I read this book as part of my ongoing research into the assassination of President Kennedy. In my opinion the conflict in Vietnam is one of the keys to unraveling this greatest of mysteries if it can even still be called a mystery today.
The conspiracy theory is President Kennedy was going to end America's involvement in Vietnam once he was re-elected in 1964. And that was something the Military Industrial Complex was never going to allow to happen.
The great Fletcher Prouty worked with Allen Dulles at the CIA up until the time JFK got killed. Fletcher felt there never was any real military objective in Vietnam. The goal was to create a bottomless money pit of military spending. So the CIA was doing things in Vietnam to prolong the conflict for as long as possible even if this meant getting American military personnel killed.
Author and historian John M. Newman has shown how the CIA and American military intelligence were telling President Kennedy and Secretary Of Defense Robert McNamara all lies about the true state of affairs in Vietnam. But they were telling then Vice President Lyndon Johnson the truth about what a quagmire Vietnam had become and would most likely always be. So Johnson knew what was going to happen in Vietnam even before he became president.
Fletcher Prouty and also James W. Douglass in his book JFK And The Unspeakable tell how the CIA had infiltrated every aspect of the power structures in Washington, DC. The CIA had their spies collecting information from all the government agencies and telling lies to everyone in the government also.
I don't really see a lot in this massive book about the Pentagon Papers to make me doubt those conspiracy theories.
The book says JFK continued America's involvement in Vietnam. But the fact remains that when JFK was alive and in office the number of American military personnel in Vietnam was around 16,000. And according to an official government document called NSAM 263 JFK had ordered that all American personnel should leave Vietnam in the near future.
Then within a few days after JFK got killed Lyndon Johnson issued NSAM 273 which seems to be a vaguely worded document about the future policy and plans for Vietnam which could be interpreted in many different ways. It's creepy because people say Lyndon started working on the draft for NSAM 273 when President Kennedy was still alive.
This book also confirms that there didn't seem to be any real military objectives in Vietnam. The stated objective was to just keep escalating the destruction against the enemy until they got discouraged.
But as I said if the conspiracy theories are true the CIA knew all along that this would never happen.
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