is uncontroversially true, and completely - totally - without interest. Furthermore, it has been known to be true, and uninteresting, for almost 30 years. The basic content of the withdrawal plans was made public at once, in October 1963.
He was referring to the same White House Statement of Oct. 2, 1963, that Schurmann et al. referred to. I had pointed out to him (June 18, 1992), with examples taken at random, how respected historians like J. M. Roberts, Paul Kennedy, Nevins and Commager, and Stanley Karnow had perpetuated the myth of continuity between the Kennedy and Johnson Vietnam policies over these three decades, thanks to which
the general public has not even been aware that there was a withdrawal policy, much less that Johnson reversed it - despite the clear account in PP Gravel. If the Stone film [JFK] informed people of this much, it has performed a public service.
For Chomsky, "Orwell's problem" was not at work here because the historians I had cited were correct, and the Stone film was wrong to imply otherwise. The Establishment historians had described continuity because there was continuity.
The notion of continuity was in fact doctrine imposed immediately after the assassination, expressly ordered by the Johnson administration and faithfully carried out by the government scribes (Leslie Gelb et al.) who wrote the historical summaries in the four-volume edition published by Beacon Press in October 1971 (henceforth PP Gravel) and the NYT reporters who wrote the one-volume abridged (and partially rewritten) version published in the newspaper and as a Bantam paperback in July 1971 (PP NYT).
PP Gravel says:
The consequences [of Kennedy's assassination] were to set an institutional freeze on the direction and momentum of U.S. Vietnam policy. Universally operative was a desire to avoid change of any kind during the critical interregnum period of the new Johnson Administration. Both the President and the governmental establishment consciously strove for continuity, with respect to Vietnam no less than in other areas. In Vietnam this continuity meant that the phase-out concept, the CPSVN [Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam] withdrawal plan, and the MAP [Military Assistance Program] programs probably survived beyond the point they might have otherwise.
The immediate Johnson stamp on the Kennedy policy came on 26 November. At a NSC [National Security Council] meeting convened to consider the results of the 20 November Honolulu Conference, the President "reaffirmed that U.S. objectives with respect to withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963." [Pp. 190-191.]
PP NYT mentions the assassination only in passing and emphasizing not the continuity of the withdrawal plan but "[p]articularly in the sphere of covert operations against North Vietnam... a smooth transition in the decision-making process." [P. 189.]
PP NYT is clearly exercised to disguise the significance and even the existence of the withdrawal plan, which constitutes an entire chapter of PP Gravel, much less acknowledge Johnson's reversal of it. The "Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces in Vietnam, 1962-1964", Ch. 3 of Vol. 2 of PP Gravel, is omitted in the PP NYT table of contents and in the sub-headings within the chapters. The term "phased withdrawal" occurs only once in PP NYT (p. 25) and refers not to the Kennedy plan but to its earliest stage under Eisenhower in the spring of 1960 when there were less than a thousand US personnel in Vietnam, which increased to more than 16,000 in 1963 (see here).
PP NYT must be added, then, to the list of Establishment historians who have accepted the myth of continuity. Ten years after I wrote to Chomsky (June 18, 1992 and Aug. 3, 1992, see also here) James Galbraith made the same point in a Boston Review article, but I seem to be the only person who has noticed this in PP NYT. I think it's important because, again with reference to "Orwell's problem", PP NYT was intended for the mass market and was much more likely to be read, even cursorily, than the four-volume PP Gravel (five including the volume of essays edited by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn).
Hedrick Smith, the reporter who wrote the two chapters of PP NYT covering the time of the Kennedy-Johnson transition ("The Kennedy Years" and "The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem"), writes at the end of Ch. 3 that the "Pentagon account"
presents the picture of an unbroken chain of decision-making from the final months of the Kennedy Administration into the early months of the Johnson Administration, whether in terms of the political view of the American stakes in Vietnam, the advisory buildup or the hidden growth of covert warfare against North Vietnam.
This wording ("unbroken chain of decision-making") is not found in PP Gravel, which has a more qualified description of the transition:
The only hint that something might be different from on-going plans came in a Secretary of Defense memo for the President three days prior to this NSC National Security Council] meeting [on Nov. 26, 1963]. In that memo, Mr. McNamara said [i.e. on Nov. 23, one day after the assassination] that the new South Vietnamese government was confronted by serious financial problems, and that the U.S. must be prepared to raise planned MAP levels.
In early December, the President began to have, if not second thoughts, at least a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam. In discussions with his advisors, he set in motion what he hoped would be a major policy review, fully staffed in depth, by Administration principals. The President wanted "a fresh new look taken" at the whole problem. In preparation for such a basic reappraisal, an interdepartmental meeting of second-echelon principals accordingly convened on 3 December and laid out a broad outline of basic topics to be addressed and staff papers to be developed by various departments and agencies. This attempt at a systematic and comprehensive reexamination, however, did not culminate in a fundamental national reassessment.
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