The Myth that JFK Was Killed Over the Vietnam War

[Michael Griffith]

Three myths that have done great damage to the case for conspiracy in the JFK assassination, and that have drawn severe criticism from academics and journalists, involve JFK and Vietnam. These myths are (1) that JFK was killed because he was going to unconditionally and totally disengage from South Vietnam after the election, (2) that JFK never would have escalated the war the way LBJ did, and (3) that LBJ enthusiastically escalated the war as quickly as he dared after JFK's murder. Numerous facts refute these myths. Let us start with facts that refute the third myth, and then go backward from there.

-- As literally hundreds of historians have documented from the LBJ White House tapes and memos and meeting minutes, until the Communist offensive in 1965, Johnson strenuously tried to limit the war effort because he feared that an expanded war would interfere with his domestic agenda, especially his Great Society legislation. 

-- Most of the Kennedy holdovers in the Johnson White House recommended deploying combat troops in response to Hanoi's enormous and unprecedented offensive in 1965, a situation that JFK never faced. The North Vietnamese army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) had never launched an offensive of such magnitude against South Vietnam during JFK's presidency. In response to this escalation, JFK holdovers John McNaughton, Robert McNamara, William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk advocated sending combat troops to South Vietnam.

-- Even when Johnson felt compelled to send combat troops in response to the 1965 Communist offensive, he placed insane, reckless restrictions on U.S. ground, naval, and air operations, restrictions that needlessly cost the lives of many American pilots and soldiers.

The Joint Chiefs' objections to these restrictions caused a bitter, deep rift between them and LBJ and McNamara. And, mind you, these were not the "fire-breathing/radical" Joint Chiefs of the JFK era. These chiefs were handpicked by LBJ and McNamara because they were known for being moderate and temperate, and because LBJ and McNamara believed they would be compliant with the administration's gradual-escalation, limited-war approach. For a time, the Joint Chiefs were compliant, but as American casualties mounted, they became increasingly vocal about calling for an end to the restrictions.

-- Far from being chummy with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and far from rubber stamping the Joint Chiefs' requests, LBJ sidelined, attacked, manipulated, and misled the Joint Chiefs. Historian H.R. McMaster documents LBJ's war with the Joint Chiefs in painstaking detail in his best-selling book Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

McMaster documents the devious methods that LBJ and McNamara used to mislead, sidetrack, and muzzle the Joint Chiefs and to either reject most of their recommendations or to approve only parts of their recommendations. 

-- Although JFK was adamant about wanting to avoid sending combat troops to South Vietnam, he was never faced with the situation that Johnson faced in 1965. Bobby Kennedy's 4/30/1964 oral history interview makes it clear that Bobby believed JFK might have used combat troops if he had been faced with the imminent collapse of South Vietnam. 

-- Given the fact that Rusk and the Bundy Brothers, and even McNamara and McNaughton, recommended using combat troops in response to the 1965 NVA-VC offensive, would not these men have given the same recommendation to JFK if JFK had not died and had faced a similar situation? 

-- The JFK White House tapes do not contain a single syllable of evidence that JFK intended to abandon South Vietnam after the election, as Dr. Marc Selverstone proves in his widely acclaimed 2022 book The Kennedy Withdrawal. (BTW, earlier this month, Selverstone's book was the subject of a roundtable review by several historians in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review [LINK]. One of the reviewers compares Selverstone's book to John Newman's book JFK and Vietnam, and finds Selverstone's book to be more convincing.)

-- As I have documented in this forum on several occasions, JFK's public statements about the Vietnam War, even including two of his speeches during his November 1963 Texas trip, sharply contradict any suggestion that he was planning on abandoning the war effort after the election. In fact, in the months leading up to this death, he specifically criticized and rejected the idea of withdrawing from South Vietnam.

-- Unfortunately, some researchers have uncritically run with the so-called "secret debrief" created by Robert McNamara shortly before JFK's death, to the point of including it in the 2021 documentary JFK Revisited. They failed to consider crucial facts that cast great doubt on the debrief's veracity. For example, not one word about this debrief is uttered on the JFK and LBJ White House tapes. Not a single JFK holdover in LBJ's administration said a word about the debrief. Not one of McNamara's adoring proteges/supporters, not even McNaughton, breathed a word about the debrief. Revealingly, McNamara himself did not even mention the debrief in his memoir, even though he argued in his memoir that JFK intended to withdraw from Vietnam by late1965.

On one especially revealing LBJ White House tape, a phone call between LBJ and McNamara on 2/25/1964, we hear LBJ criticizing McNamara--and JFK--for having publicly talked about the 1,000-man withdrawal plan, going so far as to call such talk "foolish." You would think that if JFK had truly told McNamara he was determined to pull out of Vietnam after the election, McNamara surely would have mentioned this historic declaration to defend himself and JFK. 

And this is not to mention McNamara's known, documented willingness to falsify records, brazenly lie, and deliberately misrepresent the views of others. McMaster's book documents many cases of such conduct. Given McNamara's well-documented penchant for dishonesty and intrigue, did it not occur to the researchers who assisted with JFK Revisited that they should do some checking before running with McNamara's "secret debrief"?

-- Part of the unconditional-withdrawal myth is the myth that the war was going badly in 1962 and 1963. According to this myth, JFK decided he had to get out of Vietnam because the war was going so badly. Even though this myth was soundly refuted years ago by disclosures from newly available/released North Vietnamese sources, among other sources, it still made its way into JFK Revisited. Dr. Mark Moyar's 2006 book Triumph Forsaken presents many pages of evidence, including evidence from North Vietnamese sources, that the war was going well in 1962 and 1963. If you read the 2010 roundtable compilation Triumph Revisited, you will see that the roundtable's liberal scholars did not even address most of the evidence that Moyar presents--they simply ignored it (but acted as though they were refuting Moyar's case).

Needless to say, the fact that the war was actually going well in '62 and '63 belies the claim that military and civilian hawks in Saigon and Washington were feeding JFK false information about the war. It was JFK's liberal advisers who were feeding him false information about the war, especially Hilsman, Harriman, Forrestal, and Ball. The hawks, such as General Harkins, Ambassador Nolting, William Colby, and Walt Rostow, were the ones who were telling JFK the truth about the war effort.

Simply put, the Vietnam War was not one of the plotters' motives. If the plotters were deeply concerned about the Vietnam War, they had far more reasons to be furious with LBJ than with JFK. If the plotters had been as powerful as some have said they were, and if they had killed JFK over Vietnam, they would not have allowed LBJ to impose ridiculous and suicidal restrictions on our military operations in Vietnam, would not have allowed LBJ to fail to respond to VC attacks on American personnel in South Vietnam in 1964, would not have allowed LBJ to implement his bungling gradual-escalation strategy, and would not have allowed LBJ to choose the dovish Hubert Humphrey as his VP.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

Below you will find part of the evidence that the war was going well in 1962 and 1963 that is presented in Dr. Mark Moyar’s book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Presenting all of that evidence would require at least three more posts.

If you’re curious to know how liberal scholars have responded to this historic evidence, go read the liberal reviews of the book in the roundtable compilation Triumph Revisited--you’ll see that they have simply ignored most of it and have misrepresented the small parts of it that they have addressed.

Here is small part of the evidence that the war was going well in 1962 and 1963 from Moyar's book:

          All observers in South Vietnam at the time, even the American journalists who would later claim that the war effort was deteriorating at this time, reported that the Diem government dramatically improved its position in the countryside relative to that of the Viet Cong during the second half of 1962. It did so in the face of extensive North Vietnamese infiltration of men and materiel that continuously replenished the Viet Cong’s forces.

          The Australian Wilfred Burchett, a pro-Communist journalist who lived with the Viet Cong during this time and spoke with many of their leaders, accurately summed up the year. “In terms of territory and population, Diem made a considerable comeback in 1962,” Burchett observed. Government armed forces “registered a number of successes and held the strategic and tactical initiative.” In the final analysis, stated Burchett, 1962 was “Diem’s year.”[546] (pp. 184-185).

          Once again, North Vietnamese documents and histories corroborate the American and other foreign reports on the Diem government’s effectiveness. One North Vietnamese account stated that in the first six months of 1963, the South Vietnamese government conducted between 1,500 and 2,000 infantry operations per month, and it noted: “Protracted and large-scale operations launched unremittingly against any given region were more numerous and fiercer than in the previous year.”[626]

          A top-level Communist report on this period asserted that the government strengthened the rural militias and it still possessed much stronger military forces than the Viet Cong. “Due to the results attained in the recent sweeps and due to his grinding efforts to gather in the people and establish strategic hamlets,” the report acknowledged, “the enemy seized a large number of people and constricted our liberated areas, causing us many manpower and materiel difficulties.” It also stated that government forces had launched successful operations deep into Communist base areas, destroying Communist forces and disrupting Communist lines of communication that ran from North Vietnam and Laos into South Vietnam.[627]

          The history of the Communists’ critical Region 5 noted that during 1963, “the enemy recaptured practically everything we had captured.” (pp. 208-209)

          Most compelling of all, the Communists themselves acknowledged that the Diem government was attacking the Viet Cong energetically and adeptly during the last months of 1962. Meeting on December 6, the North Vietnamese Politburo remarked, “The enemy is using his military superiority to expand the war in a determined effort to annihilate our forces.” It conceded that “our armed forces are still weak,” and that if the Communists continued the armed struggle at the present level, they would be unable to maintain the movement in the South.[529]

          One official Communist history noted that South Vietnamese government leaders “obstinately continued to strengthen their forces and wage an increasingly fierce ‘special war’ against our people in the South” through the end of 1962.[530] A Communist document concerning the upper delta – the 7th Division’s own area of operations – in late 1962 acknowledged that “the enemy succeeded in mopping up our weak areas, repressing the people’s political movement, expelling our forces, and activating strategic hamlets. The enemy then employed concentrated Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps, and Ranger units to attack liberated areas.”[531]

          Similar descriptions appeared in a Communist history of Military Region 6, which encompassed six coastal and highland provinces in central South Vietnam.[532] According to these Communist histories, South Vietnam’s regulars as well as its irregulars caused great harm to the Viet Cong in this period, a strong indication that the South Vietnamese Army was becoming more proficient in counterinsurgency operations.[533]

          As the hamlets sprouted up across the country, Hanoi ordered the Viet Cong to set the destruction of the strategic hamlets as their top priority. The Viet Cong, however, were not capable of annihilating the new hamlets, not even in the Mekong Delta, where the program was making the least headway and was most vulnerable.

          The Communist history of the upper Mekong Delta noted that when the Viet Cong tore down the strategic hamlet fences and guard posts, “the enemy would just force the people to rebuild them, this time even stronger, and would tighten his defensive alert procedures, tighten his controls on the population, and aggressively hunt down our guerrilla organization inside the hamlet to suppress it, making it more difficult for us to conduct our operations. . . . When we destroyed a strategic hamlet they usually rebuilt it and then built even more.”[539]

          The official Communist history of the southern Mekong Delta region stated, “We expended tremendous efforts in the program to destroy strategic hamlets but in fact accomplished very little.”[540] (pp. 181-183)

          South Vietnam’s armed forces were to make even greater progress in the second half of 1962 than in the first. Weak commanders were replaced with aggressive young men from the new generation of leaders. Government units hit the Viet Cong hard in VC-held areas and at night. . . .

          A Communist historical account of 1962 noted, “Our people’s war forces were unable to stop the enemy’s helicopter-borne and armored personnel carrier assaults, and so our three spearheads [military, political, military proselytizing] became confused and hesitant, and our losses increased. . . . Many units were forced to disperse.”[477]

          In the latter part of the summer, the number of government victories soared, and the government reasserted its control over many areas that had fallen into Viet Cong hands over the past two and a half years. After repeated maulings of large Viet Cong units, the Communists cut back severely on large-unit operations, making it more difficult for them to overwhelm government units and strategic hamlets. . . .

          As the summer came to a close, Ambassador Nolting’s deputy William Truehart exclaimed that he was “tremendously encouraged” by progress in the military realm that was “little short of sensational.”[478] (168-169)

          Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, the senior American adviser in the Mekong Delta, where the government’s armed forces were at their weakest, reported in February 1963 that “tremendous progress has been made in virtually all areas of training, operations, logistics, civic action programs and in the fields of leadership and command since 1 January 1962.”[589] None other than Vann himself was to say, in his final report before leaving the country in April, “There is not the slightest doubt that significant improvements have occurred in practically every facet of the counterinsurgency effort in this tactical zone during the past year.”[590] Steady improvement was to continue for the rest of Diem’s tenure. . . . (pp. 199-200)

          As 1963 progressed into the spring and summer, the South Vietnamese government continued to improve its counterinsurgency capabilities and its position in the countryside.[609]. . . .

          At Diem’s command, the South Vietnamese continued to eliminate small and isolated outposts in the countryside and transfer their personnel to more productive duties. The government’s forces aggressively sought battle with the Viet Cong and inflicted many defeats during this time.

          Colonel Bryce F. Denno, upon completing an eleven-month tour as the I Corps senior adviser in July 1963, reported that in his region, “the Self-Defense Corps units are defending their villages against enemy attacks with much greater confidence and success than in the past. The ARVN is reaching out into the deep jungle to attack Viet Cong ‘secure’ areas.” The population, moreover, was giving more information on the enemy to government forces in his corps area.[611]

          In a mid-year assessment, Ⅲ Corps senior adviser Colonel Wilbur Wilson remarked that pacification had experienced substantial gains in every province of the corps area.[612] (p. 206)

          U. S. officers who visited each of South Vietnam’s provinces in the first half of 1963 remarked that local governments had undergone dramatic improvements and had greatly extended their reach, while the hamlet militia were repelling the Viet Cong with determination and skill. They also noted that the rural population and local officials now had much greater confidence in the government and their morale was up.[616]

          Colonel Ted Serong, a guerrilla warfare expert who headed the Australian training mission in South Vietnam, told top Washington officials in May 1963 that “the big success story in Viet-Nam is the strategic hamlet program and this story has not yet been fully told.”[617]

          Sir Robert Thompson, who like many other observers had shifted to an optimistic view of the war effort after holding a distinctly pessimistic view in the bleak days of 1961 and early 1962, observed that in the strategic hamlet program, “the energy displayed has been remarkable by any standards.”[618] In Thompson’s opinion, the government was now winning the war and it might be able to shut off the Viet Cong’s access to the people by the middle of 1964, even in the Mekong Delta.[619]. . . .

          Later it would be alleged with great regularity that the optimism surrounding the strategic hamlet program was the result of uncritical acceptance of inflated South Vietnamese statistics.

          In reality, Phillips and most other advisers did not rely solely on statistics or other reports from the South Vietnamese. In every province, American civilian and military advisers personally inspected numerous hamlets and talked with villagers and government employees, then sent reports to Phillips’s staff and other U. S. organizations. The Americans also received pertinent information from captured documents and Viet Cong defectors.[620] Phillips’s report made very clear that the optimism about the program was not based upon official statistics. (p. 207)

          From his first entry, on October 9, 1962, to the last entry, on January 11, 1963, Tregaskis described a war that was very different from the one that Halberstam and Sheehan later depicted in their enormously influential books.

          The American advisers Tregaskis met during those three months gave no indication of frustration with the level of aggressiveness among South Vietnamese leaders; to the contrary, they generally thought that the South Vietnamese were prosecuting the war effectively. “Patrols are going on constantly,” said Major Lloyd Picou, the American operations officer for Ⅱ Corps. “We want to get into new areas, so that there will be no area where the VC can say, ‘This is a safe area.’” Pointing to a map of Vietnam, Picou showed Tregaskis a province where the government had gone from controlling very little two-and-one-half months earlier to controlling three quarters of the rice land.[508]

          Other American journalists who visited Vietnam in late 1962 came away with the same general impressions as Tregaskis. Touring Vietnam for Newsweek after Sully’s removal, Kenneth Crawford wrote, “In the opinion of Diem’s responsible American advisers, his strategy is right and he has made a promising start.” Crawford also noted, “Missionaries scattered through the country report that the Communists are in fact complaining about lack of support.”[512]

          Writing in The Saturday Evening Post in late November, Harold Martin concluded that the huge American investment of men and materiel had begun paying dividends in recent months.[513] Time commented that the war in South Vietnam “looks far more hopeful than it did a year ago,” and “U. S. advisers are confident that the Viet Cong now have virtually no hope of achieving their goal of setting up a separate Communist-ruled puppet state in South Viet Nam.”[514]

          Most remarkably, the reporting from the Saigon correspondents themselves in late 1962 confirmed that the South Vietnamese government had not cut back on aggressive military operations and that the South Vietnamese armed forces were fighting well. (pp. 177-179)

          Much other evidence shows that Diem’s war effort did not falter between October and December 1962. In some areas, especially those distant from Saigon, American military advisers witnessed successful operations during this period that entirely escaped the attention of the press corps. Among the most noteworthy was a series of joint air-ground assaults in Ⅲ Corps near the Cambodian border. . . .

          Theodore Heavner, following a visit to Vietnam from October 18 to November 26, noted that American advisers “say that the GVN forces are doing more and better night work,” with the result that “the night no longer belongs only to the VC.” The South Vietnamese armed forces were performing much better on the whole, he noted. . . . (p. 181)

          At an early stage in the development of the strategic hamlet program, Theodore Heavner, a Vietnamese-speaking State Department official who examined the strategic hamlets in considerable depth, commented, “One of the brighter aspects of the program at the moment appears to be the remarkable effort to send good cadre into the hamlets to get the program in motion.”[448] (p. 158)

          Diem’s government rang in the second half of 1962 with a sensational exhibition of military prowess. On July 20, two days after Harkins had told Diem “the only way to win is to attack, attack, attack,” the South Vietnamese 7th Division executed a large night helicopter assault in the Plain of Reeds. Employing thirty U. S. Army and Marine Corps helicopters and one thousand government troops, it was the biggest attack involving helicopters to date, day or night. The heliborne government troops came down almost directly on top of a Viet Cong battalion, but the Viet Cong were unable to gun down the South Vietnamese troops as they disembarked from the helicopters, when they were most vulnerable. Upon realizing the strength of the attack force, the Viet Cong attempted to flee, only to find themselves pursued by South Vietnamese infantry, helicopters, and rocket-firing AD-6 Skyraiders. (p. 168)

Edited September 17, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

Here is more of the evidence from Dr. Moyar’s book Triumph Forsaken that the war was going well from early 1962 until Diem was assassinated in November 1963. Much of this evidence addresses the myth that the war effort took a sharp downward turn in the summer of 1963, a few months before Diem’s death.

          Another [Communist] account explained, “With a network of outposts and strong points and a web of roads, airfields, and ‘strategic hamlets,’ the enemy was able to establish fairly tight control over Region 5. In the rural lowlands, our self-defense guerrillas and local force troops were few and weak.”[629]

          Concerning Cochinchina, meaning the Mekong Delta and the provinces surrounding Saigon, a Communist account stated that the Viet Cong had few full-time soldiers at this time, and noted that the Viet Cong troops were dispersed into small groups, which prevented them from defeating government forces engaged in either mobile operations or the construction of strategic hamlets.[630]

          Le Quoc San, the Communist commander in the upper Mekong Delta for most of the war, remembered that the Viet Cong were hurting badly in Ben Tre province, which had been one of the most troublesome provinces for the government since the Ben Tre insurrection in January 1960.

          By the middle of 1963, the government had established 195 strategic hamlets across Ben Tre. “Our Party members and guerrillas who had previously lived with and been close to the people,” explained Le Quoc San “were now driven out and forced to return to conducting secret operations or to living in the fields in bushes and on riverbanks. District and provincial local force troops could no longer rely on the people. Without this support, they were forced to disperse to conduct low-level operations, evading the enemy’s constant sweep operations and patrols.”[631]

          These developments reinforced the pessimism that had taken hold during the middle of 1962 in Hanoi. In a prominent Party journal, a senior North Vietnamese official named Minh Tranh wrote that the Americans and the South Vietnamese government “resort to all shrewd and cruel measures” and therefore “the South Vietnamese revolution must go along a long, arduous and complicated path.” The fighting capabilities of Diem’s forces, he predicted gloomily, “will not diminish during 1963 but can grow even fiercer.”[632]

          After 1963 had come and gone, Halberstam, Sheehan, and other reporters would claim that South Vietnam’s counterinsurgency efforts crumbled over the course of 1963, up until the end of October, and that they had been aware of the crumbling at the time.[633] It was a myth crafted afterwards to justify their support of the disastrous November coup. . . .

          Albert Fraleigh, one of the top U. S. advisers to the strategic hamlet program, received frequent visits from Halberstam, Sheehan, and other correspondents. On many occasions, Fraleigh discussed with them the achievements of the strategic hamlet program, but they showed no interest in such topics because they quite obviously were not seeking positive information about the Diem government. “Halberstam and Sheehan were always looking for glaring errors on the South Vietnamese side,” Fraleigh explained.[634]

          Major General Edward Rowny recalled from firsthand experience that some journalists, especially Halberstam, “were more interested in pursuing their own political agendas than they were in reporting on the military situation.”

          After Halberstam and Rowny accompanied one operation that resulted in combat with the Viet Cong, Halberstam wrote an article stating that the government troops had performed poorly and blaming their ineffectiveness on the unpopularity of Madame Nhu. Rowny told Halberstam, “You know, Dave, that the operation was rather successful. And whether it was or not had nothing to do with Madame Nhu. The soldiers don’t even know who she is.” Halberstam replied, “Ed, the readers don’t want to read anything about these military skirmishes. What they are interested in is the Dragon Lady.”[635] (pp. 209-210)

          But what is most significant is that Catholics did not come close to dominating the Diem government, not even at the highest levels. Among Diem’s eighteen cabinet ministers were five Catholics, five Confucians, and eight Buddhists, including a Buddhist vice-president and a Buddhist foreign minister. Of the provincial chiefs, twelve were Catholics and twenty-six were Buddhists or Confucians. Only three of the top nineteen military officers were Catholics.[658]. . . .

          No successful leader in Vietnamese history had tolerated the sort of vicious and organized public attacks that the Buddhist militants began to make on Diem in May 1963. In the rural areas, moreover, where the war was being fought, no one cared about the Buddhist crisis. Even among the educated elite, a large number understood and supported Diem’s actions during the Buddhist disturbances.[660]. . . .

          A few captured Communist documents, available at the time to both the Americans and the South Vietnamese, revealed Communist participation in the Buddhist protest movement. . . .

          For many years, Hanoi kept silent about the very sensitive subject of its involvement in the Buddhist movement, but in the early 1990s it began publishing detailed accounts of its early and intimate complicity. (pp. 216-217)

          In their trip reports, McNamara and McCone commented that during the Diem era some Americans had made use of South Vietnamese government statistics on the war that exaggerated the government’s successes. Supporters of the coup would later cite these remarks as evidence that the strategic hamlet program and other elements of the South Vietnamese war effort were crumbling during Diem’s last months.[901]

          This contention was erroneous. As mentioned earlier, top U. S. government officials had long distrusted South Vietnamese statistics and had based their views of the war on what they had learned from American advisers in the field and other reliable sources. Up until the time of Diem’s death, they had believed, correctly, that the war in general was proceeding well, and after the coup they perceived, with equal accuracy, a spectacular decline in performance.

          Coup proponents were also to misuse a statement in McCone’s report that statistical indicators of South Vietnamese performance in the war had begun a downward turn in July. They argued that these statistical trends showed that the Viet Cong had held the upper hand in the war from July onward, but in truth these statistical trends resulted from the increase in Viet Cong attacks on fledgling strategic hamlets in a few delta provinces, which, it has been seen, in no way demonstrated that the war had begun to turn against the government. These provinces had little strategic value, and Diem had been faring well in the rest of the country. At the time of the December report, McCone himself and the rest of the CIA knew that until the coup the problems had been confined to a few provinces, and that the sharp downturn did not begin until November.[902]

          In February 1964, moreover, after all of the claims of statistical error had been analyzed, an independent CIA team of experts pinpointed November 1, 1963 as the date at which the strategic hamlet program and the militia entered into a steep decline.[903] Communist sources were to confirm that the government had held the upper hand until the coup, and quickly lost it after the coup.

          In April 1964, reporting on the general situation, their southern command would state that the Viet Cong had struggled during 1962 and the first ten months of 1963, but after November 1 they began to re-establish themselves in areas where they had been weakened.[904]

          A Communist assessment prepared in March 1965, by which time the Saigon government stood very close to total defeat, was to describe the government’s collapse in the sixteen months since Diem’s killing in the following manner:

          “The balance of forces between the South Vietnamese revolution and the enemy has changed very rapidly in our favor. . . . The bulk of the enemy’s armed forces and paramilitary forces at the village and hamlet level have disintegrated, and what is left continues to disintegrate. . . . Eighty percent of the strategic hamlets, which are viewed by the Americans as the ‘backbone of the special war,’ have been destroyed, and most of the people and land in the rural countryside are in our liberated zones.”[905]

          Consonant with U. S. sources, Communist accounts indicate that the Viet Cong took longer to capitalize on the coup in some areas than in others. In the crucial lowlands of Communist Military Region 5, according to Hanoi’s official history of the region, the destruction of strategic hamlets built under Diem did not begin until the middle of 1964, for the Communist forces needed the intervening period to recover from the losses sustained during Diem’s final years.

          Between the middle of 1964 and the middle of 1965, the history stated, the Communists destroyed 2,100 of the 2,800 strategic hamlets that had been built in the region before the coup of November 1963.[906] A similar situation prevailed in Communist Military Region 6.

          The official Party history of that region stated that between Diem’s assassination and the middle of 1964, Communist forces accomplished little in the way of destroying strategic hamlets and retaking control of the population. The reason, again, was Communist weakness, not governmental strength; the history noted that the Minh government’s rapid disbandment of Diemist organizations and prosecution of Diemist officials had quickly caused the collapse of the government’s ruling apparatus in the villages, while the major advances did not begin until mid-1964. From that point until mid-1965, the number of civilians under Communist control in Military Region 6 jumped from 25,000 to 203,345.[907]

          In the central highlands, the strategic hamlet program sustained very little damage prior to November 1963. It came under attack in the months immediately following the coup, suffering substantial injury well before the programs in Communist Military Regions 5 and 6.

          The Communist history of the central highlands front observed that the ousting of Diem and the resultant disorganization of the South Vietnamese militia forces enabled the Viet Cong to cause the strategic hamlet program serious harm for the first time; within a few months, they destroyed forty percent of the region’s strategic hamlets.

          The strategic hamlet program in the highlands continued to suffer losses throughout 1964 and the first half of 1965. Many of the most geographically important hamlets in the highlands did not fall under Communist domination until the Communists’ summer offensive of 1965.[908]

          The southern command’s April 1964 report acknowledged that before Diem’s demise, the campaign against the strategic hamlets had attained significant momentum only in the Mekong Delta, and that even there, the Viet Cong’s achievements had been rather modest up until November 1963, at which point they began to grow rapidly.[ rapidly.[909]

          Even in Long An and Dinh Tuong, the two provinces where the Viet Cong had inflicted substantial pain on the strategic hamlets prior to the coup, the strategic hamlet program suffered much greater damage after the coup than before.

          The official Communist history of Long An province stated that September 1963 was the “period when the province faced its greatest difficulties. Enemy strategic hamlets and military outposts practically covered the entire rural area of the province. Most of the civilians had been moved into the hamlets.”

          The Viet Cong’s mobile company in the province had been so weakened in recent battles with the enemy that neither it nor the district and village forces could destroy any strategic hamlets completely. Whenever Viet Cong forces injured a strategic hamlet, the history asserted, the government came back the next day to repair the damage.[910]

          Of the 273 strategic hamlets established in the province under Diem, the history recounted, only 20 had been put out of order before the coup. In the six months after the coup, “virtually all the strategic hamlets throughout Long An province were destroyed.”[911] (pp. 283-285)

          The last point worth mentioning in connection with the claims of a major decline preceding the November coup is that almost all of the supporting evidence originated with Diem’s successors, who, even if they had always respected Diem and had turned against him primarily to appease the Americans, had a desperate need after the putsch to save face with the Americans and with their own people. Like Halberstam and Hilsman and the other American proponents of the coup, South Vietnam’s new rulers inaccurately claimed that the abysmal situation at the end of 1963 differed little from the situation preceding November so as to show that the coup they had instigated had created no new problems.

          An American assessment of the strategic hamlet program at the beginning of 1964 noted that because of “political or personal considerations,” the Minh government had replaced the original statistics on the pre-coup period with new, less positive statistics in order to support the “denigration of the old regime” and establish “a favorable data base for the new incumbent.”[913] The deceitful misrepresentation of the pre-coup situation by coup supporters, American and Vietnamese, would color analysis of the Diem regime for many years to come.[914].

          Because of Diem’s accomplishments in 1962 and 1963, the Viet Cong lacked the ability to defeat the government at the time of Diem’s death, and for a considerable period thereafter. Had Diem lived, the Viet Cong could have kept the war going as long as they continued to receive new manpower from North Vietnam and maintained sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, but it is highly doubtful that the war would have reached the point where the United States needed to introduce several hundred thousand of its own troops to avert defeat, as it would under Diem’s successors. Quite possibly, indeed, South Vietnam could have survived under Diem without the help of any U. S. ground forces.

          Those who led South Vietnam from November 1963 to the time of the American intervention prosecuted the war far less effectively than Diem had, and this weak performance helped overcome Hanoi’s great reluctance to send the North Vietnamese Army into South Vietnam. If the North Vietnamese Army had invaded the South at some later date while Diem still ruled, South Vietnam might very well have withstood the onslaught with the help of U. S. air power but without U. S. ground troops, as it would in 1972.

          The Communists, unlike most of the Americans, were very quick to grasp the profound significance of the November 1963 coup. Upon hearing of Diem’s assassination, Ho Chi Minh remarked, “I can scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid.”[915] Demonstrating astonishing foresight, the North Vietnamese Politburo predicted:

          “The consequences of the 1 November coup d’état will be contrary to the calculations of the U. S. imperialists. . . . Diem was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Diem. Diem was one of the most competent lackeys of the U. S. imperialists. . . . Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause the others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d’état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last.”[916]

          The pro-Communist Australian Wilfred Burchett, who spent time with Vietnamese Communist leaders shortly after the coup, told an American journalist in late 1964, “We never believed the Americans would let Diem go, much less aid and abet his departure. Diem was a national leader, and you will never be able to replace him – never. You haven’t had an effective government in Saigon since and you won’t have one.” Burchett said that Vietnamese Communist leaders, amazed by their good fortune, called the coup a “gift,” and exclaimed that “the Americans have done something that we haven’t been able to do for nine years and that was get rid of Diem.”[917] (pp. 285-286)

 

[Chuck Schwartz]

Recent  facebook postig by John Newma...https://thenewamerican.com/.../dr-john-m-newman.../

[James DiEugenio]

There is nothing about this topic that is a myth.

The disgrace about it is that it, with few exceptions, had been ignored for decades on end by the MSM and the critical community.

It is a simple fact:  Johnson sent the first combat troops to Vietnam about 3 1/2 months after the Commission volumes were issued.

That act  crossed a line that JFK refused to cross in three years. But worse, Johnson had been planning this move for months on end. This has been proven by more than one author: Moise, Goulden, Logevall.

Many people in the Pentagon felt that the Saigon government could not win on their own.  For example, Col. John Paul Vann, plus his acolytes in the press, Halberstam and Sheehan. Therefore, to avoid the loss and humiliation, America had to get involved directly.

Two of the people who tried to cover up this breakage with Kennedy's policy were Johnson and Walt Rostow, who LBJ brought back from State after Kennedy got rid of him because he was too hawkish.  The idea there was not any break in policy is a flat out fabrication. There was one and it did not take very long at all for that to begin to set in among Kennedy's advisors.  Like at the first meeting on the 24th.

Very soon after, in January, Johnson did something that Kennedy would not have done:  he brought the Pentagon into the oval office to plan American intervention in the war. Kennedy did not even want those guys visiting South Vietnam.  You then had NSAM 288 in March.  Every serious commentator on the subject notes that 288 is a milestone since it plans for an American  war against North Vietnam, including air target lists.  That list was used for the retaliation against Hanoi over the phantom attack at Tonkin Gulf. Those kinds of plans did not exist under JFK since he had no intention of broadening the war. His plan was to get out. In fact, he was worried that Saigon might fall before America got completely out so he signed an evacuation order in November.

There is no logical way to explain all of these reversals of policy in Indochina. Except to say that the Pentagon and Johnson were totally opposed to Kennedy on this issue. Plain and simple. As Roger Hilsman once wrote, there were things in foreign policy that only Kennedy advocated for; he was out there on his own.  One was Indonesia, and we saw what happened there after his death.

Another was Indochina. And we saw what happened there. Nether would have happened if Kennedy had lived.

 

Edited October 29, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Bill Fite]

On 9/14/2023 at 5:52 PM, Michael Griffith said:

(2) that JFK never would have escalated the war the way LBJ did

 

from: https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/jfk-ordered-full-withdrawal-vietnam-solid-evidence/

Evidence of JFK’s Decision to Withdraw from Vietnam

 

The evidence is massive and categorical. It includes:

* Robert McNamara’s instructions to the May 1963 SecDef Conference in Honolulu to develop the withdrawal plan.

* A  detailed account of the McNamara-Taylor mission to Vietnam that returned with the withdrawal plan, drafted in their absence in the Pentagon by a team under Kennedy’s direct control.

* An audiotape of the discussion at the White House that led to the approval of NSAM 263 (National Security Action Memorandum), which implemented the plan; this audio was released by the Assassination Records Review Board at my request.

* The precise instructions for withdrawal delivered by Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to his fellow Chiefs on October 4, 1963, in a memorandum that remained classified until 1997.

Taylor wrote:

“On 2 October the President approved recommendations on military matters contained in the report of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following actions derived from these recommendations are directed: … all planning will be directed toward preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all US special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965. The US Comprehensive Plan, Vietnam, will be revised to bring it into consonance with these objectives, and to reduce planned residual (post-1965) MAAG strengths to approximately pre-insurgency levels… Execute the plan to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963…”

 

[Michael Griffith]

21 hours ago, Bill Fite said:

from: https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/jfk-ordered-full-withdrawal-vietnam-solid-evidence/

Evidence of JFK’s Decision to Withdraw from Vietnam

The evidence is massive and categorical. It includes:

* Robert McNamara’s instructions to the May 1963 SecDef Conference in Honolulu to develop the withdrawal plan.

* A  detailed account of the McNamara-Taylor mission to Vietnam that returned with the withdrawal plan, drafted in their absence in the Pentagon by a team under Kennedy’s direct control.

* An audiotape of the discussion at the White House that led to the approval of NSAM 263 (National Security Action Memorandum), which implemented the plan; this audio was released by the Assassination Records Review Board at my request.

* The precise instructions for withdrawal delivered by Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to his fellow Chiefs on October 4, 1963, in a memorandum that remained classified until 1997.

Taylor wrote:

“On 2 October the President approved recommendations on military matters contained in the report of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following actions derived from these recommendations are directed: … all planning will be directed toward preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all US special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965. The US Comprehensive Plan, Vietnam, will be revised to bring it into consonance with these objectives, and to reduce planned residual (post-1965) MAAG strengths to approximately pre-insurgency levels… Execute the plan to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963…”

Did you bother to read the first post in the thread? None of what you cited and quoted proves that JFK was determined to unconditionally and totally disengage from the Vietnam War.

No one denies that there was a withdrawal plan. The problem is that a small handful of researchers, mainly Jim DiEugenio and James Galbraith and John Newman, won't admit that the withdrawal plan was plainly, clearly, and indisputably conditional and partial (some supports would remain), and that JFK intended to continue to provide military and economic aid to South Vietnam even if conditions on the ground allowed the withdrawal to be completed.

The unconditional-withdrawal myth is rejected even by the vast majority of liberal, anti-war historians, including ultra-liberals such as Edwin Moise and Fredrik Logevall. The myth has been destroyed by in Dr. Marc Selverstone's recent and widely acclaimed book The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam. Selverstone's book has been praised by leading scholars from both sides of the spectrum.

The unconditional-withdrawal myth is based on poor scholarship, a distorted reading of NSAMs 263 and 273, ignoring the JFK White House tapes, and dismissing as strategic lies every single firsthand statement from JFK himself during the last several months of his life, in addition to Bobby Kennedy's crucial April 1964 oral history interview in which he made it as plain as English can make something that JFK had no intention of pulling out of Vietnam and/or allowing South Vietnam to fall to the Communists.

Edited October 30, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Bill Fite]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Did you bother to read the first post in the thread? None of what you cited and quoted proves that JFK was determined to unconditionally and totally disengage from the Vietnam War.

LOL 

[James DiEugenio]

Bill:

That is a very cogent and incisive article by Jamie.  Thanks for that.

I wish we could have used him more in the documentary.

But this shows how good he is on this issue.

Edited October 30, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Cory Santos]

I just watched an interview of JFK from September 1963.   He stated he believed in the Domino Theory.  But he does smirk when asked about the CIA.   Very odd.  

[Cliff Varnell]

On 9/14/2023 at 7:52 AM, Michael Griffith said:

Three myths that have done great damage to the case for conspiracy in the JFK assassination, and that have drawn severe criticism from academics and journalists, involve JFK and Vietnam. These myths are (1) that JFK was killed because he was going to unconditionally and totally disengage from South Vietnam after the election,

I argue JFK was killed because his plans to scale down overall American presence in SE Asia would jeopardize CIA operations in Laos.  

On 9/14/2023 at 7:52 AM, Michael Griffith said:

It was JFK's liberal advisers who were feeding him false information about the war, especially Hilsman, Harriman, Forrestal, and Ball.

Bingo!  Harriman was the heavy, the others merely his protégés.

Harriman out maneuvered Kennedy and boxed him into support for the Diem coup.

Who negotiated the ‘62 partition of Laos, which gave the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Communists and the Golden Triangle poppy fields to allies of the CIA?

Harriman.

American elites had a vital interest in Laos.  Diem and Kennedy had to go.  The most intense bombing campaign in history followed, and the Golden Triangle eventually replaced Turkey as the foremost source of heroin.

[Michael Griffith]

17 hours ago, Bill Fite said:

LOL 

You are not to be taken seriously. FYI, Galbraith's spin on the evidence, i.e., that JFK was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election, is viewed by the vast majority of historians as a discredited, fringe view.

15 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

I argue JFK was killed because his plans to scale down overall American presence in SE Asia would jeopardize CIA operations in Laos.  

Bingo!  Harriman was the heavy, the others merely his protégés.

Harriman out maneuvered Kennedy and boxed him into support for the Diem coup.

Who negotiated the ‘62 partition of Laos, which gave the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Communists and the Golden Triangle poppy fields to allies of the CIA?

Harriman.

American elites had a vital interest in Laos.  Diem and Kennedy had to go.  The most intense bombing campaign in history followed, and the Golden Triangle eventually replaced Turkey as the foremost source of heroin.

But that's just it: The evidence shows, and shows pretty clearly, that JFK had no intention of allowing South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia to fall to the Communists, and that he had every intention of providing whatever military and economic aid was needed to keep South Vietnam free. The whole reason, the entire rationale, for his limited and conditional withdrawal plan was that the war was going well enough that some U.S. troops could be brought home without endangering the war effort; moreover, as JFK made clear, and as Bobby later explained, JFK felt that the war "had" to be won. Bobby even said that JFK was willing to authorize air strikes if they were needed, and expressly allowed that JFK may have been willing to send in regular combat troops if the situation ever got so bad that they were needed.

Also, as I've said before, if the plotters killed JFK over Vietnam, they certainly would have knocked off LBJ when he began and continued to blunderingly hamstring and restrict our military operations. For that matter, if Vietnam was the plotters' main concern, they never would have allowed Johnson to pick such a feckless dove as Hubert Humphrey as his VP, especially given LBJ's age and health history. It just makes no sense.

I agree with you about Averell Harriman's role. The fatally flawed "neutrality" pact for Laos was Harriman's doing, and his was recognized at the time. During the war, many GIs nicknamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail the "Averell Harriman Memorial Highway." What you seem to be unaware of is that JFK recognized that the Laos deal was a bad deal and was not working. 

[Cliff Varnell]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

You are not to be taken seriously. FYI, Galbraith's spin on the evidence, i.e., that JFK was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election, is viewed by the vast majority of historians as a discredited, fringe view.

But that's just it: The evidence shows, and shows pretty clearly, that JFK had no intention of allowing South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia to fall to the Communists, and that he had every intention of providing whatever military and economic aid was needed to keep South Vietnam free. The whole reason, the entire rationale, for his limited and conditional withdrawal plan was that the war was going well enough that some U.S. troops could be brought home without endangering the war effort; moreover, as JFK made clear, and as Bobby later explained, JFK felt that the war "had" to be won. Bobby even said that JFK was willing to authorize air strikes if they were needed, and expressly allowed that JFK may have been willing to send in regular combat troops if the situation ever got so bad that they were needed.

Also, as I've said before, if the plotters killed JFK over Vietnam, they certainly would have knocked off LBJ when he began and continued to blunderingly hamstring and restrict our military operations. For that matter, if Vietnam was the plotters' main concern, they never would have allowed Johnson to pick such a feckless dove as Hubert Humphrey as his VP, especially given LBJ's age and health history. It just makes no sense.

I agree with you about Averell Harriman's role. The fatally flawed "neutrality" pact for Laos was Harriman's doing, and his was recognized at the time. During the war, many GIs nicknamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail the "Averell Harriman Memorial Highway." What you seem to be unaware of is that JFK recognized that the Laos deal was a bad deal and was not working. 

What you seem to be unaware of is that the partition of Laos worked wonderfully well for the CIA.

[James DiEugenio]

As John Newman has noted, and proved, Kennedy said things in public which were contradicted by his actions.

And he makes Vietnam an example.

As per the Domino Theory, if you read Gordon Goldstein's book, Lessons in Disaster,  McGeorge Bundy denies this.

He says Kennedy did not really buy into that idea, namely that if Vietnam fell, all of Asia would collapse and the dominoes would extend, in some cases, to Manila, with  others to Hawaii.

I mean, when China went communist, did any other country fall?

Not that I can see.

The reason that Cambodia went was because Nixon and Kissinger were illegally bombing the country causing the collapse of two governments leading to the rise of Pol Pot. This would not have happened under Kennedy.

Edited October 31, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Cory Santos]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

As John Newman has noted, and proved, Kennedy said things in public which were contradicted by his actions.

And he makes Vietnam an example.

As per the Domino Theory, if you read Gordon Goldstein's book, Lessons in Disaster,  McGeorge Bundy denies this.

He says Kennedy did not really buy into that idea, namely that if Vietnam fell, all of Asia would collapse and the dominoes would extend, in some cases, to Manila, with  others to Hawaii.

I mean, when China went communist, did any other country fall?

Not that I can see.

The reason that Cambodia went was because Nixon and Kissinger were illegally bombing the country causing the collapse of two governments leading to the rise of Pol Pot. This would not have happened under Kennedy.

Well there is an interview where JFK said he believed in the Domino Theory so I will accept what he said.  However, if, as you suggest, he was not telling the truth or misleading the public, then if that is true one would have to throw out everything he said.  I choose to believe what he said.