A Dark View of the Diem Assassinations, JFK and South Vietnam, And the JFKA.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Stanley Karnow's excellent summary of what happened (note the mention of Diem's family, e.g., Nhu and his wife: the problem wasn't just Diem). As he points out, the coup and the deaths deepened US commitment and involvement as, among other things, Diem's successors made things worse and not, as hoped, better. Meanwhile Hanoi, watching this upheaval, stepped up its attacks. The political situation worsened; so did the military.

Karnow's summary is wrong on every major point about Diem and the anti-Diem coup except his observation that Diem's successors made things worse. Karnow did little else but repeat the anti-Diem attacks spread by the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, American so-called "anti-war" agitators, and JFK's liberal anti-Diem advisers.

Shorter: JFK handed LBJ an impossible situation.

Under the principle of command responsibility, yes, JFK handed LBJ a mess in South Vietnam. But, in terms of actual culpability, the bulk of the blame should be placed on Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, George Ball, Michael Forrestal, and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Whether JFK would have sent in the hundreds of thousands of troops, made it an American war, is an open question. My guess is no, he wouldn't have.

I tend to doubt that JFK would have sent 536,000 troops to South Vietnam, but Bobby Kennedy's oral history interview suggests that, at a minimum, JFK was prepared to start using heavy air power against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong if necessary.

But the question as to whether he had decided to simply withdraw, unconditionally, is a closed one: he had not. Those conspiracists who say he had are, as usual, simply making things up. To their credit, they're very good at making things up.

They're wrong, but they're not "making things up." They are relying on some of JFK's liberal advisers who belatedly claimed that JFK told them he was determined to completely withdraw from South Vietnam after the election, even if it enabled the Communists to conquer South Vietnam. Of course, they dismiss the accounts of JFK's advisers, such as Rusk and Rostow, who said they never heard JFK say any such thing. They also ignore the fact that the JFK White House tapes contain not a single word that suggests any such intention.

They are also relying on the "secret debrief" that McNamara recorded, only for himself, in September 1963, in which he claimed that JFK had privately told him that he had decided to get out of South Vietnam, even if it meant South Vietnam fell to the Communists.

A number of facts cast serious doubt on the veracity of McNamara’s “secret debrief.” For one thing, McNamara never told anyone about it, never mentioned it in any White House discussions on the Vietnam War, and said nothing about it in his memoir. Not one of McNamara’s adoring aides ever claimed that McNamara told them that JFK had confided to him that he was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Moreover, in the numerous JFK and LBJ White House tapes, McNamara never once mentioned JFK’s alleged decision to abandon South Vietnam.   

I devote an entire chapter in A Comforting Lie to debunking the unconditional-withdrawal myth.
 

[Benjamin Cole]

JFK also showed his willingness to use naval blockades, as seen during the CMC.

Very possibly, JFK would have put a naval blockade on NV, or destroyed Haiphong.

Given JFK's long association with SV, and that JFK loathed, detested and reviled communist oppression, I doubt JFK would have simply walked away from SV.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The many JFK conspiracists who say JFK was leaving Vietnam, pulling out after re-election (and that's why in part he was killed), repeatedly ignore the fact that the plan JFK supported was conditional, that the McNamara-Taylor report and proposal was a phased withdrawal contingent on the ability of the South to take on the war. That's not an opinion; it's in the documents. Doesn't matter how many times and ways one says this, they ignore it.

So what do they do when confronted by this? They simply make things up. About what NSAM 263 and what NSAM 273 said, about what the McNamara-Taylor report proposed and what JFK repeatedly said about the conflict. There's nothing in 273 that overturns 263. But they make things up and say it does. They never answer one obvious question: Why would JFK tell Hanoi that the US was unconditionally leaving in two years? That is, show his hand? In response, Hanoi would simply wait things out, wait for the US to leave and then resume its attacks. And force the US to return. Because JFK conspiracists are silly doesn't mean JFK was too.

Here is "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's fantasy movie JFK: "Only four days after JFK was shot, Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Memo 273, which essentially reversed Kennedy's new withdrawal policy and gave the green light to the covert operations against North Vietnam that provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In that document lay the Vietnam War."

Once again, the conspiracy crowd is making things up or living in a fantasy world. Maybe both.

Here is NSAM 263: https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsam-jfk/nsam-263.htm

Here is NSAM 273: https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsam-lbj/nsam-273.htm

There's nothing in 273 that undoes what 263 says.

As to Karnow: The man simply wasn't a historian writing about events fifty years later. He was IN Vietnam at the time of the Buddhist Crisis and Diem Coup. He knew what was happening, interviewed the people, reported on events, understood the history and culture. He saw firsthand the consequences of the government's crackdown on the Buddhists, how it was causing problems among the intellectuals, the students, and obviously the Buddhists. And that in turn was hurting the war cause, the defense of the South. How could it not? Moreover, it was causing problems for JFK as Congress and the public were souring on supporting the government.

Whether Diem *had* to crack down on the Buddhists to secure his political base, whether the uprising was caused by communist agents, is meaningless. The issue is the problems for the war that it caused. None of that is debatable; they are facts.