By the time I finally got him to accept what he called my "thesis," which he then dismissed as "known to be true, and uninteresting, for almost 30 years" (Jan. 7, 1993), I had read Newman's JFK and Vietnam and I realized that Chomsky had not been arguing with me all this time so much as with Newman and other JFK "hagiographers" who were in fact arguing that Kennedy had decided to withdraw not just on the assumption, and not on the condition, of victory, but regardless of victory ("victory" meaning being able to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese).
This was a whole different ball game. It put the debate fully on the level of pure speculation about what Kennedy was "really thinking" and what he would have done if he had lived. It started with John Newman's JFK and Vietnam, which appeared in early 1992 shortly after the release of Oliver Stone's JFK, for which Newman had been a consultant.
In January 1992, before Newman's book was in the bookstores, Alexander Cockburn wrote: in The Nation, Jan. 6/13 ("J.F.K. and JFK"):
Newman's JFK and Vietnam first came into the offices of Sheridan Square Press, [Ellen] Ray and [Bill] Schaap's publishing house, whence it was passed on to Stone, who assisted in its dispatch to Warner Books (part of the conglomerate backing JFK), which is publishing the book in February. [The Nation, Jan. 6/13, "J.F.K. and JFK."]
So Cockburn had an advance copy of the book, which he proceeded to savage. This would not be noteworthy except for the underlying relationships of the people involved. Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray, the publishers of Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, were also the publishers of Covert Action Quarterly (formerly Covert Action Information Bulletin, now Covert Action Magazine) and Lies of Our Times (now defunct), to which Chomsky was a frequent contributor. Chomsky told me on May 15, 1989, that CAIB was "Quite a good rag. I write for it a lot." This was puzzling since I could find only two articles by him in all the back issues, one of which (No. 32, summer 1989) was simply an abbreviated version of the other (No. 26, summer 1986) both identically titled "Libya in US Demonology".
Obviously Schaap and Ray differed sharply with Chomsky, however, and with Cockburn, over the Kennedy assassination issue. Cockburn says of the film:
Ray...has long felt that history did a U-turn for the worse when conspiracy laid J.F.K. low. Why the publishers of Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies of Our Times should take this position I'm not sure, unless we take a biographical approach and argue that maybe it all goes back to Ellen's Catholic girlhood in Massachusetts, with an icon of J.F.K. on the wall.
Since I was already corresponding with Chomsky at the time, I asked him if he knew Cockburn. He replied that he and Cockburn were "in very regular contact, and have a good deal of exchange as well" (March 3, 1992). In May I published my own review of the Stone film, and sent Chomsky a copy. He answered (May 21, 1992) that Cockburn's review was, "so far,"
the only one in print that does justice to the factual record. Perhaps I should abstain from comment on this, since I did a lot of the background research for it (though what he wrote is his way of using it).
The reader of Cockburn's review, then, should not be surprised to recognize the same arguments reappearing, first in Chomsky's article in Z magazine in September 1992, "Vain Hopes, False Dreams", and later in Rethinking Camelot.
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