JFK, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone

Gary Aguilar
November, 2005

Oliver Stone would scarcely have elicited more righteous indignation by lecturing Baptist ministers on the evils of Christianity than he did among journalists and historians by releasing his popular film JFK. Pundits by the pack bristled at Stone’s contempt for the Warren Commission. One of the outrages that provoked particular vehemence was Stone’s revisionist representation of Kennedy as a president who threatened The Establishment because he would not have taken the country to war over Vietnam. But the outcry wasn’t just about his bad history. It had at least as much to do with the director’s chutzpah in trespassing onto turf owned by career journalists and historians.

In the Washington Post, George Will called JFK a "three hour lie from an intellectual sociopath."[1] Noam Chomsky dedicated an entire book – “Rethinking Camelot” – to debunking Stone’s notion that under Kennedy the history of Southeast Asia would have been altogether kinder and gentler.[2] Leslie Gelb sneered from the pages of the New York Times that the "torments" of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson over Vietnam "are not to be trifled with by Oliver Stone or anyone."[3] A banner headline on the cover of Newsweek barked: "Why Oliver Stone’s New Movie Can't Be Trusted."[4]

Stone’s crackpot history had apparently imperiled the public not only by throwing mud at perhaps America’s most respected murder investigation, but also by rewriting American history to push his leftist, anti-American agenda. The message was that there was danger when moviemakers forgot their place. Theirs was the business of entertaining, not interpreting history. That business was best left in the capable hands of credentialed authorities.

Across the political spectrum those authorities derided Stone’s war-wary peacenik on grounds his “JFK” bore no resemblance whatsoever to the historical JFK. Behind a pacific façade, received wisdom had it, Kennedy was really a clanking Cold Warrior spoiling for a fight – in Southeast Asia, in Cuba and perhaps elsewhere. In the context of his treatment of Diem, Stone's critics placed JFK's occasionally fierce, if conflicted, rhetoric.

"By November, sanctioning a coup against an ally in the name of winning the war had been added," wrote Robert Bartley in The Wall St. Journal. "Then withdraw? Joe Kennedy's competitive kid? The 'bear any burden' guy? Give me a break. Acolytes love this myth dearly … ." [5] Another historian, William Gibbons, said that it “is absurd” to imagine that Kennedy would have pulled out.[6] In The Nation Magazine, Alexander Cockburn wrote, “The public record shows JFK was always hawkish.”[7] And in no less than the respected Reviews in American History, Max Holland, a Nation Magazine contributing editor, declared that it was a “fantasy that Kennedy was on the verge of pulling out from Vietnam.”[8]

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.

No doubt to the dismay of Stone’s detractors, a strikingly different and more favorable – even more Oliver Stone-like - view of Kennedy has recently emerged. In March 2005, long after similar accounts had been widely reported elsewhere, The Nation finally acknowledged that the real JFK, despite his considerable personal peccadillos, was worlds away from the hawkish hooligan The Nation had been peddling for so long.

On March 14, 2005 The Nation reported: “We also now know that Kennedy that same spring [1963] ordered the Pentagon to plan to have all US troops out of Vietnam by early 1965, shortly after what he assumed would be his re-election – and further ordered that the troop pullout begin by the late fall of 1963. But he did not, of course, live to see their withdrawal.”[9] This was an amazing metanoia for the leftist outlet that had not only hard-pitched the opposite a decade earlier, but had also used its letters pages to savagely beanball two well-known advocates of the withdrawl thesis:  it’s originator, Peter Dale Scott, and Oliver Stone’s consultant-historian, John Newman.[10]

Tardy or no, The Nation had finally joined the growing consensus of recognized historians and journalists. Naval War College historian David Kaiser, for example, wrote that his book, American Tragedy,[11] documented the “numerous occasions during 1961, 1962, and 1963 on which Kennedy did exactly that [‘stopped the United States from going to war in Southeast Asia’], rejecting the near unanimous proposals of his advisers to put large numbers of American combat troops in Laos, South Vietnam, or both.”[12] That conclusion was not at all what some informed observers had expected to find among the secrets.

University of Alabama historian Howard Jones said that when he began his study he “was dubious” about the assertions of “Kennedy apologists [that] 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 [Jones’] 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 [JFK’s] skepticism about the war in the context of his growing disenchantment with his advisers … .”[15]

Historian Robert Dallek came to much the same conclusion. “Toward the end of his life John F. Kennedy increasingly distrusted his military advisers and was changing his views on foreign policy. A fresh look at the final months of his presidency suggests that a second Kennedy term might have produced not only an American withdrawal from Vietnam, but also rapprochement with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”[16]

Dallek produced a quote that gives a sense of the newly visible JFK: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”[17] This is much closer to the crazy director’s version of JFK than Noam Chomsky’s, George Will’s or The Nation’s.

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 [full of the highest officers in the country] 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.

So Oliver Stone, the brash, Bronze Star-winning, Vietnam veteran mountebank, turns out to have been right all along: JFK wasn’t going to budge on Vietnam; just as he wouldn’t budge on the Bay of Pigs invasion; on the war in Laos; on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was precisely because Kennedy was not a hawk that he was a threat to The Establishment. He did represent change – right up until the moment the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.

Given that Stone’s vindication comes directly from secret government files that the director himself had forced into the light, files that “credentialled authorities” now agree prove that Stone’s JFK had gotten JFK and Vietnam right, could the “intellectual sociopath’s” victory be any sweeter?[*]