[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: JFK's lessons for Iraq - Marc J. Selverstone - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  JFK's lessons for Iraq

By Marc J. Selverstone  |  March 9, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

BEGINNING tomorrow scholars, journalists, and government officials -- 
both former and current -- will revisit a topic that remains tightly 
woven into the fabric of American political culture: the Vietnam War. 
Convening at the John F. Kennedy Library, they will explore some of the 
more contentious aspects of this chapter in our history. Among the 
questions they will ask are those concerning America's entrance into 
war, the roles played by the media and public opinion in shaping the 
course of the war, and the lessons learned from that conflict.

Arguably, the most vexing question is the great ''what if" of the entire 
war: ''What if" President John F. Kennedy had not been cut down by an 
assassin's bullet and had lived out his term -- and perhaps a subsequent 
one? Would he have made good on an expressed desire to withdraw American 
troops from Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese? 
These questions are hardly academic; as a recent New York Times op-ed by 
Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, Kennedy had devised 
a coordinated exit strategy that America's current president would do 
well to emulate.

Thanks to an extraordinary collection of documents -- the secret tape 
recordings that Kennedy made in the White House -- we have some sense of 
what Kennedy did, and didn't, plan to do with respect to Vietnam. 
Although available to the public for more than a decade, these tapes 
remain largely unexplored. This is due partly to the many challenges of 
the transcription process, including the identification of numerous and 
hard-to-hear voices, the placement of microphones relative to Kennedy 
and his aides, and the quality of the audio itself.

Yet several key tapes are largely intelligible and reveal the outlines 
of what is clearly a withdrawal plan, laid out by Secretary of Defense 
Robert S. McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell D. 
Taylor, in a series of recorded meetings from October 1963. As 
conceived, the plan would have removed most US troops from Vietnam by 
the end of 1964 and virtually all of them by 1965. To kick-start that 
process, the Defense Department was prepared to recall 1,000 soldiers by 
the end of 1963.

At first glance, Kennedy's endorsement of this scenario appears to be a 
flat-out commitment to wind up the US advisory effort that he himself 
had expanded during his first year in office. Yet there is much more to 
the story. For starters, the tapes suggest that this is McNamara's 
withdrawal plan. In fact, the defense secretary goes to great lengths to 
convince the president that the withdrawal process be both immediate and 
public; the agitation in his voice while making his case is 
unmistakable. Indeed, it is McNamara who lays out not only the military 
rationale but also the political calculus at work, lending further 
credence to the argument that it was the secretary who conceived of and 
authored the withdrawal.

And Kennedy's reaction to the idea suggests as much. While he had always 
maintained that the war was South Vietnam's to win or lose -- arguing 
repeatedly against the insertion of US combat troops to back up or 
supplant South Vietnamese forces -- Kennedy nevertheless seems caught 
off guard by the McNamara-Taylor proposal. These conversations reveal a 
president seemingly distant from the topic and in need of convincing.

Is there a back-story to this episode? Did Kennedy orchestrate the 
McNamara-Taylor meeting to make it seem that this was all news to him, 
that he was largely unaware of such planning or the politics of 
withdrawal? According to former administration officials, the president 
had a penchant for giving instructions to McNamara that never found 
their way into the written record. Is this, therefore, a case of Kennedy 
debating and then approving a previously considered position in the 
presence of and for the benefit of his more hawkish advisers?

Failing a written record, we cannot know for sure. Scholars still have 
no access to several August 1963 conversations that would add much to 
our understanding of Kennedy's engagement with Vietnam and his thoughts 
about US involvement. What we can say with confidence is that the 
president, though clearly desirous of an American withdrawal, recognized 
the military and political imperative of achieving it under favorable 
conditions.

As he told his most senior advisers at one of those October meetings, 
they would simply ''get a new date" if the situation in Vietnam 
prevented an American withdrawal by the end of 1965. Indeed, as Kennedy 
makes clear in these tapes, any public statement about a withdrawal must 
emphasize the fact the objective remained that of winning the war.

Do the Kennedy tapes offer useful lessons for the current war in Iraq? 
Insofar as they provide analogues not only to America's entrance but 
also to its exit from both conflicts, we would do well to recall 
Kennedy's motives for his phased withdrawal from Vietnam: increased 
pressure on the client government to institute political, economic, and 
military reforms; a tangible response to dovish critics of his policy at 
home; and -- perhaps -- the rudiments of a full withdrawal he had every 
intention of completing.

Yet we cannot know conclusively how Kennedy would have responded to the 
altered conditions in the Vietnam of 1964 and 1965. Given his many 
conflicting statements on Vietnam, all we can say, by virtue of his own 
words on the subject, is that he would have crossed that bridge when -- 
and only when -- he came upon it.

Marc J. Selverstone is an assistant professor with the Presidential 
Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of 
Public Affairs. Transcripts and audio of the Kennedy conversations 
mentioned above are available on the program's website, 
www.whitehousetapes.org <http://www.whitehousetapes.org/>.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/09/jfks_lessons_for_iraq/
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