I believe John Newman first spoke on a panel at a JFK researcher conference at the Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy (A.S.K.) in October 1992 in Dallas, Texas. John appeared on a panel titled, “Media Cover-Up: Then and Now.” Jim Olivier introduced him and reminded John to briefly mention the workshop he would do later that night on Ed Lansdale.
Newman - Indeed I will. There have been so many questions about Ed Lansdale, Cuba, Howard Burris, at 6 o’clock in the Duncan room we’ve got about an hour and a half to go into that. We are going to do a special workshop on that.
[ I did not attend this workshop. I do not believe it was videotaped or audiotaped. If anyone did attend this and has an audiotape of it please contact me, I'd be very interested in what John said. ]
Newman - Gus Russo, who is very, very active, and a highly respected researcher will be on hand to give you some of his ongoing findings. And I’m sure you will find that interesting. Gus and myself will be there. And anyone else who is interested please show up.
I’d like to thank Mary Ferrell, Gary Shaw, Erin McArthur and everybody else who made this possible. And thank you all for coming and being patient.
I think this is a very important panel, more than meets the eye. The reason Oliver Stone’s movie caused all the uproar and brought all the hate and vitriol that it did is because of one reason, really one reason. It was a major media event.
Now what I think we need to do is define our terms a little bit. It can get too confining, this topic begins to lose its focus a little bit. I mean, after all, I don’t think when we say “Media and Cover-Up,” I don’t think we’re talking about hundreds of board members of major networks and newspapers sitting in a secret room saying, ‘Okay, what are we going to tell them this week guys?’ What we are talking about, I think, a little loose than that. But, it is deliberate acts carried out by individuals to suppress facts, or to alter facts, or to insert new [false] facts; also, the collected penguin syndrome, the net effect of which is, however, to function as a cover, or a myth. It is the combination of these deliberate acts, the accumulation of the penguin syndrome on the case that allows the truth in this case to remain hidden and the emergence of a myth or a set of myths to persist.
When we talk about “media,” the tendency is, anymore, television, I want to broaden today, I think it’s valid to include all printed media. And what I want to talk about are books. I mean after all even in television and radio when they really get down to it, when they have a fire fight, what do they do? They haul out some guy who’s written a book, to appeal to authority.
There are really two bottom lines here, there is the book, and then the all mighty documentary record. Books and documents are the scriptures of media.
I would like to talk to you, for just a few minutes about the evolution of a policy cover-up. I am going to stay on Vietnam. This does not mean that this is the only place where I think this has happened. There are green pastures for investigators all over the place in the policy arena. But we have just a few minutes here so let me talk to you about the evolution of a Vietnam policy cover-up here. What I am talking about here are the suppression of real facts, of replacing, or inserting false ones.
I am not going to talk about the falsification order of battle which I did in my workshop and I did in my book. I am going to talk about some totally new things here.
The headline is that the truth of Kennedy in Vietnam which is basically that his advisory effort had failed. And he knew it. And he was preparing to withdraw at the time of his death.
That truth has been replaced by a deception story. The deception story has a couple of variations. I’ll give you just two, that the advisory effort largely succeeded under him as the war improved and after his death things began to deteriorate. And then LBJ had to escalate, something Kennedy would have done.
Some people on the further extremes of the Right and Left would take that a step further and talk about a trigger happy JFK bent on winning in Vietnam, even firing squeamish generals who got in his way to act machismo.
Now this deception story really begins right at square one. It’s important to begin at the beginning, particularly in this situation because when one reads the documents and one gets into the history of Kennedy in Southeast Asia, you find, right in the beginning a battle over intervention. The very first thing Eisenhower tells him to do is to send American combat divisions into Southeast Asia, into Laos. Kennedy’s solution to that was, no, to seek a nonmilitary, political solution. And the same sort of proposals were made on Vietnam right away.
So, the truthful headline would read, right off the bat, "President Destroys Ongoing Plans to Intervene in Southeast Asia.” That would have been the headline in the New York Times. That is not the way it reads. The reason why it doesn’t read that way is because of some deliberate acts by individuals who I shall not name but I will tell you their institutions. You may be able to guess their books if you are interested in this. This particular effort to destroy the truth about the early days’ of the Kennedy’s administration’s policy in Vietnam are carried out by very esteemed officials at Cornell and Princeton. [ William Conrad Gibbons at Princeton with his books "The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War.]
Now one of them tells us that with respect to Laos that Kennedy had a disposition to send in a large combat force. No source on that.
He tells us that in May 1961, we are a couple of months into the new administration, Kennedy ordered his Vice-President to ask South Vietnamese President Diem if he wanted U.S. combat troops. Now this has been picked up and paled in other texts on the war. In this case we have a scriptural reference, the Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, Volume Two, page 54. But, don’t turn to the scriptures because ye shall find there art no truth to this scriptural reference.
In fact, not only is there no order from Kennedy to Johnson to ask Diem for American combat troops the tenor and tone of those pages suggests quite the reverse.
This same individual who I am talking about whose book is from an Ivy league university tells us that JFK’s disposition was to act very forcibly in South Vietnam was increased by a 26 April (1961) Lansdale report. I am going to talk about Lansdale later. But, as proof, as backup, he cites a students paper, which doesn’t prove it at all, in my own humble opinion. What he fails to mention though is that JFK, that very day shot down that section of that very report which asks for, or suggests, or recommended that U. S. combat troops be sent. He also fails to mention that Kennedy fired Lansdale that day from any responsibilities for Vietnam.
But, you see, the effect of those statements here, ‘Kennedy’s disposition to send large combat forces into Laos,’ (and) ‘Kennedy charged Johnson to ask [Diem] for combat troops,’ ‘Kennedy was following Lansdale,’ what do they suggest to you? Certainly not the headline as it should have read, “President Knocks Down Ongoing Plans to Intervene in Southeast Asia.” That was about circa 1987, a book used as a textbook now, in many, many universities.
Not to far away in Princeton we have a three volume series, “The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War [By William Conrad Gibbons.] This particular scripture has now become official, in the sense that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee uses it, and has published it. We find that not 64 days into the new administration (March 25, 1961) John Kennedy is issuing orders for American planes to shoot down “hostile aircraft,” the quotes around hostile aircraft are meant to suggest there are no hostile aircraft. We have a trigger happy president, ordering, you know, gun happy, sending our aircraft into air to air combat missions, not even, two months after his inauguration!
Now we have a scriptural reference to back this up, John F. Kennedy Library, a document in the National Security Files, what we have is an order from the JCS to a general in Vietnam seeking approval from an ambassador in Vietnam to shoot down these aircraft using hostile aircraft.
Well, there are several problems when one looks at the scriptural basis here because the problem is the organization to which it was sent, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) does not yet exist, and will not exist for another year. No problem, we will use the old ellipses, you know, dot, dot, dot so you don’t see MACV, we’ll just say MAG, the Military Advisory Group, in the text outside of the quotation, which gives the effect that this thing is being sent to an organization which did exist in 1961.
Well, what about the commander? Well, it was sent, when you hold the document in your hand, which you can, what you find out is that is that it was sent to General Harkins, the commander of MACV. There is no General Harkins in Vietnam in 1961! It’s General McGarr. No problem, we have ellipses, we’ll get rid of that and put McGarr’s name in the text.
One final problem here, the Ambassador’s name is wrong too! Ambassador Durbrow is our Ambassador on the date in which this order was issued. The problem is the text of the order. No problem, we’ll just say that Nolting’s date of arrival has been moved up.
You see, what I am talking about here is not a mistake. It’s not an oversight. We are talking about a pattern, where the names of commanding generals are changed, the names of the organizations are changed, the names of the ambassador or their arrival dates are changed around, all [of this] for just one little document to work, so we can have the president, trigger happy, sending aircraft off to do combat against mythical aircraft just 64 days into his presidency!
I could go on. And I did my doctoral dissertation on 1961. And it was very, very difficult to work through a lot of these problems because they get picked up and repeated and tracking it back to where it started. But a key for me was when I realized that some of the scriptures themselves had been diddled with it was easy. I always made sure I went back to the Kings, Chronicles and Jeremiah and worked from there forward. And I did not have much of a problem after that.
Now I could go on, there were many more instances like the one I said, [examples are] NSAM-111 when Kennedy increases the advisors, and General Taylor’s mission out there, and so on. But, I am going to skip over that. I do want to mention that these are secondary sources. These are books. These people are hauled out, and were hauled out after Oliver Stone made his movie, the people who wrote the two books I’m talking about were quoted by George Lardner of The Washington Post and put on television to convince you of what an idiot Stone was for his ridiculous suggestion that Kennedy might have been pulling out of Vietnam.
Documents have been doctored.
The very first study that came out as a result of an illegal declassification, the Pentagon Papers, had a huge black hole in it. Peter Dale Scott was the first to notice it but it’s in October and November 1963. There are an awful lot of documents about Kennedy in Vietnam but mysteriously, especially when it was hot, and they were meeting practically everyday, there is this big hole, very strange.
I have found in my particular survey of all of these years, and all of the documents, not that something is still classified, but document gone.
National Intelligence Estimates have been altered, in particular, or sections dropped off. And, you, the public, wouldn’t know because even though the law that if it is not all there it has to say sanitized, or section deleted, or whatever. It is illegal not to do that. But, nonetheless there are large sections missing. And they always deal with the number of enemy out there. It is not a coincidence.
And it is still going on! A general, a very famous one, but who shall go nameless who was Patton’s G-2 during WWII, so you can find out who he is, [General Joseph A. McChristian] told me that his personal papers had been pilfered and a large number of them destroyed. And we’re talking about Vietnam, and intelligence in Vietnam, only it’s after my period.
There are problems in the documents, big problems, of the documents being altered.
At the very end we have this NSAM controversy, NSAM 263 and 273. I am not going to go into that now. I talked about that at length yesterday. What I want to tell you today is simply that the net effect of these presidential orders at the very end, and the later one [273] Kennedy never saw and never signed, but many people including Noam Chomsky and Alexander Coburn on the Left, and Harry Summers and his crowd on the Right would have you believe that Kennedy would have signed that [NSAM 273.] The net effect is that Kennedy would have changed his mind, that he was not going to withdraw and was going to escalate and section direct American attack against North Vietnam. The net effect of all; I have a long list, a long list of changes, changes to documents, changes to part of the story. Never have I discovered one yet where it softens Kennedy’s position on Vietnam, where it makes a mistake to the direction that would make him less of a Cold Warrior, or less likely to intervene. Always, in 100% of the mistake is to the other direction, to tar him with the feather of intervention.
And the most important parts of the deception story are the beginning and the end. And so it’s not unnatural that we should find that most of the diddling here is in the early days and the last days. But, it exists inbetween too.
To summarize a little bit here, by changing the beginning from one in which JFK torpedoes intervention to one in which he orders escalation at every turn and by changing the ending from one in which the president’s last will and testament, in effect, his withdrawal order is changed to one in which he is about to sanction a direct war effort against North Vietnam alters our understanding of what was going on. It buries the truth about how the course of history was changed on 22 November 1963, and remains effectively buried by what functions as a myth.
And what is particularly ugly about this myth here is the way in which it indulges dogmatism on both sides of the political spectrum. I’ve already mentioned Chomsky and Coburn on the far Left, read this month’s copy of Z magazine, Noam Chomsky going after me for 15 pages and more and says this is an extract of a book to come. So, get ready folks, we are going to have a real long debate on this.
On the far Right it’s the same thing. Half of them accuse me of being unaccountably kind to Kennedy. There is another group of them that say I have vilified beyond the wildest dreams of his worst enemies. Which is it?
What is happening is they are bouncing off each other like billiard balls. There is so much baggage being brought into this subject matter that this myth of Kennedy charging into Vietnam is very valuable to extreme points of view. I call it the pitchfork/pedestal syndrome. You see, it’s interesting how Alexander Coburn and Col. Harry Summers make the identical arguments that Kennedy would have charged in there. In fact, even faster than Lyndon Johnson. You see, because on the one hand all presidents are corrupt, our system is so broken it cannot be fixed. No president can ever have a correct thought, not even a little itsey-bitsey one, and that’s a great thing. In other words from the Right side, and this is Summers, Kennedy was a great macho warrior and he has even been adopted as an icon, if only he had been allowed to live he would have really gone in there and really cleaned their clocks.
So, what I am saying to you, the particular ugliness of this myth appeals, it indulges extremist views and dogmas on both sides.
I believe the time has come to slam the door on Kennedy as hero, or Kennedy as villain, and reclaim our history. Thank you very much.
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