The son of a John F. Kennedy advisor has a question [View all]
"The record of meetings, tapes and memoranda demonstrates otherwise. One from General Maxwell Taylor to his fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated October 4, 1963 and conveying the President's decision states plainly: “All planning will be directed towards preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all U.S. special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965.”
The other topic was America's nuclear war-fighting plans. Twenty years ago my student Heather Purcell discovered in the Vice Presidential security file for 1961 that the US strategic plan foresaw a nuclear first strike on the USSR and China, to be launched on an unspecified pretext in late 1963.
Kennedy's reaction to this was fury. It was not for nothing that President Johnson, staring out of the window on the flight from Dallas, remarked to Bill Moyers, “I wonder if the missiles are flying.”
Did these matters play a role in Kennedy's death? And if they did, what was their importance, compared with (say) the possibility that Kennedy might have been about to normalize relations with Cuba – or even to end the Cold War?"
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James Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. His father, John Kenneth Galbraith,
tutored John F. Kennedy at Harvard and served as his Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. He
stood 6 feet, 8 inches tall – a most inconvenient size.
http://jfkfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/galbraith-on-jfk.pdf
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