Friday 27 November 2009by: Ray McGovern, Op-Ed
"It
took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to defy the Pentagon, defy the
military -- and do the right thing," said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA
(ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone
article "The Generals' Revolt."
Wilkerson,
who was chief of staff at the State Department (2002-2005) and now
teaches at George Washington University, was alluding to President John
F. Kennedy's courage in 1962, when he faced down his top generals and
refused to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear war.
That was as close as we came to nuclear calamity during the entire Cold War.
Despite
the urgency of the threat posed by the Russian military buildup in Cuba
(we now know the Russians had already placed nuclear weapons on the
island), Kennedy's deliberate decision-making style allowed enough time
for cooler heads to prevail and yielded a peaceful solution.
A
hallmark trait of John Kennedy was his ability to listen and learn. At
the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom.
Call
that "dithering," if you wish. I, for one, applaud President Barack
Obama for following Kennedy's calm, deliberative style, as Obama faces
similar pressure from the military to send tens of thousands more
troops to Afghanistan.
Kennedy: Out of Vietnam
The
Cuban crisis was not the only time JFK found himself at loggerheads
with generals who thought they knew better and who verged on the
insubordinate. Kennedy's sustained arm wrestling with his senior
generals over whether to send more troops to Vietnam was just as tense,
and much more sustained.
In
the end, he concluded that they had it wrong and decided against them.
In short, he opted to behave like a President -- a "decider" (pardon the
odd word). His overruling of the U.S. military brass on Vietnam had
huge implications, both short- and long-term. This "real history" is
highly relevant today.
The
46th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination passed by last Sunday
virtually unnoticed. The unfortunate thing is this: his legacy on
Vietnam is so widely misunderstood that it is easy to miss the
relevance of his decision-making in the early Sixties to the dilemma
faced by President Obama today as he decides whether to stand up to -
or cave in to - the Pentagon's plans for escalating another misbegotten
war in Afghanistan.
Faux
history has it that President Lyndon Baines Johnson's infusion of
hundreds of thousands, up to 536,000, combat troops into Vietnam was a
straight-line continuation of a buildup started by his slain
predecessor. Kennedy did raise the U.S. troop level there from about
1,000 to 16,500 "advisers" -- a significant increase.
But
as he studied the options, cost and likely outcomes, Kennedy came to
see U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a fool's errand. Few Americans are
aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to
pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965.
The
Pentagon was hell bent on thwarting such plans, and Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara found it an uphill struggle to enforce the President's
will on the top brass. Senior military officers were experts at
"slow-rolling" politicians who favored a course that the Pentagon
didn't like.
When
in May 1962 Kennedy ordered up a contingency troop-withdrawal plan, it
took more than a year for the military brass to draw one up.
As
the President encountered continuing resistance, he paid increasing
attention to more level-headed military and civilian advisers as well
as to his own intuition and instincts. Kennedy asked the Marine
Commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, "to look over the ground in Southeast
Asia and counsel him." Shoup told the President:
"Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control."
Kennedy
concluded that there was no responsible course other than to press for
a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior
national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of
Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.
How To Do It
My Irish grandmother called Kennedy "a clever lad" and she was right.
Realizing
that he had to exercise the utmost care in navigating choppy military
and political waters, Kennedy employed the artifice of sending Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor on a "fact-finding"
trip to Saigon. At the end of the trip they would "recommend" the
course the President had already chosen.
Stopping
in Hawaii en route back to Washington, McNamara and Taylor were given
"their" report, which had been written by John and Robert Kennedy. It
was instantly named the "McNamara-Taylor report" and the two travelers
presented it to the President on the morning of Oct. 2, 1963.
Wasting no time, the President convened a National Security Council meeting that evening to discuss the report.
The senior military saw through the subterfuge and strongly opposed the key recommendations of the report. In his memoir, In Retrospect,
McNamara wrote that the NSC meeting saw "heated debate about our
recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw
U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal
of 1,000 men by the end of the year."
In
McNamara's words, there was "a total lack of consensus." However, there
is only one "decider" on the National Security Council -- the
President. Kennedy stepped up to the plate and decided, bypassing the
majority opposed.
Thirty-two years later in a Sept. 12, 1995, letter to the New York Times,
McNamara took strong issue with a charge in an earlier op-ed that "the
groundwork was being laid for our tragic escalation of the war" before
President Kennedy was killed.
McNamara described the President's reasoning in deciding to go ahead, despite the lack of consensus:
"[T]he
President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing
that either our training and logistical support led to the progress
claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the
situation and, in either case, we should plan to withdraw."
His
decision made, Kennedy wasted no time in acting, well, like a
President. He told McNamara to announce it immediately in order to "set
it in concrete," according to McNamara.
As
the defense secretary was leaving the NSC meeting to tell White House
reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all
of the helicopter pilots, too," according to Kenneth O'Donnell and
David Powers in their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.
Action Memo
The
President's policy was formalized nine days later in his National
Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of Oct. 11, 1963. That document
put into effect the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, which provided
that:
"A
program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions
now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by
Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the
bulk of U.S. personnel by that time ... [and] the Defense Department
should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to
withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963."
Whether
Kennedy truly believed that the U.S. training program would succeed in
helping the South Vietnamese prevail is doubtful. Clearly, he wanted
out. He carried around in his conscience and from time to time spoke of
the number of American troops already killed. (Eight died under
Eisenhower; about 170 during Kennedy's tenure.)
Assistant
Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, to whom fell the task of announcing
President Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, told James Douglass, author
of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that
Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before. Instead of
rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:
"I've
just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're
losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out.
The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are
doing the fighting.
"After
I come back from Texas, that's going to change. There is no reason for
us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another
American life."
A
month before, during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his
next-door neighbor Larry Newman, "I'm going to get those guys out [of
Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's
impossible to win."
Kennedy
understood that decisions on Vietnam were far too important to be left
to myopic generals. They were still chafing at what they considered
Kennedy's failure in 1962 to seize the moment and obliterate Cuba -- and
perhaps also the U.S.S.R., while we were at it.
Add
Kennedy's clear desire to work closely (often secretly) with Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a priority effort to prevent another
Cuba-type crisis, and then letting generic "Communists" take over
Vietnam - with "dominoes" expected to fall all over the place -- and the
military brass became convinced they needed to strongly oppose such
"appeasement."
'Best and Brightest'
And
it was not only the generals. Far from it. The "best and the
brightest," first and foremost McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national
security adviser, were also opposed to Kennedy's decision to pull
troops out of Vietnam.
Bundy
strongly disagreed with the recommendations in the McNamara-Taylor
report. He also resisted Kennedy's frequently expressed doubts that
foreign troops, even in large numbers, could prevail in guerrilla war,
and Kennedy's determination never to send combat troops to Vietnam.
Bundy
thought he knew better, refusing to believe that the President would
ever "let South Vietnam go." Years later, Bundy's memoirs defended his
views and advice to Kennedy on Vietnam.
However, after McNamara published In Retrospect in
1995, in which he concluded that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" on
Vietnam, Bundy went back to the drawing board to rethink his assessment.
Bundy
hired a man half his age, Gordon Goldstein, as research assistant to
help him on what turned out to be Bundy's personal quest for the roots
of his own mistakes which, for the most part, were the result of
hubris, pure and simple.
Early
this year, author William Pfaff reviewed what started out as the Bundy
Memoir Part II (McGeorge Bundy died in 1996), but ended up as Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Goldstein.
In
the review, Pfaff highlights Bundy's pedigree: tops at Groton,
professor of government at Harvard and youngest dean of faculty; his
mother a Boston Brahmin, his father a diplomat. Pfaff is ruthlessly on
point in describing Bundy's attitude:
"American
had to 'win' in Vietnam because America always wins. America knows
better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower
deployed at Harvard and other elite universities. America does not have
to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.
"Goldstein's
decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note
written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising
about the war. He answered, 'the endurance of the enemy.' Goldstein
writes: 'He didn't understand the enemy 'because, frankly, he didn't
think they warranted his attention.'"
The
good news for today comes from press reporting that top officials of
the Obama administration, including the President, have read
Goldstein's book. Applying Kennedy's challenge on Vietnam to Obama's on
Afghanistan, a Wall Street Journal report of Oct. 7 noted, "For
opponents of a major troop increase ... 'Lessons in Disaster'
encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice
unchallenged."
Obama Must Decide
There
are hints that Obama is more Chicago than Harvard -- and that, like
Kennedy, he carries casualty figures around in his conscience. His
late-night, early-morning appearance at Dover Air Force Base to salute
what the Washington Post calls "transfer cases" coming home from the
war is, I believe, a telling sign.
Obama knows they are not just "transfer cases."
This
young President, too, is a "clever lad;" he is also a politician.
Intellectually, he is surely equipped to understand the March of Folly
that would be involved, were he to send substantial additional forces
to Afghanistan.
Moreover,
Obama is surely aware that the majority of Americans are no longer
deceived by the pundits at Fox News. Recent polls show broader and
broader popular opposition to sending more troops.
The
choice, in my view, is between courage anchored in a determination to
do the right thing and cowardice cloaked in the politics of the
possible. Let me guess what you're thinking -- "But that's asking too
much of a young President; cowardice is too strong a word; Obama cannot
possibly face down the entire military establishment."
John
Kennedy did. So the question is whether Barack Obama is "no Jack
Kennedy," or whether he will summon the courage to stand up to the
misguided military brass of today.
We are talking, after all, about thousands more being killed -- and for what?
I would suggest to the President that he give another close read to Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster and then ponder the lessons that leap out of Barbara Tuchman's The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.
Obama may also wish to ponder the words of W.E.B. Dubois:
"Now
is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It
is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or
future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater
usefulness of tomorrow."
Ray
McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA
for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS.