Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK | Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived.
By James G. Blight, janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch | Koji Masutani (director)
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. Pp. xv, 421. ISBN 978-0-7425-5699-7 | New York: New Video Group, 2008 [in theaters], 2009 [DVD]. Eighty mins.
It is a tantalizing historical conundrum: What if Lee Harvey Oswald had
missed? Leaving aside the conspiratorial controversies surrounding the November
1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (did Oswald act alone? was the
mafia behind it? Castro and the Cubans?), his sudden departure left lingering
questions, foremost among them Vietnam. When Kennedy became president, he
inherited from Dwight D. Eisenhower a relatively limited advise-and-support
commitment to South Vietnam. By November 1963, the American role had grown
exponentially, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to the brink of taking
over control of the war from South Vietnam. Kennedy knew that US policy towards
Indochina had reached a major crossroads and that he must make decisions to
either deepen or lessen Washington's commitment to South Vietnam's survival. But
those decisions fell to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
BL&W, with director Koji Masutani, have also produced and written a
documentary that mirrors the book but does not directly accompany it. Here, they
are reprising their role as historical consultants on the critically acclaimed
film The Fog of War, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in
2003 and for which Blight and Lang wrote an accompanying book.[4] Instead of
critical oral history, Virtual JFK deftly uses stock newsreel footage and
photographic stills from the early 1960s to contextualize Kennedy's Vietnam
policy; it is entertaining and informative in equal measure and is an ideal
teaching tool. Although BL&W and Masutani share credit for writing the script,
Blight is the only scholar to appear on screen. The film is based on six
"episodes" during the Kennedy presidency: the Bay of Pigs (1961); the Laos
crisis and negotiations (1961-62); the Berlin crisis and building of the Berlin
Wall (1961); the first push to send US ground troops to South Vietnam (1961);
the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's plan
to begin withdrawing US military advisers from South Vietnam in the fall of
1963. Although only two relate directly to Vietnam, BL&W use each to illustrate
that Kennedy's foreign policy followed a general pattern—cautious and skeptical
of military solutions to geopolitical and diplomatic problems—that had obvious
implications for Vietnam.
Although BL&W are generally fair-minded in evaluating the competing claims
about "virtual JFK," in the end they side unambiguously with the radicals:
"[the] evidence on virtual JFK is in our view overwhelming. JFK was not going to
Americanize the war in Vietnam…. There would have been no American war in
Vietnam if Kennedy had lived because this view is far more consistent with the
relevant evidence than the alternative" (241).
At this point, I should make it clear that I myself am a skeptic, and have
considered elsewhere, and explicitly rejected, the theory that Kennedy had
either already planned to withdraw or was likely to do so.[5] I should also
confess up front that nothing in Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived has made me
change my mind. However, though the evidence BL&W present is much less
conclusive and more ambiguous than they appreciate, they do make a good case
that JFK was temperamentally more inclined than Johnson towards the option of
withdrawal.
* * *
As BL&W note, the question of what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam is fraught
with the methodological controversy typical of counterfactual history. Unfairly
derided by some scholars as a silly, trivial game of "What If?" (What if
Cleopatra's famously elongated but alluring nose had been shorter? What if
Napoleon had had tanks at Waterloo?), counterfactual history, exactly as
advertised, requires us to imagine what history would have been like had one or
more factors changed (for example, if Kennedy had lived). Most historians
implicitly envision counterfactual history when they write "factual" history:
that is, they weigh some factors more heavily than others and, in a sort of
mental experiment, ask whether things would have been much different without the
influence of a certain factor. But going beyond such an informal intellectual
exercise is frowned upon as too inherently subjective—after all, by definition
the results of such experiments lack any basis in fact. For a discipline already
neurotic about objectivity, using counterfactual history as anything more than a
private musing is often anathema.
For their part, social scientists have no such qualms. (Not coincidentally,
BL&W are not historians but are trained in the behavioral and social sciences.)
By employing a method known as regression analysis, they routinely engage in
counterfactual experimentation. For instance, in trying to trace the root cause
of an economic downturn, an economist consults a wide range of relevant data
(unemployment figures, interest rates, balance of payments surpluses or
deficits, consumer demand, etc.) and asks "What caused the recession?" He then
crunches the numbers repeatedly, each time removing a single factor to see if
the outcome changes much. If, for example, removing data on interest rates
alters nothing in the overall results, then they were probably not a primary
cause. But if everything changes when our economist removes, say, the collapse
of housing prices in California, then that likely was a major causal factor.[6]
Political scientists and international relations theorists proceed similarly,
and their rigorous use of counterfactuals is indispensable to the study of world
politics.[7]
The point of writing a plausible counterfactual history is not necessarily to
change one factor and then plot out a fanciful alternative history but to stress
contingency over determinism and agency over structure in historical causation.
This forces historians not to assume events unfolded in the only way possible,
and to acknowledge that they might well have turned out very differently.[8]
This is fascinating stuff that many historians would not hesitate to debate,
yet BL&W spend a large amount of time and energy—in truth, too much—to explain
that they are not practitioners of counterfactual history, which they dismiss as
superficial and trivial because of its tendency to lead historians into
speculative and unverifiable fantasies. In their final chapter, they even label
such counterfactual speculation as "bullshit" (241-49). Instead, borrowing a
term coined by Niall Ferguson, they explain that their book is an exercise in
"virtual history." The actual differences between "counterfactual history" and
"virtual history" are never quite clear—as Fredrik Logevall[9] points out in
the book's foreword, what BL&W advocate "is merely counterfactual history
properly done" (x). Instead, they deride counterfactual history as a form of
"entertainment or performance art" and an "irrational" and "silly" exercise that
is "demeaning to historians who take the history of the war in Vietnam
seriously" (229). By contrast, virtual history is portrayed throughout as
rational, logical, commonsensical, and scholarly rigorous.
* * *
According to BL&W, proponents of virtual history would not dare predict what
Kennedy would have done in situations he did not live to face, for example, the
Gulf of Tonkin crisis in August 1964 or the Vietcong attack on the US base at
Pleiku in February 1965. Since these incidents, the authors argue, arose as a
result of LBJ's actions, they are too remote from the facts we know about JFK to
be of any heuristic value.
Leaving aside for the moment the overwhelming likelihood that Kennedy would
have faced a series of Vietnamese-driven crises beyond his control almost
precisely as LBJ did, the authors' definition of counterfactual history is
highly problematic. There is more than a touch of the straw man here, for
serious, carefully constructed counterfactuals do not spin fantastical
alternative historical scenarios based on a change in the facts; rather, they
posit different but logical outcomes.[10]
Unsurprisingly, then, despite their protestations, BL&W do in fact speculate
on what might have happened in the short term had things been slightly
different. How could they not? Without at least some speculation about an
alternative future, there is little point—indeed, none at all—to
counterfactual history, or virtual history, or whatever we want to call it. So,
while they admonish their readers not to conjecture what Kennedy would have done
about Tonkin or Pleiku, they do ask them to "'simulate' what virtual JFK would
have done regarding Vietnam, had he lived and been reelected. Would JFK have
gotten in, gotten out, or something in between?" (28). Note that they assume
Kennedy's reelection in November 1964—surely an impermissible supposition under
their own ground rules of virtual history. Yes, Kennedy's reelection was
probable, but it was not guaranteed, because it lay in the unknowable future.
The early front-runner in a presidential election campaign could conceivably
squander his advantage and lose the race (as in the 1948 and 1992 elections).
Note too that they assume conditions in Vietnam in November 1964 would have
differed little from those of a year before, a highly improbable if not strictly
impossible eventuality. Without this assumption, those conditions would likely
have mirrored the ones Johnson actually faced.
The point merits emphasis because it rests at the heart of the entire virtual
history enterprise and furnishes the rationale for Vietnam If Kennedy Had
Lived. It is crucial to remember that Kennedy, not Johnson, authorized the
coup of Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, three weeks before his own
assassination. The Diem coup ushered in a period of political instability and
internal insecurity—this was already apparent before Kennedy's death. Had he
lived to run for reelection, he, like LBJ, would have faced a rapidly
deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, quite apart from any policy or action
in Washington.[11] Thus it is worth asking how Kennedy would have fared in a
crisis like Pleiku, for he would have faced something very like it at some
point. As McGeorge Bundy said at the time, "Pleikus are like streetcars"; in
other words, they happen with great regularity, as if on schedule.[12] When
Johnson's streetcar arrived, he opted for war. It is of course an open question
what Kennedy would have done, but he certainly would have met his own streetcar,
too.
As much as BL&W highlight the differences between Kennedy and Johnson, they
were actually incredibly similar, especially in their approach to Vietnam.
Unfortunately, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived makes no use of the new
historiography on Lyndon Johnson, a rich body of work that demolishes the tired
myths repeated here (267-68)—that LBJ, ignorant of the wider world,
uninterested in diplomacy, and unskilled in foreign policy, was a brash Texan
who confidently swaggered his way into the Big Muddy.[13] Neither Kennedy nor
Johnson wanted to commit the United States to war—that much is clear. For every
conflicted statement Kennedy uttered about Vietnam, Johnson probably uttered
three or four. And though Johnson ultimately took the nation to war, he did so
at a snail's pace, reflecting the same degree of caution as Kennedy. He did not
jump on the first streetcar to pass his way. Just over a month before Pleiku
there was the Christmas Eve bombing of a US officers' quarters at the Brinks
Hotel in Saigon, and before that the November 1964 attack on the US air base at
Bien Hoa. Johnson did not want or seek war, yet felt he had no option but to do
so. Would Kennedy, who felt much the same, have acted the same?
* * *
Even if we grant BL&W free license to eliminate (almost) all forms of reasonable
speculation from virtual history, there remains the problem of subjective
assessment of the facts. "Virtual JFK" is supposed to be more rigorously
historical than "counterfactual JFK," because it is based strictly on the record
of the "actual JFK" up to 22 November 1963. As the authors rightly observe at
the outset, few historians quibble about the historical facts regarding Vietnam
between Kennedy's inauguration and his assassination. Instead, they debate the
relative causal significance of these events as well as the intentions and
motivations of the policymakers behind them. For BL&W, virtual history seeks
greater objectivity by pondering not what might have been but what actually
occurred. Thus their insistence on examining Kennedy as he really was.
Evaluating Kennedy's personality and policies, however, is not an exact
science. Consider one of BL&W's most prominent yet problematic pieces of
evidence—the Bay of Pigs. To recap, Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower a plan to
sponsor a secret invasion of Cuba by over a thousand disgruntled anti-communist
Cuban exiles. When the poorly planned invasion ran into stiff resistance, most
of Kennedy's advisers, military and civilian alike, urged him to intervene
openly with US air power. Kennedy refused, Fidel Castro's forces trounced the
exiles, and America, which had clearly sponsored the invasion, was humiliated.
Applying the lessons of Cuba to the problems of Vietnam, BL&W portray the Bay
of Pigs as definitive evidence of Kennedy's resistance, under tremendous
pressure, to his advisers' calls for military intervention. Thus, his refusal to
bow to military and other internal pressure in April 1961, as a new president
with everything to lose, supposedly reveals a leader skeptical of military
intervention everywhere else, including Vietnam. In short, like all good social
scientists, the authors extrapolate larger patterns from specific, apparently
representative examples. "There is very little mystery about JFK's performance
in that crisis, what motivated it, or what he learned from it," they conclude of
the Bay of Pigs (231).
The evidence, to us, is unequivocal: if one focuses on the available evidence
from these seminal events of April 1961, it is difficult to imagine a scenario
of Third World "defeat" in the long 1964 or any other comparable period that
could have elicited from JFK a large-scale military intervention in the Third
World. At potentially great political cost, Kennedy was willing to pull the plug
on an invasion plan he inherited from his predecessor, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, occurring little more than a hundred miles from US shores, an
invasion that would have been mounted against the regime of Cuban leader Fidel
Castro, who was, at that moment, America's most prominent and vilified Third
World opponent. After the Bay of Pigs, it is fair to ask: under what
circumstances was JFK likely to have invaded a Third World country? The evidence
is overwhelming that JFK not just decided to say "no" to an invasion of Cuba,
but also set his bureaucracy the task of never letting anything like it happen
again on his watch (233).
Inarguably, the Bay of Pigs provides Kennedy counterfactual radicals a
compelling precedent for a similar decision to retreat in Vietnam. It took
colossal resolve for Kennedy to resist pressure to authorize a second air strike
and effectively abandon the invasion to failure. Yet, as I will argue, the Bay
of Pigs also provides Kennedy counterfactual skeptics with equally convincing
evidence.
The legacy of the Bay of Pigs was hardly "unequivocal." BL&W's reading,
certainly a logical one, underscores Kennedy's caution regarding military
intervention. But, alternatively, the Bay of Pigs also showed Kennedy recklessly
involving himself in a sticky situation that could only be resolved through
enormous effort and controversy. Failure in April 1961 did not diminish such
recklessness but encouraged it, even when it could easily have landed the United
States in another confrontation. Thus, after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy authorized
Operation Mongoose, an aggressive campaign to sabotage Cuba's economy and
assassinate Castro. When the Cubans then agreed to host Soviet nuclear missiles
in the summer of 1962 as a deterrent to an anticipated US invasion, Kennedy did
not accept the missiles with equanimity but instead forced a confrontation that
nearly sparked a nuclear war.[14] Kennedy ran that risk even though he agreed
with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the missiles posed no strategic
threat, or even strategic disadvantage, to the United States.[15] He also
recognized the double standard of protesting Soviet missiles in Cuba when the
United States had deployed nuclear missiles to Turkey during his own
presidency.[16] Kennedy provoked the crisis in large part because of domestic
political considerations, such as intense pressure from Republicans not to allow
any Soviet arms into Cuba[17]—precisely the kind of political pressure he
would have faced in authorizing a withdrawal from Vietnam.
Moreover, the situations in Cuba and Vietnam were not at all similar, let
alone analogous. Cuba was already "lost" in April 1961 and had been for over two
years. The United States was not "in" Cuba, so Kennedy's decision not to ensure
the invasion's success, however courageous, was not the same as favoring
withdrawal. The same could not be said for South Vietnam, where the United
States was involved as deeply as it could be short of deploying regular ground
forces. By 1963, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had poured several
billion dollars worth of military hardware and economic aid into Vietnam. Even
more importantly, both presidents had repeatedly staked American political and
moral prestige on the survival of a non-communist South Vietnam in the most
categorical and explicit terms. True, Kennedy also equivocated about Vietnam and
even voiced doubts at times. But the US investment in the fate of South Vietnam
was not remotely similar to its support for a bunch of ill-trained, amateur,
anti-Castro partisans whom Kennedy could jettison far more easily than the South
Vietnamese.
In April 1961, JFK's opposition to direct and open US involvement, let alone
outright intervention in Cuba, was crystal clear to policymakers and invasion
planners, be they military or civilian, Cuban or American. He was always unsure
about the invasion plan and harped on the need to dissemble any US role. "The
President has stated that under no conditions will [the] U.S. intervene with any
U.S. forces," the CIA's Jacob Esterline told his colleague Jack Hawkins only a
few days before the operation.[18] Or as Maj. Gen. David W. Gray reminded Adm.
Robert L. Dennison, the Commander-in-Chief in the Atlantic theater, as the
invasion was going down to defeat, "There is no intention of intervening with US
forces."[19] Thus, Kennedy was merely upholding his own stated policy in
deciding to cut his losses and allow the invasion to fail on its own terms. This
was a tough call, to be sure, but one more consistent with his stated views than
follow-up air strikes or further US action. Vietnam, of course, was a different
story. A Kennedy order to withdraw would have meant going back on his own
policies as president and his earlier pro-South Vietnam position as a US
Senator. Kennedy certainly could have made such a reversal, but the Bay of Pigs
provides little evidence that he was likely to do so.
Most seriously, BL&W's reading of the Bay of Pigs does not always accord with
the facts. Their argument rests on a claim that Kennedy cancelled not only the
second air strike, but also a follow-on amphibious landing of marines on the USS
Essex patrolling nearby: "JFK was urged on by increasingly hysterical
advisers on April 19-20, 1961, to send the Marines into Cuba to rescue the
invading, but overmatched Cuban exile brigade. Kennedy firmly refused to oblige
them" because he wanted to avoid committing the United States to "a disastrous
jungle war" (231). In the film, Blight, the narrator and on-screen analyst, goes
even further, saying that Kennedy was "besieged" by advisers pleading with him:
"Look, you have an option: you can send in the Marines, and begin the
conquering, or the re-conquering, of Cuba and the destruction of the Cuban
Revolution." According to Blight, Kennedy rejected this advice and "personally
called the commander of that ship [the Essex], Admiral Arleigh Burke, and
said, 'Stop. We are not getting involved in jungle warfare 90 miles south of
Florida.'"
Now this really is counterfactual history. To begin with, Admiral Burke,
Chief of Naval Operations, was based the whole time in Washington, was in the
same room as Kennedy during much of the crisis, and was not in command of the
Essex. Moreover, the cancellation of the second air strike is well known,
but I had never heard of JFK cancelling or refusing to authorize a ground
invasion by US forces. BL&W's citation (392, n. 45) refers to two books but no
page numbers. One, Politics of Illusion, is the product of a critical
oral history project on the Bay of Pigs, organized by Blight and Peter Kornbluh
of the National Security Agency.[20] The other is journalist Peter Wyden's
classic investigative narrative, The Bay of Pigs.[21] The only references
in either book to a proposed US ground invasion are, to put it charitably,
pretty thin. In one of the oral history sessions in Politics of Illusion,
Thomas Blanton (who also participated in Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived),
said that the father of a researcher at the National Security Archive had been
on board the Essex during the crisis and had assumed he was there to
mount an invasion of Cuba after the exiles had landed.[22] This third-hand
account nearly forty years on merely indicates that some people at scene
(understandably) anticipated an invasion; it proves neither that any ground
invasion was actually contemplated nor that JFK refused to authorize it.
Politics of Illusion also discusses whether the Cuban exiles believed
Kennedy would send in US troops—apparently they did—but nothing more.[23]
Again, this proves only what people in and around the Cuban operation
(mis)perceived, not what Kennedy had in fact authorized or not. Wyden says
American naval personnel assumed an invasion was possible[24] and expected to
evacuate the exiles from the beach, but that the exiles themselves chose to make
a last stand and fight on.[25] My reading of other secondary sources uncovered
nothing more. Corroborating evidence that Kennedy rejected direct intervention
by US ground forces may exist, but BL&W do not provide it.
This is critically important. There is a huge difference between, on one
hand, Kennedy paring down and then ruling out air support and, on the other, his
rejecting a ground invasion. Phrases like "jungle war" (in the book) and "jungle
warfare" (in the film) powerfully evoke Vietnam. But if there was never any
prospect of US forces waging "jungle warfare" in Cuba—and it appears there was
not—the case for a virtual JFK withdrawing from Vietnam suffers.
Moreover, the supposed confrontation between Kennedy and his "hysterical"
advisers, especially Admiral Burke, does not pass the test of logic. Kennedy's
aversion to tipping the US hand was, we have seen, widely known in Washington.
As the invasion was failing, Burke and others had a very hard time trying to
convince him to authorize the second air strikes. Having lost that argument, why
would they possibly think JFK might approve a full-scale ground invasion by US
Marines?
This is not to say that my reading of the Bay of Pigs proves Kennedy would
have escalated and Americanized the war in Vietnam. My interpretations are no
more definitive than anyone else's, including BL&W's. I would merely caution
against the purported "unequivocal" conclusions drawn from a particular
historical episode. Historians should not shy from using counterfactual history,
but nor should they pretend that it is methodologically rigorous and
historiographically conclusive. BL&W have every right to conclude from the Bay
of Pigs and other examples that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam, but
they must also acknowledge that their virtual history is purely subjective and
speculative. There is simply no basis to contend so categorically that "Kennedy
decided—that is the most appropriate term—Kennedy decided that under no
circumstances he could foresee would he be dragged into a major military
conflict in the Third World" (233, authors' emphasis). Kennedy made no such
decision about Cuba or elsewhere—and certainly not about Vietnam.
* * *
What, then, would Kennedy have done? There is a case to be made that he would
not have Americanized the war, and, despite its flaws,
Vietnam If Kennedy Had
Lived makes it. He might well have tried to limit American involvement and
have succeeded in the attempt. The key difference between Kennedy and Johnson is
that, had JFK lived to win the 1964 election, he would have been less
susceptible to political pressure than Johnson, who always had one eye on 1968.
I, however, remain unconvinced, mostly because I find the merits of BL&W's
case unconvincing. Though I fully share their concern for contingency over
inevitability and agency over structure, that policymakers had options open to
them does not mean they would have taken those options. Thus, despite all their
intriguing book's merits, BL&W fail to resolve the Kennedy counterfactual
question one way or the other. The debate continues. Long may it run.