JFK and withdrawal from Vietnam
As a social democrat, I am reasonably partial to President Kennedy who was, as a liberal with a social conscience, the closest thing to a social democrat who has yet inhabited the White House. A continuing source of annoyance to me is the debate which continues to fester over whether or not he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. The evidence, in fact, is abundant, that that is precisely what he wanted to do. Numerous individuals who had discussed Vietnam with Kennedy, including Kenny O'Donnell, Evelyn Lincoln, Canadian PM Lester Pearson, Senator Mike Mansfield and others, state quite explicitly that he mentioned to them his intention to withdraw from Vietnam once the 1964 election was behind him. Yet in Blackwell's Companion to the Vietnam War, Edwin E. Moise rejects this view on the basis of Kennedy's public statements. It is astonishing but true that Moise rejects the considerable amount of evidence that reveals JFK's actual intentions on the basis of statements in which he was - like all politicians - trying only not to give his enemies any ammunition to use against him, at least before he was re-elected. It seems to me that in regards to such a sensitive matter his private statements yield far greater insight into his intentions that do his public utterances.
Yet so anti-JFK is the tenor of academia today that public utterances take priority over what he said in private. Indeed, Moise goes so far as to reject O'Donnell's version of JFK's words for no other reason than that he finds them 'hard to believe.' Personally, I find a lot of things in history books 'hard to believe' but I certainly am not entitled to reject them on that account. It's amazing these days how many academics are resorting to insinuation, character assassination and other CIA-type techniques to discredit Kennedy. Why, over forty years later, is it still necessary to persuade the public to believe that JFK was a sexmad male chauvinist pig who accomplished nothing and stood for nothing?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: Michael Morrissey: 'The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the assassination.'
BELOW: President Kennedy, the last decent human being in the White House:
