Stoned: JFK's Revision of the '60s

THIS MUCH, at least, is definitely true: In 1963, there was a coup d'etat brewing at the highest levels of the government of a superpower, involving both the number-two man in the succession hierarchy and the heads of the military-industrial complex, which feared the lessening of Cold War tensions if a reform agenda was allowed to go ahead. But the superpower was not the USA, and it was not LBJ out to get JFK; it was the Soviet Union, with Leonid Brezhnev preparing to depose Nikita Khrushchev. Coming soon to a theater near you: NSK.

Now, I don't know anything about ballistics or magic bullets or grassy knolls. I have no idea whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Maybe the Warren Commission botched its report, and maybe it didn't (I'm certainly not going to read the thing). I am an assassination agnostic. But JFK, Oliver Stone's conspiracy epic, isn't satisfied to leave it at that.

Instead, Stone leads us to believe that what happened on November 22, 1963 was nothing less than a "coup d'etat" by Lyndon Johnson and the military-industrial complex, who feared that John F. Kennedy '40 would wind down Vietnam and the Cold War and thus put them all out to pasture. This theory is based on nothing more than the say-so of a mysterious character who identifies himself only as "X" (George Kennan, maybe?) and claims to have been involved in running U.S. covert operations. At this point, we wind up, as Stone's protagonist, Jim Garrison, says in the film, "beyond the looking glass."

Truly. Never mind the ballistics, watch the politics. For Stone's coup theory to work, there are a couple of historical premises that must be established. One, Kennedy really was going to wind down the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. Two, Johnson wrecked everything. Three it was all planned--so sayeth "X," who appears to be the unfortunately named L. Fletcher Prouty (what could the L. stand for that's worse than Fletcher?), a cranky aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

To put it in really simple terms: JFK good, LBJ bad. That is not even facetious: in Stone's own words, "[u]ltimately, [Kennedy and Garrison] were good guys." You can tell, because they wear white hats.

Stone is peddling an appealing thesis, because everyone is uncomfortably aware of the paradox that the sainted JFK was a good guy and that the Vietnam war was bad, bad, bad. How could the former be even partially accountable for the latter? To resolve that unseemly dissonance, Stone indulges in what is at best a ridiculous oversimplification of some very complicated politics, and at worst deceit.

ALTHOUGH you'd never know it from watching JFK, Kennedy was the chilliest of Cold Warriors. As David Halberstam '55 writes in The Best and the Brightest, "at best he was cool and cautious and not about to rush ahead of events or the current political climate by calling for changes in the almost glacierlike quality of the Cold War." He won a reputation, as a journalist put it admiringly in 1960, as "a Stevenson with balls." With him came a whole coterie of equally tough young advisors, proud to call themselves hard-nosed realists, including the likes of McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor.

When Kennedy ascended to the Presidency, his electoral victory was narrow and evidently depended somewhat on his impressive sweep of the crucial "dead people" vote. That was certainly no mandate on which to wind down the Cold War, especially for a candidate who campaigned by railing against a so-called missile gap that was the product of fevered anti-communist imaginations, and topped that off with a fire-eating inaugural speech about "a long twilight struggle" with the Russkies. He was, in short, exactly the kind of leader you would expect to get a lot of Americans up to their knees in Indochina.

Indeed, Kennedy did so even after Eisenhower left the hapless French, stuck on the wrong side of history in their bitter little colonial war, to their fate when Dienbienphu fell. To get around these inconvenient facts, Stone uses the passive voice: Kennedy somehow finds himself in this mess. Stone somehow manages not to mention that Kennedy made his bed and then he, and after him Johnson, slept in it.

As for the nefarious military-industrial complex, it had never had it so good as it did under Stone's favorite peacenik. For the Pentagon and its suppliers, Eisenhower's massive retaliation doctrine had meant slim pickings, for under it a few relatively cheap missiles did all the work of national defense.

Kennedy came into office warning direly of a missile gap, which he had to eliminate at no small cost, and also of the need for a flexible response doctrine. Where Ike's idea of international security was threatening to blow up the world if anyone annoyed the United States sufficiently, JFK preferred to meet small threats with proportionally small forces. That meant, in practical terms, building a whole array of conventional and covert task forces, and client regimes and proxies in the less developed parts of the world. Under Kennedy, the defense budget soared by $17 billion, the single largest peacetime increase until Reagan went goofy in the early '80s.

When handed a plan to increase the South Vietnamese army's (ARVN) handout by $42 million a year, above the $225 million already slated for the ARVN, Kennedy wrote "Why so little?" in the margins. Bundy told the State Department that his President was "really very eager that [Vietnam] should have the highest priority for rapid and energetic action...."

In 1961, Kennedy authorized the use of U.S. helicopters in Vietnam, which began to use their superior mobility, devastating firepower and napalm to help the flagging ARVN. Enormous American armored personnel carriers called M-113s, impenetrable to Vietcong weapons and armed with terrifyingly powerful machine guns, began hauling ARVN troops around. There were no American ground troops, and Kennedy steadfastly refused to commit any, but Americans were piloting helicopters, fighter bombers and APCs, and serving in that most ambiguous of roles, as military advisors. Beyond hardware, the Kennedy Administration never came to grips with the true politics of the war and of Vietnam; instead, they stood by the hopelessly corrupt and unpopular regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and complained about getting bad press. (Interestingly, the Administration toyed at one point with the idea of getting rid of Diem's vicious and powerful brother, one of the more sordid features of a generally sor-did South Vietnamese government, by sending him off to teach at Harvard.)

This escalation is a key part of the history of America's involvement in Vietnam, but it is conspicuously absent from JFK.

About the nicest thing that can be said about Kennedy's record on Vietnam was that--when he wasn't being a full-blown hawk--he was timid as the war grew, indecisive, and left the details to others (some of those others, like Ambassador Frederick "Fritz" Nolting in Saigon, were blind and inept; some, like McNamara, were too clever for anyone's good).

The most Kennedy did, despite some private doubts in his last months, was to undermine Diem's crooked Saigon regime--not exactly a profile in courage, especially after all Kennedy had tolerated from Diem and his cronies. At no point did Kennedy, after three years of steadily increasing violence, fundamentally rethink the rationale and feasibility of the American entanglement in Vietnam. Much to his credit, Kennedy was leery of committing combat troops; but he died with almost 17,000 Americans in Vietnam (a terrific increase from 800 in 1960), and almost 70 American deaths there. As Halberstam writes, "[Kennedy] had markedly escalated the rhetoric and rationale for being there." He left that ideological legacy to his vice president.

Kennedy also left his staff; the Johnson Administration, remember, started out as the Kennedy Administration minus Kennedy, but complete with such hugely influential Cabinet members as McNamara at Defense.

This is not the stuff out of which one easily makes a heroic dove, but Stone, relying on the hagiography that still surrounds the martyred President, blithely does it anyway. All we ever see of the Kennedy Administration are countless agonizing reruns of the fateful motorcade in Dallas, Kennedy's excellent speech at the American University and some of Stone's faux documentaire black-and-white footage of nasty military-industrial types cursing over a note from Bundy that threatens their jobs. (Bundy has said that "I don't think we know what he would have done if he'd lived. I don't know, and I don't know anyone who does know." McGeorge Bundy, meet Oliver Stone.)

Does Stone really believe that one reshuffling of Pentagon personnel is tantamount to declaring war on the military-industrial complex, or that Kennedy was the only President ever to juggle staff? It is only "beyond the looking glass" that a one-time decision to withdraw 1000 Americans, as Kennedy committed to shortly before his trip to Dallas, out-weighs a long-standing policy that led to the deployment of about 15,000 others. In the course of a three-year war, such a move means precious little, and could far more easily have been motivated by a desire, for instance, to prod Saigon to greater self-reliance. As Johnson and Nixon would later prove, troop withdrawals were in no way inconsistent with war escalation.

Certainly, such figures as Dean Rusk, Bundy, Robert Kennedy '48, and George Ball (a dove who fought Kennedy's escalation) find nothing convincing or even particularly significant in that December 1963 decision--upon which JFK's conspiracy theory rests.

What Stone has given us is anything but a representative portrait of the Kennedy Administration. I'm not quite sure what a "counter-myth" is, which is how Stone has described his film, but I have a pretty good idea of what a myth is.

LYNDON JOHNSON also seems to have thought his predecessor was a hawk, or at the very least found a justification for his own hawkishness in that interpretation. Riding Air Force One back to D.C. immediately after the assassination, Johnson writes, "I made a solemn private vow: I would devote every hour of every day during the remainder of John Kennedy's unfulfilled term to achieving the goals he had set. That meant seeing things through in Vietnam...I made this promise not out of blind loyalty but because I was convinced that the broad lines of his policy, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, had been right. They were consistent with goals the United States had been trying to accomplish in the world since 1945" (my italics). Thus began a policy on Vietnam that Johnson called "steady on course."

It was in that vein that, on November 27, the new President told both houses of Congress that "[w]e will keep our commitments from South Vietnam to West Berlin." In that same speech, Johnson also said: "In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint." By Stone's standards of historiography, that might be enough to prove that, say, Johnson was a restrained leader saddled with onerous commitments from a hardline predecessor. At the very least, how on earth did the conspirators know they were bringing in someone who would be more of a Cold Warrior or, indeed, be in any way different from Kennedy?

In fact, there were reasons to suspect that Johnson was more interested in domestic affairs than in the war. To be sure, on taking office he promptly swore that "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." But above all, Johnson wanted his Great Society, not a mess in Indochina. As Halberstam, hardly a Johnson apologist, explains it, "[h]e intended to secure the Kennedy legacy, prove his own worthiness to accept the torch by pushing the Kennedy legislation through Congress" and then move on to his own agenda. But "[a]ll that would take time, and for a start he wanted to hold the world at bay; he did not need any additional and extraneous problems from the world, and particularly not from Vietnam." Stone makes much of footage of a Johnson meeting with advisors just after the assassination, as if the new President couldn't even wait for his predecessor to be decently buried to start bombing hamlets. What Stone doesn't mention is that the people eager for fighting were the advisors, top Kennedy men like Bundy, Walt Rostow and McNamara.

Saddled with such staffers, and with the rhetorical justifications of any number of Cold Warrior speeches by Kennedy, Johnson found himself haunted--and his domestic agenda threatened--by the Kennedy legacy in Indochina. "I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world," Johnson said after he had escalated the disaster.

That in no way excuses Johnson, but it does give a more nuanced understanding than Stone's crude sketch of Johnson as a pro-war putschist.

THE POINT HERE is that JFK, JFK notwithstanding, was not actually Gandhi with a Brahmin accent. Stone has failed to grasp that the causes of the Cold War, and of its bastard child the Vietnam war, were more deep-seated than a shadowy cabal skulking around the Pentagon. In fact, that lets us all off the hook. But America's involvement in Vietnam cannot be explained by a couple of bullets--even magic bullets.