That interpretation gained more support in 1998 when the Assassination Records Review Board released the records of the May 1963 SecDef conference in which a phased withdrawal from Vietnam was put on the books as a policy option, something that was not known at the time and remained a state secret for 35 years. When JFK’s national security advisers met in Honolulu on Nov. 20, 1963, their briefing books reiterated the plans for withdrawal without victory. The debate endures because JFK expressed support for both his dovish policy option (withdrawal without victory) and his hawkish option (escalation until victory). But overall, Galbraith notes that on a series of foreign policy decisions in his first two years and half years in office, JFK rejected the recommendation of his hawkish advisers. He sees JFK’s unfinished Vietnam policy in 1963 as “part of a larger strategy, of a sequence that included the Laos and Berlin settlements in 1961, the non-invasion of Cuba in 1962, the Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Kennedy subordinated the timing of these events to politics: he was quite prepared to leave soldiers in harm’s way until after his own reelection. His larger goal after that was to settle the Cold War, without either victory or defeat—a strategic vision laid out in JFK’s commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963.”
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 19:04:52 +0000
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