Reply #14: President Kennedy is one of my heroes.

[Octafish]

When he followed his own advice, President Kennedy did the right thing. Staying out of Vietnam for instance was something he wanted to do. And yet, the War Party did all it could, even before he was assassinated, to provoke war.

The Kennedy Assassination and the Vietnam War (1971)

Peter Dale Scott

EXCERPT...

The 1962 Geneva Agreements on Laos were marked by an unusual American willingness to “trust” the other side.<60> Chester Cooper confirms that their value lay in a private deal worked out between the leaders of the American and Soviet delegations—the “Harriman-Pushkin Agreement.” In essence the Russians agreed to use their influence on the Pathet Lao, Peking, and Hanoi to assure compliance with the terms agreed on at the Conference. In exchange for this, the British agreed to assure compliance by the non-Communists.<61>

He also confirms that, before Harriman and Kennedy could terminate U.S. support for the CIA’s protégé in Laos, Phoumi Nosavan, “some key officials in our Mission there…had to be replaced.”<62> The U.S. Foreign Service List shows that the officials recalled from Vientiane in the summer of 1962 include both of the resident military attachés and also the CIA Station Chief, Gordon L. Jorgensen.<63> In late 1964 Jorgensen returned to Saigon, to become, as the Pentagon Papers reveal, the Saigon CIA Station Chief .

This purge of right-wing elements in the U.S. Mission failed to prevent immediate and conspicuous violation of the Agreements by Thai-based elements of the U.S. Air Force through jet overflights of Laos. These same overflights, according to Hilsman, had been prohibited by Kennedy, on Harriman’s urging, at a National Security Council meeting. In late October 1963 Pathet Lao Radio began to complain of stepped-up intrusions by U.S. jet aircraft, as well as of a new military offensive by Phoumi’s troops (about which we shall say more later).<64>

            According to Kenneth O’Donnell, President Kennedy had himself (like Galbraith) abandoned hopes for a military solution as early as the spring of 1963. O’Donnell allegedly heard from Kennedy then “that he had made up his mind that after his re-election he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam…in 1965.”<65> Whether the President had so unreservedly and so early adopted the Galbraith perspective is debatable; there is, however, no questioning that after the Buddhist crisis in August the prospect of accelerated or total withdrawal was openly contemplated by members of the bureaucracy’s “political” faction, including the President’s brother.

CONTINUED...

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vietnam/KennedyVietnam1971/KennedyVietnam1971.htm

BTW: Harriman -- and his under-toadie, McGeorge Bundy -- are big time suspects in Dallas, IMFO. There is justice in the world.