>Just curious if anyone who's commented on this has read Galbraith's piece.
What I found new and intriguing in Galbraith's article was the fact that the White House tapes for the period between the overthrow of Diem and the overthrow of Kennedy are unavailable. Is this why Galbraith makes no mention of General Duong Van Minh? "Big Minh," a Buddhist, was the South Vietnamese head of state during this period. He was close to the Buddhist opposition led by Tich Tri Quang, and also, as I recollect, was reported to be in favor of a negotiated settlement with the NLF. He was quickly overthrown under Johnson (but returned in 1975 to superintend the transition to NLF rule). Those unavailable tapes had to contain discussion of Minh, and that is where Kennedy's strategy might well have been revealed even more clearly than in the publicly available documents Galbraith cites.
Another of the missing tapes would have contained Kennedy's conversation with the French journalist Jean Daniel, and would reveal whether or not Daniel lied when he wrote, shortly after the coup, that Kennedy had charged him with a personal mission to prepare for a reconciliation with Fidel Castro.
I've noticed that there is on the "Left", and not only from types like Cockburn and Chomsky, a passionate hatred of JFK quite symmetrical to his adulation by liberals. In 1960 Kennedy certainly was "an ignorant and illiterate millionaire," to quote the winged words of Fidel Castro. But a great deal had happened in the following three years, and Kennedy might well have learned some important lessons (even though he never did learn the most important one--the need to guard his aching back).
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64