General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Justice for JFK [View all]coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)monster, has it not? I had seen those links in post #57 and my eye promptly proceeded to skip over them upon several re-readings. So I appreciate your annotations.
It may be heresy on this board and forum, but I found the Douglass book tiresome and repetitive, with multiple instances of sloppy reasoning (substituting premises for conclusions and vice versa), although I did find Douglass' accounts of JFK's attempts to open back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev on matters relating to war and peace noteworthy. As regards the central question of this thread, though, I found Douglass' book long on promises but short on delivery. As stopbush and zappaman have pointed out in other spots on this thread, there's not one shred of evidence to support any conspiracy theory, just a morass of suppositions that may or may not be true.
I'm also experiencing the disconcerting feeling of having read something many years earlier, knowing roughly where I read it, but being unable to lay my hands on the specific instance. (I've been driving my wife bonkers this morning as I searched Specifically, I've got roughly 2,000 pages of Vietnam War history arrayed in front of me right now (all 3 secondary sources) but I cannot find the specific passage where the historian (Kaiser, Robert Mann or Stanley Karnow) specifically mentions JFK's intention to kick the can down the road about whether to withdraw from Vietnam until after the 1964 elections. In short, JFK's public announcements that you point out were predicated upon the military victory over the NLF that Taylor and McNamara promised him would come no later than the end of 1964 or early 1965 (this despite the NLF's demonstrated ability to fight and win major battles like Ap Bac earlier in 1963).
Absent that military victory by the puppet forces over the NLF, though, who can say that JFK might not have engaged upon the very course of action which LBJ chose, i.e., to escalate, or at best to continue to try to muddle through with the collection of puppet Generals administering the puppet regime?