The Watson Institute, a CFR and Carlyle Group backed pack of political science academics at Brown University are designing a JFK studies lesson for high scholl and college classes complete with a movie called
'Virtual JFK: Vietnam, if Kennedy Had Lived.'
I'm thinking they are going to muddy the October 11, 1963 NSAM #263 ending US involvement in Vietnam Kennedy signed and NSAM #273 LBJ signed just two days after JFK was shot.
And I'm sure they won't expose the high-level government killing of JFK.
http://ww.watsoninstitute.org/project_detail.cfm?id=77
The participants set out first to determine what actually happened, before speculating on what might have happened, regarding such issues as: what Kennedy thought he had decided on Vietnam; what his senior advisers believed he had decided; what Johnson believed was his predecessor’s Vietnam policy; and what new dilemmas Johnson faced that Kennedy was spared, such as the turbulent aftermath of the US-endorsed November 1963 coup in Saigon. In a substantial coda to the conference, which Blight, Lang and Welch will include in their book, the lessons learned from the disaster in Vietnam were applied to contemporary US foreign and defense policy, especially to the war in Iraq, which has been compared by many to the Vietnam experience.
I don't trust those academics.
Instead-
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/exit.htmIn 1972 Peter Dale Scott first made the case that Johnson’s NSAM 273—the document that Gibbons relied on in making the case for continuity—was in fact a departure from Kennedy’s policy; his essay appeared in Gravel’s edition of The Pentagon Papers. Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times tells in a few tantalizing pages of the “first application” in October 1963 “of Kennedy’s phased withdrawal plan.”
A more thorough treatment appeared in 1992, with the publication of John M. Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.1 Until his retirement in 1994 Newman was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is deciphering declassified records—a talent he later applied to the CIA’s long-hidden archives on Lee Harvey Oswald.
Newman’s argument was not a case of “counterfactual historical reasoning,” as Larry Berman described it in an early response.2 It was not about what might have happened had Kennedy lived. Newman’s argument was stronger: Kennedy, he claims, had decided to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam, that he had ordered this withdrawal to begin. Here is the chronology, according to Newman:
(1) On October 2, 1963, Kennedy received the report of a mission to Saigon by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The main recommendations, which appear in Section I(B) of the McNamara-Taylor report, were that a phased withdrawal be completed by the end of 1965 and that the “Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 out of 17,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Vietnam by the end of 1963.” At Kennedy’s instruction, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger made a public announcement that evening of McNamara’s recommended timetable for withdrawal.
(2) On October 5, Kennedy made his formal decision. Newman quotes the minutes of the meeting that day:
The President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed. (Emphasis added.)
The passage illustrates two points: (a) that a decision was in fact made on that day, and (b) that despite the earlier announcement of McNamara’s recommendation, the October 5 decision was not a ruse or pressure tactic to win reforms from Diem (as Richard Reeves, among others, has contended3) but a decision to begin withdrawal irrespective of Diem or his reactions.
(3) On October 11, the White House issued NSAM 263, which states:
The President approved the military recommendations contained in section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
In other words, the withdrawal recommended by McNamara on October 2 was embraced in secret by Kennedy on October 5 and implemented by his order on October 11, also in secret. Newman argues that the secrecy after October 2 can be explained by a diplomatic reason. Kennedy did not want Diem or anyone else to interpret the withdrawal as part of any pressure tactic (other steps that were pressure tactics had also been approved). There was also a political reason: JFK had not decided whether he could get away with claiming that the withdrawal was a result of progress toward the goal of a self-sufficient South Vietnam.
Lynne Russell revealed her own fascist tendencies during a recent appearance on Fox News w/Bill O'rly.
