At the same conference on Friday October 23, 1992 in a workshop John Newman spoke on Vietnam. This was concurrent with a medical evidence panel in the main ballroom.
The tape starts with John Newman already talking.
Newman - How many people have not? I want to know how many people have not..(some audience reaction to the question) How many people have not seen the film “JFK” ?
I want to amend what I do a little bit here because we have here not very much time I assume since each one of you is here that you have a special interest in this subject. So, I want to try and really compress what I will do. I’ll tell you what I will give you the choice, I can make very limited remarks myself and have this turn into a discussion or I can try, we have 90 minutes approximately, or I can try and give you a baseline in an hour or less. What is the sense of the group?
Audience - Baseline
Newman - Okay, I can do that. Okay, in that case....I guess the first thing that I am going to do is just give you ah,...I’ll introduce myself. How’s that? My name is John Newman, I’m a Doctor (Ph. D) Major, Major Doctor (Ph. D.), sir, whatever you want. I am active duty, still. I have 19 years of service. I will probably retire a year from now. My branch is military intelligence. Most of my time has been hanging around in NSA or working with some other overseas sites. I’ve done some attaché work in China, the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, now obviously, and Mongolia. I’m an academic. My first degree was before military service was actually in Chinese studies. I have a M.A. in East Asian studies from the University [?] arts and history I’ve taught at the university for 12 years on 20 to 25 subjects, very wide ranging, Soviet history, Chinese history, U.S. history, that sort of thing, my doctoral dissertation is a slice of this book. It is focused on 1961. And Stone found out about my work at a critical stage with his movie, the making of his movie, they were getting ready to shoot in Dallas, I wrote seven or eight scenes in that movie. Some of them come directly out of material from this book, the White House scenes, the Pentagon scenes, they were mine, I co-directed them I should say. Anyway, I’ll say no more about that. If you have any questions or you want to ask questions when get into discussions...Yeah?
Q. - Yeah, I have a question I just came from across the hall over there and it was so crowded I couldn’t find a chair. Why is the shooting of an officer a lot more important than the Vietnam war?
Audience member - That's what I said, I was just telling him that.
[ There was a presentation on the Tippit shooting across the hall.]
Newman - Well, I can’t answer that. Anyway, if that interests you, that part of the story, we can also just talk anytime, we don’t have to talk now. I’m hanging around here for three days. I’ll be happy to go on with you about that. So, having said all of those things by way of introduction let me give you, a little military thing to do, the bottom line up front, okay, I’m going to give you the headline, the headline is history changed when Kennedy died. As far as I’m concerned that’s the way this issue has been framed. Now it is true we don’t know 100% that he would have followed through and pulled out of Vietnam. He might after all have changed his mind. Honestly, that is the truth. But that is not the way the question is being framed. The way the question is being framed by academics and anti-conspiracy types is, well, Johnson just continued Kennedy’s policy.
No, Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policy, and Kennedy [had he lived] also may also have reversed Kennedy’s policies.
As long as the issue is framed correctly then we can get along famously. But, by ignoring this reversal aspect we have become intellectually dishonest on this issue. And I am going to address that from a separate angle in the Media and Cover-Up panel tomorrow. But I want to broaden the definition of media to include all printed media to include books and academics. And I will be focusing on that area. Did you have something you wanted to say?
Q. - Yeah, I think the question is wrong on Kennedy withdrawing, he had to get us in before he could get us out. I don’t think the question is would he have addressed the war the way that Johnson did in 1968.
Newman - Well, I’m going to talk about the Kennedy Johnson comparison in a second.
In any event, that’s the thesis. What is the evidence? The evidence really comes to us from three areas, two primary areas, one’s verbal, one’s written. In the oral area we are talking public utterances and private utterances that are directly contradictory, and in the written media we are talking about documents, documents of presidential orders and minutes from national security council meetings.
On the oral side the press conferences were available immediately. They have always been there. People watched them while he was alive or shortly after he was dead. The private utterances never came out until the war went bad. There are a lot of reasons for that, let me just digress. Why in the hell should we think he was going to pull out if Robert Kennedy says he wasn’t going to pull out? Answer, because Robert Kennedy said that in 1964 and his brother had just spent the previous twelve months lying to the public about staying the course. Why in the hell is Robert Kennedy going to say, oh yes, my brother was a liar, he was pulling out. You got to understand what American public opinion was all about back then, 2 to 1 in favor of these sorts of policies. This was the Cold War period, okay? And by exposing the political nature of Kennedy’s Vietnam decisions Robert Kennedy would have been destroying the martyr syndrome that had been building up around John Kennedy.
You may detect already with me you’re not going to get an apology for Kennedy. I’m not going to build him up and for another thing I’m not going to tear him down either. The truth lies somewhere inbetween, and if that is bothersome to you then I apologize. But, I say it’s time to get rid of the whole baggage. The pitchfork/pedestal syndrome won’t do any more, putting the man on a pedestal with a halo around his head is unsatisfactory, putting a pitchfork in his hand and making him the devil incarnate as Noam Chomsky tries to do is also inadequate. These dogmas no longer serve any useful purpose.
The oral evidence then; I’m sorry for that tangent; the oral evidence as far as the private utterances that contradict the public ones don’t come out until after the war goes south. Then all of a sudden they are coming out of the closet. Mansfield says this, and O’Donnell says Kennedy said that and so on.
And the written record, the documents were secret until the Pentagon Papers release and we have a lot of them there. But, Peter Dale Scott was one of the first to notice this gaping black hole in the October - November ‘63 time frame. And we’ve had trickle, trickle down declassification since then. It’s still inadequate to flush out fully the key meetings until last year. Last year the State Department released four volumes, it would have been before last year by the way, the national security council held up the State Department study for four years. We actually had volumes 1 and 2, volume 1 was 1961, volume 2 was 1962, volumes 3 & 4 were 1963 split up to August, and then August up to November timeframe. Volumes 3 and 4 were released last year. Thousands of new documents including the meetings at which these decisions were made. So, in other words, in sum, the oral evidence, the public side of it available immediately, the private side of it came out towards the end of the war, the hard documents became available in ‘75, ‘76 and increasingly since then. But, the major end piece put on there only less, well, I guess about a year and a half ago, 18 months ago, 17 months ago. That is the state of the evidence, what type of evidence is out there.
For me anyone who would deal with only one portion of this evidence is either now ignorant or this war has some political subtext or has some reason for not dealing with it, one must reconcile the two sides of Camelot, being a Kennedy apologist, or a Johnson apologist in the first place is no longer adequate. And yet for me personally it’s the documentary record which resolves it. And I will go over that. But, anyway, that is my bottom line. I gave you my thesis, my thesis is he was pulling us out at the time of his death. And I think the evidence is overwhelming that he was. As far as whether or not he would have changed his mind obviously I think the evidence strongly indicates that he would not have changed his mind, that he would have continued. 1961 is a crucial year for understanding that. I am going to get to that right now.
I am going to give you a Vietnam baseline. I’m going to try to do it, 15 minutes has already gone by I am going to try to do this within 40 minutes or so. And I would also like to make a few comments on what I consider collateral issues of current import chaos on the right, chaos on the left and America’s self image.
Right, a Vietnam baseline for the Kennedy years, 1961 is a crucial year. It is a clean year, not totally, particularly in the area of Lansdale and Rostow. And because we have now been able to add this, another panel I will not waste time here today very much on that. We will have tomorrow evening at 6 o’clock, 6 to 7:30, time to really go into, to what Lansdale is up to and so on. I will mention him if it is important. If you think there’s something that you need to have answered, then fine, it's not, we can discuss that. But, when I say it’s a relatively clean year here’s what I mean, THE GENERALS SAY WHAT THEY MEAN. There are disagreements; and the senior civilians too, by the way. This is not a case where the military want to get into a war and the civilians are brought in kicking and screaming, uh-un, not at all. The senior military and civilian leaders who make recommendations to the president, and I will discuss this, SAY WHAT THEY MEAN. And they say why they want these policies implemented. And so does the President. It becomes very combative. The President becomes increasingly isolated. But, nevertheless, people tell the truth. It gets very vitriolic towards October and November 1961. But, what we have in this year is a clear record of every senior administration official, military and civilian of what policies they’ve recommended and why.
In a nutshell, the policies that were put before Kennedy were intervention. I do not have time to tell you the whole story of 1961 in chronological order right now. It’s all laid out in my book. But, what we have is a sequence of events in the Spring where an initial plan to intervene in Laos with a massive American force is rejected by Kennedy. This is what Eisenhower told him you would have to do, this is what the Joint Chiefs told him he must do, what his senior civilian advisors, including Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary [of Defense] McNamara, the principal deputies, and so on. [Chester] Bowles being the exception at the State Department. [Bowles was Undersecretary of State for most of 1961. He was replaced by George Ball in early December 1961.]
Audience member - Also Rostow and Bundy, correct?
Newman - His national security council advisors, yes, you’re right. We have a unanimity of advice here. Kennedy almost did it. Understand that at a certain point in this process and this spring [ of 1961] we had a build up more or less like Desert Shield. And American forces were poised in the Gulf of Siam ready to hop in there. It would have been a miserable operation in military terms if you understand what a distance, yeah?-
Audience member - Also, an excellent book, Lewis Paper’s Promise and Performance [John F. Kennedy: The Promise and the Performance] by Lewis Paper...to send 50,000 troops (I can’t make out what he says. Sorry.)
Newman - Most of the senior leaders in the government felt that going in would lead to the use of nuclear weapons, and/or war with China. Curtis LeMay was one of the few who thought the Chinese wouldn’t come in but wanted to nuke them anyway.
(Laughter.)
Yeah, there is a, sort of a comical character, comical quality to this, I think only because we can’t conceive of that sort of a discussion today. And it’s not that using nuclear weapons isn’t what generals should do, that’s what they are paid to do, to think about this but it was the wholly inappropriate scenario here in these jungles that these, that using these weapons was being talked about in that is so surrealistic today to think of a discussion in these terms. But it’s true. Just read the documents, I’ve got it in there where, that cover these discussions. I don’t want to spend anymore time on that. What I am trying to tell you is that Kennedy came extremely close to going in. The Bay of Pigs failed literally at the eleventh hour, fifty ninth minute. That’s not the only reason [why] Kennedy changed his mind and doesn’t go in. There are other purely sound military reasons for not following through, that come up.
In any event the plans change for Vietnam very quickly. The rest of the story of 1961 is a story of increasing pressure on Kennedy to intervene. He does not. In the end everybody comes on board with this. And lots of differing opinions on how many guys we should be sending in but the bottom line is this American combat divisions, 200,000 troops, plus or minus, depending on which individual we’re talking about. Now we’ve missed some pieces of ‘61 we haven’t really discussed Lansdale and Rostow, there were the Johnson escapades that were going on in ‘61 that are extremely crucial for lots of reasons. Maybe we can return to LBJ later as far as the ‘61 episodes are concerned if there is time or inclination from this room.
But, I need to deal right now with the main import of this year, you see, because ...is saying this, Noam Chomsky, in Z magazine this month he’s questioning why I think 1961 such a big deal. And I do think it’s a big deal. And he just makes the statement that it’s not the same as when Johnson, as the situation Johnson faced later, which I find incredibly naive.
Here is what they told him, the situation, the battlefield situation is dire, the fate of South Vietnam hangs in the balance, critical U.S. interests in that region and globally are at stake and nothing short of the introduction of several U.S. combat divisions can save the day. Now I will hold, I won’t not hold my breathe, I was going to say I would like for anyone in this room here to tell me a stronger case for intervention, other than they’ve landed in San Francisco, or something. Those are the precise same arguments that were laid before President Johnson in ‘64 and ‘65. So, when people say, oh we don’t know what Kennedy would have done because the situation wasn’t bad, it turned sour after his death and Johnson faced this different situation. So, because Kennedy didn’t face that situation we don’t know. Now those people have bought the lie, the lie of progress on the battlefield under Kennedy. That in itself wasn’t true. But there was never a lie about progress in ‘61. Everyone told the truth. See, that’s my point. You go back to ‘61 you see the criticality of this year. No one said we’re winning. Everyone told him there were only weeks left before the whole thing was going to go up in smoke. And I’m talking about a memo from the Joint Chiefs that said, Japan, India, the Philippines, the whole thing was going to go.
I can’t imagine how Noam Chomsky or any other military genius, which he is not, can possibly figure out a worse case that was made before President Johnson. It simply wasn’t. They pulled out all the stops, bare none, to convince Kennedy that this had to be done. And it was against those arguments and in that context that he said no. And it was in that precise same context and precise same arguments that Johnson said yes. To me that is the headline of 1961
Audience member - How did he say no?
Newman - How did he say no. In the first place he fired a bunch of people over at the State Department. In the second place he fired some people at the CIA that were connected to the Bay of Pigs thing but he fired them within hours of the Thanksgiving Day Massacre at the State Department. [See pages 140-141 of “JFK and Vietnam.
The firings and reshuffle took place between Nov 26th and 29th, 1961. They happened in response to NSAM 111, dated November 22, 1961.
George Ball replaces Chester Bowles in the number 2 spot at State.
Averell Harriman replaced Walter P. McConaughy as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.
George McGhee was put as Second Under Secretary of State
Brook Hays replaced Rostow as the President special assistant.
Frederick Dutton became the Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations.
Two days after the massacre at State Kennedy gave a very short speech as he welcomed John McCone as the new CIA director. “We want to welcome you here and to say that you are now living on the bull’s eye and I welcome you to that spot.”
In addition he demanded that someone come forward and take personal responsibility for carrying out his Vietnam policy. McNamara stepped forward.]
The third thing he did was he held a little meeting of people he was firing and people he wasn’t firing in his office about Vietnam. And he said you get with my policy or you get out.
Audience member - when was that?
Newman - NSAM 111, we are talking November 1961, all of these, these firings this meeting all happened literally within 72 to 82 hours of each other. Everybody got the message, never again would anyone ask John Kennedy to send combat troops to Vietnam. Game, set, and match. Battle over.
Audience member - What was John Kennedy’s reason for not sending.
Newman - If I am not going to send American soldiers to Cuba why should I send American soldiers 16,000 miles away to Vietnam, he asked Lemnitzer in this meeting in this same timeframe I’m talking about. Of course, do you know what Lemnitzer said back to him? We still think we should send troops into Cuba. These meeting were as I said vituperative. They were acrimonious. There was no love lost.
Audience member - But, there was a further complication with Russia.
Newman - No. What he was saying is that for me Vietnam is not even [as important as] Cuba. And he wouldn’t even sent soldiers into Cuba.
Now does that mean I am saying that Kennedy is some kind of a pacifist? Or some peace guy? No, I didn’t say that. I just answered your question with a documentary response. Look, in the Fall of 1961, just before when Khrushchev really starts pushing his button on Berlin, what does Kennedy do? Something not even Reagan would have done. He sent an armored task force right through East Germany, and had the Vice-President on the other side of the line to meet it. Now can you imagine any other point in history? The United States sending an armored task force through East Germany? Kennedy was not chicken. Now we can talk until the cows come home about the Cuban Missile Crises and the different options that he picked from and he picked the one that was the least dangerous from the three but nevertheless as you have seen on your TV screens and what not now that he was willing to go all the way. And we damn near did.
So, the issue is not whether Kennedy is a peace-nick or a hawk, the issue is squarely where and under what circumstances was he willing to use American power, and to what ends? And for John Kennedy, and this is Newman speaking, to answer your question, Saigon was no Berlin.
Audience member - Another point to this argument is the import that Kennedy gave to McArthur’s advice. McArthur who was fired for wanting to go into North Korea advised Kennedy not to get into a ground war in Vietnam.
Newman - Right, and Kennedy used to brow beat the Chiefs with that, you go tell General McArthur to change his mind and then come and tell me about it and I’ll change my mind.
audience member - Why wasn’t Saigon, Berlin, because Berlin is European and Saigon is Southeast asia?
Newman - I can’t answer this definitively because I don’t have the document, and I don’t have time really to deal with all the geo-strategic realities or gestalt such as they were. My personal opinion therefore and this is all it can be is that is simply that it did not pass the so what test. We had a crisis in Europe at the time, we had a crisis in the Caribbean developing, and Rostow told Kennedy we will have to call up the reserves. He told him that in 1961 in order to play both Southeast asia and Europe at the same time. Kennedy didn’t want to do that. It was a simple case of not going everywhere all at once at the same time. And Vietnam did not pass the "So, what?" test.
Audience member - Also, I think it’s because the French...
Newman - Sure. And on, and on, and on. We can sit here in this room and we can come up with good reasons. Do we know that those were Kennedy’s reasons? No, we don’t. We don’t have the documents. There are some speeches,, and I don’t want to get into that, that’s just a guess. What’s clear is from the document I quoted to you, sir, if I’m not going to send American troops into Cuba, why should I send them 16,000 miles over to Vietnam? That gives you the flavor. Whatever his constellation of reasons collectively were the end result is that Vietnam WAS NOT THE PLACE, as Karnow has it as a chapter heading in his book. [See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, Penguin Books 1981 Chapter 7 Vietnam is the Place. James Reston of the New York Times claimed JFK said, “Now we have a problem of making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” This was supposedly said by Kennedy to Reston in Vienna right after Kennedy met Khrushchev. ]
Now, I’m sorry I want to get into 1962. I’m sorry to be so watched up here. We have spent half an hour. I really do want to march on here. And if I have done any disservice to ‘61 on this argument please hold my feet to the fire in the discussion period.
1962, everything changes. Can I give you an aside, let me digress, I predict, because we are in the infancy of this research. We have a lot further to go, standards are sloppy in the Kennedy research business, and they are getting better, and they are going to get better, my prediction is this, if, IF there is any connection to the policy nexus, if there is, you are going to see major things happening in Oswald planning in ‘62. The presumption is that he is not acting as a lone gunman and there is a connection to the policy nexus therefore there must be from some planning standpoint a cross fertilization in the time horizon. That’s just a prediction of where the research will go.
Now here’s what happened in ‘62. At the end of ‘61 Kennedy does agree to a significant military increase, a significant increase of U.S. military presence. No combat troops. But, more armored personnel carriers, an air force squadron that bombs and does herbicidal missions and that sort of thing, and a vast increase in the number of U.S. advisors. And they don’t all show up on the doorstep on morning one but by the time his presidency is finished they have gone from roughly 880 up to almost 16,000.
Now for our purposes the only part I really want to talk to you about is the intelligence part of the equation because this big U.S. presence, this increase in our presence leads to a an exponential increase in ground combat intelligence on the ground in there, overnight. It was awkward the way it happened if you read the chapters and the Winterbottom / McNamara exchanges. And Winterbottom waffling on the figures. and we can’t tell the boss how many bad guys there are out there it’s kind of embarrassing. But, in any event, very quickly this became priority number one, and military intelligence the size and nature of the enemy in Vietnam. And they go to the bottom of that one in a hurry. Umm, headline, when they took their first good look and we turn on the system in there what does it say? There’s a whole lot more out there than we ever imagined. So many that this whole concept of Kennedy’s of an advisory program was dead before he could even implement it. In other words it doesn’t matter how good the advisors are, how good their advice is, if the force they are advising is wholly incapable of doing the job, you’re going to lose. And that is what that intelligence meant. The enemy was too large, by ten, twenty times for ARVN, the army of the Republic of Vietnam to handle it. In the interest of time I am not going to give my 5 to 10 minute on counterinsurgency warfare and forced ratios, just understand that Kennedy believed it, that the Joint Chiefs believed it that they all operated on the same sheet of music, so that these figures did matter, and that’s why they were falsified.
An enemy too large to cope with, for ARVN to cope with left the Americans with two options send in the American army to do the job, or withdraw. Now everybody knew that the first of those two options was no option at all, to wit let’s play ‘61 through again, we don’t need to, get with my policy or get out.
Oh, and by the way I didn’t finish that meeting, and I want one man personally responsible for implementing my policy. Who is it? And McNamara puts up his hand. So, what that intelligence really means is withdrawal. Send it back to Washington and it forces a decision from the White House, either change your mind about sending in American troops or get out because we can’t win this thing on an advisory effort.
Let’s turn on the slides, okay next. That is General Harkins the first commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, MACV. You probably don’t remember his name you probably remember Geneal Westmoreland who became his successor. Next. MACV was created by the way in February of 1962.
Now I am going to talk to you about this intelligence, it’s one thing, I think this is critical, I can stand up here and I can tell you this, and it’s going to be important when we talk about who knows what and who is tracking what in all of this, but I want to make believers out of you. So I am going to show you the documents okay? Because there are people who say I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever for these crazy things I’m saying.
Now all the people who falsified the intelligence in Saigon to make it look as if we were winning the war so that the truth would not go back to Washington have since told their stories and you can read about it, all of them without exception. And they are backed up, incidently by the American advisors, our senior advisor in country Dan Boone Porter and all of the other folks that I was able to document. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wondered when as I was calling up these guys and they would say agh, no, that’s not the way it was, we were doing fine. I never got that story. Now a lot of the advisors weren’t privy, or didn’t know too much about what I am going to talk to you about now, about inteligence figures being falisified. But, they knew about operation reports being falsified. In other words South Vietnamese offensive operations that did not exist, that was known.
Now for reasons which I am not going to go into because I would have to describe the military structure in the Pacific theatre and all of this. There is another Army intelligence operation in theatre, in Honolulu, the United States Army Pacific. They had direct electrical communications with Army security agency units in Vietnam. They got raw data. The same raw data that went into MACV in Saigon and was brought [into] the false story of success. These people at USARPAC, this is an intelligence outfit out there did the same thing. They did their own analysis, and their own reporting, and these monthly USARPAC intelligence bulletins. The Army was nice enough to declassify all of that stuff last year, okay? Now, what do these things show? Let’s take a look at the next slide. That one, I guess it was April, here, just look at the headline of this okay?
Pace of Vietcong War Slowly Accelerating. If you compare this to what they are telling McNamara, you know, Pace of South Vietnamese Effort Accelerating, it’s the exact opposite.
One little physical irony of this is USARPAC, the Army intelligence folks in Honolulu are sitting only a building or two over from the room in which McNamara is being briefed with opposite statistics. If we were Oliver Stone for example and we wanted to do a movie you would have a scene were a guy doing a dick and jane, with a map saying yeah, here’s all these bad guys are dying over here and all these good guys are winning here and then we could just look through a window seing an analyst writing up this headline “Pace of Viet Cong War Slowly Accelerating.” It really is interesting.
Audience Member - Was it the same statistics and different treatment? I mean its numbers and numbers.
Newman - You want to see some of these statistics, don’t ya? Okay, next slide. This is May it’s a crucibile period becuase it’s the end of this first real total sweep of the enemy order of battle by the MACV intelligence people and all the best and brightest guys we could find anywhere from Washington, from Honolulu, from the newly created [?] we picked the best guys we sent them out there to augment the team in May they came up with their findings. It was a three fold increase in Viet Cong numbers, 40,000 main force is what they found. These figures were cut down to about 15,000 and reported to McNamara in May at the May Sec/Def conference, okay?
What I am going to show you is next slide is the May USARPAC bulletin on the other hand, was saying this, Communist Viet Cong violence continues unabaited during March the Viet Cong launced an all time high of 1,861 armed attacks. McNamara comes out of the meeting I’ve never been so impressed in all my time. We’re taking it to the enemy. It’s the best account I’ve heard yet. That’s what he tells the press. [McNamara is quotes as saying, “ I’ve seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future.” See A Bright Shining Lie” And that’s what he’s actually been told. He’s not lying [He’s been lied to.] He’s just reporting what he’s been hearing, which is the opposite of this. {Reading from the USARPAC bulletin] “The number of attacks does not tell the whole story,..” Anyway, it goes on and on and on. I don’t have time to go into this.
Next. I’m going to show you how this really works. I also asked to have declassified all the Sec/Def briefings, all the briefings given to McNamara. So, we have those now. We have the documents. We have exactly what they told him. And here is his visit to Vietnam in May and let’s take a look at the next slide. That is Robert Strange McNamara himself. Next slide. Here is the crucial passage on the enemy in the briefing given to him, let me just draw your attention to the two subtitles, subtitle one is a review of the major Viet Cong military operations as opposed to or compared to a review of the major South Vietnamese RVNF operations, alright? Well, what about the enemy? Since 14 April there have been no VC operations as large as a battalion size, a battalion is about 600 men, the largest involves about 50, and here’s the 16,000 enemy in theater whereas we knew there were 40,000. Down here, since 21 March there have been over 40 operations by government forces of battallion or larger.
Now lets use, lets do my football analogy, the good guys are winning 40 to 0, right? If I look at that, zero battalion operations here, 40 or more here, that’s pretty good stuff. We really must be winning. Now a couple of things jump out here an really hit you, first of all what about the date, since 14 April? In other words we are going to look at VC operations, this is 8 May, so, for what, a couple of weeks. Now we are going to give them a score of zero in a two week period. Now, let’s look at friendly operations, well, we are going back to 21 March so they get a score of 40, but, we are going back, how long? six weeks, no three weeks, so they get an extra week, so we get to double their time period. So, imagine you go home, you get to tell your wife, yeah, it was a hell of a football game honey, we scored so much in the whole game the other guys they didn’t do so good and here’s what they scored in the second half. You don’t give the score for the other half in other words.
Now there is a reason why any operations in the first half weren’t reported here. Why don’t we take a look at that, let’s look at the next slide. Aha! Now, this is from USARPAC, remember those little guys that had the raw data this is a map of Viet Cong battalion sized operations. Let me read you the dates, 12 April, 8 April, 6 April 2 April, 2 April, 9 April, 10 April, 26 through 31 March, 20 - 13 March, April 9, April 2, 16 March, 29 March, 15 March, 6 April, 12 April.
Previous slide, let’s go back. Now, Viet Cong operations zero since 14 April.
Audience - They were tired from all that-
Newman - It was the largest offensive of the war! Okay? They were refiting. That is what the Viet Cong were doing. Yeah, they were taking a much needed break. You know, if the other team scores 90 touchdowns in the first half they don’t need to score any more in the second half, they can play defense for awhile, okay? Next slide.
So, you see the pattern here. This is just one example. I could stand up here for hours. I have pages and pages and pages of this stuff but that’s an example of how these statistics are juggled around. Next slide.
This is the measles map I had that declassified. This is the situation where the commander himself actually, General Harkins that is, when after they had cut the order of battle, or the analysts who cut it cut it forgot about the map. And the night before McNamara showed up for his briefing they came in for a practice run and they saw this map. And there was great dismay. This [referring to his slide]
is actually the falsified map. Harkins himself is giving orders while Col. Winterbottom, the intelligence chief himself peeled off pieces of acetate off of here to change the numbers on there. And this is the map that actually was shown to McNamara with his briefing book.
Audience member - So, the red area is the area that was-
Newman - Viet Cong dominated, red with blue lines is VC controlled and most of that stuff was ripped out of here.
Same audience member - So, you’re saying there was more red on the map
Newman - Yeah. More especially the red with the blue lines in it
Audience member - ?
Newman - Yeah, that’s what most people notice right away. It looks bad enough as it is. You can understand their dismay when they saw the original because of the overall statement that they were saying about how great the war was going.
Audience member - John, I don’t understand something, the same paragraph where McNamara was shown 16,500 VC troops, later in the paragraph it says 100,000?
Newman - That’s the political infrastructure, paramilitary forces, as seperate from hard core Viet Cong units, battalions, regiments
Same audience member - It said guerilla regiments?
Newman - Yes, guerilla being the key word.
Same audience member - Is that something different than Viet Cong?
Newman - There is still Viet Cong. What we are talking about is political infrastructure and they have a military capability, you bet ya. But it is still a different type of organization it’s not main line units battalions, regiments, and divisions.
Same audience member - Kind of like reserves, then?
Newman - Yeah. Well, they have weapons too, some of them. And they kill people. And when one of them dies you put him in the enemy dead camp. So they count then. But, understand the South Vietnamese army also had civilian irregular defense forces and all sorts of irregular forces as well. And we can get way off into the grass on this one and start counting main forces and paramilitary forces on both sides and I will if you are interested in that I’ll be happy to do that.
But, I want to keep moving forward here this afternoon, and in the interests of time. The main point is that there were a whole lot more out there than they were letting go back to Washington. And the reasons was they knew that it woul.d jeopardize our program, our continued pressence out there.
Audience member -...getting the sense that there was somebody is changing the scorboard, signals intellgence was gicing these guys the confidence to make the changes
Newman - Oh yeah, the blatant nature of this. This is not fudging one figure, okay? I laid out in chapters 11, 12, and 13 how this went on, meeting after meeting after meeting, week after week after week, the blatant nature of it would mean that there is no way Harkins could have dreamt this all up by himself. Somebody back in Washington was behind this.
I’m worried about time. I need to make leaps and bounds, leap tall buildings in a single bound.
This duplicity that began in ‘62, this lie, in fact I love this quote from one of the guys who worked in MACV intelligence when he found out I was doing my book, so you’re doing ‘61 and ‘62? That’s when the big lie started. It’s alsmot a good title for a book.
This false story of success on the battlefield will continue until 20 Nov 1963. Okay? You need to know that date. As soon as MACV is created in the context of a no decision as far as putting in combat troops in the end of ‘61, then we get this new intelligence we see what the size of the enemy is, then what will happen is, oh, we’re winning the war.
Oh, and I should tell you how that story is crafted. In other words the story that goes back to Washington through McNamara and all these meetings is we’re winning the war, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but, we need just a few more airplanes, just a armored personnel carriers, just a few more advisors. So, the way it was told is we’re winning, but..., it was used to justify incremental increase in U.S. personnel and equipment.
Did you have a question?
Audience member - Well, I was going to ask was the disinformation that they were giving to McNamara was it meant to change the policy...?
Newman - No, let me recapitulate, what this intelligence means is that his advisory program cannot work. You have to have a force big enough to advise. And they didn’t. The size of the South Vietnamese army was 150,000 men. They needed about half a million just to keep pace with the Viet Cong. Understand Viet Cong forces had grown from about 8,000 to 40,000 in 15 months. There was a hemorrhage coming down the trail and being recruited in the rice patties in South Vietnam. And the South Vietnamese army, they were trying, couldn’t increase it from 150,000 to 170,000 because of the desertions. The south Vietnamese army was hemorrhaging off the battlefield. And that’s the reason why. That stuff was known. There were only two choices, withdrawal or send in the American army. Sending in the Amerian army, that battle had been fought, and lost. He was not going to do it even if everything was critical. That’s why I went through that ‘61 argument in some detail here this afternoon.
Now, what I need to say is this, this lie of battlefield success will continue until 20 November 1963.... (tape ends)
SIDE B
Newman - ...if you go back and look at the press accounts and the headaches they are having in Washington dealing with the press accounts, which were basically true, all the intelligence guys and advisors in the country didn’t believe it, they knew it wasn’t true, and a lot of them were trying to blow the whistle. Read John Paul Vann, read about him, and Bright Shining Lie, and what he tried to do.
These guys I write about in my book, they came back to Washington and blew the whistle. They probably wished they hadn’t. But, they tried, nothing happened.
Some of Kennedy’s own advisors began to figure it out in the White House. Rostow had long since been sent out to pasture at the State Department, Forrestal had taken over, he (Forrestal) directly challenges this as early as January of ‘63. The CIA begins challenging not just the concept of winning but the statistical underpinning of it as well by January of ‘63.
The State Department’s intelligence bureau INR did the same thing. They attack this winning scenario.
So, when Noam Chomsky attacks John Newman and says John Newman has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about because Kennedy and everyone thinks they were winning the war, the withdrawl plan was only done in the context of winning I say c’mon Noam don’t be so damn naive. EVERYBODY knew it was a lie.
But, not right away. For me the question has always been when did he (Kennedy) figure it out? And that’s what caused, you know, my book would have been out earlier, but I wasted three aditional months and my last three chapters turned into seven or eight trying to figure out when Kennedy gets wise? And what he does about it? And we can’t prove when he knows because I don’t have a document that says, or a newspaper headline that says “President Kennedy Fires Top Advisors For Lying About Battlefield Situation.” Or I don’t have, you know, “Col. Smith Court-martialed for Falsifying Evidence to the President.” [ I ] Don’t have that kind of document. What I have is a pattern of information being made available to the president, and I have a time period in which this information was being made available to him. I have copies of all of the cable traffic sent to him that say we’re losing the war, Vietnamese generals, the Vice-President of South Vietnam. In other words I can establish when he has the opportunity to know. I cannot prove to you that he agrees with it or not.
I’m not talking about the statement to Mansfield. I’m talking about hard intelligence from his own advisors, from the CIA, from the State Department, from the National Security Council. It’s my guess that critical mass is reached in the president’s brain on or about March 1963. The private statements begin then, this [Senator Mike] Mansfield, [Senator Wayne] Morse, all that stuff, that’s when that private record which contradicts the public record really begins, and it’s also when the confluence of all of these different intelligence sources begin merging to challenge Harkin’s story out there.
It’s also at the point where in one of these Sec/Def conferences McNamara drives home the 1,000 man withdrawal and casts it in concrete, withdrawl planning which has been up to this point talked about in terms of a winning scenario, okay? We find in May that we are going to have a 1,000 man withdrawal now. We are all going to get out by 1965, but, we’re going to trickle out a thousand guys, in 1964. And what’s happening in 1964?
Audience member - An election.
Newman - An election campaign. You start to put two and two together, okay? You’ve got this private statement where he says well, I got to get re-elected. We can’t get out unless I get re-elected. If I try to pull out now we’d have a Joe McCarthy red-scare on our hands. Right? Now what that would suggest is that okay he is afraid of attacks from the Right. So, he’s not going to pull the plug until after re-election. So, but you’ve got Higgenlooper, and all of these other guys, Mansfield, and Morse, and so on attackng him for getting bogged down, so, we’re goling to trickle out a 1,000 guys during the campaign. So, we’re insulated from the Left. So, his plan was to do it in such a way as to insulate himself from attacks from both sides. And so when suddenly McNamara orders the 1,000 man withdrawal cast in concrete in May 1963 that tells me, Aha, aha, got it all worked out. You know, it’s nice to have all the facts explained by the same theory, to wit, that at or on or about March or April all of these things come together. And the plan, the withdrawal plan, such as it was basically had those two components.
A third component, and the interesting one is how are you going to justify publicly this this 1,000 man trickle out? If you do it during a losing scenario you threaten to have the same Joe McCarthy red scare that you would have on your hands if you pulled them all out. You can’t pull out a thousand guys if you’re losing. It looks like you’re running. So, Kennedy accepts and uses the lie of progress for whom, for which he had been the original target to forestall a decision on withdrawal and uses it to justify precisely that. A judo move, if you will
Now that will become a political football. And people don’t believe he’s going to do it but as soon as he orders it done then they are going to change the terms of reference on him. And I’ll get to that in a second. But the important thing at this point of the story is that this plan of his, this withdrawal plan wasn’t suppose to kick in until 1964, the 1,000 man part of it, and then everybody else in 1965.
And so, I am going to go beyond what I ordinarily do.
[Then he asks me, Is this the legal tape or an illegal one? I didn't think there was anything illegal about taping his presentation, but I didn't want to get into an argument with him. And he asks me to turn it off. So, that’s it folks.]
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