Reply #13: Yes and LBJ continued JFK's policies!

[Octafish]

Professor Peter Dale Scott said he once believed what Cockburn and Chomskey thought. He changed his mind when he checked out National Security Action Memorandum 263, where JFK in November 1963 said all American troops would be out of South Vietnam by 1965 with NSAM 273, where LBJ ordered the US to provide whatever level of support necessary to protect the government of South Vietnam just days after Dallas.

Interview with
Peter Dale Scott

JFK Conspiracy Researcher
Comes in From the Cold

EXCERPT...

In his 1972 book, The War Conspiracy, Scott went out on a limb to write, "The systematic censorship and distortion of NSAM 273, first by the Pentagon study and later by the New York Times, suggests that the Kennedy assassination was itself an important, perhaps a crucial, event in the history of the Indochina war conspiracy."

Here's what Scott discovered in his readings of the NSAM documents: Despite intense opposition within his administration, Kennedy's NSAM 263 authorized plans "to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963" as "an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel." Elsewhere, Kennedy's administration had declared its intention to "withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel. . . by the end of 1965."

Johnson's NSAM 273, drafted before Kennedy's death but not approved by Kennedy, was significantly rewritten on Johnson's orders. It was, as Scott and his critics both agree, intended to reassure the nation that Johnson had not changed national policy. But a close reading of the document suggests the opposite. Johnson's NSAM ignored NSAM 263's explicit authorization of the 1,000-man withdrawl, stating instead, "The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawl of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963." That White House statement was not Kennedy's binding NSAM 263, but a non-binding advisors' report. Therefore, when the Pentagon failed to withdraw 1,000 men by the end of the year, the false impression was that no binding orders were broken.

NSAM 273's doublespeak included a provision directing that military assistance programs to Vietnam should not be reduced, which seems to contradict NSAM 263 and other Kennedy policy statements. The clearest signal of a sweeping policy change, though, was NSAM 273's explicit plans for escalating the war--including carrying the war north--plans that Kennedy had vigorously resisted. These "actions of graduated scope and intensity," as a key Johnson advisor described NSAM 273's orders, led directly to U.S. destroyer patrols and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which marked America's belly flop into the proverbial quagmire. These plans, long promoted by the Pentagon, were shoe-horned, two days before his death, into the draft NSAM that Kennedy never approved.

CONTINUED...

http://www.conspire.com/scott.html