> Martin writes: 'I can't get over the assertion that Kennedy didn't invade Cuba.' Yes, I am with you on that. He plainly did. Chomsky's little book on Camelot is good on that. There were some radicals coming out of the Kennedy admin., like Pierre Salinger - but for the most part the myth of Kennedy having a secret anti-cold war agenda and wanting to pull out of Vietnam is a post festum construction.
>
This general topic has been subjected to a lot of mythicization - by the left, though certainly not only the left. The fact is, you didn't have to be very radical in 1963 or 1964 to want to pull out of Vietnam. I know this sounds like it violates the laws of nature, but it's true. The general belief among American elites who followed foreign policy closely was that a war in Vietnam would be a disaster and should be avoided if at all possible. The only question was what sacrifices America should be willing to accept for avoiding a quagmire. If you were at all conservative, or even somewhat "hawkish," that meant you couldn't accept any Vietminh victory, of course. But there were plenty of more "dovish" elites who thought it was absurd to believe Communists coming to power in Vietnam would represent some sort of calamity for the United States.
In keeping with the teachings of the New Left, we're supposed to believe that US foreign policy was a machine that could no more tolerate a small country like Vietnam "withdrawing from the capitalist world system" than a PC can run Mac OSX. But in real life the people who debated foreign policy at high levels almost never talked about that stuff. They talked about how events would affect perceptions and power balances in a (partially imagined) U.S.-Soviet or U.S.-Chinese geopolitical struggle. Crazy, but true. In 1964, people like William Fulbright and Walter Lippmann wanted the US to try to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union to let Vietnam go Communist in some gradual, graceful, decent-interval-ish way, in exchange for guarantees that it would remain neutral (mostly as imagined protection against some notional threat of "Chinese hegemony").
They had some bitter disputes with Cold Warriors about this, but while many different arguments appeared in these disputes, one argument never heard was: "Are you crazy? How will we defend the capitalist system if a small country is allowed to create a model of successful autonomous socialist development?"
SA