If Kennedy Had Lived

“What if . . .?” For historians the question can be a great parlor game, launching all-night arguments over what would have happened if, say, Hitler had got the Bomb or Pickett had not charged at Gettysburg. Nowadays one of the hottest questions involves speculating about what John Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he not been killed in November 1963.

John M. Newman, a former U.S. Army major who teaches history at the University of Maryland, has entered this fray with a meticulously documented argument that Kennedy planned to withdraw from Vietnam had he been re-elected in 1964. Earnest yet overheated, grounded in footnotes yet prone to flights of conspiratorial conjecture, JFK and Vietnam (Warner Books; 506 pages; $22.95) reads like a strange hybrid between a doctoral dissertation and the rough draft of an Oliver Stone screenplay, and with reason: it was, indeed, Newman’s dissertation, and Stone did use it as a basis for his movie JFK.

The U.S. military, Newman argues, provided overly optimistic battlefield assessments after American advisers were sent to Vietnam in the early 1960s. These were designed to encourage Kennedy to continue America’s commitment there. Newman contends that Kennedy eventually became aware of this deception, but he went along because it served his own secret purpose: to withdraw some of the U.S. advisers under the guise that the war was going so well that they were no longer necessary. The “elaborate deception,” Newman writes, “was originally designed to forestall Kennedy from a precipitous withdrawal, but he was now using it — judo style — to justify just that.”

Newman shores up his thesis with citations from newly declassified documents. He is particularly impressive in detailing the evolution of a national security action memo — NSAM 263 — that Kennedy signed in October 1963, ordering the withdrawal of 1,000 of the 16,000 or so American advisers in Vietnam. Newman also documents the subtle changes in policy that occurred after Kennedy was shot less than two months later. The 1,000-man withdrawal went ahead, but instead of full units departing, it “was turned into a meaningless paper drill” by counting individual soldiers who were due for rotation. In addition, four days after taking office, Lyndon Johnson signed a new memo — NSAM 273 — that Newman shows was subtly but significantly different from the version Kennedy had been contemplating: among other things, it allowed U.S. involvement in covert actions against North Vietnam.

Newman’s thesis would have been both powerful and persuasive had he stuck to the facts he uncovered in the documents. Instead he indulges in unnecessary speculation and theorizing. Every instance in which Kennedy whispers to a dovish Senator or makes a public remark about his desire to be extricated from Vietnam is taken as evidence of his secret intentions; the far more frequent examples of his invoking the domino theory and denouncing the idea of withdrawal are construed as public posturing, designed to deceive conservatives in order to get re-elected. In fact, it would be more logical to interpret Kennedy’s contradictory pronouncements at their two-face value: like most charming politicians, he tended to tell people what they wanted to hear. Even he may not have known what he really planned to do in Vietnam after the election.

In the end, a good historian must realize that the “What if . . .?” game is indeed just that — a game. Statesmen must be judged by what they did, not by what they might have done. By this measure, Kennedy comes out well in Newman’s reckoning. He was not deceived by the falsely optimistic reports on + Vietnam. Despite Pentagon pressure, he did not send in combat troops. And one of his last acts was ordering the withdrawal of a significant number of advisers. Newman has done a good job of making this record clearer; he would have done even better had he left it at that.