Reply #39: JFK, Vietnam and Oliver Stone

[Octafish]

First: Thank you, ConsAreLiars. I truly appreciate your kind words and appreciate you understanding why I do what I do.



Second: Here's something from a writer and his subjects who deserve the real credit:

JFK, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone

Gary Aguilar
November, 2005

EXCERPT...

The years that followed have not been kind to those who had stoned the director. “Received wisdom” has been swamped by a tsunami of new and credible scholarship brought about by the declassifications of literally millions of pages of government secrets. The impetus for their release came directly from Stone, who publicly nagged about the absurdity of the government saying the case was “open and shut” while suppressing mountains of the evidence.

SNIP...

University of Alabama historian Howard Jones said that when he began his study he “was dubious” about the assertions of “Kennedy apologists he would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam and America’s longest war would never have occurred.” But “what strikes anyone reading the veritable mountain of documents relating to Vietnam,” Jones admitted to his own surprise, “is that the only high official in the Kennedy administration who consistently opposed the commitment of U.S. combat forces was the president.”<13> “The materials undergirding this study demonstrate that President Kennedy intended to reverse the nation’s special military commitment to the South Vietnamese made in early 1961.”<14>

Echoing Jones, journalist Fred Kaplan wrote that, “the argument that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam becomes truly compelling only when you place skepticism about the war in the context of his growing disenchantment with his advisers … .”<15>

SNIP...

Once-secret records demonstrate a pattern in Kennedy we are unaccustomed to seeing in presidents: rather than JFK following his senior advisers on critical issues – the way “good” presidents usually do, the way LBJ did – Kennedy often ignored it.

He withstood pressure from the CIA and the military to follow-up the foundering Bay of Pigs invasion with a military assault on Cuba.<18> He rejected advice to use force in Laos, pushing against the defense establishment to achieve an ultimately successful negotiated settlement.<19> He shouldered aside the defense and intelligence establishments to advance a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.<20> And as historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikov discovered from live voice recordings made during the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK was often “the only one in the room who is determined not to go to war.”<21>

This is the same Kennedy we discover in Perils of Dominance, an important new book by Gareth Porter.<22> Porter documents in chilling detail that, in isolation and with virtually no real allies to help him, Kennedy orchestrated numerous Machiavellian ruses to frustrate the “national security bureaucracy’s” determination to march headlong into war.

CONTINUED...

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vietnam/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone/JFK,%20Vietnam,%20and%20Oliver%20Stone.htm

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