Customer Reviews:
Today America has become the nightmare (Arnold Toynbee).......2007-08-25
Prouty's autobiography is very revealing indeed.
Of course, it contains controversial items (Would JFK have stopped the Vietnam War?). But, it is the general picture that counts, and here, the author is prophetic.
Prouty presents his world view as follows: `The world is ruled by a power elite. The basic motivations are always the same. Money lays at the root ... the enormous amount spent on military matériel.'
This elite wields its power partly and most importantly through invisible intelligence agencies. `The power of any agency allowed to operate in secrecy is boundless'.
Nationally, JFK would probably be reelected in 1964, also via carefully directed investments, which should have influenced favorably the voting in heavily contested states. This reelection for another 4 years was very hard to swallow for a part of the power elite. JFK had promised to cut the defense budget and destroy one of its power bases (`split an intelligence agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.')
JFK's masterfully planned assassination was a coup d'état, not less than a total takeover of the US government. The cover-up of the assassination, which is still going on, shows the immense power of the culprits. They controlled the Warner Commission and could (can) force, until today, the media and Congress to pay lip service to them. Congress was never capable to launch an adequate investigation into the murder.
Internationally, `the world's power elite benefited splendidly from the staggering sums involved in the Vietnam War.' The author's moving evocation of the fate of a pastoral Vietnamese village shows that `people's lives are valueless when they get in the way of elitist interests.' (Mark Curtis)
The powerful show absolutely no respect for national sovereignty (e.g., Vietnam, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Panama, Iraq, the Philippines, even Grenada), which is the principle on which `the family of nations exists, with its property rights and the rights of man.'
At the end, Prouty is even prophetic: `the power elite utilizes all manner of plots to achieve their ambitious goal. That gamesmanship is called `Terrorism'.
This book is a must read for all those wanting to understand the world we live in.
Simply Great!.......2006-09-02
In this volume, Colonel Fletcher Prouty captures both the secret history of the United States from 1945 to 1975 and the reasons behind the plot to kill President Kennedy. Herein, the courageous Colonel illustrates quite clearly that the clandestine history and the assassination plot were intrinsically linked.
From the important information in this book, we learn that the war in Vietnam actually began on September 2, 1945, when Ho Chi Minh was established as the new leader of Vietnam by our OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, and the US Army. The United States was thoughtful enough to provide all the weapons, ammunition, and supplies necessary for Ho and Giap to pursue their war against the French, which culminated in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Following that defeat, the CIA arranged for the transfer of 1.1 million "refugees" from the North of Vietnam to the South. These folks caused such disruption in the fragile agricultural economy of the South that their arrival ultimately drove the orginal residents to banditry in order that they might survive. These displaced bandits became what was later known as the Viet Cong. Hence, the CIA created the conditions necessary for a full scale war in Vietnam.
On coming to office, Kennedy, a brilliant and studious man, came soon to understand the perfidy of the CIA. One of first his acts on realizing this was to fire CIA director Allen Dulles. Soon thereafter, he issued one the most important, and unknown, documents of US history, NSAM 263. Issued in October of 1963, this document called for 1,000 US military personnel to come home from Vietnam by that Christmas. The remainder were to be out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. Had John Kennedy lived, what Americans know as the war in Vietnam would never have happened.
Prouty demonstrates herein that the powers that be ultimately made the decision that they could not allow Kennedy to live. He makes it clear that assassination researches who make a career of examining the details of the government's false cover story truly miss the point. What matters is not how the President was killed, but why. And the answer to that question is that the assassination was a coup d'etat, transferring control of the government of the United States to a power elite, which has been in control ever since. Hence, we have the strange silence of every succeeding President on the issue of the cover up of the Kennedy assassination.
The book is well written and extraordinarily important. He would understand our nation and how it came to be in the condition that now obtains would be well advised to read carefully this terribly important book. God bless.
America has Waited a Long Time to Hear the Truth..........2005-09-22
Finally, those involved are getting old enough not to place concern about their own welfare above truth anymore.
This book provides so many connections, such a depth of behind the scenes knowledge and inner workings of the specific programs operating at the time, you can't help but be bowled over.
***Note: Anyone interested in the Kennedy Assassination should realize that there is a "misinformation plant" in the Library Journal review department. Every honest book on the subject has been unconvincingly discredited by them, while they praise and try to steer you towards known flake CIA-financed writers such as Gerald Posner.
It's rather common to hear of wrongdoing by the CIA. I saw a graph recently that showed American citizen's belief in their government plummetting after the Kennedy Assassination. Almost no one accepted the Warren Commission Report and such a cover up has casted doubt on our government ever since.
This "High Cabal" as Churchill called them obviously doesn't start with the CIA, or the Federal Reserve. It predates Christianity, but it's quite simple. There are bums who seek handouts and never try to rise, and there are bums who gain a position over others but still yearn for that same handout, taking it by force, by skimming, whatever is neccessary to defeat justice, honor and civility. These are not great men and they will not be remembered like an Edison or a Ford. They are the most creative parasites on the planet, and the most deeply engrained.
Currency control has changed EIGHT times since America's inception. The most vocal fighter against irrational banking was Andrew Jackson; not Kennedy or Lincoln (google "Jackson Bank Veto"). He fought and defeated in his time what has morphed into the Federal Reserve Bank. Before the Civil War, such bankers were buying politicians, planting press stories, steering elections, stealing freedoms, killing people--anything to assure a fascist cushion between themselves and existence.
Do we ever hear anything bad about the Federal Reserve? In Jackson's time, they were entrenched 16 years deep and it was difficult to rout them out then. They did try to kill him. Now they are ninety years deep. They have owned many Presidents, they control the Justice and State Departments, and the CIA secretly furthers their agenda.
Nothing happens at the Assassination Level without their approval. In today's world, America is struggling in recession (bankruptcy) mostly due to the $360 Billion we now pay to the Fed for their generous "Debt-Money" System, and that is an exponentially increasing burden. EVERY dollar in our country has interest being paid on it as if it were borrowed! Due to this, bankruptcy for America is a mathematical certainty. (Imagine if you had to pay interest not just on every dollar you owed, but on every dollar you made! America IS!)
With changes in the laws, soon none of us will be permitted to walk away from our debts and start over--as if our hard economic times is our own personal fault.
We are all about to become debt slaves, as they intend. If you want to have a chance at recovery, if you want your kids to have a chance at a decent future, join me and I'll give you the Moral Armor neccessary to beat down these parasites and restore America to what it was meant to be. They CAN be defeated, but not without YOUR empowerment. If you can't stand up or are afraid to, I'll show you how. Invest in yourself right now and let's save this ship!
Enthralling.......2005-07-27
If you are looking for a book for a by name list of "who done it" or who was shooting from what building, on what knoll, from what curb side drain, then this is not your book.
If you are looking for "why was it done," which is a far more important question; then this IS your book. This book takes you back to the end of WWII and then up through 1963 and a bit beyond. It is more a history book of what was truly happening behind the scenes with the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex in that time period, as it pertains to Indochina, and the Korean Peninsula. From the view and stand point of someone that was on the inside, and took part to a certain degree in such operations there and elsewhere. It speaks of what Winston Churchill called "The High Cabal" and how these elite group of people simply run the world to better suite themselves and those around them, using the CIA as their tool.
You'll learn in this book possible reason behind the Korean Conflict, the war in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and so on. You'll learn of the ultra secret side of the CIA and its origins, and how and why Kennedy meant to dismantle it, which was probably the catalyst for his ultimate demise.
(...)
Excellent book.
Completely Ludicrus.......2005-03-29
Contrary to popular belief today, Kennedy was a cold warrior. There is no evidence at all that he was (in his second term, if he even got one) going to end the cold war, or pull out of Vietnam. Michael Lind in his book 'Vietnam: The Necessary War' addresses this issue, and points out that the record clearly shows otherwise. Several of the people who claim that Kennedy told them he was going to pull out of Vietnam revealed this information in the late 60's after the war had become traumatic for the country. Robert McNamara (one of the original architects of the Vietnam War), who has speculated for years that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam, admits that Kennedy never told him he was going to pull out. In an interview with Walter Cronkite a few months before he was assassinated Kennedy said (about Vietnam): "I think it would be a mistake to withdraw." Oliver Stone (cleverly), only shows bits and pieces of the interview at the beginning of JFK. Editing the interview to make it look like Kennedy was going to withdraw. In fact, the day he was assassinated Kennedy gave a speech endorsing our involvement in Vietnam. The claim that Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam is speculation at best. Go to : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/stjohn.htm
This post details many of the myths surrounding JFK's policy stances, and shows that (by today's standards) Kennedy (most likely) would have been a moderate Republican. There was no motive (as Prouty claims) to kill Kennedy.
Also go to: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/prouty.htm
For some more of Prouty's crackpot opinions.
Kennedy was a cold warrior: he was conspicuously absent (as a representative from Massachusetts) when the House of Representatives voted to censure Joseph McCarthy (he even praised McCarthy on several occasions). He ran against Nixon in 1960 on the missile gap (i.e. we were behind the Soviets in the number of ICBM's). He said in his inaugural address: "......Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Doesn't sound to me like he was going to "bug out" of Vietnam.
Also, check out: http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100vietnam.html
This further debunks the idea that JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam.
Average customer rating:
- True in '63.....
- Superb view of the Kennedy administration and Vietnam
- Thoroughly Researched History but Questionable Conclusion
- Ch. 4, Secret War 5, Subterfuge 6, Seduction 7, Decent Veil
|
Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War
Howard Jones
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 1960s
| 20th Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| 20th Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Vietnam
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Southeast Asia
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Vietnam War
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Federal Government
| Levels of Government
| Political Science
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War
-
Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam
-
Triangle Of Death: The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK
-
One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964
-
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
ASIN: 0195052862 |
Book Description
When John F. Kennedy was shot, millions were left to wonder how America, and the world, would have been different had he lived to fulfill the enormous promise of his presidency. For many historians and political observers, what Kennedy would and would not have done in Vietnam has been a source of enduring controversy. Now, based on convincing new evidence--including a startling revelation about the Kennedy administration's involvement in the assassination of Premier Diem--Howard Jones argues that Kennedy intended to withdraw the great bulk of American soldiers and pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Vietnam. Drawing upon recently declassified hearings by the Church Committee on the U.S. role in assassinations, newly released tapes of Kennedy White House discussions, and interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and others from the president's inner circle, Jones shows that Kennedy firmly believed that the outcome of the war depended on the South Vietnamese. In the spring of 1962, he instructed Secretary of Defense McNamara to draft a withdrawal plan aimed at having all special military forces home by the end of 1965. The "Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam" was ready for approval in early May 1963, but then the Buddhist revolt erupted and postponed the program. Convinced that the war was not winnable under Diem's leadership, President Kennedy made his most critical mistake--promoting a coup as a means for facilitating a U.S. withdrawal. In the cruelest of ironies, the coup resulted in Diem's death followed by a state of turmoil in Vietnam that further obstructed disengagement. Still, these events only confirmed Kennedy's view about South Vietnam's inability to win the war and therefore did not lessen his resolve to reduce the U.S. commitment. By the end of November, however, the president was dead and Lyndon Johnson began his campaign of escalation. Jones argues forcefully that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, his withdrawal plan would have spared the lives of 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese. Written with vivid immediacy, supported with authoritative research, Death of a Generation answers one of the most profoundly important questions left hanging in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's death.
Customer Reviews:
True in '63............2006-11-26
"Death of a Generation" reports on President John Kennedy's attempts to limit the United States' exposure in Vietnam. It is set in the early 1960's, prior to "South Vietnam" becoming the staple of nightly newscasts and before most of us could locate the place on a map. Burned by his experience at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, JFK was dubious of our Indochina involvement and leery of advice from his military and the CIA. He favored counter-insurgency/Special Forces action as opposed to main force combat. Central to the Vietnam problem was Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The two, most especially Nhu, were authoritarian, remote and resistant to any democratic reforms. The Catholic brothers became increasingly estranged from the Buddhist majority. DG revolves around JFK's increasingly frustrating dilemma of dealing with the recalcitrant Premier. Diem's resistance to those reforms only served to further the cause of North Vietnam and the efforts of the ever-present, increasingly aggressive Viet Cong to undermine the Saigon regime. 1963 was the key year. JFK had to survive the 1964 Presidential election without being accused by the Republicans as "soft on Communism". He wished to avoid the fate of President Truman, who was accused of "losing China". Once safely re-elected, his plan was to call US forces home by late 1965, after South Vietnam could "stand on its' own". As 1963 progressed, rumors of a military coup in Saigon intensified. Slowly and reluctantly, JFK relented and allowed the South Vietnamese military to overthrow Diem and Nhu and force them into exile unharmed. But the brothers were assassinated-virtually murdered. The coup solved nothing and arguably made the crisis in Saigon worse as the generals squabbled among themselves. The rest is history as President Johnson immediately pursued a military buildup that led to the "death of a generation". There are some dark warnings in DG from top Kennedy lieutenants Chester Bowles and Michael Forrestal about our Indochinese quagmire in the making. And there is a chilling warning from Lieutenant General Lionel McGarr, the onetime top commander in Vietnam: `Military measures could not provide permanent solutions to a massive problem that has political, economical, social, psychological AND military dimensions'. McGarr's warning to Army Chief of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer went unheeded. His position was correct in 1963 as it would be in 1975 as Saigon fell to the Communists. DG is exhaustively researched and documented, with 100 pages of notes. It certainly covers the topic! But DG far too long, self -indulgent and wordy. The same points are made over and over. DG cries out for a stern editor with a sharp blue pencil. 100 pages could easily have been truncated. Is such editing performed anywhere anymore? In all the heft, there are two issues that are not covered adequately: 1) What if only Nhu had been removed and Diem left in place? Such is pure speculation, but deserves mention. Vietnam, in 20/20hindsight could not have been worse off with Diem than it was with the squabbling generals. 2) Did JFK's staff serve him well? This reviewer feels they did not! Secretary of State Rusk seems virtually detached, and Maxwell Taylor, Joint Chiefs Chairman appears more loyal to the military establishment than to his Commander in Chief. And this reviewer has never understood what value Defense Secretary McNamara bought to the table. (Personal feelings do not belong in book reviews but RM was the man this observer's generation loved to hate). "Death of a Generation" is recommended to SERIOUS (!) history buffs, students of the Vietnam War and those who can wade through such a long rice paddy of writing. . Casual readers should look elsewhere; there are many other JFK and Vietnam works to choose from. 3 stars are a rather strict rating for such a serious and well researched work, but the sheer heft here begs for the reduction in rank.
Superb view of the Kennedy administration and Vietnam.......2003-08-21
If there is a better work on the Kennedy administration and its involvement in the Vietnam war, I haven't read it. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how the United States got so deeply involved in Vietnam.
Thoroughly Researched History but Questionable Conclusion.......2003-08-17
The author has done his homework by thoroughly researching primary and secondary sources on President Kennedy's Vietnam policy from 1961 through 1963. Kennedy had always maintained, going back to his election as senator in 1956, that the Vietnam conflict could only be won or lost by the Vietnamese themselves, and that the U.S. could not fight the war for them. He continued with this view as President, even though many political and military advisers urged him to send in significant U.S. troops. While he did increase the number of advisers, who sometimes assisted the South Vietnamese in battle, he never favored deploying significant ground forces. Also, Kennedy had a plan to eventually withdraw what U.S. troops were in country as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) became more capable. Even in 1963 1,000 U.S. troops were withdrawn. The author's main position is that Kennedy would never have turned the war into an American war, with a huge deployment of U.S. forces, the way Lyndon Johnson did starting in 1965. Thus the death of a generation of young Americans (over 57,000), and many more times that number of Vietnamese, as well as the spiritual death of a generation of Americans who never again trusted their government and turned to self-destructive behavior in the drug culture, could have been avoided. This is an interesting thesis, but essentially unknowable. Hanoi significantly built up Viet Cong military capability in 1964 and 1965. The coup overthrowing Diem, which the Kennedy administration supported(though no Americans were involved in its execution) resulted in a series of ineffectual political leaders who were no better at political and economic reforms, or at leading the fight against the Viet Cong, than Diem was. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, had he been reelected in 1964, would he really have been able to totally withdraw from Vietnam and be tagged with another global loss to Communism, as the Democrats where in 1950 with the loss of China? The politics of 1965, both Republican and Democrat, strongly supported U.S. assistance to South Vietnam, even the deployment of significant U.S. ground troops. The author's basic position, then, that Kennedy would have avoided the death of a generation, is highly questionable.
Nevertheless the book is well worth reading and is a must for anyone interested in Kennedy's Vietnam policy or the buildup to the Vietnam War. One interesting story relates how the intriguing Edward Lansdale told McNamara his statistical measures for judging progress in fighting the Viet Cong insurgency were all wet because he was measuring many factors which weren't getting to the heart of the issue. An intriguing what if of this period is: what if Lansdale had been more involved in forming U.S. policy on Vietnam? At the time he was assigned to Operation Mongoose, the program of covert action against Cuba.
In the novel "Intruders in the Dust," Faulkner describes how in Southerners' hearts it will always be July 3, 1863, at the moment before Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, the high tide of the Confederacy before the devastating loss that day set the South on the road to ultimate defeat. Similarly, in the American heart, even for those who aren't Kennedy fans, there will always be a wish that the bullets in Dallas would have missed, that a young president who inspired hope in so many citizens would have somehow been able to avoid one of our great national tragedies by avoiding the massive bloodshed and societal chaos resulting from the Vietnam War. Like the thesis of this book, we'll never know if that could have happened, but such a wish is a natural longing of the human heart.
Ch. 4, Secret War 5, Subterfuge 6, Seduction 7, Decent Veil.......2003-05-23
This book has great chapter titles, and 80 pages of notes.
There are a lot of questions in this book are about death. While President Kennedy was alive, it was not obvious that Vietnam was going to be part of the world in which so many Americans would die. The insignificance of the problem at the time Kennedy took office might be guessed from such assessments as, "Interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres showed them to be well trained and brought in, across the seventeenth parallel, or through Laos and Cambodia. The total Vietcong in central Vietnam had grown from a thousand at the end of 1959 to five times that number by mid-1961." (p. 102). President Kennedy had authorized an increase in American troops that jumped from hundreds to thousands as the years went by, but with little sign that, merely seven years after JFK took office, more than a thousand troops per week on each side might be losing their lives in Nam early in 1968.
As a professor in history with a year off from teaching, Howard Jones had the opportunity to examine documentary sources and the Oral History Interviews at presidential libraries, and he even talked to a few of the remaining participants. Daniel Ellsberg is not a major character in this book, though Jones talked to him on March 27, 2002, concerning a meeting in which President Kennedy asked Lansdale about getting rid of The Nhus, "But if that didn't work out--or I changed my mind and decided to get rid of Diem--would you be able to go along with that?" Lansdale ended up in a limousine with Robert McNamara after the meeting, where McNamara told him, "When he asks you to do something, you don't tell him you won't do it." (p. 365). Actually, the source of this story is a book by A. J. Langguth, a New York Times correspondent in South Vietnam who claimed "Ellsberg's unpublished memoir, Langguth asserted, contained this account of Lansdale's clandestine meeting with the president." (p. 365). "Ellsberg likewise considers the story valid. But in an interview of McNamara conducted by Langguth years afterward, the former secretary alleged that he did not recall the meeting." (pp. 365-366). I checked the index of SECRETS by Daniel Ellsberg, finally published in October, 2002, and found no mention of President Kennedy on the pages of the only entry for "Lansdale, Edward G.: McNamara's meeting with," though it included a page on which "high Vietnamese officials who met with General Lansdale regarded him warily but with awe because of his reputation as a kingmaker. They assumed he was there to pick the next Diem." By the time Ellsberg was on the Lansdale team, LBJ was president, Diem and Nhu were dead, and the Vietnamese could only hope that another government like Diem's would be better than a bunch of generals.
America clearly considered a coup against Diem at a time when it was trying to be as neutral as possible, because Diem could have asked American diplomats to leave Nam if he had any evidence that the Americans were actively engaging in plots against a government that it was supposed to be supporting. The index is good at sorting out who was involved, though it isn't until page 280 that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a brigadier general in the Army Reserves who spent 1962 writing policy papers on Vietnam, was given the opportunity to become the American ambassador to Saigon. In the photo section, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's trip to Saigon on May 12, 1961, established that Frederick Nolting was ambassador then. President Kennedy is shown talking with Henry Cabot Lodge on August 15, 1963, just a few weeks before JFK's CBS television broadcast with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963. As usual, "Lodge's appointment, the Kennedy administration insisted, ensured bipartisan support for its Vietnam policy. These statements were true, but they did not reflect reality. The White House believed that Nolting had become too close to Diem," (p. 281). The note supporting this information adds, "Nolting learned of his removal over radio while on vacation." (p. 501).
While this is a history of policy that led to the Vietnam war, there is little sense that any possibility, other than a result which might be considered a victory for American policy, was ever considered. The only use that the Vietnamese had for the Americans was for creating the illusion that somehow America could win a war there. By September 18, 1963, Lodge was trying to get Nhu to leave the country, and reporting back to Washington, "one feels sorry for him. He is wound up as tight as a wire. He appears to be a lost soul, a haunted man who is caught in a vicious circle. The Furies are after him." (p. 371).
This is history on an emotional level. I have no doubt that Jack Ruby pulled the trigger of the pistol that shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach, resulting in Oswald's death, and it might have been because of a cancer that would take the life of Jack Ruby before the end of the 1960s, when we had learned enough from Lenny Bruce to let just about anybody swear, if they felt like it. For President Kennedy to remain on good relations with the C.I.A., after news started coming in on how bad the situation in Nam really was, is like expecting Americans to believe that Ruby and Oswald were friends, or even knew each other. Oswald and Ruby do not appear in this book. For that side of the story, see OSWALD TALKED by La Fontaine. This book has no news on who took part in the JFK assassination, which is officially still more of a mystery than anything that happened in Nam.
Book Description
This book provides a brief and manageable collection of the most important documents on U.S. policymaking in the Vietnam War between 1950 and 1968. Edited by the foremost Vietnam historian, this supplementary text can be used in conjunction with any history of the Vietnam war--Herring's own America's Longest War, for example.
Customer Reviews:
Robert McNamara's Gift to the World.......2000-01-08
Prepare to have your trust in government shattered. It illustrates the "credibility gap" during the Vietnam War, i.e., the gap between what Johnson and Kennedy were saying to the public and what was actually happening in Vietnam. The administrations constantly lie to the American public on our progress in the war. What's most interesting is reading these documents alongside speeches made to the public during this time by McNamara and Johnson. It's quite startling. Read this book.
Amazon.com
John Kennedy's presidency has taken a beating in the historical literature of the past few years, in what Lawrence Freedman wryly calls "the drive to replace history as celebration by history as indictment." Kennedy's performance was, Freedman holds, mixed at best, but it reveals a complex personality and an equally complex set of viewpoints over how the United States could best maintain its role as world leader and contain communism.
Drawing on a wealth of new material--including a 25-volume official documentary history of U.S. foreign relations under Kennedy and declassified transcripts of Cabinet meetings held during the Cuban missile crisis--Freedman examines the intellectual and political contexts of the Kennedy administration, giving attention to largely overlooked actors such as Dean Acheson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Walt Rostow, all of whom influenced the conduct of the administration as it confronted military and political foes around the world. Freedman scrutinizes Kennedy's efforts to stabilize fledgling democracies and thwart communist designs in Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Some of those efforts led to disaster, including Kennedy's misguided actions in Vietnam (which, the author argues, "compounded the folly of the Eisenhower administration"). Still, by the time of Kennedy's death, in November 1963, some of the administration's efforts had paid off. As Freedman notes, in October 1963, Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy to propose not only a program of arms control, but also a relaxation of tensions over the Soviet encirclement of Berlin, opening the way to the détente that would come only much later. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
In his thousand-day presidency, John F. Kennedy led America throuh one of its most difficult and potentially explosive areas. With the Cold War at its height and the threat of communist advances in Europe and the Third World, Kennedy had the unenviable task of maintaining US solidarity without leading the western world into a nuclear catastrophe. In 'Kennedy's Wars', noted historian Lawrence Freedman draws on the best of Cold War scholarship and newly released government documents to illuminate Kennedy's approach to war and his efforts for peace. He recreates insightfully the political and intellectual milieu of the foreign policy establishment during Kennedy's era with vivid profiles of his top advisors - Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Robert Kennedy - and influential figures such as Dean Acheson and Walt Rostow. Tracing the evolution of traditional liberalism into the Cold War liberalism of Kennedy's cabinet, Freedman evaluates their responses to the tensions in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. He gives each conflict individual attention, showing how foreign policy decisions came to be defined for each new crisis in the light of those that had gone before. Readers will follow Kennedy as he wrestles with the succession of major conflicts - taking advice, weighing the risks of inadvertently escalating the Cold War into outright military confrontation, exploring diplomatic options, and forming strategic judgements that would eventually prevent a major war during his presidency. 'Kennedy's Wars' offers a dynamic and human portrait of Kennedy under pressure: a political leader shaped by the ideas of his time, conscious of his vulnerability to electoral defeat but also of his nation's vulnerability to nuclear war. Military and Kennedy enthusiasts will find its balanced consideration of the president's foreign policy and provocative 'what if' scenarios invaluable keys to understanding his accomplishments, failures, and enduring legacy.
Customer Reviews:
Kennedy's Wars: An Objective Look Back.......2005-12-25
In "Kennedy's Wars," British historian Lawrence Freedman provides a detached, clear-eyed review of the foreign policy of the Kennedy Administration from 1961 to 1963. Freedman discusses in depth the Administration's responses to ongoing and somewhat overlapping crises in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Freedman provides vital context in terms both of the intermal dynamics of Kennedy's foreign policy and of the ongoing Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and its attendant shadow of potential nuclear war. Few modern readers, for example, remember the keen edge of the struggle over the status of Berlin in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Visible throughout is the education of a young John F. Kennedy as President, learning from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs operation to become progressively more skeptical of his own advisors and more pragmatic about what could realistically be accomplished in foreign affairs and made palatable to the American public. Kennedy's insistence on keeping options open over foreclosing them through quick decisions was both a strength and a weakness, in that flexibility was seemingly preserved, at the price of a sometimes chaotic foreign policy process.
Freedman's research appears thorough and his presentation is consistently even-handed. His understanding of the dynamics and challenges of nuclear deterrence is worth savoring for its remarkable clarity. The concluding chapters on the long descent of America into involvement in Vietnam is especially poignant, as the reader knows the tragic outcome, but these chapters may also offer the most compelling lessons of the book. Freedman brings out how deliberations over Vietnam policy were warped by an inability to understand either Saigon or Hanoi from Washington, where Kennedy's foreign policy advisors fought over the correct characterization of a messy conflict. The lack of understanding of the conflict made it difficult for Kennedy and his advisors to recognize how few viable or palatable options they really had with respect to Vietnam.
Freedman devotes some analysis to the proposition that Kennedy would have avoided the quagmire that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, plunged into headfirst in 1965. Freedman emphasizes that Kennedy was in no hurry to deepen the U.S. committment to South Vietnam and may have formed the working assumption in late 1963 that a withdrawal was likely after the 1964 Presidential Election. But Freedman also documents the vital counterpoint that Kennedy's assumption was based on a faulty understanding of progress in countering the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam; the assumption of a withdrawal was based on an expectation of reasonably favorable political conditions in which to do so. Freedman grants that Kennedy might have been more inclined to resist escalation of the war in 1965 than Lyndon Johnson.
This book, written with the advantage of some 30 years perspective on events, is highly recommended to the student of U.S. foreign policy and of the short but turbulent administration of John F. Kennedy.
The Playboy President Goes to War.......2003-12-26
While JFK was idolized and glorified by the press, his image has not withstood the test of time. Thus, Mr. Freedman tries to portray a more objective history of Kennedy's foreign policy. Mr. Freedman does a remarkable job drawing on various sources to examine JFK and his NSC staff and how they approached various global hotspots in the early 1960s. The Kennedy that emerges is hardly a man "willing to bare any burden," for world freedom, but rather a President constantly concerned with his own popularity. Rather than make decisive decisions in the national interest, JFK constantly focused on the publics response. The quality of a great leader is a man who can make tough decisions and then explain to and convince the nation why they were just. Unfortunately, JFK was not able to stand up to difficult circumstances in Cuba and Laos and then tried to pretend that the problems did not exist. Therefore, nuclear war almost broke out and the Ho Chi Minh Trail led to the fall of Saigon. Perhaps the greatest lesson of JFK's foreign policy, as interpreted by Freedman, is the flawed 'graduated response' idea. The idea of using minimal force in response to aggression in hopes of detering your enemy only led and will always lead to escalation, a prolonged war, and massive casualties. Thankfully, in the U.S. today we have the Powell Doctrine to avoid such a flawed foreign policy. My only complaint with the book was that it was to soft in regards to Kennedy but, nonetheless, it is by far the best work on the 35th U.S. President.
Well Researched Objective History of Kennedy as Cold Warrior.......2003-11-10
Sir Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, since 1982 and is an outstanding researcher and writer. This book is a very scholarly look at President Kennedy's performance in four hot spots of the Cold War: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. It's must reading for anyone who wants to understand Kennedy's approach to crisis management, also for those who think that Kennedy would have kept the Vietnam War from being an American war--that is, with Lyndon Johnson's later deployment of large numbers of American ground troops. Unlike the recent book Death of a Generation, by Howard Jones, which argues that Kennedy would never have turned Vietnam into an American war, Freedman's view is that we can't know what Kennedy would have done in 1965 when the government of Vietnam was on the brink of being defeated by a stepped-up Viet Cong insurgency. The situation in Vietnam during the years 1961 to 1963, covered by this book, was very different from that in 1965, when U.S. choices were very limited: basically either insert significant numbers of U.S. troops, or see South Vietnam fall to the communists, an unacceptable outcome for any American president at that time. The South Vietnames army was weak, and U.S. air power alone, used both in North and South Vietnam, could not alone have turned the tide (airpower never does, though today it has become an increasingly significant key to victory). Sir Lawrence has researched thousands of documents, summaries of administration meetings, and state department cables. His views are both documented and balanced. No one studying this period in U.S. and world history, and conflicts in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, can do without reading this first-rate book.
"John F. Kennedy as Cold Warrior: One Crisis After Another".......2000-11-09
This book about John F. Kennedy's foreign policy focuses on the United States' confrontation with the Soviet Union over Berlin 1961, the nearly cataclysmic events in Cuba, and the deepening U.S. involvement in Indochina, which culminated in the overthrow and murder of the prime minister of South Vietnam just weeks before President Kennedy, himself, was assassinated. Is it appropriate to emphasize "wars" in a book about foreign policy? The answer, of course, is: Yes. Author Lawrence Freedman, one of Britain's leading authorities on the Cold War, does not expressly invoke Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but every reader knows that diplomacy and military power often are inextricably linked. On few occasions in American history has this been more true than during the "High" Cold War, the dangerous period between the first Berlin crisis in 1948 and the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. Freedman's fascinating, if occasionally frustrating book, examines the relationship between foreign and military policy at a time when U.S. and the Soviet Union confronted each other, directly or through surrogates, in venues throughout the world, several of which could have, by a single miscalculation, led to nuclear Armageddon.
If John Kennedy genuinely deserves of the judgment of history as great, it is because of the remarkably cool judgment during the missile crisis. According to Freedman, Kennedy followed this advice in a book written by British military historian and strategist Basil Liddell Hart, which Kennedy reviewed shortly before his election: "Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face." The Soviet Union may have been foolish, if not reckless, to send nuclear missiles to Cuba, but, once they were there, the only way Nikita Khrushchev could remove them was through a political bargain which allowed his country to avoid international humiliation. If Kennedy had not allowed Khrushchev to save face, some sort of military confrontation, if not general nuclear war, would have been inevitable. Kennedy's decision not to take the advice of his more hawkish advisers was one of the great profiles in courage in the history of the American presidency.
Kennedy defused the Berlin and Cuban crisis, but the war in Vietnam was well on its way to disaster when Kennedy died. Would anything have changed if he had lived? It is, to be sure, impossible to say. Shortly before he was assassinated, President Kennedy met with George Ball, a senior State Department official, to discuss Vietnam. When Ball spoke of the possibility of a war involving 300,000 American troops and lasting five years, Freedman reports that Kennedy reacted with "asperity," stating: "George, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys in town, but you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen." Freedman notes that Ball was uncertain whether the president was "making a prediction that events would not follow this line or that he would not let such a situation develop." In any event, we now know that George Ball was, indeed, one of Washington's most astute policy-makers, that Kennedy's assassination prevented him from determining the course of American policy in southeast Asia, and that the American commitment in Vietnam reached a peak of over 500,000 troops and lasted nearly 12 years before it ended in failure.
I admire Freedman's cogent presentation of the Kennedy-era military crises in just over 400 pages. That includes a brief, but most welcomed, digression into the rift between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the early 1960s. The relaxation of the United States' confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Kennedy administration simply cannot be understood without reference to Sino-Soviet relations. I must candidly concede that, if Freedman had pursued other, similar digressions, the text would have approached 600 pages, and I then would be critical of its length. Nevertheless, I disagree with some of his choices. Every book must begin somewhere and the introduction to this one starts with a short summary of Kennedy family history. Most readers are familiar with the most salient points: The overbearing Joseph P. Kennedy was almost pathologically ambitious for his sons; after the eldest, Joseph, Jr., was killed in combat during World War II, the mantle fell to John, who had spent his early manhood as a playboy; after the war, JFK was elected first to the House of Representatives and then to the Senate but distinguished himself in neither body and was generally dismissed as a handsome, glib lightweight. Instead of rehashing that, Freedman should have devoted more space to Kennedy's role in the "missile gap" controversy of the late 1950s. It was one of the issues which brought Kennedy to national prominence, and it is significant for the fact that, by the time Kennedy was elected in November 1960, if any missile gap existed, it favored the United States. Consider this scenario: Within weeks of taking office, several of President Kennedy's key aides, principally National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara realized that the U.S. was superior to the Soviet Union in the missile race; having lost the missile gap as an issue, but under pressure to make good on Kennedy's campaign promise to increase defense spending, the administration decided to take a more aggressive stance elsewhere. The Soviet Union clearly provoked the 1961 Berlin crisis, but "Kennedy's wars" in Cuba and southeast Asia resulted from the new administration's deliberate effort to confront the international Communist menace wherever they found it.
I doubt that Kennedy's Wars will change many minds about John Kennedy's legacy. His partisans will continue to view Kennedy's unexpected and untimely death as one of the great lost opportunities of the 20th century. Critics will find in this book further ammunition for their position that Kennedy must be judged by what he did and based on his charisma and soaring rhetoric. Nevertheless, this book must be read by anyone who wants to understand why the 1000-day Camelot era was one military crisis after another.
Customer Reviews:
Betrayed.......2002-10-18
As one who has both read Newman's book and as one who served in Vietnam myself, (1970) I can only say I feel a deep sense of betrayal by my own Government, that I have served so well in two wars in a military capacity and as a Civil Servant in a civilian capacity. The document's that Newman publishes in his book were classified "Top Secret" at the time of Kennedy's Assassination. Thanks to the "Freedom of Information" act, that is no longer the case and we can now see the behind the scenes moves that led the US deeper and deeper into Vietnam. We can also see Kennedy's efforts to reverse course before it became too late.
My grandmother who is now dead and millions of other Americans never saw JFK's NSAM - 263 classified Top Secret. Nor did I. That NSAM was quietly shelved by Lyndon Johnson two days after Kennedy's Assassination and his own NSAM implimented. NSAM - 273 freezing everyone in place. Today, thanks to Newman's book we can now see who was the real culprit responsible for America's slide into Vietnam. And it certainly wasn't that awful Roman Catholic President (in the eyes of anti-Kennedy bigots) in the White House, John F. Kennedy.
Instead the REAL culprit was Lyndon Baines Johnson and THAT is how History will eventually record it. Hats off to John M. Newman for bringing these Document's into public view for future generations to "learn" from. That is IF, people are now willing to learn.
William P. Urban
Sgt US Army
PO2 US Navy
The Question was: Who Was in Charge?.......2000-04-10
A book called Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky introduced me to the importance of this book. While the United States had suffered a number of defeats in countries in which we had chosen not to fight (China being gigantic compared to France), most of the people involved in maintaining American policy on Vietnam had accepted the idea that a way could be found to win in Vietnam. John M. Newman considered the importance of that idea "like going to church" for the people whose actions would be based entirely on the strength of such convictions. My father (who was not mentioned in the book being reviewed) was a minister who had been ordained during World War II, possibly a good excuse for not actually fighting in that war, but not good enough to convince me that God would always give us perpetual peace out of the goodness of His heart for having saved the world from the domination of anyone who actually wanted to rule here. Chomsky's book was based on the premise that American policy was the desire to win in Vietnam, an aim which Kennedy couldn't have deserted until this country had extracted the last full measure of devotion from everyone concerned. In the present, it should be much easier to admit the tendency to waffle, as all things have been twisted into a psychotic multiplicity in which our deepest desires take part in the constant attack on the facts. As much as those like Chomsky, who believe that Americans should maintain a certain level of belief in policy, might differ, I am inclined to think that some real dirt can be dug up on this issue, and this book shows what the official record looks like when its secrecy has been stripped away.
Customer Reviews:
The Kennedy Years needs to be rethought and retaught.......2007-07-07
Utilizing the declassified documentary record during the Kennedy Administration, Chomsky makes quite clear the unpleasant fact that John F. Kennedy was essentially no different from Eisenhower, Johnson or even Nixon with regard to foreign policy.
While I am a fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, this book provides a detailed refutation of many claims and assumptions the film implies. For example, the notion that John F. Kennedy was secretly against U.S. intervention in Vietnam (yet the troops remained there the entire 3 years he was in office), and National Security Memo 263 has been totally taken out of context, as Kennedy made it quite clear that he didn't want withdrawal with failure, and that the "overriding objective" was victory in Vietnam. And National Security Memo 273, the memo which essentially reversed the "withdrawal" plan noted in 263, was drafted on November 21st (while Kennedy was still alive), and signed by LBJ on November 26th, clearly indicating that Johnson was simply continuing JFK's policies in Nam. As for his remarks, he gave similar remarks to that of why Bush gives that the US should stay in Iraq. On June 17th, 1963, Kennedy said, "For us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there", then saying, "I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw" - that's just a sample. On November 22nd, 1961, Kennedy authorized a large scale attack on South Vietnam (yes, South), napalm and "counter-terror" (U.S. terror). It's interesting that this authorization was signed on November 22nd, 1961, exactly 2 years before Kennedy suffered the fate he authorized - murder.
As well, Kennedy authorized the invasion of Cuba on April 17th, 1961, and authorized Operation Mongoose, and only turned down Operation Northwoods because he was he knew it wouldn't work. Kennedy, according to the official documents, sanctioned crop burnings, germ warfare, sinking fishing boats, etc. John and Bobby knew all about almost everything that happened, and anyone who says otherwise is full of it.
Cross reference everything Chomsky says with the declassified documentary record, which is available in book form in the book The Kennedys and Cuba, assembled by Mark J. White.
Once you learn about Kennedy's policies, his assassination, and all the conspiracies become completely irrelevant because he didn't do ANYTHING different from his predecessor and successors. He wanted Vietnam to be a sphere of influence of the United States, regardless how many civilians died, he wanted Castro to be murdered, and Cuba to return back to being mafia and US Corporation ran, and even implemented the fascist dictatorship of Brazil to take power, which they did in 1964, all of which break international law. But then again, since when does the US observe international law?
This is a must read.
Anton Batey
Anton_Batey@yahoo.com
Chomsky: the CIA's favourite dissident.......2005-10-01
Chomsky's pseudo-dissidence is revealed by, among many other lies found throughout his oeuvre, his repeated insistence upon the CIA's unwavering fidelity to successive Presidents. Where the evidence is contrary, he ignores it. Nowhere is the suppression more systematic than in Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture. Consider, in particular, his Stalinoid survey of the Vietnam coverage of the New York Times from October 3 to December 4, 1963 (in this paperback edition, pp.82-83). One omission, among many, will suffice.
On October 3, 1963, the NYT carried a column entitled "The Intra-Administration War In Vietnam." It opened: "The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in despatches from Vietnam..."
Its author, Arthur Krock, proceeded to quote extensively from one such despatch, "Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders in Vietnam", by Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard group. The quotes below are from Starnes's courageous and hauntingly prophetic original.
According to Starnes's source, "Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge", even though one set had been brought direct from Washington. Likening the CIA's growth to a "malignancy", which he was "not sure event the White House could control any longer", the source predicted: "If the United States ever experiences a Seven Days in May it will come from the CIA" (Washington Daily News, October 2).
Chomsky was, and remains, the creation and creature of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rethinking Camelot represented the cashing of the CIA's most important dissident chip in its unending war against both genuine dissent, and JFK's memory. It is a measure of the fear, corruption and cowardice prevalent in mainstream Anglo-American academia and media that Chomsky's imposture has gone unchallenged for so long.
Mixed bag.......2002-08-16
Just finished reading this book and found the portion
debunking JFK idolators' revisionist history to be well done,
although rather long winded. The rest of the book is pure paranoia - I was alive during the Vietnam buildup and well remember the motives that led to intervention. Surprisingly,
Chomsky attributes dark motives to practically everything
the US did during those times, and virtually never touches on the motives most often at play - the defeat and containment of Communism, which at times looked as though it was going to win.
Chomsky seems to think that Communism was essentially just a sort of ultra socialism. That is his biggest error in the book:
a severe naivete about what Communism was and why much was sacrificed to ensure that it didn't envelope the planet. In other words, he displays an extreme case of tunnel vision.
Chomsky Critiques Camelot!.......2001-04-27
Excellent overview of the relationship between American political/corporate culture and the origens of the Vietnam War. In this case, Chomsky looks at the historical revisionism that clouded the discourse on the assassination of JFK. The book does not debunk the notion that a conspiracy in Dallas occurred; rather the emphasis is on how JFK simply continued (and, in some cases,expanded) the basic thrust of American foreign policy. Using mostly the internal record, Chomsky details JFK and his virulent hawkish and anti-communist ideology, a fact which Camelot propogandists attempt to hide or minimize. Once again, the point is to highlight the reality: a single political party exists today to do the bidding for the corporate sector (of which the military-industrial complex is a large component). Remember, JFK had increased defense spending and forced through a great deal of pro-corporate legislation (while also dragging his heels on Civil Rights legislation and scolding the Warren Court for its progressive leanings) prior to the assassination. All in all, another worthy contribution from one of the great American intellectuals of the 20th century.
Closer to Insanity.......2000-04-10
What is missing from Chomsky's book is the notion that if anyone told JFK right to his face precisely what the United States was going to do in Nam for the following ten years (I think George Ball tried to do this), the president himself wouldn't have believed it, and could have told him, "You're crazy . . . " (as I remember this, the president expressed himself with an expletive) and really meant it. Anyone who thinks that American policy in Vietnam ever made sense is underestimating the ability of the government to lie whenever it is trying to picture what its national honor adds up to in evens and odds. I knew that something was crazy when I read in Rethinking Camelot that John Newman had written a letter to "The Nation" in which he said, "Let's get serious." Actually, the policy always begged to be compared with some outrageous joke, and "The Nation" has been great at coming up with jokes (I have even read the admission by Calvin Trillin that he used jokes in his column) to match such situations. Possibly the funniest thing that I ever read just showed up again in the April 10, 2000 issue of "The Nation," in a book review by John Leonard. "It's worth recalling that when Freud finally got permission to leave Vienna in 1938, the Gestapo obliged him to sign a certificate saying that he had been well treated by the authorities. He added a sentence of his own: 'I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.'" (p. 26) American policy in Vietnam was always a dream of imposing that kind of order in a country in which a majority of the people were not Americans, and might even try to kill Americans, if you want to know the truth. I can name one Kennedy adviser who was willing to tell LBJ in November, 1965, that the odds were about even that things were getting worse in Vietnam, and were going to get a lot worse as the plans at that stage were implemented, but he wouldn't have even been keeping his job if he told everybody what he thought. I'm actually glad McNamara didn't resign in protest, because he knew that other people could do his job worse than he could, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the country from the kind of stupidity that was assumed for anyone in his position, of which he was highly aware.
Book Description
Fought as fiercely by politicians and the public as by troops in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War--its origins, its conduct, its consequences--is still being contested. In what will become the classic account, based on newly opened archival sources, David Kaiser rewrites what we know about this conflict. Reviving and expanding a venerable tradition of political, diplomatic, and military history, he shows not only why we entered the war, but also why our efforts were doomed to fail.
American Tragedy is the first book to draw on complete official documentation to tell the full story of how we became involved in Vietnam--and the story it tells decisively challenges widely held assumptions about the roles of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Using an enormous range of source materials from these administrations, Kaiser shows how the policies that led to the war were developed during Eisenhower's tenure and nearly implemented in the closing days of his administration in response to a crisis in Laos; how Kennedy immediately reversed course on Laos and refused for three years to follow recommendations for military action in Southeast Asia; and how Eisenhower's policies reemerged in the military intervention mounted by the Johnson administration. As he places these findings in the context of the Cold War and broader American objectives, Kaiser offers the best analysis to date of the actual beginnings of the war in Vietnam, the impact of the American advisory mission from 1962 through 1965, and the initial strategy of General Westmoreland.
A deft re-creation of the deliberations, actions, and deceptions that brought two decades of post-World War II confidence to an ignominious end, American Tragedy offers unparalleled insight into the Vietnam War at home and abroad--and into American foreign policy in the 1960s.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent; 4.5.......2006-08-31
This is a very careful, detailed analysis of decision making in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations about the extent of American involvement in Vietnam. Based on meticulous and original archival research, Kaiser sets the decisions of both the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses against the background of the foreign policies of the Eisenhower administration. While a number of scholars have presented Eisenhower's Cold War policy as relatively cautious and non-confrontational, Kaiser argues that in many respects the Eisenhower era policies were relatively aggressive and rigidly confrontational. Kaiser account rings true. While Eisenhower was cautious about direct confrontations with the Soviet Union and China, in the Third World his administration pursued aggressive policies towards regimes that were suspected to have leftist elements, such as the Arbenz regime in Guatemala or the Mossadegh regime in Iran. When Kennedy assumed office, the State Dept. and Pentagon were imbued with and preferred to carry forward Eisenhower era approaches. The Kennedy administration also inherited the problem of South Vietnam and our less than satisfactory ally, the authoritarian and progressively corrupt Diem regime. By the early 1960s, the Communist regime of North Vietnam had reactivated their efforts to reunite Vietnam. Kennedy was pressed by many of his advisors to pursue an agressive course in Vietnam, up to and including a large US presence in Vietnam, invasion of the North, and even the use of nuclear weapons, all consistent with Eisenhower era policies. Kaiser's depiction of Kennedy is quite interesting. He shows him to be quite intelligent and knowledgeable about foreign affairs, skeptical about the policies suggested by the Pentagon and State Dept., and very good at encouraging diverse opinions among his advisors. At the same time, Kaiser presents considerable documentation that many of our diplomatic and military leaders fundamentally misunderstood events in Southeast Asia. From a diplomatic point of view, overemphasizing the importance of Vietnam and from a military point of view, completely misunderstanding the nature of the challenge posed by the insurgency in South Vietnam. Kennedy's confidence and skepticism led him to resist suggestions for major American involvement and Kaiser makes a good case he would have continued in this vein in a second term in office.
The case of Johnson is quite different. Johnson wanted to be a great domestic president, and almost achieved that status. Johnson, however, was less experienced in foreign policy, more doctrinaire in his anti-communism, and more deferential to the Pentagon and the State Dept., ultimately accepting the case for a major US involvement in Vietnam. Kaiser has a nice description of the relatively deceitful manner in which the Johnson administration went about proceeding to war, something that would have major consequences later on.
Kaiser presents the decision to make a major US commitment in Vietnam as a spectacular and avoidable error brought by doctrinaire anti-communism, refusal to consider quite a bit of contrary data and dissenting opinions, overconfidence in the value of military force, and excessive concentration on the problems of Southeast Asia.
My one criticism of Kaiser is that he tends to interpret actions of many of the major actors in terms of generational effects. Many of the major US decision makers were members of the GI generation whose experience with WWII had apparently taught them the power of American military power and the dangers of what they saw as appeasement. He looks at other actors from the point of view of their important generational experiences. This is a reasonable point but Kaiser tends to apply it in an excessively deterministic fashion.
Another incomplete rehash of Vietnam lore.......2002-04-19
The frightening aspect of this work is that it is simply another glazing over of what Americans call the Vietnam War. The sources consulted do not constitute anything resembling a full scope of available scholarship. Americans do not understand the Indochina conflict because they are only allowed to see one side. This book is simply another work in a long line of American political lore which has created convenient rationalization for complex events in Southeast Asia. There are significant scholarly works available for the reader who desires true understanding. This work is certainly not to be held among them.
A detailed account of the US entry into Vietnam.......2001-11-07
David Kaiser has accessed newly released documents to write an excellent book. He has chronologed the day by day decisions and opinions of the men at the upper levels of the government that led America into the Vietnam War. We see how Eisenhower's men wanted to commit troops to stop the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos. Then we see how Kennedy's people continued these policies, while Kennedy reigned them in and wanted to move more carefully.
Kaiser shows us the different agendas. How Diem did not want to use his troops against the Viet Cong, but rather to keep him in power. Diem refused to give any of his military officers enough power to fight the Viet Cong for fear they would plot a coup. He only gave his officers enough force to show the governments strength, keeping Diem and his family in power.
After Kennedy was assassinated Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy's advisors, but did not keep a reign on them, so the government made commitments to send troops into Vietnam. Even after Diems death, the Vietnamese only wanted to continue their troops in their power plays instead of fighting the Viet Cong. McNamara and Rusk continued to lead us into war and Lyndon Johnson agreed with them. Ball continuously tried to slow the slide to commitment down, but Johnson and his advisors ignored him.
Kaiser argues that the opinions each man held depended on when he was born. He explains that some were born, and grew up during the 30s and 40s during what he calls the GI generation. Because of this they believed that the United States could achieve anything. Kaiser also points out that the arrival of World War 2 also affected their opinions. Rusk devoutly believed that we had to stop the communists in Vietnam, or there would be another World War. Johnson also held this all or nothing viewpoint. Kennedy on the other hand held a more sophisticated view, placing Vietnam behind other problems, unlike Johnson.
Kaiser shows how Johnson and his advisors refused to negotiate with North Vietnam unless North Vietnam gave us everything we asked for first. An unlikely event. Eventually Johnson and others lied about the problems to keep the commitments increasing. Johnson also tended to ignore other foreign policy problems.
Kaiser's writing usually moves easily so it is not as hard to read as it might have been, given the complexity and detail of the subject matter.
Professor David Kaiser's American Tragedy.......2001-05-09
Professor David Kaiser of the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College tells us the real story behind the bureaucrats who put us into Vietnam, and in doing so lives up to the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps which have generally been far ahead of the other services in their resistance to bureaucratic pressures from politicians. The CIA refused to provide Kaiser with anything but token documents, violating the Freedom of Information Act. Kaiser shows how politicians including Presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson grew up under the spell of Churchill's anti-appeasement speeches to believe that the USA had to become the World Policeman. When he became President, Eisenhower began U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia covertly and the Joint Chiefs of Staff except General Shoup of the Marines were badgered into accepting this. When John F. Kennedy became President, both his Senate and Navy service led him to oppose intervention for a long time, in agreement with the U.S. Senate Democrats (Mansfield, Humphrey, etc.) and isolationist Republicans (Dirksen, etc.). The State Department Bureaucrats (who controlled the CIA) and their allies in related departments and the Joint Chiefs so badgered and pressured Kennedy that he eventually collapsed under their bombardment and agreed to intervention in Laos. When Johnson came in as President, he made full scale intervention. Some readers may recall that I have reviewed biographies of Field Marshalls Montgomery and Slim of Great Britain and Marshall/General Zhukov of Russia but not Eisenhower. The Allies produced 4 creative geniuses in World WarII: Montgomery, Slim, Zhukov, and Admiral Nimitz. Eisenhower was not one of them. He was then and later more suited to bureaucratic Ingenious Follower status than to individual Creative Genius status, like Lyndon Johnson. Our British and French allies opposed the intervention (Churchill would probably have opposed it too) not because of De Gaulle's *intransigence* as the news media claimed, but because they are the two nations with the most creative geniuses (along with Italy) in world history. When all is said and done, World War II was needed to defend the USA, but most wars are not and were not (like World War I, which was a bureaucratic war and nothing more). I hope that we start thinking more about jobs and education and environment at home and less about creating overseas what we cannot do at home.
Terrific Entry In Debate Over Responsibility For Vietnam!.......2000-09-12
In an interesting, provocative, well-written and often very surprising work of careful scholarship, author David Kaiser has raised the level of intellectual discussion regarding the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Using a range of new archival materials only now available, he carefully constructs an intriguing and disturbing portrait of individuals out of control. In this sense this book is a worthy companion piece to David Halberstam's memorable book, "The Best And The Brightest", in the fact that it argues that it was a number of specific individuals with their own personal credos, private agendas, and belief systems that led to the deepening involvement in Southeast Asian affairs. However, this is not to suggest that Professor Kaiser either agrees with Halberstam's thesis or to argue that he has nothing new or worthwhile to reveal. Yet there are undeniable threads of similarity running through both works. Most interesting is Kaiser's contention that it was the unique and singular "can-do" Yankee spirit and aggressive attitude of the World War Two generation that directly led to the decisions to interfere in the internal policies of Vietnam.
Unlike previous tomes such as Halberstam's as well as Stanley Karnow's excellent book, "Vietnam", that portrayed President Eisenhower's policies of global containment of communism as extremely cautious and careful, Kaiser presents a mass of documentary evidence that reveals that it was precisely those decisions and policy predispositions established by Eisenhower, including a willingness to use nuclear weapons tactically, that later led to the fateful moves toward greater involvement by Lyndon Johnson. Even more interesting, Kaiser presents evidence by way of policy changes made By President Kennedy illustrating his own deep concern and reticence regarding involvement in the former French Indochina. In fact, the author shows that for the three years of his administration, Kennedy purposefully denied repeated attempts by both his senior advisors and the military to significantly widen our action in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, while JFK did allow escalation by way of many more military advisors, he repeatedly quite specifically denied, both verbally and by way of documented minutes to meetings with advisors, authorization to escalate by introducing direct combat involvement.
However, the author argues that even Kennedy was seriously misled and misserved as to the status of ongoing efforts by deliberate deception on the part of that great national hero and contemporary revisionist historian, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in Kennedy's administration (see my review of McNamara's book). As a result, Kennedy died believing the situation in Vietnam to be much more constrained and careful than it actually was. With Kennedy's departure from the scene in late 1963, events began to move much more quickly and fatefully toward our blind involvement in a situation we neither appreciated the complexity of nor had any real strategy to deal with. In this sense, Lyndon Johnson became the single worst possible foil for the efforts by McNamara and Army General William Westmoreland to massively escalate the war by introducing forty-four combat battalions to the conflict.
According to Kaiser, Johnson lacked Jack Kennedy's sophisticated foreign policy approach and did not understand or appreciate the massively negative effects that an active prosecution of the war would have in our relationship with the rest of the world. So, even as he reassured the American people to the contrary, Lyndon Johnson prepared for a quick and massive entry into the single most disastrous American foreign policy decision of the 20th century. Later, of course, he tried to extricate himself from the tar baby the war became for his administration, yet given his own philosophical world view as a cold warrior, could never manage to take Hubert Humphrey's advice to "just cut and run'. Likewise, Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, did no better. After shamelessly interfering in the internal political disposition of the South Vietnamese government through Madame Chennault in order to ensure his place in winning the closely contested 1968 elections, Nixon soon found himself stuck to the waist in the sucking quicksand of continuing involvement in the war and a terrifying related national debate approaching a revolutionary fervor. He waited four long and painful years before finally ending American involvement.
This is a wonderfully written book, and the author's style is both entertaining and edifying. He handily deals with a myriad of issues, complexions, and countervailing situations with aplomb, honesty and verve. He makes the otherwise inexplicable descent into national madness and the nightmare of Vietnam all too understandable and human. While I do not share his personally stated philosophical resignation regarding the liability of those individuals responsible for prosecuting the war (I still believe that Robert McNamara, General William Westmoreland, and a number of others should be tried as war criminals for crimes against humanity; after all, otherwise to try Serbians and Croats for their detestable deeds in the former Yugoslavia is utter hypocrisy), I believe this book will quickly become the standard text for helping us to understand how the ritual abuse of power by officials not democratically elected can itself become an anti-democratic force profoundly affecting not only the lives of our citizens, but people everywhere in the developing world.
Hopefully books like this will help us to come to understand and accept the reality of what the American government did in our name to Vietnam. We need to understand how we came to export our darkest emotional suspicions and a sense of national paranoia about a monolithic communist threat into an incredibly murderous campaign that almost exterminated a whole generation of Vietnamese by way of indiscriminate carpet bombing, deliberate use of environmentally horrific defoliates, and creation of so-called "free-fire" zones, where everthing and anything moving was assumed to be hostile, whether it be man, woman, child, or beast. All of this was visited on the world in general and the Vietnamese in particular for little or no reason other than the extremely aggressive and ultimately dangerous can-do macho world-view of the power elite. The sooner we recognize this, the better it will be for us as citizens of a democratic government, and the more likely it is we will stop the next set of so- inclined bureaucratic monsters from acting in this way again.
Amazon.com
The Secret War Against Hanoi documents American covert actions in Vietnam, beginning in 1961 when John F. Kennedy decided that if Hanoi could wage a guerilla war against the South, the U.S. could do the same in the North. Dissatisfied with the CIA's initial results, Kennedy passed responsibility for covert operations to the Pentagon--which never fully supported them. For example, in an interview for this book, General Westmoreland, Commander of American forces in Vietnam, vastly underestimated the imaginative ways in which underground activities could destabilize an enemy. American covert action focused on disrupting two vital "centers of gravity": the North's own internal stability and the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran through Laos and Cambodia. Such activities ran counter to the Geneva Accords, however, and nervous diplomats placed them under severe constraints. Permission always had to be obtained from the top, which after 1964 meant an excessively cautious President Johnson, concerned that China would be goaded into intervening openly in Vietnam as it had in Korea. The creative thinking that went into America's secret exploits reads like a racy novel, from the adroit brainwashing and release of captured fishermen to the fabrication of a phantom secret society based on a 15th-century anti-Chinese hero, plus innumerable nasty booby traps. Author Richard H. Shultz has had unusual access to prominent protagonists and to thousands of classified documents made available only to him while he researched this book. The Secret War Against Hanoi clearly lays out what was achieved and what might have been achieved by covert action in Vietnam, ending with a thoughtful analysis of lessons learned for future politicians and operatives in a post-cold war world. --John Stevenson
Book Description
From 1964 to 1972, the United States executed an extremely secret campaign of covert operations against North Vietnam. Controlled by the Pentagon's Special Operations Group, under the cover name "Studies and Observation Group" (SOG), it was the United States' largest and most complex covert operation since World War II. Because it was so highly classified and politically sensitive, once the war was over the story of SOG was buried deep in the vaults of the Pentagon--until Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr., one of the world's leading experts on SOG's activities in Southeast Asia, began his impressive investigative research and wide-ranging special interviews.
The Secret War Against Hanoi is based on thousands of pages of recently declassified top-secret SOG documents, as well as interviews with sixty officers who ran SOG's covert programs and the senior officials who directed this secret war, including Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Richard Helms, William Colby, William Westmoreland, and Victor Krulak. It is the first-ever definitive and comprehensive account of the covert paramilitary and espionage campaign, with many eye-opening disclosures.
Dr. Shultz reveals how in 1963, President Kennedy, dissatisfied with the CIA's ineffective guerrilla operations against North Vietnam, turned over operational control of the covert war to the Pentagon and demanded results. Despite Kennedy's strong directive, those results were slow in coming. United States policymakers and the senior military leadership had little interest in or understanding of special operations and resisted any expansion of the secret war. When SOG finally did get started in January 1964, under newly inaugurated President Johnson, it was constantly hobbled by the micro-management of the National Security Council, State Department, and Pentagon leadership.
Despite these restraints, SOG conducted its intense secret war for eight years, through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and managed to execute a range of operations, including the dispatch of numerous spies to North Vietnam and creation of a sophisticated triple-cross deception program: psychological warfare through a fabricated guerrilla movement, manipulation of North Vietnamese POWs and kidnapped citizens, and dirty tricks; commando raids against Hanoi's coast and navy; and operations on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to kill enemy soldiers and destroy supplies. Ultimately, the Pentagon's spies, saboteurs, and secret warriors would produce both spectacular and disastrous results.
There are lessons to be learned from Washington's conduct of the secret war against Hanoi that will be valuable and valid for years to come for presidents who engage in covert special operations to meet twenty-first-century threats to vital U.S. interests.
Customer Reviews:
Snatching Defeat From Victory.......2006-07-28
Richard H. Shultz provides a well researched book to support the claim that politicians caused us to lose the Vietnam War. He describes how some SOG operations were extremely effective despite interference from Washington. This effectiveness is based on relatively recent information from the Vietnamese, not just declassified US records. The book itself is a pretty good read. Although some parts drag along, the majority of the book moves quickly.
Even though this book was published in 1999, it contains many valuable lessons that are acutely applicable to today's War on Terrorism. The Vietnam era Pentagon contained many officers who believed conventional warfare to be far superior to special operations. The book makes the argument that special operations can provide invaluable support to a conventional war, but cannot win the war by itself. Similar discussions were held prior to the recent war in Afghanistan. The military would have preferred to fight a conventional war but was forced by time constraints to send in special forces. In hind sight, the reader can compare Vietnam to Afghanistan where Special Operations not only fought a war, but won it single handedly. This bit of historical hind sight makes the book all the more disturbing. Had SOG been given a real chance, the outcome of the Vietnam War might have been different.
Specifically, the author describes how the national command authorities were afraid of success. The Pentagon and the White House were afraid that if SOG's activities were too successful, they might widen the war and draw in China. The book also illustrates the incredible lack of common sense displayed by administration officials. Numerous covert action plans were denied because they differed from overt US policy. This explanation lacks any logic. If covert action activities were in sync with overt US policy, then there is no reason to do it covertly. Covert action should be for activities that support national objectives but which cannot be disclosed openly because they may run counter to our public policy.
The book does not pull punches. The efforts of Ambassador Sullivan and Averell Harriman seem almost treasonous. They waged a bureaucratic war against the Pentagon that effectively kept SOG from doing its job. The North Vietnamese could not have had better friends.
Bottom line, this book tells a compelling tale of how senior military and political figures failed to aggressively prosecute the Vietnam War. It is a good insight into how Washington, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the Korean War, was simply afraid of being too successful. The criminal aspect of this policy is that if the Government sends the military to war, it has an obligation to at least try and win it.
The Story of the Mythical SOG.......2004-09-29
I had heard of the Studies and Observations Group as far back as the early 80s. As it the organization was so shrouded in mystery, it was hard to tell what was fact. Richard Schultz pulls the shroud away in this scholarly work and we discover the truth is stranger than fiction.
In the early 1960s, JFK directed his underlings to unleash a covert war against North Vietnam. Sort of a do to them what theyre doing to us deal. The CIA and then Defense Department create the Studies and Observations Group (SOG)and give it four primary missions. These were to insert Vietnamese spies into North Vietnam, conduct attacks on the North Vietnamese Coast, undermine North Vietnam with Psychological Warfare (Psywar), and finally to collect intelligence on and impede use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The author comes to the reasoned conclusion that SOG was a moderate failure. He shows the main factors in this failure to be timidity of policy makers to use SOG to its full potential out of a fear too much success would expand the war, indifference on the part of conventionally minded military leadership, a failure to incorporate SOG's unconventional war with the conventional war and effective North Vietnamese countermeasures.
Despite these fatal flaws, Schultz shows SOG did manage to provide some assitance to the war effort. In particular, the psywar program apparently drove the already paranoid North Vietnamese of the deep end and SOG recon teams on the Ho Chi Minh trail collected valuable intelligence and eliminate significant amounts of men and materiel.
The best part in my opinion was the portions relating to psywar. SOG went so far as to develop a fake resistance movement and left physical hints of its existence in interesting ways. Other psywar efforts included fake letters meant to implicate the Communist faithful in coup plots and exploding ammunition inserted into supply caches. Pretty cool stuff!
The only down side to the book is its kind of dry reading. By all accounts, SOG was the most highly decorated unit in US history. To his credit, Schultz touches on this but should have gone farther. There is no mention of Fred Zabitosky, Roy Benavides or Bob Howard (a man nominated three times for the Medal of Honor before finally receiving the award). Also, he does not quantify the success of the Ho Chi Minh Trail activities. The author tells us that recon team activities hurt and annoyed the North Vietnamese but there is no mention of exact tonnage of Communist equipment destroyed or the thousands of Communist soldiers tasked with patrolling the Trail because of SOG activities.
All and all a good, solid work. But sadly incomplete. To get the full picture, read this book in conjunction with John Plaster's "SOG".
Can't anyone here play this game?.......2004-08-03
It's not often that a particular work of history speaks directly to our immediate times. Richard Shultz has written a compelling account of the largest secret operation of the Cold War--the U.S. military's covert campaign against Hanoi during the Vietnam conflict. He lays out why the US military establishment and US policymakers alike were to blame for the complete failure of this secret effort. Shultz could well have subtitled the book, "How Not to Conduct Secret Warfare." Today's US warfighters confronting the Iraqi insurgency would do well to read this book.
Triple cross theology.......2002-10-03
This reads like a guidebook, sort of a secret Bible of things to do so everyone involved in global politics will think that you can do exactly what they are doing. There is an index, but it does not have a listing for triple cross thinking (covered mainly at the end of the "Going North" Chapter). The index is more helpful on the Counterinsurgency, Counterintelligence, Covert action, Covert operations, and Covert paramilitary campaign (listed topics) thinking which finally produced the triple cross operation. Without trying to explain how numerous officials in the United States were supposed to approve everything that was being done to create the kind of revolution which superpower thinking truly wanted, in their effort to make the people with power in North Vietnam think that an internal Sacred Sword of the Patriots League considered itself to be potentially more popular than the government of North Vietnam, a more recent approach to understanding this guide might consider how well this guide would work as a plan for triple cross activities, possibly including elections, elected officials, and the courts, to convince people in the United States that a Sacred Sword of the Patriots League had successfully taken over government operations in the United States of America. Specific comments in this book about the triple cross:
Could SOG create a triple-cross system to convince Hanoi that, in fact, it had uncovered only part of a much larger and more intricate subversion operation inside its borders? (p. 93).
The triple cross was not just against Hanoi but also "against our compatriots," noted the chief of OP 34, who was convinced that the STD was infiltrated by enemy intelligence. (p. 114).
"Of course, we were setting these guys up because there was no team to contact." (p. 115).
"We might also provide information about corrupt government officials who we claimed we learned about from messages sent back from agent teams inserted by us." (p. 115).
To make Project Oodles believable, different false radio messages were sent from OP 34 to each phantom team. (p. 119).
Finally, radios that sent messages out from these fake teams were air-dropped into North Vietnam. This completed the communications loop. Messages were coming in and answers were being sent out. (p. 120).
In effect, it was real evidence of spy commandos, as Hanoi referred to them. (pp. 122-3).
Finally, in November 1968, when the United States was going to have an election, MACVSOG was called by Washington, D. C., and told, "we are going to publicly say that we have no activities north of the parallel." (p. 124). Teams in North Vietnam had to get out immediately. Some people (and candidate Richard Nixon did not actually say this) were still thinking, "Just deny that you're engaged in MACVSOG operations and then crank them up. This was the way the operators saw things." (p. 126). I think about triple cross operations when I see a lot of political advertising on TV, but some of the Americans who created such operations might be engaged in other occupations today, and it would be extremely difficult to convince me that they aren't.
Turned out less well than the Peace Corps.......2001-01-04
As each book based on declassified data comes out, the story of Vietnam and the Great American Stumble there becomes more clear.
"The Secret War Against Hanoi" is particularly good in its own way. It elucidates the liberal train of thought as they were starting the war in 1961. On January 28 Kennedy had been president for 8 days. Vietnam was divided, the French were gone, and the Viet Cong were prosecuting a campaign of terrorism in the South in order to destabilize it and absorb it into the North. On that day Kennedy met with his National Security Council and listened to what was (in his view) the bad news on Vietnam: if the current conditions persisted, the South would fall to the Communists.
Why a little underdeveloped country in Asia should have been of such concern to Kennedy is anyone's guess, but what is no longer in doubt is that major American involvement in Vietnam began at that NSC meeting of Jan 28, when Kennedy stated that he wanted "guerillas to operate in the North". All that followed for 13 years was built upon that one simple sentiment expressed by the new president.
He wanted guerillas to operate in the North because, as he expressed it in April of that year, "We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerillas by night instead of armies by day." Kennedy was intent on fighting back in kind: infiltrating, subverting, and deploying guerillas by night.
Presumably, the CIA would train Vietnamese spies and guerillas and inflict them on the North. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco happened that April, and the Kennedy brothers were convinced the fault for that lay with the CIA. Therefore they gave the job of training and inserting spies and guerillas into North Vietnam to the Pentagon, which had little experience in such operations.
There followed a string of failures, where hundreds of Vietnamese spies and saboteurs were sent up north, and never heard from again. Or North Vietnamese fishermen would be hauled off to an island and treated to an elaborate charade intended to show them that a revolt against the communist government was imminent. Shultz discusses these attempts in a dispassionate tone, but one gets a growing sense of waste and futility from the narrative. Any of the career espionage people at the CIA could have told Kennedy that it was virtually impossible to plant people in a closed totalitarian society like North Vietnam, even if, as in the case of the CIA, that's your business. But to have the Pentagon take a crack at it? Well, you might as well try to get HUD to send a rocket to the moon.
But Kennedy's obsession with and faith in covert action remained unabated till the day of his death. His cabinet, McNamara in particular, shared his enthusiasm. Eventually the Pentagon adopted the attitude that if you want anything done in Vietnam, you have to do it yourself. So covert actions began to include Americans, at the same time the overt effort began ramping up under Johnson.
The efforts were redirected toward more practical targets, such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the construction of which began in 1959), but the approach was no more practical. This wasn't a "real war", according to the brightest minds in Washington; it was more of a diplomatic game. Therefore, restrictions had to be placed on the units operating against the trail builders. Special forces could not go beyond 10 kilometers into "neutral" Laos. The North Vietnamese, displaying the practicality and opportunism that became their hallmark, would then route their trail 11 kilometers from the Laos-Vietnam border. Their spies, unlike those of the Pentagon, were quite effective.
It wasn't any secret that cutting off the Ho Chi Minh trail would cut off the stream of men and materiel into the South. Shultz quotes Bui Tin, the NVA officer who accepted the surrender of the South in 1975: "If Johnson had granted General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war."
As simple as that. Straight from the lips of an opposing officer. In retrospect, it seems like the logical thing to do: cut off the enemy's supply line. But from its very beginning on January 28, 1961, the Vietnam War was not conducted logically.
Perhaps the Kennedy-Johnson crowd's truly wacky ambivalence can best be glimpsed on pages 34-35. Shultz relates how President Kennedy was "stunned" by the images of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the Diem government's repression. Diem's sister-in-law, who seems to have been a cross between Immelda Marcos and Leona Helmsley, referred to the immolations as "barbecues". At the same time, South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup. It was dawning on the government of the US that the government of its ally was corrupt and effete and repressive. So where did the Kennedy Administration choose to direct its energies? Toward Hanoi: "escalation of the covert war against Hanoi became a major agenda item. The decision was made to turn up the pressure on the North."
With policy like this being made by the Best and the Brightest, one can only shudder at what a catastrophe we'd have had if our leaders had been merely average.
Average customer rating:
|
Kennedy in Vietnam: American Vietnam Policy 1960-1963 (A Da Capo Paperback)
William J. Rust
Manufacturer: Da Capo Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Bargain Books
| Stores
| Books
| Arts & Photography
| Audiobooks
| Biography
| Business & Investing
| Calendars
| Children
| Computers & Internet
| Cooking, Food & Wine
| Film
| Greeting Cards & Accessories
| Health, Mind & Body
| History
| Home & Garden
| Humor, Comics & Pop Culture
| Literature & Fiction
| Mysteries & Thrillers
| Nonfiction
| Parenting & Families
| Reference
| Religion & Spirituality
| Romance
| Science & Nature
| Science Fiction & Fantasy
| Sports
| Teens
| Travel
General
| Middle East
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Strategy
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Vietnam
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Southeast Asia
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0306802848 |
Books:
- Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
- Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
- Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers
- Los Cuatro Acuerdos: Una Guia Practica para la Libertad Personal
- My Name Is America: journal Of Rufus Rowe, Witness To The Battle Of Fredricksburg (My Nam Is America)
- NAM SENSE: Surviving Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division
- No More Vietnams
- None Shall Look Back (Southern Classics Series)
- None Shall Look Back (Southern Classics Series)
- One More River to Cross (Standing on the Promises, Book 1)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- History: Fiction or Science
- White Lies
- Modelling Metabolism with Mathematica
- Scale Models: Houses of the 20th Century
- Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete and Masonry Buildings
- When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work
- The Shadow Dancer
- Recycling Madrid
- Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited
- Biology Of Anaerobic Microorganisms
Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Hired to Kill Oswald and Prevent the Assassination of JFK
On the Trail of the Assassins
Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn't Know Then
Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?
