Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (44 page)

In 2005, Gray said, “the gravest mistake of my eighty-eight years was getting involved with Nixon,” explaining he had “refused all contact” with
the former president after Watergate, even though Nixon “sent me book after book after book” with personalized inscriptions. “If you could have known what was in my heart and mind then, you would have thought I was a vigilante,” Gray said. “I was hurt and so angry at this man, who had not only junked his presidency, but junked the career of so many other people, many of whom had to go to jail.”
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Gray was forced to resign from the FBI on April 27, 1973, after it became known publicly that he had destroyed the two Hunt files given to him by John Dean.

Had there been proof JFK had ordered the Diem assassination, E. Howard Hunt would never have needed to forge State Department documents. Moreover, that Hunt broke the law to create falsified State Department documents underscores the explosive nature of the Diem assassination, even in 1972 and 1973, ten years after the JFK assassination.

One of the tantalizing aspects of the Watergate investigation involves the possibility that the “plumbers unit” in the White House fabricated and stole yet unseen documents that would tarnish the record or the character of JFK and his two brothers.

Why then exactly did Richard Nixon employ E. Howard Hunt in the White House?

Nixon’s purpose very possibly was not just to change the historical record regarding the Diem assassination, but to make sure no evidence existed that could implicate him in the JFK assassination.

Why then did Richard Nixon pay E. Howard Hunt hush money after the burglars at the Watergate were caught?

Quite possibly Nixon feared that Hunt knew enough about the JFK assassination to implicate him. Even if in revealing the truth Hunt implicated himself, Nixon feared he might do it if he got a good deal for trading off the information.

What is certain is that if Hunt knew the full extent of the CIA’s involvement in the JFK assassination, Nixon knew it too.

In the first one hundred days after taking office, President Kennedy was faced with escalating Soviet military involvement supporting the Pathet Lao, a Communist nationalist group in Laos engaged in a civil war seeking
to overthrow the Royal Laotian Government. On March 23, 1970, JFK held a press conference in the then-new State Department auditorium. He spoke against a background of three maps of Laos illustrating the advance of the Russian-supported Pathet Lao. In his opening statement, JFK made clear there could be no peaceful solution in Laos without “a cessation of the present armed attacks by externally supported Communists.”
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On Thursday April 27, 1961, only ten days after the launch of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK held a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House—a meeting historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described as a “long and confused session.”
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At the meeting, the Joint Chiefs, cautioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, refused to guarantee the success of a US military operation in Laos, even with the sixty thousand troops the Joint Chiefs had recommended only a month before being committed to Laos to block the Russians and stop the advance of the Pathet Laos. How could a US military incursion in Laos, some five thousand miles away, succeed when military intervention in Cuba had just failed, only ninety miles off the shore of Florida? Moreover, for JFK, the problem remained of justifying the intervention against Communism in Laos if we were resolved to reject intervention against Communism in Cuba.

Coincident with these discussions, General McArthur gave a speech in New York City where he once again expressed the views he espoused at the end of World War II that, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. characterized it, “anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.”
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McArthur advised strongly that the United States should never again fight a land war in Asia, a part of the world where indigenous military forces could subsist for days on a pocketful of uncooked rice, while the US military required extensive bases and forward supplies just to sustain battle-ready troops. McArthur added that if we intervened in Southeast Asia, the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons, should China enter in force. The lesson of the Korean War was that fighting a limited warfare war fought with conventional troops and conventional weapons was a risky strategy. When the Korean War was being fought, China was still more than a decade away from developing its own nuclear war capability. Yet, China could enter the war at any moment with thousands of fresh troops at precisely the right moment, calculating to overwhelm US troops fighting at near
exhaustion in the bitterest of winter conditions.

Combat in Southeast Asia promised to be even more difficult than combat in Korea. In Korea, China was still forced to rely on regular army troops to secure victory. In Laos or Vietnam, combatants fighting against the United States included a shadow army that could easily blend back unseen into the village and countryside. Even when regular North Vietnamese troops entered the war, the North Vietnamese were fighting in their own country, in terrain they knew and understood. In Laos and Vietnam, US troops were vulnerable to defeat in what was asymmetrical combat against an enemy that could be organized loosely as guerilla insurgents. War in Laos and Vietnam was as much about controlling the infrastructure of the local communities as gaining or losing territory in a conventional sense. In the peasant civil war typically fought in Southeast Asia, fighters lived where they fought, often with only a pocketful of uncooked rice to sustain them. Insurgent guerilla fighters entered and exited the field of battle as often as not unseen, if not necessarily unsuspected, typically without the niceties of uniforms or a formal command structure.

The Laos crisis ended when the Russians stepped down and Khrushchev decided to negotiate. But this did not occur before Kennedy had given the order, on April 20, 1961, for the corps of American military advisors in Laos to discard their civilian clothes and to put on their military uniforms, transforming into a Military and Advisory Group authorized to accompany Laotian troops into combat.
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In Laos, JFK was not willing to commit US military forces, but he was willing to commit military advisors. With Laos, JFK had begun to develop a limited warfare theory for Southeast Asia that would rely upon military assistance and foreign aid, not combat troops. As Kennedy reflected on Laos, he resolved he would not make in Vietnam the mistake he had avoided in Laos. As he studied Vietnam, JFK came to the conclusion he would not make the mistake Truman had made in Korea. JFK had no intention whatsoever of committing to Vietnam regular US troops, as he had also refused to commit in Laos.

On the day JFK was assassinated, he was on his way to the Dallas Trade Center to give a luncheon address. This, the “Unspoken Speech,” contained a strong and clear statement of Kennedy’s determination to support our allies and to fight back Communism worldwide through a military and economic assistance program, not through the direct intervention of US military forces. JFK’s prepared remarks read:

But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of international Communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice.… For our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3–5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers.… A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.
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With this speech, JFK would have expressed a clear policy preference for providing military aid to nations such as Vietnam, rather than committing troops. Beginning in the first days of his administration over Laos to the last hours of his administration over Vietnam, JFK was constantly pressured by the military to ramp up the US military presence in Southeast Asia. White House historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that starting with Laos, “the military left a predominant impression that they did not want ground troops at all unless they could send at least 140,000 men equipped with tactical nuclear weapons.”
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The Pentagon was unrelenting in this position, calling for the possibility even of dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi and Beijing. Kennedy was moving in the opposite direction, even when Gen. Edward Lansdale presented to him the same proposal he had developed for Eisenhower.

General Lansdale was a product of the OSS formed in World War II as the predecessor of what became the CIA. He had a swashbuckling reputation and was often cited as the model for William J. Lederer and
Eugene Burdick’s 1958 novel
The Ugly American
.
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Until LBJ came along, General Lansdale’s only supporter was E. Howard Hunt in the CIA who saw benefits to Lansdale’s thinking in covert coups, such as what the CIA engineered in Guatemala in 1954 and 1957. Landsdale recommended to JFK a direct US military intervention in Vietnam, just as he had recommended the same to Eisenhower in 1954 when the French faced defeat at Diem Biem Phu, and were at the point of being pushed out of what was then known as Indochina.

JFK properly worried that no direct US military intervention in a region like Southeast Asia could succeed, regardless how many troops were sent or what type of arms they had, unless the indigenous population was ready to fight and die for their own freedom. JFK also worried about the corrupt regimes. How could a constitutional republic modeled on the United States possibly survive in a political environment where corrupt politicians oppressed the citizens in the name of liberal democracy?

By offering a wide range of financial assistance, military training, and sophisticated military equipment, JFK felt he could test the resolve and the ability of the citizens of a nation like Vietnam to help them win in a war against indigenous Communists supported by China and Russia. Listening to the Pentagon’s enthusiasm for bombing, JFK harkened back to the Strategic Bombing Study that FDR ordered at the end of World War II. It proved that strategic bombing achieved no true military advantage unless there were strategic targets to bomb, especially fuel and chemical production sites. What was going to be achieved by carpet-bombing the jungle in Southeast Asia, Kennedy asked? Yes, the “rolling-thunder” effect of massive B-52 raids would be frightening. But in a theater of war where supply routes like the Ho Chi Minh trail were little more than footpaths through dense tropical undergrowth, what military advantage would massive strategic bombing raids achieve?

On the day JFK died, the United States had fifteen thousand American military advisors in South Vietnam; the same number JFK had decided to send there in 1961.
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Presidential historian Robert Dallek has argued that JFK was moving in the direction of reducing the US military
involvement in Southeast Asia. “But we do know that in November 1963 Kennedy was strongly leaning both toward reducing tensions with Castro and against expanding commitments in Vietnam.” Dallek argued. “And most historians agree that Kennedy, like Johnson, would have faced Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election and defeated him by a wide margin, just as Johnson did. This would have given Kennedy, now free from concern about re-election, the mandate to make a bold foreign-policy change while staring down his military advisers.”
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James W. Douglass in his 2008 book,
JFK and the Unspeakable,
describes a conversation JFK had in the White House with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in the spring of 1963, after Mansfield criticized Kennedy over Vietnam. JFK aide Kenneth O’Donnell who sat in on part of the meeting described the discussion as follows: “The President told Mansfield that he had been having second thoughts about Mansfield’s arguments and that he now agreed with the Senator’s thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.” Kennedy told Mansfield that while he was in agreement, a pull out was not possible until 1965, if JFK were reelected. “President Kennedy explained and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to office for a second term,” O’Donnell continued. “After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, ‘In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure I
am
reelected.”
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That policy to withdraw the bulk of US military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1965 became official government policy on October 11, 1963, when JFK signed National Security Action Memorandum Number 263. Nine days later, JFK signed National Security Action Memorandum Number 263, making into official government policy the recommendation of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor for the withdrawal of one thousand US military personnel by the end of 1963 and by the end of 1965, the withdrawal of the bulk of US military personnel.

On Monday, September 2, 1963, Labor Day, at Hyannis Port, JFK had a relaxed interview outdoors with CBS television anchorman Walter Cronkite, who that sunny day was inaugurating a new CBS television news program. About midway into the interview, Cronkite asked about Vietnam: “Mr. President, the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment is of course the one in Viet-Nam, and we have our difficulties there, quite obviously.” Kennedy answered directly, careful to set the stage for explaining why a military withdrawal from Vietnam was beginning to make sense to him. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government [of South Vietnam] to win popular support that the war can be won out there,” Kennedy explained. “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can’t help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”
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In the interview, JFK distanced himself from saying the U.S. should withdraw from Vietnam, saying to withdraw would “be a great mistake.” James W. Douglass argued when he spoke with Cronkite, that Kennedy “knew he was headed in that contentious direction, but he was not prepared to admit it in advance on national television.”
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Douglass commented that even when Kennedy had implemented a policy of withdrawal from Vietnam by signing National Security Action Memorandum 263—a document not declassified for some thirty years—he “still hesitated how to justify it politically during the final last weeks of his life.”
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