We know that after the failed Bay of Pigs mission (April 1961) President Kennedy, angry that he had trusted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, declared that he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds. But too few Americans know that JFKs assassination prevented him from making critical decisions in Washington that would decide the fate not only of Vietnam and Indonesia, but also the the fate of the Cold War. (1) President Kennedy ignored his military advisors who pushed hard for sending combat troops to Vietnam. Instead, on October 11, 1963, six weeks before he was assassinated, he issued a secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 263).(2) When he left for Texas, President Kennedy said he was willing to accept and invitation from President Sukarno to visit Indonesia in the spring of 1964, which would signal his support for independent third world nations. (3) President Kennedy hoped to make a visit to the Soviet Union at the first suitable moment and on November 19 told a close friend he intended to be the first U.S. president to visit the Kremlin as soon as he and Khrushchev reached another arms control agreement. Thus, President Kennedy was planning to make peace with the Soviet Union and thereby taking the first steps to end the Cold War. Just days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the new president, he escalated the Vietnam war. Cynically running as the Democratic Partys peace candidate, Johnson explained to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a White House reception on Christmas Eve 1963: Just let me get the elected, and then you can have your war. Consider these facts and judge the truth from falsehood about the JFK assassination.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 21:59:22 +0000