Rethinking Camelot by Pluto Press

Rethinking Camelot

JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture

Noam Chomsky

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First Edition published by South End Press This edition published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © 1993 Noam Chomsky The right of Noam Chomsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3542 1 978 1 7837 1237 3 978 1 7837 1239 7 978 1 7837 1238 0

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Table of Contents Preface to the 2015 Edition Introduction: Contours and Context

vii 1

Chapter 1 From Terror to Aggression

Chapter 2 Interpretations

131

Notes

185

Bibliography

197

Index

201

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Preface to the 2015 Edition The immediate occasion for “rethinking Camelot” was the release of a rich collection of declassified documents covering 1961–64, offering a good opportunity to reconsider what I had written twenty years earlier after the appearance of the two volumes of the Pentagon Papers, the Gravel edition released by Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo and the government edition released in reaction.1 A great deal of other valuable material was also available at the time, and much more had appeared in the interim. “Camelot” became a favored image of the liberal intellectuals entranced by the years of glory cut short cruelly by the assassination of JFK just at the time when he was about to go on to marvelous achievements—murdered for that reason, according to many admirers. This book is concerned only with what actually happened, which accords poorly with the legend. It touches on the assassination only obliquely, taking no stand on the culprits except negatively: the evidence is overwhelming that it was not a high-level plot with significant policy consequences. The main focus here is on Vietnam. A core part of the Camelot myth is that Kennedy was planning to end the war. The primary evidence presented consists of two classified documents, NSAM 263 (October 11, 1963) and 273 (shortly after the assassination). These are discussed in chapter 2. The former, in particular, continues to be subject to fanciful misreadings. It is vii

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actually quite clear and explicit, and even though the text was not available at the time, the press reported its contents accurately. The document expresses the President’s reluctant acquiescence to proposals of his advisers that troops be withdrawn if they are no longer needed to ensure “our fundamental objective of victory”—President Kennedy’s insistent condition, as the record makes crystal clear, to the day of the assassination. If Kennedy had had any interest in ending the war short of victory, he had a perfect opportunity in October 1963, when he accepted NSAM 263. As discussed in chapter 2, the United States then learned that the Saigon government it had installed was seeking a peace settlement with North Vietnam. Washington could have supported this effort, at least tolerated it, ending the war gracefully and taking credit for the peaceful outcome, even claiming in the usual manner that North Vietnam had capitulated, vindicating Washington’s noble intervention to defend South Vietnam from the “assault from the inside” (Kennedy’s term for the internal uprising that threatened to overthrow the client regime)—“internal aggression,” in the interesting phrase favored by UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Instead of grasping this opportunity to withdraw with claims of victory, Kennedy moved at once to crush the threat of peaceful settlement and US withdrawal, backing the military coup that installed a regime of hawkish generals more attuned to Kennedy’s goals of military victory. The newly released information established these conclusions more firmly, as discussed below. Documentary material that has been released since this book was written makes it even more clear that the tentative withdrawal initiative was primarily McNamara’s, very likely influenced not only by the belief at the time that victory was in sight but also by budgetary considerations. In a careful scholarly review, Marc Selverstone concludes plausibly that “McNamara’s effort to devise a carefully cali-

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brated, phased reduction of US troops from Vietnam seems to have been a function of federal and departmental planning as much as a response to the war itself.”2 Selverstone also gently refutes claims about Kennedy’s hidden intentions—so deeply hidden that there isn’t a particle of evidence for them, though there is plenty of evidence refuting them. But Camelot wish-fulfillment is likely to be as resistant to fact and logic as the rather similar Reagan worship at the other extreme of the political spectrum. The basic conclusions remain. By the late Eisenhower years, the vicious repression of the regime the United States imposed on South Vietnam in violation of the Geneva agreements of 1954 (which the United States rejected) had finally elicited indigenous resistance, which the regime was unable to contain. Kennedy therefore sharply escalated the US intervention to direct aggression, with extreme brutality: directing US air force attacks (under South Vietnamese markings), authorizing napalm and chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock, initiating population removal to virtual concentration camps where the population was “protected” from the guerrillas that US intelligence and province advisers knew they were mostly supporting. Reports from the US military were relatively “optimistic,” indicating that aggression might succeed, and would therefore be justified. At that point Kennedy’s advisers, primarily Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, called for phased withdrawal. Kennedy reluctantly acquiesced, while insisting, to the very end, that there could be no withdrawal without US victory in the war he launched. Easy opportunities for withdrawal were flatly rejected in favor of escalation, to the end. After the assassination, reports from the field finally began to reveal the truth: the USrun war was failing to overcome “the assault from the inside.” The same Kennedy advisers, including those later heralded as doves, therefore called for escalation of Kennedy’s war.

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NOAM CHOMSKY The war spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, with

horrendous consequences, surely the worst state crime of the post–World War II period. The crime is enhanced by the reaction. There is no need to tarry on Reagan’s lauding of a noble cause. Much more interesting are the reactions of presidents who can be taken seriously: President Carter’s judgment that we owe the Vietnamese no debt because “the destruction was mutual,” or the admonition to the Vietnamese by President Bush I—the statesmanlike Bush—that we seek no vengeance for the crimes the Vietnamese have committed against us, and will agree to let them enter the global system that we dominate if they will recognize their duty to put all else aside and devote themselves to the one moral issue remaining from the war: finding the remains of American pilots whom they murdered while those pilots strayed innocently over North Vietnam. As Bush put it, with much media approbation, “It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past.” Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but “we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam War” if they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the American pilots still missing.3 Across the political spectrum, the Vietnam War is regarded as a US defeat. That too is an interesting reaction. True, the United States did not achieve its maximal aims: Vietnam was not turned into the Philippines. But as the record makes clear, the real concerns were quite different. They were one special case of a leading theme of Cold War history. When World War II ended, the United States was in a position of unprecedented wealth and power, and the political leadership developed sophisticated plans for a global system that would conform to the needs of dominant domestic forces within the business classes. Naturally, they were concerned that the system might erode, as happened at once, with what is called “the loss of China” as China declared independence. A “loss,” on the tacit and unquestioned assumption

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that it is ours by right, part of our world system. The “loss of China” quickly became a major factor in domestic US life, including the rise of McCarthyism: “Who was responsible for the loss of China?” Later presidents feared that they would be blamed for “the loss of Indochina,” and much else. Vietnam in itself was not of great significance to the United States. Rather, it was perceived as a “virus” that might “spread contagion,” to adopt Henry Kissinger’s later terms for Chile’s Allende. A constant theme running through policy planning is that successful independent development, even in some tiny place like Grenada, might have a “domino effect.” “The rot might spread” to others, causing real problems. In the case of Indochina, a major concern was Indonesia, with its rich resources, and even to Japan—the “superdomino,” as it was described by Asia historian John Dower—which might accommodate to an independent East Asia, becoming its industrial and technological center, independent of US control, in effect constructing a New Order in Asia. The United States was not prepared to lose the Pacific phase of World War II in the early 1950s, so it turned quickly to support for France’s war to reconquer its former colony, and then on to the horrors that ensued. The proper way to deal with a virus is to kill it and protect potential victims from contagion. That was done successfully. Vietnam was virtually destroyed: it would be a model for no one. And the region was protected by installing murderous dictatorships. The most important case was Indonesia, protected from contagion by the 1965 Suharto coup, a “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it accurately, while joining in the general euphoria about “a gleam of light in Asia” (liberal columnist James Reston). In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy recognized that “our effort” in Vietnam was “excessive” after 1965, with Indonesia safely inoculated.

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NOAM CHOMSKY In later years a combination of Vietnamese resistance and

the growth of a mass and active anti-war movement led the US business community to recognize that the war was no longer worth pursuing, and it was slowly wound down, not without horrific crimes. It is of some interest and significance that the outcome is described as “a defeat.” It was, indeed, a partial defeat, but overall a significant victory. The “defense of South Vietnam” was not the only achievement of Camelot. Another was bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba, in the words of Kennedy’s close associate historian Arthur Schlesinger. Kennedy’s terrorist war against Cuba, which was no small affair, was a major factor in bringing about what Schlesinger described accurately as “the most dangerous moment in history,” the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy is much lauded for his cool courage in bringing the crisis to an end. The truth, now well established by scholarship,4 sheds little glory on the Camelot image. At the peak moment of the crisis, when Kennedy’s subjective assessment was that the probability of nuclear war was 1/3 to 1/2, he decided to reject Khrushchev’s offer to end the crisis by simultaneous public withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and US missiles from Turkey—obsolete missiles for which a withdrawal order had already been given because they were being replaced by far more lethal and threatening Polaris submarines. Luckily, Khrushchev accepted the humiliation. There is much more, some of it reviewed in the final chapter. To quote: One of the most significant legacies left by the Administration was its 1962 decision to shift the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” while providing the means and training to ensure that the task would be properly performed. As described by Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, that historic decision led to a change from

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toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

That hideous chapter in the history of Latin American travail for five hundred years—now mercifully coming to an end, in significant measure—was brought to a peak of fury by Reagan’s terrorist wars in Central America. These ended immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite unit of the US-trained and -armed Salvadoran army, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy school of counterinsurgency, under the direct orders of the Salvadoran High Command. The twenty-fifth anniversary passed in the usual silence accorded to our own crimes. But the facts are not obscure. Genuine scholarship is well aware that from 1960 until “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet Bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries,…an unprecedented human catastrophe” in Central America alone, culminating in the Reagan-Bush years.5 Apart from the intrinsic importance of the events themselves, the comparison of image and reality, as is often the case, offers a useful opportunity for self-examination.