Rick Perlstein and the Wages of Denial
Rick Perlstein cannot control his flatulence on the subject of John Kennedy. Perlstein is best known for his four volume set about the rise of the New Right. This was published from 2001-20. It included the books Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland.
It is my belief, and also that of authors like David Talbot and John Newman, that one cannot tell that story without discussing the suspicious assassinations and following cover ups of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. As I wrote in the afterword to the anthology The Assassinations, the relevant question is what would have happened if all four had lived? (See p. 636) To take just one example, all four were involved with the historic 1963 March on Washington. In fact, as Irving Bernstein noted in his book Promises Kept, President Kennedy was the first white politician to endorse that event in public. He then called in his, rather surprised, brother and told him that, as Attorney General, he was going to provide security. This demonstration had to come off perfectly since they were laying themselves on the line and their enemies would take them apart if it did not. It did come off perfectly and many believe it is the high point of post-war American liberalism.
Robert Kennedy was looking forward to running against Richard Nixon in 1968. He very likely would have been the candidate, if he was not killed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. As Lisa Pease demonstrated in her excellent book on that case, A Lie too Big to Fail, Sirhan Sirhan not only was not his killer, he could not have been the assassin.
And unlike what Perlstein has written elsewhere, John Newman has shown that Bobby Kennedy was part of his brother’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam. (JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition, p. 416) Even Mr. Hardball, Chris Mathews has said that Bobby Kennedy would have been the anti-Vietnam candidate in 1968. (Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, p. 311) Hubert Humphrey’s fatal error was in not making this clear early enough in the campaign. Thus separating himself from the man who reversed Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, Lyndon Johnson. It was RFK’s assassination, and that issue, that brought Richard Nixon his victory in 1968. Without that victory, what would Perlstein’s tetralogy have looked like?
Make no mistake, as a man of the doctrinaire left—he wrote for The Village Voiceand The Nation--Perlstein understands his dilemma and the problem it poses for him. Long ago he decided on a “take no prisoners” stance on it. At the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s murder he wrote a column for The Nation. (November 21, 2013) Consider how he opened that essay:
Note the way Perlstein pens this passage. First the book he refers to was written by both O’Donnell and Dave Powers. Powers and O’Donnell told House Speaker Tip O’Neill that they heard shots from the grassy knoll area during the assassination. But the FBI talked them out of this testimony. (Man of the House, p. 178) When Kennedy was killed, Powers left the White House but O’Donnell stayed on until 1965. Therefore he was in a position to see how Johnson altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy.
As per Oliver Stone’s picture--which came well after that book—the film’s Vietnam angle was based on the work of two men: John Newman and Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Prouty worked under General Victor Krulak, who was directly involved with Vietnam policy under both Kennedy and Johnson. Therefore, he was also in position to observe the alterations to Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Newman was the first person to write an entire book based on Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam and how it was changed afterwards. This included how Kennedy’s NSAM 263 was neutralized by NSAM 273. That later order was delivered to the White House after Kennedy’s murder. Newman demonstrated how National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s draft of 273 was significantly altered by Johnson, when Bundy thought he was writing it for Kennedy. (Newman, pp. 462-66)
Newman also included an important quote from Johnson, which he made in December of 1963. This is just one month after Kennedy was killed. At a White House Christmas Eve reception the new president told the Joint Chiefs, “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.” As writer Monica Wiesak showed in her book on the Kennedy presidency, JFK did not even want the generals visiting Saigon, let alone planning for war there. (America’s Last President, p. 133)
As Fletcher Prouty pointed out, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed than when he was inaugurated. And, in fact, Kennedy was at work withdrawing the advisors at the time of his murder. The declassified record of the Sec/ Def conference of May 1963 in Hawaii proves this beyond any doubt. The Pentagon was shocked in 1962 when they first learned of Kennedy’s plans to remove the advisors. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120)
To get around his tract-like thinking, what Perlstein did in 2013 was to rely on Noam Chomsky.. He says that Chomsky insisted that the withdrawal plan was reliant on Saigon winning the war. How this could happen without direct American intervention is a mystery that neither Perlstein nor Chomsky ever explained. And General Maxwell Taylor underlined this reality for all to see:
U. Alexis Johnson, Dean Rusk’s Deputy, said the same for the record. Kennedy had drawn the line at “no combat troops” in 1961. And this line was clear and indelible. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 371)
But beyond that, as a result of that Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii in May of 1963, General Earle Wheeler stated that any proposal for overt action would be treated negatively by President Kennedy. (Wheeler notes of 5/6/63, Pacific Command meeting). The final hole in Chomsky’s leaking rowboat was applied by Newman when he listened to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s debriefs as he left the Pentagon. In those sessions McNamara said that it did not matter if Saigon was losing or winning. Once the training period was over, America was getting out. He and Kennedy had mutually decided on this policy in advance. (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, pp. 164-67)
If anyone needed any more convincing of the difference between Kennedy and Johnson on Indochina just look at the first meeting LBJ helmed on the issue. As CIA Director John McCone later wrote, the difference between the two presidents was readily apparent. Johnson said he had never been happy with our operations in Vietnam. And any person who disagreed with his policy should be removed. He actually compared losing South Vietnam to losing China in 1949. (Newman, p. 459) To put it mildly, Kennedy did not see it that way. As he told General Lyman Lemnitzer, if we did not go into Cuba which was 90 miles away, why should we do so in Vietnam which was 8,000 miles away? (Newman, pp. 139-40)
Johnson’s new policy was enthroned in NSAM 288 in March of 1964. This order is crucial in understanding what happened to escalate the war in Vietnam. With NSAM 288, Johnson and the Pentagon mapped out an entire air campaign against North Vietnam, with literally dozens of targets, using American planes and pilots. Perlstein has to know about its primacy since two other sources he uses, Edwin Moise and Fredrik Logevall, mention it at length. Echoing the Pentagon Papers, Logevall wrote it was hard to exaggerate the importance of NSAM 288 on the road to direct American intervention in the Vietnam War. (Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129; Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 24-25) It is revealing that Perlstein did not mention this milestone in 2013. Perhaps because it proved that what Kennedy would not do in three years, Johnson did in three months.
NSAM 288 was part of a deliberate planning scheme by Johnson to escalate the war and insert massive American air and land power into theater. That planning eventually included a draft for a congressional declaration of war. LBJ placed William Sullivan in charge of this effort at first. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, pp 87-91) The obvious question that Perlstein does not want to answer is: If as Johnson always said, his policy was a continuation of Kennedy’s, why would he have to do this?
The answer to that question is that LBJ knew Kennedy’s plan was withdrawal and he disagreed with it vehemently. He even told McNamara this directly: How can you supervise a withdrawal in a war America is losing? (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310) That conversation, which we have on tape, shows just how bankrupt Perlstein is in utilizing a zealot like Noam Chomsky. The war was being lost and LBJ knew Kennedy was withdrawing. The new president was not going to oversee America losing a war.
Which relates to Perlstein’s opening piece of snark, about Kennedy being a closet peacenik. When did troops enter a combat theater under Kennedy? There were certainly opportunities for this to happen. For example at the Bay of Pigs, during the Berlin Crisis, in Laos, in Vietnam, and during the Missile Crisis. Kennedy did not do so in any case. But we know that past and future presidents would have i.e. Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. Eisenhower told Kennedy that Laos was the key to all of Southeast Asia, and if America had to, she should intervene unilaterally. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 163) Nixon was explicit when he told Kennedy he should declare a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs and send in the Marines. (Schlesinger, p. 288). Lyndon Johnson thought Kennedy was giving away too much in his negotiations over the Missile Crisis and not taking enough action. (The Kennedy Tapes, pp. 590—602, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow). And Johnson sought and received Eisenhower’s approval for his Vietnam escalations. (Blight, pp. 186-88).
Let us take another example. Does anyone think Kennedy would have sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965 to support a military dictatorship and deny the elected president Juan Bosch his office? Kennedy supported Bosch and began an economic embargo against the military coup. But Johnson sent 25,000 Marines into theater to safeguard Bosch from returning to power—which was a clear reversal of Kennedy’s policy. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-79). But beyond that, Johnson had lied about his reasons for sending in those combat troops. Senator William Fulbright and his staff grew suspicious of Johnson’s changing stores for the invasion. And they discovered that the “atrocities” LBJ bandied about were either clear exaggerations or, in many cases, simply fictional. (Goulden, pp. 165). This is important because it was Fulbright’s discoveries of these deceptions that led him to think that Johnson was also lying about his reasons for escalating in Vietnam—specifically the Tonkin Gulf incident. This then caused Fulbright to open the damaging senate hearings that the senator held about Vietnam that began to divide the nation and erode the president’s support for his land-air war in Indochina. (ibid, p. 171)
What Perlstein and his like do is end up being camouflage for Johnson. It was Johnson’s disastrous foreign policy alterations which were largely responsible for splitting asunder the Democratic Party. As senate staffer Carl Marcy, working for Fulbright wrote, his hearings should try and ascertain what happened in the last 24 months to:
This was no less than a polarizing sea change and pretty much spelled the end of the FDR coalition stemming from the 1930’s. It literally exploded at the Chicago convention in 1968. Largely because Robert Kennedy was not there.
To ignore all the above is simply astonishing.
But now Perlstein has come back for more. On December 5, 2024 he wrote another article, this time for The American Prospect. He now says that somehow the high feelings that the American populace has for the fallen Kennedys is a cult. If one can believe it, Perlstein actually uses a 22 year old blogger named Joshua Cohen to dismiss this “cult”. He quotes him as saying that baby boomers believed Kennedy was doing some things that others really did not want him to do. And they took drastic action to stop him; this was followed by the end of the American Golden Age.
Perlstein says that this was perhaps partly true. In 1963 Kennedy did make a fine speech on civil rights and then he did the Peace Speech at American University. Incredibly, this is all that Perlstein can come up with as to Kennedy’s achievements while in office. He can name not one of Kennedy’s reversals of John Foster Dulles’ foreign policy: in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in Congo to name just three examples. Or how this all reversed back under Johnson. This is really kind of shocking considering Kennedy’s relationship with Gamel Abdul Nasser and what is happening in the Middle East right now. And of course he pretty much leaves out Vietnam.
I won’t even go into how he gives Kennedy short shrift on civil rights. But I will say that it is provable that JFK did more for that issue than FDR, Truman and Eisenhower combined. And this started on his first day in office. That night he called up Treasury Secretary Doug Dillon. He asked him: Why were there no black faces in that Coast Guard parade? Dillon said he did not know. Kennedy told him to find out. This eventually led to the first affirmative action order in American history in March of 1961. It is pretty hard to avoid a milestone like that. But Mr. Historian of the sixties does it. When one links to this series the reader will see the work that I did and Perlstein failed to do. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1)
What is amazing is how much Kennedy accomplished—for example with the economy-- in slightly less than three years.
Perlstein then gets even worse. He actually mentions Vincent Bugliosi’s oversized and overlong book on the JFK case, Reclaiming History. He says that his book demolished “every existing conspiracy claim”. One does not know whether to laugh or cry at a statement as stupid as that. Bugliosi’s book was simply and completely a fraud. And this author himself showed that was the case in a normally sized book length treatment. I demonstrated with footnotes how Bugliosi violated his own opening statement, namely that he would not leave out anything of importance. He did just that and he did it many times. (See The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today) That Perlstein could fully endorse a mirage like that shows what a cheap grandstander he is about the subject.
About all the evidentiary holes in the Warren Report, like the MSM, Perlstein can chalk that up to fear of expanding the Cold War, “not an assassination conspiracy”. He even states that this was J. Edgar Hoover’s excuse. Perlstein is unaware he is now in sci-fi land. He apparently does not know that the FBI report on the JFK case does not include the Single Bullet Theory! But further that Hoover did all he could to cover up the bullet strike to bystander James Tague. Because that would undermine his report’s theory that all the projectiles struck inside the car. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 130-38) In other words Hoover knew the lone assassin paradigm was baloney. And he actually admitted this in private--not once, but twice. (DiEugenio, p. 246)
How can one explain what the CIA did with the Oswald tale in Mexico City as “the routine passion of bureaucracies to hide their own incompetence”? That one is a doozy, even for Perlstein. Oswald visited both the Cuban and Russian embassies five times. So there should be ten pictures of him entering and exiting. In 61 years, the CIA has not produced one. Since both embassies were also electronically bugged, the CIA should be able to produce a tape of the man’s voice. The one they sent to Dallas while Oswald was in detention was not Oswald. This is what drove Hoover to write on the marginalia of a memo that the CIA sold him a snow job on Oswald in Mexico City. (DiEugenio, p. 304)
There is nothing fanciful about the above. These are all evidentiary holes in the JFK case. There is nothing political or “mythic” about them. But either Perlstein or his buddy Cohen do not know about them, or they do not want to admit them. Either alternative shows just what a faux historian Rick Perlstein really is.
