Ultra-Liberal CTers Are Outraged Over New Book on JFK and Vietnam

[Mark A. Oblazney]

When you serve at the pleasure of the President, you have to accept a lot of things. All of the Cabinet officials can be fired without cause. I find it interesting that the only senior official the President can't fire is the Veep. He's stuck with him no matter what.

JFK appointed a number of Republicans to key positions including Cabinet secretaries Robert McNamara (Defense) and C. Douglas Dillon (Treasury).

AI had just told me that JFK had appointed no Republicans to Cabinet positions which further erodes my confidence in AI.

Nixon also made several cross-party appointments including JFK's brother-in-law Sargent Shriver as ambassador to France, John Connally as Treasury Secretary, and perhaps my favorite Democrat of all time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan as Ambassador to India and later to the UN.

one fine day, there shall be ‘ETAI’, and all shall be known, unless you’re with the Greys, who are with the chinese if you pleez.  even aliens make mistakes, god made them, too!

[Michael T. Griffith]

I know one of the things that has some liberals upset is Cheevers' documentation of the fact that it was not JFK’s idea to announce a 1,000-man troop withdrawal, and that he didn’t like the idea but was talked into it by McNamara:

McNamara and Taylor also encouraged Kennedy to publicly state that he’d pull a thousand U.S. advisers out of South Vietnam by the end of the year, and that “the bulk of U.S. personnel” could probably be withdrawn by 1965. Other White House counselors thought such a declaration was imprudent. What if the war went badly, especially in light of South Vietnam’s political troubles, and the advisers had to stay longer? What if more were needed to help battle the VC?

Kennedy himself was reluctant, saying the proposed statement was “overly optimistic” and didn’t have much value. McNamara, however, insisted it would show congressional critics that the administration had a plan for reducing American combat casualties. Kennedy ultimately agreed to issue a press release along the lines his defense secretary wanted.

But the president’s instincts were right; he was quickly attacked in the press. The Washington Post, for example, lambasted the prediction of a 1965 pullout as “groundless prophecy” and an affront to the “maturity and intelligence” of the American public. (pp. 373-374)

The statement said that "the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965" and that "by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Viet-Nam can be withdrawn." Kennedy thought this was "overly optimistic." However, he eventually succumbed to McNamara's pressure and agreed to the press release.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

In an October 2, 1963 National Security Meeting where the McNamara/Taylor report was discussed, JFK expressed "reservations" about the proposed 1000 troop withdrawal by the end of the year.

Here is the exchange with McNamara.

President Kennedy: My only reservation about it [the report] is that it commits us to a kind of a ... if the war doesn't continue to go well, it'll look like we were overly optimistic, and I don't—I'm not sure we—I'd like to know what benefit we get out [of it] at this time announcing a thousand—

McNamara: Mr. President, we have the thousand split by units, so that if the war doesn't go well, we can say these thousand would not have influenced the course of action.

President Kennedy: And the advantage of taking them out—

McNamara: And the advantage of taking them out is that we can say to Congress and people that we do have a plan for reducing the exposure of U.S. combat personnel to the guerrilla actions in South Vietnam—actions that the people of South Vietnam should gradually develop a capability to suppress themselves. And I think this will be of great value to us in meeting the very strong views of Senator [J. William] Fulbright and others that we're bogged down in Asia and will be there for decades.

President Kennedy: All right.

That's not much of a disagreement or reservation to me; it sounds half-hearted and staged. And completely political. JFK wanted McNamara to give him cover, cover for something he didn't want attributed to him.

You can hear JFK himself say this in a taped recording of that meeting: https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-mtg-114-a49d

Go to the 19:00 minute mark.