EIGHTEEN
WHEN I BEGAN TO WORK with Oliver Stone as an adviser for the development of the script of the screenplay for his movie JFK, I realized that few Kennedy assassination researchers and writers had ever looked at the scene in Washington during 1961—63 for clues to the answers to the questions, “Why was President John F. Kennedy assassinated? What enormous pressures had arisen to create the necessity for a decision of that magnitude that would not only result in the death of Kennedy, but in the overthrow of the U.S. government?”
I discussed this subject with Stone and he became most interested in that side of the assassination scenario. I had already written letters to Jim Garrison, judge of the Court of Appeal in New Orleans, as I worked with him on his manuscript of his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Garrison had become interested in the subject of my letters and had shown them to his editor, Zachary Sklar, at Sheridan Square Press. Sklar became the screenwriter for Stone’s movie JFK, and he had discussed my letters with Stone also. It was Garrison who introduced me to Oliver Stone in July 1990.
The significance of all this was that I had introduced President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy statement NSAM #263, into these discussions. It is my belief that the policy announced so forcefully by Kennedy in his earlier NSAM #55 and in NSAM #263 had been the major factor in causing the decision by certain elements of the power elite to do away with Kennedy before his reelection and to take control of the U.S. government in the process.
Kennedy’s NSAM #263 policy would have assured that Americans by the hundreds of thousands would not have been sent to the war in Vietnam. This policy was anathema to elements of the military-industrial complex, their bankers, and their allies in the government. This policy and the almost certain fact that Kennedy would be reelected President in 1964 set the stage for the plot to assassinate him.
Strong evidence in support of this belief lies in the statements in the previous chapter that are transcribed directly from NSAM #263, and from a description of the deaths of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu.
First of all, NSAM #263, October 11, 1963, was a crucial White House document. Much of it, guided by White House policy, was actually written by my boss in the Pentagon, General Krulak, myself, and others of his staff. I am familiar with it and with events which led to its creation.
Its cover letter authenticated that policy to the addressees. In this case, McGeorge Bundy prepared and signed the cover letter and dispatched it directly to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Official copies were made available to the director of central intelligence and the administrator, Agency for Internal Development. These formalities authenticated the President’s decision that applied to specific sections of the “Memorandum for the President, Subject: Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam,” dated October 2, 1963.
In order to appreciate what had taken place with the publication of President Kennedy’s policy I shall cite the few paragraphs of this NSAM #263 (Document 146 in the Pentagon Papers)
At a meeting on October 5, 1963, the President considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam.
The President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
After discussion of the remaining recommendations of the report, the President approved an instruction to Ambassador Lodge which is set forth in State Department telegram No. 534 to Saigon.
What is unusual about this cover letter from McGeorge Bundy is the fact that, although it makes reference to the McNamara-Taylor report, it does not carry or cite an enclosure. Without the report itself in the record this cover letter of NSAM #263 is all but worthless. This fact has confused researchers since that time. The cover letter authenticates the fact that the President had approved only “Section I B (1-3) of the report.” In other words, on that date, that was an official statement of the President’s Vietnam policy. What does that section say? In the usual source documents of the Pentagon Papers the researcher will have to turn to another section to find Document 142, “Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam.” Here he will discover the cited sections (pertinent items extracted below):
IB(2) A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. military personnel by that time.
IB(3) In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U. S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
In brief, those sections above are the essence of the Kennedy policy that would take men out of Vietnam in 1963 and the bulk of all military personnel out by 1965. At that time, after nearly a generation of involvement in Vietnam, this was a clear signal that Kennedy meant to disengage American military men from Vietnam. This was the bombshell. It made headlines around the world.
On January 15, 1992, Oliver Stone made a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This was about one month after the movie had opened in theaters across the country. In this speech Stone said, “Had President Kennedy lived, Americans would not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam War.”
For his movie, and for having said things such as the above quote, Oliver Stone was attacked by leading journalists across the country. To this he responded, “Am I a disturber of history . . . [not] to accept this settled version of history, which must not be disturbed? . . . No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not history! This is myth! It is a myth that a scant number of Americans have ever believed. It is a myth that a generation of esteemed journalists and historians have refused to examine, have refused to question, and above all, have closed ranks to criticize and vilify those who do.”
Stone was right. But the problem goes beyond that which he cited so eloquently. Our history books and the basic sources of history which lie buried in the archives of government documents that have been concealed from the public and, worse still, government documents that have been tampered with and forged. As I have just demonstrated above, this most important policy statement, NSAM #263, that so many historians and journalists say does not exist, has been divided into two sections in the Pentagon Papers source history. One section is no more than the simple cover letter, and the other section, pages away in the record, is presented by its simple title as a “report” with no cross-reference whatsoever to the fact that it is the basic substance of President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Such things are no accident. The record of the Kennedy administration has been savagely distorted in basic government documents and by so-called historians who have accepted the myths to be found on the record.
I have cited these facts with care in order to demonstrate what the original presidential policy was and to compare it with what has been done with it since those days by those who wish to conceal and obfuscate the facts of the Kennedy administration by means of such grandiose “cover story” creations as the Pentagon Papers, the Report of the Warren Commission, and the whole family of historical publications both from governmental and private sources. As we have seen repeatedly, the cover-story aspect of the plot to kill the President is much the more serious and elaborate task of the whole plan. Furthermore, as we have seen as a result of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, the cover-story activity lives on today.
When the “Department of Defense Study of American Decisionmaking on Vietnam,” as the Pentagon Papers study is called officially, was completed in January 1969, it was said to be highly classified and did not become available to the public until Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked in Vietnam with Lansdale and Conein, found a way to make the documents available to certain major newspapers in June 1971. While the Nixon administration was bringing charges against Ellsberg and the newspapers in order to suppress their use, Senator Mike Gravel obtained a complete set of these documents and, over a period of days, read them into the Congressional Record as a way of making them available to the public.
In his introduction to this four-volume compilation Senator Gravel said:
The Pentagon Papers tell of the purposeful withholding and distortion of facts. There are no military secrets to be found here, only an appalling litany of faulty premises and questionable objectives, built one upon the other over the course of four administrations, and perpetuated today by a fifth administration.
The Pentagon Papers show that we have created, in the last quarter century, a new culture, a national security culture, protected from the influences of American life by the shield of secrecy.
This was 1971. In 1991, after time enough to permit government historians to correct the brazen errors and omissions of the record of the Vietnam era, the Office of the Historian in the Bureau of Public Affairs of the Department of State has published a new document, “Vietnam August—December 1963.” Even in this new publication, the presentation of NSAM #263 is unclear. On page 395 it publishes document #194, National Security Action Memorandum #263 in the form presented above. Then without any cross-referencing data whatsoever, on page 336, it presents Document #167: Memorandum From the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor) and the Secretary of Defense (McNamara) to the President, Subject: Report of McNamara—Taylor Mission to South Vietnam. Then to further obfuscate the record, this State Department publication omits crucial elements of the trip report entirely. Instead of improving the historical record with the passage of time, the authors are further distorting it. There can be but one conclusion. Almost three decades later the cover story lives on, and records of the Kennedy era, in particular, are the hardest hit.
The deaths of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu in Saigon on November 1, 1963, were considered a Vietnamese internal affair during most of the decade that followed, but on September 16, 1971, President Richard Nixon made a statement that revived those events and put them in a different light. Sen. Harry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a strong possibility as the Democratic candidate against Nixon in 1972, had suggested that the United States might be in a position to exert discreet pressure upon President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to move toward a more democratic form of government and to settle the warfare in Indochina.
That same day, President Nixon, when questioned by Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News about the Jackson statement, responded, “If what the senator is suggesting is that the United States should use its leverage now to overthrow Thieu, I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem, and the complicity in the murder of Diem; and the way to get out of Vietnam, in my opinion, is not to overthrow Thieu.”
Nixon had put a match to the fuse, and the bomb was certain to explode. The “Pentagon Papers” had been published just three months prior to this exchange, and some of those carefully screened documents did appear to show that the Kennedy administration had had a role in the overthrow of Diem in 1963. But until this Nixon comment, no public official had openly suggested the Kennedy administration was guilty of complicity in Diem’s murder.
It was not long after this press conference that a CIA agent, Howard Hunt, then working as a consultant to Charles Colson, Nixon’s jack-of all-trades, mentioned several of the highly classified messages contained in the Pentagon Papers, specifically those that referred to White House action relative to Diem’s death. Hunt suggested to Colson that it might be possible to alter those messages, in White House files, so that anyone using them for research in later years would “discover” that President Kennedy had, beyond doubt, ordered the murder of President Diem.
Colson, the man who had said that he would walk over his own grandmother if it would help the reelection of Nixon, took no action to stop his crafty consultant from trying to see what he could do with those messages.
These events, among so many others at the time, underscored the nature of the pressures that had been brought to bear on President Diem in Saigon and President Kennedy in Washington during those fateful months of October and November 1963. They also demonstrated the deep animosity that still existed between Nixon and the Kennedys. As this example shows, there were in the Nixon camp those who would not stop at forgery to achieve their goal of destroying the Kennedy historical record.
This was a role played quite willingly by Howard Hunt, who was as bitter about the Kennedys as was Nixon. Despite the unclear account of the assassination of the Diems that appears in the Pentagon Papers, and because of the totally false record that resulted from the forgery of the White House records, the extent of the Kennedy role in U.S. government plans to remove the Diems from power has been stated clearly and authoritatively by those familiar with it.
As mentioned earlier, Diem had made it quite clear what his goals with the Strategic Hamlet program were. His position did not jibe with those who wanted to escalate the war in Indochina and who were not at all interested in the introduction of an ancient form of self-government into the battle-scarred countryside.
On top of this came Kennedy’s desire to get the United States out of Indochina by the end of 1965, as evidenced by his orchestration of a series of events such as the Krulak-Mendenhall visit to Vietnam in September 1963. By late summer, and certainly by the time of the McNamara-Taylor trip, closely held plans had progressed for the removal of the Diems from Saigon. President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem.
On the same day that the President received this McNamara—Taylor report, Gen. Tran Van Don had his first “accidental” (it had been carefully planned) meeting with the CIA’s Lt. Col. Lucien Conein at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. This was a meeting of great significance, and one that to this day has never been properly explained. General Don was the commander of the South Vietnamese army. He had been born and educated in France and had served in the French army during World War II. He and Conein were well acquainted.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1963, the CIA designated Conein, one of its most valuable agents in the Far East, to meet with his old friend of eighteen years, Gen. Tran Van Don, to arrange for the ouster of President Diem. Only ten years earlier, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and Conein had worked hard to get Ngo Dinh Diem started as the newly assigned president of South Vietnam.
Conein’s task was to stay close enough to key Vietnamese to assure them that the United States would not interfere with their plan to move in as soon as President Diem had left Saigon, and to keep Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Conein’s own CIA associates informed.
The plan prepared by the United States had been carefully drawn to leave Diem no alternative except to leave on this scheduled trip. There was much discussion and argument among members of the Kennedy administration, who knew of the President’s intention to oust Diem once he had left the country. With Madame Nhu and Archbishop Thuc already in Europe, Diem and his brother were to follow to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The evacuation plan, carefully orchestrated under Kennedy’s direction, broke down, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered. There have been many accounts of this coup d’état. They do not tell the role that Kennedy played in the story, and many were created to cover the real plan and to protect those Vietnamese who had worked closely with the administration.
I was on duty in the Joint Chiefs of Staff section of the Pentagon on the day of the coup d’état. My immediate boss, General Krulak, knew the full details of the plan to remove Diem from the scene by flying him and his brother out of Saigon. Krulak remained in contact with the White House as developments in Saigon were relayed. I can recall clearly the absolute shock in our offices when it was learned that Diem had not left on the proffered aircraft for Europe.
One of the most important narratives of this event was written by Edward G. Lansdale in his autobiography In the Midst of Wars. Few Americans, if any, knew Ngo Dinh Diem and the situation in Vietnam from 1954—68 better than Ed Lansdale. He wrote:
As the prisons filled up with political opponents, as the older nationalist parties went underground, with the body politics fractured, Communist political cadre became active throughout South Vietnam, recruiting followers for action against a government held together mainly by the Can Lao elite rather than by popular support. The reaped whirlwind finally arrived in November 1963, when the nationalist opposition erupted violently, imprisoning many of the Can Loa and killing Diem, Nhu, and others. It was heartbreaking to be an onlooker to this tragic bit of history.
It was some time before the news became known that Diem had fled to Cholon and been captured and killed there. This news was flashed around the world; this was the story that everyone heard. The public never heard of the planned flight to Europe that the Kennedy administration had arranged for him.
Thus it was that the file of routine cable traffic between Washington and Saigon eventually became known with the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers. This is how it happened that Howard Hunt was able to locate certain top-level messages to and from the White House and Ambassador Lodge in Saigon that contained information referring to “highest authority”—the cable traffic code for President Kennedy.
None of these messages contained any reference to a plot to kill President Diem and his brother or came even close to it. Concealed within these messages were carefully worded phrases that gave Ambassador Lodge the information he needed in order to direct all participants into action and to begin the careful removal of the two brothers to Europe by commercial aircraft.
According to information that came out during the Watergate hearings, those files that had been forged to smear President Kennedy were put in Hunt’s White House safe, where they remained until discovered by investigators later.
There is much about this episode that has become important upon review. There are those who have been so violently opposed to Jack Kennedy and all that he stood for that they have stooped to all kinds of sordid activities to smear him while he was alive, to attack his brother Bobby while he was still alive, and to hound Sen. Edward Kennedy to this day. Nixon’s gratuitous reference to Kennedy’s “complicity in the murder of Diem” after a decade of silence on that subject speaks for itself. The efforts of Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson (both employees of the White House at the time) to dig up old files in order to besmirch the memory of President Kennedy provide another example.
In an ominous way, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate episodes were cut from the same fabric, and most important, their exposure was a direct outgrowth of the nationwide dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. Because the development of the war in Indochina had been spread out so long, since 1945, and because most of the events that brought about this terrible form of modem genocide in the name of “anticommunism” or “containment” were buried in deep secrecy or not even available in written records, Robert S. McNamara, then secretary of defense, directed, on June 17, 1967, that a task force be formed to collate and study the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present.
This project, which produced thousands of documents of all kinds from many sources, was the primary source of that group of more than four thousand documents that were surreptitiously released to various news media and called the Pentagon Papers. Almost four years later, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among others, started the serialization of the Pentagon Papers. Few people have been more articulate on the subject than the then senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel:
The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government’s ends, but never the cause of their own people.
In his brilliant introduction the senator included an extract from the works of the English novelist and historian, H. G. Wells, who once wrote:
The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession” and its days are numbered.
The publication of the Pentagon Papers became an event unique in American history. One day after their publication had begun in the New York Times, I received a call from the British Broadcasting Corporation requesting that I travel to London to participate in a series of programs, live on prime-time TV, with Daniel Ellsberg. I did travel to London and did take part in a daily series on the subject, but Ellsberg did not participate in the broadcasts, because his lawyer advised him not to leave the country at that time.
In this book, I have used various editions of the Pentagon Papers as reference material. They are useful and they are quite accurate as far as individual documents go, but they are dangerous in the hands of those who do not have the experience or the other sources required to validate and balance their content. This is because their true source was only marginally the Pentagon and because the clever selection of those documents by the compilers removed many important papers. This neglect of key documents served to reduce the value of those that remained to tell the story of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, the Pentagon Papers were a compilation of documents designed to paint President John F. Kennedy as the villain of the story, and to shield the role of the CIA.
This vast stack of papers has been labeled the Pentagon Papers, but that is a misnomer. It is quite true that most of them were found in certain highly classified files in the Pentagon, but they were functionally limited files. For example, despite their volume—nearly four thousand documents—there are remarkably few that actually bear the signature of military officers. In fact, many of those that carry the signature of a military officer, or that refer to military officers, make reference to such men as Edward G. Lansdale, who actually worked for the CIA while serving in a cover assignment with the military. When such papers are removed from the “military” or “Pentagon” categorization, what remains is a nonmilitary and non-Pentagon collection. For the serious and honest historian, this becomes an important distinction. To be truly “Pentagon” Papers, the majority of them, at least, ought to have been written there.
In a letter to the then secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, dated January 15, 1969, Leslie H. Gelb, director of the Study Task Force that assembled the Pentagon Papers, said: “In the beginning, Mr. McNamara gave the task force full access to OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] files, and the task force received access to CIA materials, and some use of State Department cables and memoranda. We had no access to the White House files.”
Despite this disclaimer, there are many White House files in the Pentagon Papers—and it was this group of documents, in fact, that was the source of the anti-Kennedy forgeries.
The files from which most of these papers were obtained were in that section of the Office of the Secretary of Defense called International Security Affairs. Although this office was in the Pentagon, it was lightly staffed with military officers, and most of its activities concerned other government departments and agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House. That is why its files consisted of papers that originated outside the Pentagon, giving the Pentagon Papers production an entirely nonmilitary slant.
Another reason for caution regarding the utilization of the Pentagon Papers as history is that, as Gelb said, “These outstanding people [those who worked on the task force] came from everywhere—the military services, State, OSD, and the ‘think tanks.’ Some came for a month, for three months, for six months. . . in all, we had thirty-six professionals working on these studies, with an average of four months per man.”
That says it all! They had become experts in four months!
John Foster Dulles, formerly secretary of state, once declared that one of the most complicated periods in this nation’s history began in Indochina on September 2, 1945. There is no way that this group, averaging “four months per man” in its studies in 1967, and 1968, was going to be qualified to present a true and accurate account of that war by the compilation of a scattering of papers that contained bits and pieces of the story.
This reveals one of my greatest misgivings concerning the accuracy of the study. There are altogether too many important papers that did not get included in this study, too many that were absolutely crucial to an understanding of the origins of, and reasons for, this war.
This has been a complaint of historians who have attempted to teach the facts of this war. They have found that the history book accounts of it have been written by writers who were not there, who had little or nothing to do with it—or, conversely, that they have been written by those who were there, but who were there for a one-year tour of duty, usually in the post-1965 period. Few of these writers have had the comprehensive experience that is a prerequisite to understanding that type of contemporary history.
Regarding the Pentagon Papers themselves, Senator Gravel wrote:
The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American war, serving to perpetuate American military power in Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims, as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation for toughness and determination.
He added:
The elaborate secrecy precautions, the carefully contrived subterfuges, the precisely orchestrated press leaks, were intended not to deceive “the other side,” but to keep the American public in the dark. . . . For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of half-truths or deliberate deceit by executives who consider the people of the Congress as adversaries.”1
It is important to understand the Pentagon Papers’ subtle anti-Kennedy slant. Nothing reveals this bias more than the following extract taken from the section “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May— November 1963.”
At the end of a crucial summary of the most momentous ninety-day period in modern American history, from August 22 to November 22, 1963, this is what the authors of the Pentagon Papers had to say:
After having delayed an appropriate period, the U.S. recognized the new government on November 8. As the euphoria wore off, however, the real gravity of the economic situation and the lack of expertise in the new government became apparent to both Vietnamese and American officials. The deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program also came more and more clearly into perspective.
These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu conference on November 20 when [Henry Cabot] Lodge and the country team [from Vietnam] met with [Dean] Rusk, [Robert] McNamara, [Maxwell] Taylor, [George] Ball, and [McGeorge] Bundy. But the meeting ended inconclusively. After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington, the White House tried to pull together some conclusions and offer some guidance for our continuing and now deeper involvement in Vietnam. The instructions contained in NSAM 273, however, did not reflect the truly dire situation as it was to come to light in succeeding weeks. The reappraisals forced by the new information would swiftly make it irrelevant as it was overtaken by events.
Recall what had been going on during that month of November 1963. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother had been murdered, and the administration of South Vietnam had been placed in the hands of Gen. Duong Van “Big” Minh. Then, in one of the strangest scenarios of recent history, most of the members of the Kennedy cabinet had flown to Honolulu, together, for that November 20 series of conferences. The full cabinet meeting—even the secretary of agriculture was there—in Hawaii was to be followed by a flight to Tokyo on November 22. Again, almost all of the Kennedy cabinet members were on that flight to Tokyo. They were on that aircraft bound for Tokyo when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas. Upon receipt of that stunning news, they ordered the plane to return directly to Hawaii and, almost immediately, on to Washington.
But consider here the strange and impersonal words used by this “official history.” The Pentagon Papers, in its long section on the events of that tragic period, ends its own narrative report of those events by saying: “But probably more important, the deterioration of the military situation of the Vietnamese position. . . .”
What could have been the basis for that conclusion? What caused the Papers’ authors to say that in 1968? Let’s look at the record from the pages of their own work:
1. On September 11, 1963, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had cabled to Secretary Rusk saying:
“I do not doubt the military judgment that the war in the countryside is going well now.”
2. On September 16, 1963, President Kennedy had written a personal letter to President Ngo Dinh Diem in which he said: “ . . . the contest against the Communists in the last year and one half has gradually but steadily turned in our favor.”
3. On September 29, 1963, Secretary McNamara and General Taylor met for three hours with President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. As reported, President Diem said:
“The war was going well, thanks in large measure to the strategic hamlets program . . . ” Diem concluded his optimistic presentation by noting that “although the war was going well, much remained to be done in the Delta area” [where most of the Tonkinese had been sent].
4. Then we have the McNamara/Taylor “Trip Report” of October 2, 1963, that became the body of NSAM #263 on October 11, 1963, that concludes:
o #1. “The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress.
o #2. ”A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.
o #3. “ . . . the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
o #6. “ . . . We believe the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965.”
News of this “White House Report” was splashed across the front page of the U.S. armed forces Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper of October 4, 1963, in banner headlines: U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.
These are quotes taken from official documents of that time, all taking an optimistic view of the war by the leaders closest to it and including statements by President Kennedy and President Diem. The official Kennedy White House policy document, National Security Action Memorandum #263, was dated October 11, 1963, and there is no evidence that the situation, as perceived by Kennedy and his closest advisers, had changed over the next month. General Krulak was as close to the President and his policy as he had ever been, and I worked directly with General Krulak on the Joint Staff. We never heard of any changes in plans from the White House.
Just four days after Kennedy’s death and less than sixty days after Kennedy published NSAM #263, which visualized the Vietnamization of the war and the return of all American personnel by the end of 1965, Lyndon Johnson and most of the JFK cabinet viewed the situation in an entirely different light. In Johnson’s NSAM #273 they saw the military situation deteriorating (“the deterioration of . . . the Strategic Hamlet program”) and all of a sudden saw the program as a failure. (“These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu Conference on November 20. . . . ”)
This is a remarkable statement. On that date, John Kennedy was still alive and President of the United States. Yet this report says that his cabinet had been assembled in Honolulu to discuss “these topics”—the very same topics of NSAM #273, dated November 26, and a vital step on the way to a total reversal of Kennedy’s own policy as stated in the Taylor-McNamara report and in NSAM #263, dated October 2, 1963. The total reversal was completed with the publication of NSAM #288, March 26, 1964.
This situation cannot be treated lightly. How did it happen that the Kennedy cabinet had traveled to Hawaii at precisely the same time Kennedy was touring in Texas? How did it happen that the subject of discussion in Hawaii, before JFK was killed, was a strange agenda that would not come up in the White House until after he had been murdered? Who could have known, beforehand, that this new—non-Kennedy—agenda would be needed in the White House because Kennedy would no longer be President?
Is there any possibility that the “powers that be” who planned and executed the Kennedy assassination had also been able to get the Kennedy cabinet out of the country and to have them conferring in Hawaii on an agenda that would be put before President Lyndon Johnson just four days after Kennedy’s death?
President Kennedy would not have sent his cabinet to Hawaii to discuss that agenda. He had issued his own agenda for Vietnam on October 11, 1963, and he had no reason to change it. More than that, he had no reason at all to send them all to Hawaii for such a conference. It is never good practice for a President to have key members of his cabinet out of town while he is on an extended trip. Why was the cabinet in Hawaii? Who ordered the cabinet members there? If JFK had no reason to send them to Hawaii, who did, and why?
Keep in mind, through this series of vitally important questions, that we are piling circumstance upon circumstance. It is the body of circumstantial evidence that proves the existence of conspiracy.
As soon as the Honolulu conference broke up, these same cabinet members departed from Hawaii on an unprecedented trip to Japan. No one has explained why the Kennedy cabinet was ordered to Japan at that time.
This trip to Japan was not some casual event. Someone had arranged it with care. A reading of newspapers from late November 1963 reveals that extracts of speeches supposedly given by some of these cabinet officers in Japan were made available and then printed, for example, even in the Washington, D.C., Star.
We all know now that these cabinet officers did not reach Japan and that their VIP aircraft returned to Hawaii. Why would newspapers in the United States print extracts of their speeches as though they actually had gone to Japan and delivered those speeches? Who had set this trip up so meticulously that even such details as the press releases appeared to validate the presence of the cabinet members in Japan when in fact they never went there?
Continuing this account of the period, the chronology prepared by the authors of the Pentagon Papers lists the following:
22 November 1963: Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.
23 November 1963 NSAM #273: Drawing together the results of the Honolulu Conference, and Lodge’s meeting with the President, NSAM #273 reaffirms the U.S. commitment to defeat the VC in South Vietnam. . . .
These are astounding statements, considering that they were written sometime in 1968, when everyone knew that the most important fact of those two days was the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This massive compilation of official documents produced by Secretary McNamara’s “task force . . . to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present” (1969) totally ignored the assassination.
The Pentagon Papers say simply, “Lodge confers with the President,” as though it were just another day in the life of a President. Which President? Didn’t that matter? What a way to dismiss Kennedy and his tragic death! This entire section of the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned to be a complete account of the history of the Vietnam war period, cannot find a word to say about that assassination. This official history simply skips all mention of the death of the President of the United States and tells the story of the death of Diem as though it had occurred in a vacuum.
Why do you suppose Leslie Gelb, director of the Pentagon Papers Study Task Force, chose to close his “Letter of Transmittal of the Study” with this quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “This is a world of chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together as one; chance by turn rules either and has the last featuring blow at events. ”
Then, as if to introduce some reality into the study, he closes with this remarkable thought: “Our studies have tried to reflect this thought; inevitably in the organizing and writing process, they appear to assign more and less to men and free will than was the case.”
This sounds more and more like the “God throws the dice” syndrome. What could Les Gelb have been thinking about when he saw “chance” taking “the last featuring blow at events?” Did the Vietnam War happen by “chance”? Was President John F. Kennedy killed by “chance”? That takes a strange view of history. When Oliver Stone’s movie asked, “Why was Kennedy killed?” I doubt that anyone in the audience would have answered, “By chance.”
This “Letter of Transmittal” of January 15, 1969, was addressed to Clark M. Clifford, secretary of defense and a man we have quoted frequently during this work.
These questions and the subjects they unfold are the things of which assassinations and coups d’état are made. The plotters worked out their plans in detail as they moved to take over the government that Kennedy had taken from them. As a result, every other public official became a pawn on that master chess board. Assassinations and coups d’état permeate and threaten all levels of society.
These may be entirely speculative questions, but they are based upon a close reading of the subject and firsthand knowledge of the times. They are presented here for the consideration of the reader. Let the record speak for itself. It is unfortunate that most historians have not looked more carefully at Kennedy’s NSAMs from NSAM #55 in July 1961 through NSAM #263 in October 1963; or at NSAM #273 of November 26, 1963, and its draft of November 21, 1963, or at the enormous pressures that all of these documents created. If anyone had wished to zero in on the key to the source of the decision for the “Why?” and the “Who?” of that assassination, he would not have needed to go much further.
In concluding this chapter, it may be well to add a few more words. I was on Okinawa in 1945 and observed the shipments of arms being loaded onto U.S. Navy transport vessels for shipment to Haiphong Harbor in Indochina, where, as we have seen, they were given to Ho Chi Minh under the auspices of the OSS.
I was in Vietnam many times during 1952, 1953, and 1954. I saw that serenely beautiful country go from a placid recreation area for wounded and hospitalized American soldiers fighting in Korea to a hotbed of turmoil after the defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the division of the country into two parts, the forced movement of more than one million Catholic northern Tonkinese to the south, and the establishment of the Diem administration. During this period I had frequent contact with the members of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.
Then, from 1955 through 1963, I was in the Pentagon. I served as chief of special operations for the U.S. Air Force for five years, providing air force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA. I was assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the next two years, and then I was directed to create the Special Operations Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to bring that military support work under the guidance of a single “focal point” office. I headed that office until 1964, when I retired after the death of President Kennedy.
By the fall of 1963, I knew perhaps as much as anyone about the inner workings of this world of special operations. I had written the formal directives on the subject that were used officially by the U.S. Air Force and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for all military services.
Therefore, it seemed strange when I was approached after I had come back from a week spent reading intelligence papers in Admiral Felt’s headquarters in Hawaii, during September 1963, and informed that I had been selected to be the military escort officer for a group of VIP civilian guests that had been invited to visit the naval station in Antarctica and the South Pole facility at McMurdo Sound. This group was scheduled to leave on November 10, 1963, and to return by the end of the month.
Although this trip had absolutely nothing to do with my previous nine years of work, except that I had supported CIA activity in Antarctica over the years, I appreciated the invitation and looked forward to the trip as a “paid vacation.”
After we went to the South Pole and returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, a member of the VIP party, a congressman, asked me if I would like to go with him on a two-day side trip to the beautiful New Zealand Alps and to the Hermitage Chalet at the foot of Mount Cook, the highest mountain in the country. I said yes.
On the first morning of our visit I was about to have breakfast in a dining room of rare beauty, offering as it did a dazzling view of Mount Cook and the nearby range. I had secured a table for the two of us and had ordered coffee. The public-address announcer had been reading off the list of passengers to be taken to the top of Mount Cook by small aircraft for the ski ride back down when he broke off his announcements to say: “Ladies and gentlemen, the BBC have announced that President Kennedy has been shot . . . dead . . . in Dallas.”
That is how I learned of the assassination of the President and of the start of the strange events surrounding that murder and the takeover of our government as a result of that brazen act.
I have always wondered, deep in my own heart, whether that strange invitation that removed me so far from Washington and from the center of all things clandestine that I knew so well might have been connected to the events that followed. Were there things that I knew, or would have discovered, that made it wise to have me far from Washington, along with others, such as the Kennedy cabinet, who were in midair over the Pacific Ocean en route to Japan, far from the scene?
I do not know the answer to that question, although many of the things that I have observed and learned from that time have led me to surmise that such a question might be well founded. After all, I knew that type of work very well. I had worked on presidential protection and knew the great extent to which one goes to ensure the safety of the chief executive. Despite all this, established procedures were ignored on the President’s trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963.
This “Letter of Appreciation” was given to the author by his boss on the Joint Staff, Major General V.H. Krulak, USMC. He had served under General Krulak for two years and had been directed to establish the Office of Special Operations in the Joint Staff by the then Director of the Joint Staff, General Earle Wheeler, shortly before that time.
The Office of Special Operations was created to provide a system for all military services to provide special support for the clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.
President, John F. Kennedy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as he inherited them from President Eisenhower on January 25, 1961. From left: Generals David M. Shoup (Marine Corps), Thomas D. White (Air Force), and Lyman L. Lemnitzer (Army and Chairman), President John F. Kennedy, Admiral A. Burke (Navy) and General George H. Decker (Army).
The author worked under General Lemnitzer for nearly two years and learned to know him well and to respect him highly. Lemnitzer was a traditional “old soldier,” not a “cold warrior.” His friend and confidant was General Shoup, who shared much the same views. The author served, as Chief of “Team B” (code for Special Operations), under General White on the Air Staff for three years, 1957—1960. At the age of eighteen, General White was the youngest man ever to graduate from West Point. Admiral Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, gets the author’s vote as the finest of all CNO’s. He served on President Kennedy’s Cuban Study Group with General Maxwell Taylor, Allen W. Dulles, and Bobby Kennedy. General Decker, a brilliant fiscal expert, graduated from Lafayette College in 1924.
In Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963, actor Kevin Costner played the part of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and actor Donald Sutherland played the part of “Man X.”
During his January 15, 1992, speech at the National Press Club, Oliver Stone revealed the identity of “Man X,” saying, “So many people have asked me ‘Who is Man X?’ Let me just say that Man X exists. He is here today on the podium. He is Fletcher Prouty.” Fletcher Prouty is seated second to right of podium, looking at Stone.
L. Fletcher Prouty
Colonel Prouty and General Abrams are life-long acquaintances, and natives of Springfield, Massachusetts.
The author, commissioned in the U.S. Cavalry, reported for active duty during July 1941 with the 37th Armored Regiment of the 4th Armored Division. The first officer he reported to was Captain Creighton W. Abrams, adjutant of the 37th Armored Regiment. General Abrams became one of the greatest combat commanders of World War II. He was named Commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam in 1968 by President Johnson and continued in that capacity under President Nixon. He became Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, in 1972.
The author flew from Okinawa to the Japanese Air Base “Atsugi” on September 1, 1945, the day before the official Japanese surrender. He flew in U.S. Marines, a part of the elite guard for General Douglas MacArthur.
Atsugi became a U.S. Naval Air Station. The CIA established a Far East Headquarters for its U-2 “Spy Plane” operations at Atsugi. Lee Harvey Oswald served at Atsugi with a complement of U.S. Marines during 1957-1958. Customarily, marines on such highly classified duty are carefully selected and have outstanding records. Oswald had U-2 and radar experience.
August 22, 1945. Japanese generals from the campaign in Manchuria whitewashed this Japanese bomber and painted a red cross on it. They flew to Yontan Air Base, Okinawa, to surrender to American forces rather than to the Russians or Chinese.
August 23, 1945. The author in front of the Japanese “Betty” bomber at Yontan Air Base, Okinawa. Note the red cross symbol of surrender.
During this period, August-September 1945, a 500,000-man Japanese invasion force stockpile of U.S. military materiel was reloaded from Okinawa onto U.S. Navy transport vessels. The harbormaster told the author that one half of that enormous shipment was being sent to Korea, and that the other half was going to Indochina. Both became “Cold War” period war zones.
A giant mushroom cloud rises over Nagasaki on the southern island of Japan after “Fat Man,” the first combat-ready, five-foot-diameter implosion sphere in a tactical bomb, was dropped by an Air Force B-29 of the 509th Composite Group from Tinian in the Marianas Islands.
“In the twenty-one short days from July 16, 1945, the date of the ‘Trinity’ test in New Mexico, through Potsdam and Hiroshima to August 9th, the date of Nagasaki, the fate of the world was changed for all time.
“International control of nuclear weapons means world government, nothing tess.”—Bernard J. O’Keefe, the man who was responsible for readying and releasing the “Fat Man” bomb over Nagasaki, from his book Nuclear Hostages, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.
The author (left) with Captain Ed Clark and Captain Harry Rogers at Tokyo International Airport, 1954.
The author returned to the Far East during July 1952. He became commander of the 99th Air Transport Squadron of the Military Air Transport Service.
During those years, Colonel Prouty met Edward G. Lansdale and members of his special CIA operation in Manila during 1953-1954, and flew some of them to Saigon when they were transferred there to establish the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission in 1954.
It seems that those who planned the murder of the President knew the inner workings of the government very well. This fact is made evident not so much by the skill with which the murder of the President was undertaken as by the masterful cover-up program that has continued since November 22, 1963, and that terrible hour in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza when the warfare in Indochina moved from a low-intensity conflict, as seen by President Kennedy, to a major operation—a major war—in the hands of the Johnson administration.