really a noble cause? Yeah, like the Phoenix Program, like the drug running, like the scores of fraggings.  

As John Kerry said, "Who wants to be the last guy to die for a mistake?"  Kennedy understood that.

Edited April 19, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

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).

Edited April 20, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Did any of them bring up the point about Forrestal that I did?

Did any of them bring up the distorting of Rakove's book like I did?

Did any of them bring up those missing 19 witnesses who JFK revealed his intent to like I did?

Did any of them bring up how JFK put back the withdrawal section into the McNamara/Taylor report like I did?

Did any of them bring up the McNamara debrief like I did?

Did any of them notice how he left out the November 27th meeting making McNamara the point man on Vietnam like I did?

See, if you leave all that out, then you can say, "Well its really hard to day what Kennedy would have done."

Mike Swanson will have more to say on  Selverstone soon.

Edited April 20, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

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.

Edited April 20, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

On 4/19/2023 at 10:57 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 

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. 

Edited April 21, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

To show you how incredibly wedded to Selverstone Mike is, let us just take the first three.

1. If you read my review, Selverstone takes a wack at Mike Forrestal at the end of his book and tries to use that to smear all the other witnesses who said JFK told them he was getting out after the election. Selverstone was so eager to do this though that he missed a crucial point that Peter Scott had pointed out a long time ago.Just as Forrestal said, Kennedy did say that when he got back from Dallas there would be a complete review of Vietnam policy.  Scott got this from a separate source that went back to the mid sixties.  Therefore, Forrestal was correct and it was Selverstone who was wrong.

2. The whole point of Rakove's book is that Kennedy's foreign policy, especially in the Third World, was contra Foster Dulles, and the Eisenhower administration.  And the battle lines could not have been more demarcated.  Especially after the Algeria speech, and the Foreign Affairs article in 1957 -58.  In fact, Mahoney actually thinks that Kennedy used Algeria to bring the dispute out into the open.  John Shaw notes in his book about Kennedy in the senate that what JFK did was to map out a new way of looking at foreign policy and the Cold War.  Many people think that the Algeria speech is what put Kennedy on the map for the 1960 election.  In the face of all this, Selverstone called JFK a Cold Warrior in 1961.  

I think he does this so he can say there really was no difference between JFK and LBJ on foreign policy, thereby making his "Well, you could not tell what Kennedy was going to do in 1964-65" more logical to the unsuspecting reader.  Because if you did tell the real story, it would make his withdrawal make perfect sense.  

3. Mike, in his attempt to smear Mansfield,  ignores the one valuable part of Selverstone's sorry book.  In the very end, Selverstone says that O'Donnell and Powers had to really argue  with Mansfield in order to get what he said about Kennedy into their book Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye. Because Mansfield knew how bad that would make Johnson look.  Considering the rest of Selverstone's crappy book, that is a contribution.  Sort of like what Epstein revealed about Specter.

This points to a genuine phenomenon that took place in 1963 and early 1964.  That was Johnson's systematic and total reversal of Kennedy's policy,  all the while lying about what he was doing.  It was sweeping and it literally cowed the people left behind.  To the point they talked about it in private, how LBJ was lying about Kennedy in order to put the war on his tombstone. Which is, one by one, the reason they left. McNamara ended up being a victim of all this. That idiot Halberstam actually started calling Vietnam, McNamara's War. Which is ridiculous. McNamara was executing JFK's withdrawal program faithfully.  At the first meeting he, and everyone else there, knew there was going to be a sea change.  And everyone else knew very soon that LBJ was going to brook no dissent and he was going to lie about what Kennedy was going to do.  This is why he brought back Walt Rostow as National Security Advisor. He brought him back for the same reason Kennedy shuffled him out: Johnson knew he was an extreme hawk on Vietnam. 

As John Newman said about McNmara, "Jim, if you were responsible for the killing of 2 million people, you would not want talk about it either."  Same thing with Bundy, he only talked after McNamara did his mea culpa. There was a real reluctance to do so for a lot of different political, sociological and psychological reasons.

But the thing is, the documents made it clear that what these people were saying was correct. Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal program. And instead, he readied us for an all out war with  Hanoi, see NSAM 288. That order, in March of 1964, arranged with help from the JCS, planned that war. So what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ did in three months.  There is no getting around that one.

Edited April 21, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

On 4/21/2023 at 4:22 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 

This is your reply? You snipped and ignored most of my arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, I'll address your arguments.

1. If you read my review, Selverstone takes a wack at Mike Forrestal at the end of his book and tries to use that to smear all the other witnesses who said JFK told them he was getting out after the election. Selverstone was so eager to do this though that he missed a crucial point that Peter Scott had pointed out a long time ago. Just as Forrestal said, Kennedy did say that when he got back from Dallas there would be a complete review of Vietnam policy.  Scott got this from a separate source that went back to the mid sixties.  Therefore, Forrestal was correct and it was Selverstone who was wrong.

None of this addresses the points I made about Forrestal. I'll just repeat them, since you ignored them:

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). 

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.

2. The whole point of Rakove's book is that Kennedy's foreign policy, especially in the Third World, was contra Foster Dulles, and the Eisenhower administration. . . .

You can repeat misleading arguments a hundred times, but this won't make them valid. As I noted in a previous reply, Selverstone only cites Rakove on the very narrow point of neutralism in the context of the Domino Theory. You seemingly admit this in the introductory clause to your attack in your review, but then you go on to portray his use of Rakove as misleading.

I think he does this so he can say there really was no difference between JFK and LBJ on foreign policy, thereby making his "Well, you could not tell what Kennedy was going to do in 1964-65" more logical to the unsuspecting reader.  Because if you did tell the real story, it would make his withdrawal make perfect sense.  

More distortion. You are misrepresenting what Selverstone says on this point. Not once does he say in his book that there was really no difference between JFK and LBJ on foreign policy. That is sheer invention on your part. The problem is that you are a far-left ideologue, that you've decided that Selverstone is "the enemy," and that you're wedded to a view that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of scholars who've written on the subject of JFK and/or the Vietnam War. 

3. Mike, in his attempt to smear Mansfield,  ignores the one valuable part of Selverstone's sorry book.  In the very end, Selverstone says that O'Donnell and Powers had to really argue  with Mansfield in order to get what he said about Kennedy into their book Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye. Because Mansfield knew how bad that would make Johnson look.  Considering the rest of Selverstone's crappy book, that is a contribution.  Sort of like what Epstein revealed about Specter.

Well, first of all, I made no attempt to "smear" Mansfield. Furthermore, Mansfield contradicted the account in O'Donnell and Powers' 1972 book both before and after it was published. This suggests that the reason O'Donnell and Powers had to argue so much with Mansfield may have been that he knew the account they wanted to use in their book was inaccurate. 

In two 1970 letters to Life magazine, Mansfield said that he understood that Kennedy was considering withdrawing troops, but never said "all" troops, and in fact made no comment about the extent of the withdrawal being "considered." In the second letter, Mansfield denied that Kennedy “even mentioned the thought” of the 1964 presidential election when he discussed Vietnam with Mansfield. 

In 1989, Mansfield wrote that Kennedy only planned to withdraw “some troops” after the election. When Mansfield was interviewed by his biographer, Don Oberdorfer, in October 1999, Mansfield said that Kennedy may have planned on making “some minor withdrawals” after the election.

But you guys never mention this evidence. You only cite the handful of Mansfield statements that tend to support your position. 

Moreover, why would Mansfield have cared how anything made LBJ look by 1972? Even among Democrats, LBJ was already very unpopular. Thus, it's hard to imagine why Mansfield would have had any concern about how anything would make LBJ look.

This points to a genuine phenomenon that took place in 1963 and early 1964.  That was Johnson's systematic and total reversal of Kennedy's policy, all the while lying about what he was doing.  It was sweeping and it literally cowed the people left behind.  To the point they talked about it in private, how LBJ was lying about Kennedy in order to put the war on his tombstone. Which is, one by one, the reason they left. McNamara ended up being a victim of all this. That idiot Halberstam actually started calling Vietnam, McNamara's War. Which is ridiculous. McNamara was executing JFK's withdrawal program faithfully.  At the first meeting he, and everyone else there, knew there was going to be a sea change.  And everyone else knew very soon that LBJ was going to brook no dissent and he was going to lie about what Kennedy was going to do.  This is why he brought back Walt Rostow as National Security Advisor. He brought him back for the same reason Kennedy shuffled him out: Johnson knew he was an extreme hawk on Vietnam. 

As John Newman said about McNmara, "Jim, if you were responsible for the killing of 2 million people, you would not want talk about it either."  Same thing with Bundy, he only talked after McNamara did his mea culpa. There was a real reluctance to do so for a lot of different political, sociological and psychological reasons.

You can repeat such far-left fantasy another thousand times, but that won't make it true. There are so many facts ignored in these two paragraphs, and so many distortions and erroneous claims crammed into them, that it would take two or three pages to unpack and explain them all. 

Let's just take one example: "McNamara was executing JFK's withdrawal plan faithfully."

This argument avoids the point that not only was the withdrawal plan conditional but that under the plan we would continue to aid South Vietnam and would even leave behind support troops. Even James K. Galbraith, perhaps the leading advocate of the claim that JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam after the election, admits this fact:        

          Training would end. Support for South Vietnam would continue. They had an army of over 200,000. The end of the war was not in sight. After the end of 1965, even under the withdrawal plan, 1,500 US troops were slated to remain, for supply purposes. But the war would then be Vietnamese only, with no possibility of it becoming an American war on Kennedy's watch. (JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, Not Speculation (JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, Not Speculation (thenation.com)

I believe the end of training was going to be conditional as well, but I agree that "support for South Vietnam would continue" and that we would leave a residual force in country for supply purposes. That is a galaxy away from your baseless, irresponsible claim that JFK intended to abandon South Vietnam no matter what after the election. You keep dodging this crucial point.

But the thing is, the documents made it clear that what these people were saying was correct. Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal program. And instead, he readied us for an all out war with Hanoi, see NSAM 288. That order, in March of 1964, arranged with help from the JCS, planned that war. So what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ did in three months.  There is no getting around that one.

This is another claim that you just keep repeating over and over again, while never dealing with contrary evidence and never facing the fact that the overwhelming majority of scholars who have looked at all these same documents disagree with your spin about them, even though many of those scholars are liberal (and some are very liberal).

No one can stop you from repeating your spin another thousand times, but readers should understand that your interpretation of the documents under discussion is rejected by the vast majority of scholars, probably 98% of them, who have studied those documents.

The Geneva Accords were a dead letter due to violations on both sides.  All one has to do is read the Accords.  I mean OMG, the USA sent in a whole new military advisorship team replacing the French, and installed a whole new government: clearly those were massive violations. 

Your polemic here is more proof that you have no clue what you are talking about, that your research has been insufficient and one sided, and that you have no business pretending to be any kind of an authority on the Vietnam War. Even the Wikipedia article on the 1954 Geneva Conference admits who really violated the Geneva Accords:

          North Vietnam violated the Geneva Accords by failing to withdraw all Viet Minh troops from South Vietnam, stifling the movement of North Vietnamese refugees, and conducting a military buildup that more than doubled the number of armed divisions in the North Vietnamese army while the South Vietnamese army was reduced by 20,000 men. (1954 Geneva Conference - Wikipedia)

I mean, this is basic, basic stuff. This is Vietnam War 101 stuff. But you don't even know this material because your research has been so deficient. Even historian Max Hastings, although he is left-of-center, dismantles the far-left/Communist narrative about the Accords in his book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy. Among many other things, he points out that right after the Accords were signed, the Hanoi regime violated them by ordering thousands of Vietminh to remain undercover in South Vietnam:

          In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. (p. 104)

This was many months before Eisenhower began sending small numbers of military advisors to South Vietnam. 

Finally, I would again note that you snipped and did not answer most of the points and evidence I presented in my previous reply. 

Edited April 24, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

As mentioned, one reliable way to judge a book on the Vietnam War is whether it acknowledges the reign of terror that the North Vietnamese imposed on South Vietnam after the war. To provide some understanding of what happened, I will quote from left-of-center British historian Max Hastings book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy (2018). Hastings’ book is one of the very few non-conservative books that deals honestly with the brutal reign that the Communists imposed.

Hastings’ figure for the number of people sent to concentration camps (“reeducation camps”) is low (300K), but Hastings specifies that the figure is only for the first year after the war. New research on the subject done by Asian and Australian scholars puts the number of South Vietnamese sent to concentration camps at around one million (see, for example, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Detention Camps in Asia, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022—Hastings’ book was published in 2018). One million was 5.6% of South Vietnam's population. If this were to happen to America, 5.6% would equal 18 million Americans sent to concentration camps.

I will start with one quote about the period just before South Vietnam fell, and the remainder of the quotes deal with the aftermath. Keep in mind that these quotes tell only a small part of the ugly story:

Quote

 

British journalist Richard West, who knew Indochina intimately and had once been passionately anti-American, now wrote remorsefully from Saigon,

“It is not true to portray South Vietnam as a fascist regime overthrown by a revolutionary movement. Even at this eleventh hour opposition movements have some right of protest, while Saigon’s press is less timid than London’s in its exposure of rascals in office. . . . It is distasteful, here in Saigon, to read the gloating tone of some foreign newspapers over the fate of anti-communists here.” (p. 711).

At five p.m. on April 30, the people of North Vietnam heard echoing through a myriad of street loudspeakers the familiar theme tune “Kill the Fascists,” which preceded news from the Voice of Vietnam. Then an announcer said, “Fellow countrymen, you are invited to listen to a special victory proclamation”. . . .

Bao Ninh describes in his autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War a return to Hanoi after the 1975 campaign.

“Loudspeakers blared, blasting the ears of the wounded, sick, blind, white-eyed, gray-lipped malarial soldiers. Into their ears poured an endless stream of the most ironic messages, urging them to ignore the spirit of reconciliation, to dismiss the warmth and humanity in the ruins of the defeated, sybaritic society of the South. And especially to guard against the idea of its people having fought valiantly or been in any way deserving of respect.” Ninh and most of his comrades despised “this barrage of nonsense.” (pp. 724, 726)

Former secret cadre and PRG justice minister Truong Nhu Tang was among those embittered, indeed alienated, by the manner in which the “liberation” of South Vietnam was implemented. “The Hanoi Communist Party concentrated power in the hands of corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats and brutal security organizations. They fought among themselves to sequester the best houses, the richest plantations and black market luxuries.” (p. 727)

Yet twenty-year-old history student Kim Thanh’s family, who lived near Tan Son Nhut, remained for days in hiding in the cellar of her great-uncle’s house. The old man, like her own parents, had migrated from the North in 1954. “They knew the communists, and what they would do.” When the family finally emerged, they saw the first manifestations of Northern victory: bodies lying in the street, victims of spontaneous executions. (p. 729)

As the new rulers tightened their grip, South Vietnam’s people progressively learned the meaning of “communism,” hitherto a mere weapon word, brandished or parried by the rival combatants.

Le Duc Tho had assured foreigners during the Paris negotiations, “We have no wish to impose communism on the South.” Yet now, in the words of Michael Howard, “A gray totalitarian pall” descended upon the country. A Hanoi doctor inspected the equipment of Saigon’s main hospital and said, “You have too much. We cure many diseases without all these things.” Truckloads of medical equipment were removed and shipped North, along with much else. Cadres evicted wholesale from Cong Hoa Military Hospital a thousand ARVN wounded. . . .

In the year following “liberation,” some three hundred thousand South Vietnamese were arrested. All those with the slightest association with the fallen government were tainted for life. The cashier at Saigon’s Majestic Hotel escaped imprisonment, but was denied further employment and repeatedly interrogated because he had accepted payment for so many bills from Americans.

Approximately two-thirds of detainees, including all ex-officers, were dispatched to reeducation camps, where they remained for between three and seventeen years. A record of opposition to the Thieu regime provided no immunity: among those confined was Buddhist monk Tri Quang, who had created such embarrassments for Saigon’s generals.

A film scripted by the famous poet Nha Ca had been banned by the former rulers as an alleged incitement to pacifism. Back in 1968, however, she had been present in Hue during the communist massacres, and she published an emotional elegy, Mourning Headband for Hue. For this she was now dispatched to a camp, and a copy of her Hue poem was exhibited in Hanoi’s Museum of War Crimes as a specimen of “puppet lies.”

No fixed term was set for prisoners’ incarceration, determined by Party whim. Le Minh Dao, who commanded the South’s 18th Division at Xuan Loc, remained behind barbed wire until 1991, much longer than Stalin held captured National Socialist generals after World War II. (pp. 730-732)

Former lieutenant Si found himself working on the Cambodian border, in conditions little superior to those prevailing in World War II Japanese prison camps. He and his comrades spent countless hours composing confessions of supposed crimes. They were told that they would be released only when judged fit to play their parts in the New Society. Uncertainty about when this might be drove some men to madness. “An army doctor one day slashed his wrists. Then next morning we found his name on a list for release.” Because the only medicine available was aspirin, almost any disease sufficed to kill. Si’s own father, a former Saigon police officer aged fifty-nine, perished in the first months of his own incarceration, probably from chronic liver trouble, though the family was never informed. One of Si’s fellow prisoners died of asthma. Another, unaccustomed to agricultural tasks, was fatally injured by a jagged bamboo that sprang back and slashed him as he strove ineffectually to fell it. Dysentery was endemic. Starvation was employed as a psychological weapon. (p. 732)

Some of those dispatched to the camps were relatively elderly city dwellers, ill adapted to a primitive life with minimal sanitation and chronic malaria. Nobody knows how many prisoners died, but a death rate of 5 percent—a conservative estimate—would indicate at least ten thousand.

After release, they remained without civil rights; most were dispatched to “New Economic Zones,” raw jungle areas where they were expected to create communities amid privations little less stringent than those of the camps. Some eventually received exit visas in return for surrendering everything they owned. (p. 733)

Among these was retired Southern colonel Ly Van Quang’s wife, who had three sons serving in the military and another already already dead in Lam Son 719. Her brother was Thien Le, a general in the North Vietnamese Army. She was rashly confident that this connection would preserve the family from persecution. Instead her three sons, Thien Le’s nephews, endured years in the camps. (p. 734)

Nguyen Cong Hoan, an antiwar South Vietnamese who served two terms in the post-1975 National Assembly before fleeing in a refugee boat, said six years later, “I am very regretful that I did not understand the communists before. The communists always speak in lofty terms that appeal to the better part of people. Then they are used for a tragic end. I believed them; I was wrong.” (p. 734)

By 1980 resource-rich Vietnam had become one of the poorest nations on earth. Through the decade that followed, its people suffered terribly, yet their elderly leaders remained unwilling to abandon collectivism or to engage with the noncommunist non-communist world, for fear of polluting Vietnam’s ideological purity. . . .

In 1988 famine swept large parts of the north, imposing terrible suffering on more than nine million people; an unknown number died. Yet still ideologues in Hanoi, together with some military men and especially members of the powerful intelligence apparatus, found it hard to reconcile themselves to compromises with economic rationality.

Le Duan died in 1986, but the successors to Tho and himself have shown no inclination either to indulge personal freedom or to sacrifice a jot of the power of the Party. Marxist-Leninist theory continues to be taught in every secondary school. Hanoi’s gerontocratic leadership has acknowledged merely the necessity to allow individuals and private enterprises to make money, which some have done with notable success. . . . (p. 737)