Salon: Kennedy, Vietnam, and Iraq [View All]

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The evidence is clear: JFK decided to withdraw from Vietnam a month before he was assassinated. Setting the record straight is crucial as Baghdad continues to explode.

By James K. Galbraith

This week's crescendo of Kennedy commemoration has ranged from banal to lurid. The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley has pointed out how the event signaled the rise of modern television as our dominant medium for news. Forty years later, every vice of TV is on display: an obsession with glamour, sex, hearsay, computer simulation and sentimental appeals to authority; along with reckless disregard for evidence, complicated ideas, policies and organizations. Plainly, given the nature of the medium, access to even a small part of the underlying history of our defining trauma will be restricted to those who read.

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In the Vietnam case, events took an ugly turn, beginning in November 1963, and spun out of control thereafter. As that happened, Kennedy's exit strategy disappeared from history for decades. What will happen to us in Iraq remains to be seen. To be sure, there are those who wanted us in and do not want us to leave; their next move will be interesting to watch. Now, as then, the government is divided, and neither faction is anxious to lose. So it is worthwhile to read the history of Kennedy and Vietnam now, partly for its own sake, partly for general lessons about neocolonial war, and partly with a view to understanding how the questions of national security and domestic politics play out in Washington.

I believe the evidence now available shows that Kennedy had decided, in early October of 1963, to begin withdrawing 17,000 U.S. military advisers then in Vietnam. One thousand were leave by the end of 1963; the withdrawal was scheduled to be completed by the end of 1965. After that, only a military assistance contingent would have remained. The withdrawal planning was carried out under cover of an official optimism about the war, with a view toward increasing the effort and training the South Vietnamese to win by themselves. But Kennedy and McNamara did not share this optimism. They were therefore prepared to press the withdrawal even when the assessments turned bad, as they started to do in the early fall of 1963. This was a decision to withdraw without victory if necessary, indeed without negotiations or conditions. In a recent essay in Boston Review, I assemble this evidence in detail.

At one level, it isn't news. Certain facts -- that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, that he encouraged Sens. Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse to keep criticizing his policy, that he told Kenneth O'Donnell that he would get out after the 1964 election, that he resisted all suggestions that main combat forces be sent to Vietnam -- have been known for decades. In my family, we know that JFK sent John Kenneth Galbraith (then serving as ambassador to India) to Saigon in September 1961 because, as my father has often put it, "Kennedy knew I did not have an open mind." JKG turned in a pessimistic report, reiterated in letters and discussions with the president thereafter.

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