Customer Reviews

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. 4: Vietnam, August-December 1963 (Department of State Publication, No. 9857)

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The nature of a book like this is that it reads in somewhat of a hum-drum fashion, as it merely reproduces a long chain of documents without any attempt by a narrator to "tell a story" in the text. If someone is willing to drag their way through such a collection, it can be worth the time. For a shorter summary version of some of the most relevant information one can pick up Noam Chomsky, RETHINKING CAMELOT. However, given the very contentious nature of the debates which are stirred up around this, the inquisitive reader will probably want to pick up this volume and read it directly.

What has made this volume into a deeply controversial item is the appearance in here of the text of something called NSAM 263. The book also carries many related documents, including NSAM 273. It is the latter two documents in particular which have stirred up a hornet's nest of arguments. The Chomsky book mentioned above was responding to several of these arguments, but reading the collection of documents here is in many ways more rewarding than trying to track the multiple arguments which go back and forth in second-hand references. I can only say here that this collection of documents does generally support Chomsky's contention that NSAM 263 did not signify any attempt by the Kennedy administration to begin an unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam and there is no good reason to believe that NSAM 263 played much of a role in motivating anyone to carry off the Dallas assassination.

These documents make clear that the suggestion of a possible announcement of the withdrawal of 1000 troops from Vietnam came entirely from Robert McNamara & Maxwell Taylor. The suggestion made by McNamara & Taylor was explicitly resisted by Kennedy, and no hint of advocacy of withdrawal from Vietnam ever came from Kennedy. The suggestion about announcing such a troop withdrawal was clearly never intended by McNamara or Taylor to be the beginning of an unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam but was always made conditional upon the assumption that the training of a South Vietnamese army would make it possible to carry off such a limited withdrawal of US personnel without undermining the war effort against the Viet Minh. Kennedy explicitly resisted their suggestion, because he was not so confident that South Vietnam would stabilize.

If we read through the McNamara-Taylor report which is document 167 in this collection we see that they advised that:

"In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort."

In the Summary Record of the 519th Meeting of the National Security Council, White House, Washignton, October 2, 1963, 6 p.m., we find that:

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The President opened the meeting by summarizing where we now stand on U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Most of the officials involved here are in agreement. We are not papering over our differences. We are agreed to try to find effective means of changing the political atmosphere in Saigon. We are agreed that we should not cut off all U.S. aid to Vietnam, but we are agreed on the necessity of trying to improve the situation in Vietnam by bringing about changes there...

The President objected to the phrase "by the end of this year" in the sentence "The U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam could be withdrawn." He believed that if we were not able to take this action by the end of this year, we would be accused of being over optimistic.
Secretary McNamara said he saw great value in this sentence in order to meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam. He said the sentence reveals that we have a withdrawal plan. Furthermore, it commits us to emphasize the training of the Vietnamese, which is something we must do in order to replace U.S. personnel with Vietnamese.
The draft announcement was changed to make both of the time predictions included in paragraph 3 a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than as predictions of the President.
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It's clear that Kennedy was not by any stretch of the imagination advocating a withdrawal from Vietnam, but was rather resisting McNamara's arguments that he should announce a conditional withdrawal of 1000 US military personnel. Even if we agree to withhold judgment on what Kennedy might have done in relation to Vietnam had he lived, the attempts to explain the assassination by reference to NSAM 263 break down when we try to explain the roles of McNamara and Taylor. Either these two individuals were a part of the actual assassination conspiracy or they weren't. If they weren't then it's hard to make sense of why they would have been allowed to remain in prominent positions of authority if the motive for the assassination had been NSAM 263. McNamara & Taylor were more directly related to the origins of NSAM 263 than Kennedy himself was. It was their suggestion in the first place! If the assassination had really been motivated by NSAM 263 then I would definitely expect both of them to be at least removed from their positions (the way that the head of the CIA, John McCone, was removed by LBJ). But both of them remained secure under LBJ. So it's hard to take NSAM 263 seriously as the motive for the assassination. Of course, if McNamara & Taylor really were a part of an assassination conspiracy then that would only imply that NSAM 263 was a dummy maneuver intended to mislead. If the assassination conspirators themselves suggested NSAM 263 then clearly the motive for the assassination was somewhere else. Whatever way you look at it, there is no coherent argument supporting the contention that Kennedy was assassinated because of NSAM 263.

JFK-buffs have built a whole melange of second-hand literature around NSAM 263, but not many of them ever really bother looking up this volume to read what the documents contained herein do and do not actually say. If you've taken an honest interest in the subject, then picking up this volume should be obligatory.