From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Response to Chomsky on JFK & Vietnam
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 08:31:00 GMT

/** gen.newsletter: 130.0 **/
** Topic: Chomsky on JFK and Vietnam **
** Written  5:28 am  Jan  5, 1993 by m.morrissey@asco.comlink.apc.org in cdp:gen.newsletter **

Dec. 24, 1992

Letters to the Editor
Z Magazine
150 West Canton St.
Boston, MA 02118
USA

Dear Z,

Noam Chomsky's argument against what he calls the "withdrawal
thesis" ("Vain Hopes, False Dreams," Z, Oct. 1992) contains a
number of logical errors.

It may be true that some biographers and assassination researchers
are JFK hagiographers, but one need not deny that Kennedy was as
ruthless a cold warrior as any other president to acknowledge that
he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam.  Reagan's decision to
withdraw from Lebanon doesn't make him a secret dove either.

The withdrawal "thesis" is not a thesis but a fact, amply
documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased
Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," Vol. 2, pp. 160-200).
Since Chomsky himself co-edited Vol. 5, I am surprised that he
fails to mention that this PP account states clearly that "the
policy of phase out and withdrawal and all the plans and programs
oriented to it" ended "de jure" in March 1964 (p. 196; my
emphasis).  It is also clear that the change in the withdrawal
policy occurred after the assassination:

   The only hint that something might be different from on-going
   plans came in a Secretary of Defense memo for the President
   three days prior to this NSC meeting [on Nov. 26]....In early
   December, the President [Johnson] began to have, if not second
   thoughts, at least a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam.  In
   discussions with his advisors, he set in motion what he hoped
   would be a major policy review... (p. 196).

There can be no question, then, if we stick to the record, that
Kennedy had decided and planned to pull out, had begun to
implement those plans, and that Johnson subsequently reversed
them.

The thesis which Chomsky is actually arguing against is his own
formulation:  "withdrawal without victory."  It is true that the
withdrawal plan was predicated on the assumption of military
success, but the world's most famous linguist should not have to
be reminded that an assumption is not a condition.  There is a
difference between saying "The military campaign is progressing
well, and we should be able to withdraw by the end of 1965," which
is how I read the McNamara-Taylor report and Kennedy's
confirmation of it in NSAM 263, and "If we win the war, we will
withdraw," which is how Chomsky reads the same documents.

We do not know what Kennedy may have secretly wanted or what he
would have done if he had he lived.  Whether he really believed
the war was going well, as the record states, or privately knew it
was not, as Newman contends, is also unknowable.  What we do know,
from the record, Chomsky notwithstanding, is that Johnson reversed
the withdrawal policy sometime between December 1963 and March
1964.

The point is crucial.  If one manages to say, as Chomsky and
others (Michael Albert, Alexander Cockburn) do, that in truth
there was no change in policy, that in fact there never was a
withdrawal policy but only a withdrawal policy conditional on
victory (until after Tet), and that therefore Johnson and Nixon
simply continued what Kennedy started, then the question of the
relation of the policy change (since there wasn't one) to the
assassination does not arise.

If, however, one states the facts correctly, the question is
unavoidable.  Exactly when Johnson reversed the policy, and
whether he did so because conditions changed, or because
perceptions of conditions changed, or for whatever reason, is
beside the point.  Why do Chomsky et al. avoid the straightforward
formulation which is nothing but a summary of the PP account:  JFK
thought we were winning, so he planned to withdraw; Johnson
decided that we weren't, so he killed the plan.  The reason is
clear.  Once you admit that there was a radical policy change in
the months following the assassination, whether that change was a
reaction to a (presumed) change in conditions or not, you must ask
if the change was related to the assassination, unless you are a
fool.  Then, like it or not, you are into conspiracy theory.

Chomsky, uncharacteristically, is telling us the same thing the
government, the mass media, and Establishment historians have been
telling us for almost thirty years--that the assassination had no
political significance.  The withdrawal plan was never a secret,
but the overwhelming majority of historians have simply ignored
those forty pages in the Gravel PP (also carefully circumscribed
in the New York Times edition of the PP), treating the Kennedy-
Johnson Vietnam policy as a seamless continuum, exactly as Chomsky
does.

Conspiracy does not explain this degree of unanimity of opinion in
the face of facts clearly to the contrary, but Chomsky's own
propaganda model does (see Manufacturing Consent).  One variation
of this model, as Michael Albert has made clear in this magazine,
is that conspiracy theory is incompatible with "institutional" or
"structural" theory.  That the distinction is spurious, and
counterproductive for progressive goals, becomes clear with one
example.  The CIA (Operations, at least) is by definition a
conspiracy, and at the same time a structural part of the US
government, i.e. an institutionalized conspiracy.  When Garrison,
Stone et al. say the President was removed by the military-
industrial-intelligence complex because he was getting in the way
of their war plans (or was perceived to be getting in the way),
what could be more "structural"?

If the withdrawal policy reversal is now entering the realm of
permissible knowledge (e.g. Schlesinger, Hilsman), some version of
the propangada model, which includes truths and half-truths as
well as lies, will explain this too, just as it will explain why
CIA (Colby) endorses a book by an Army intelligence officer
(Newman) that apparently supports the coup d'tat theory, and why
a film such as JFK was produced by the world's biggest propaganda
machine (Time Warner).  As always, the realm of permissible
knowledge is infused with smoke and mirrors.

Which brings me to the document Chomsky attaches so much
importance to, the Bundy draft of NSAM 273.  Bundy, as National
Security Adviser, was the highest common denominator in the
intelligence community in the Kennedy-Johnson transition--above
even CIA, and far above Johnson.  Whatever the nation's darkest
secrets were on November 22, 1963, it was Bundy who filled Johnson
in on them, not vice versa.  Now, after a quarter of a century,
just as Garrison, Stone et al. are bringing the question of the
relation between the assassination and Vietnam to a head, a Bundy
document appears that ostensibly proves (for Chomsky) that there
was no change in policy.  How convenient.

But in fact the Bundy draft can be seen as supporting any one of
several contradictory analyses, which I'm sure is exactly the way
the smoke and mirrors artists at Langley like to have things.  If
you take NSAM 273 and the Bundy draft at face value, as Chomsky
does, they prove there was no change in the withdrawal policy, as
explicitly stated in paragraph 2.  If you take that as a lie, and
the other paragraphs (6-8) as an implicit reversal of the
withdrawal policy, as Peter Scott and Arthur Schlesinger do, they
prove that either Kennedy reversed his own policy, or Johnson
reversed it, depending on whether you believe Bundy wrote the
draft for Kennedy or for Johnson (meaning, in the latter case,
that Bundy was part of the coup).  To this must be added the
question of the authenticity of the Bundy draft (worth asking,
considering the circumstances), and the question (unanswerable) of
whether Kennedy would have approved it, since he never saw it or
discussed it with Bundy.

Here again, Chomsky is fighting a straw man.  One need not prove
that Johnson reversed the policy with NSAM 273 to prove that he
reversed it.  All we need for the latter is the PP and all the
documents, including Bundy's draft, taken at face value, which
prove that withdrawal was official U.S. policy in November 1963,
and that Johnson began abandoning that policy the following month.
Chomsky's Camelot debunking, on target as it may be in some
respects, cannot obscure this fact, and should not distract us
from the enormously important question that Garrison, Stone and
many others are asking.


Sincerely,


Michael Morrissey
** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive