ON JFK: A PRESIDENT BETRAYED (Part 1 of 2)

I watched the documentary, "JFK: A President Betrayed," last week.  It is a 90-minute film released in 2013, produced by Cory Taylor and Darin Nellis. The film focuses on the sabotage attempted by members of President John F. Kennedy's advisory staff, which occurred throughout his presidency.

Dean Acheson, an advisor during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, openly defied the President telling colleagues, "We have no leadership."  The former Secretary of State had been accused by many members of Congress and others of having been directly responsible for losing China to Communism during the Truman Administration. The elder statesman vowed to never again appear weak when facing down Communism.

The Air Force's top general, Curtis LeMay, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis in which his only solution was an immediate surprise attack on Cuba, said to his Commander in Chief in a meeting at the White House, "You're in a pretty bad fix."  Mr. Kennedy's response was immediate, "You're in there with me."

W. Averell Harriman, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs under Kennedy, went so far as to re-write the President's message to John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. Ambassador to India. Galbraith had previously told Mr. Kennedy that he thought he could arrange a back-channel message to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi to discuss peace. In a typed cable, heavily redacted in Mr. Harriman's own hand, you can see how the Assistant Secretary removed the President's direct order to begin the process of peace.  The cable became a message of obfuscation with no clear direction for Ambassador Galbraith.

All three powerful men believed the President too young and naive to attempt to broker peace with the Communist leaders in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Vietnam. The producers' use of on-camera recollections and first-hand interviews, along with the exposure and examination of previously unknown and classified documents, strengthens this incredible documentary of the 35th President's short tenure. 

Though a good deal of the documentary concerns Kennedy's dealings with Nikita Khrushchev over the division of Germany, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the two areas of the film that struck me hardest were the revelations and discussions regarding National Security Action Memorandum No. 263, dated October 11, 1963, and a meeting held in the Oval Office with President Kennedy on November 5, 1963. In today's blog I will limit my thoughts to the former Memorandum only. Tomorrow I will discuss the latter.

NASM 263, signed by Kennedy's National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, is addressed to the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In the memorandum Bundy references a meeting held October 5, 1963, with the President, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Army General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McNamara and Taylor had just returned from a fact-finding visit to South Vietnam ordered by the President.

The memo states that without making a formal announcement the President was ordering the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from South Vietnam by the end of the year.  The film emphasizes through interviews that this was to be the first withdrawal and that Kennedy's goal was to have all U.S. troops removed from South Vietnam by 1965.

In other words, President Kennedy was ordering the beginning of the end of our military involvement in Southeast Asia.  A State Department telegram, No. 534, from Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, to Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, was sent the same day with details of this decision, made with the input of the National Security Council.  It clearly emphasizes, again, that no formal announcement of intentions was to be given, but did specify how to handle the relationship with the South Vietnamese government.

From my back row seat it appears that I and many of my contemporaries participated in a war that was ordered to never happen. Further, an entire nation suffered more than ten years' of pain that also tore our nation apart. Those who survived the 1960's and 1970's in America can remember the period as the closest thing to a civil war since the 1860's.

I spent the first four years' of my young life out of high school in the Marine Corps and I served in Vietnam. That service, ridiculed by many during the years I served, was unnecessary if the President's orders had been carried out. Although no one can ever recover those years given to war as a result of Mr. Johnson's decision, we have every reason to be very angry now about the horrible changes this war made in our lives. I cannot even fathom the feelings this film may cause for the almost 60,000 families that lost a loved one to a brutal death far from home.

Because of the direct affect the Vietnam War had on my entire life, long after my service, this film and the information it contains cuts my heart deeply.  It is one thing to think President Johnson was wrong headed. It is another thing to learn that his predecessor laid out a plan to end this overseas adventure, as well as provide a way to reach out to the leader of the North Vietnamese government for peace, all of which was ignored.

It seems Lee Harvey Oswald shot the wrong man in 1963. What is it about Presidents from Texas and unnecessary wars?

(Part 2 tomorrow, how close we came to a sane Cuba policy)