story about your dad, which is when i was in high school, he came to speak at the school and i actually asked him about the disproportion number of white kids in the advanced classes. and i actually don't remember what his answer was. i don't that he had an answer. anyone more than any of the rest of us did. and then when i the reporter for the associated, when i got here, lots of applause here to i i him for a story i was doing about health care disparities. and i reminded him of this and and he gave me one of the best compliments ever. he said, well, you were asking hard questions even then. so that's like the best thing can say to a reporter. he's it is a great congratulations, everyone, in giving you a great round of applause for laura hello, everybody. welcome to the washington times for this special episode of

history. as it happens, i'm martin di caro. november 22nd, 1963 is a very dark day etched in the memories of every american who is old enough to remember it. the day john f kennedy was assassinated at the age of 46 by lee harvey oswald. less well known is what happened on november 2nd, 1963, just a few weeks beforehand in south vietnam. the autocratic president of that american ally? no dinh diem, was toppled in a coup d'etat and then murdered by the plotters and because of the remarkable work of our guest here today, we now have a clearer idea. i would even say an entirely clear idea of jfk, his role in that drama in south vietnam, in that coup and assassins. ken hughes, welcome back. it's great to have you here. thank you, martin. thank you for that kind introduction. well, now i'm going to pummel you with questions for half an hour.

ken hughes researcher, historian at the miller center, which is a great resource, by the way, at the university of virginia. you are also the author of a couple of other books dealing with white house presidential tapes. we have fatal politic and chasing shadows. i must flubbed the titles here. i could have said i do, too. chasing politics. no. chasing shadows and fatal politic, which are about the nixon. the nixon years. they deal with watergate and vietnam. these are terrific books. thank you for not writing 1000 page books. i would not be able to balance them on my on my lap here. but they're not easy books and i mean that in a good way. they have to be read very carefully because of your work as a researcher. before we dive into the history here of of kennedy and gm in south vietnam, i want to just familiarize our our audience a little bit with the work you do. you've been called the master of the white house tapes. what do you do? i basically do a job that most

people don't want to do. i listen to the white house tapes started with richard nixon's, which were the most voluminous. he recorded 3700 hours of white house conversations, but also lyndon johnson's, which people are familiar with from c-span and and john f kennedy's. he was the one who really started taping in depth. we got about about 250 or 260 hours of the kennedy administration on tape and those are the three presidents who had a recording system. right? kennedy, johnson, nixon. that's pretty much it. they were the ones who recorded the most of few other presidents, recorded a little bit. oh, we've done some with fdr. he's fascinating. some with ronald reagan, who were just recorded a few of his international conversations in the situation room or through the situation room. so those are the big three.

kennedy, johnson and nixon, i guess all presidents after nixon realized it's not such a good idea to have a record of what you're doing back there. yes, nixon ruined it for the presidents, the historians or the presidents afterwards because he lost his job, because his tapes captured too much history that otherwise would have vanished. yeah, it's. it's not a good thing for for society, really. not just historians like yourself, for all of us. we want to have an era food irrefutable record of what presidents have decided and have said behind closed doors. it's great, right? it opens a window into what kennedy was thinking. lbj, nixon we don't i don't even know what we will be dealing with in the future. emails and text messages, i guess. yes, i imagine. well, we're going to talk about what happened on november 22nd, the assassination of an american presidents in the kennedy mystique, the darker side of camelot. but we're also going to talk more really to start with what happened in south vietnam in

earlier november. really all through that summer of 1963. how did kennedy set up his taping system? he did it in 62. he did it for the same reason that other presidents did. he thought he had been misquoted, misrepresented. and so he had a secret service technician named robert bork, basically bugged the oval office in the cabinet room. he had microphones hidden under the surface of the resolute desk in what looked like a buzzer box on the coffee table in the oval office between the two big white sofas that he had his guests sit in when he sat in his rocking chair and also hidden behind the curtains in the cabinet room in in lamp sconces.

so the people who come in to speak to him, they know they're being recorded. they had no idea. and he did not tell them. it was a very, very well guarded secret. he actively did the tapes by pushing a button that looked like a buzzer. so they would think he was calling for a secretary or an aide about that. but he actually would actually start a reel to reel tape recorder spinning in the basement of the white house that, you know, i learned how to edit audio as a young radio reporter on reel to reel. me, too. i know i broke in right before the digital stuff started, and thankfully it saves a lot of time, although i still work just as much as i used to. i said i was going to get into what happened in 63 in the summer, through the fall, and saigon in washington. but just one other question about the work you do since i asked you about how kennedy set up the taping system, the audio on these tapes often is not very clear. you spend hours and hours and hours listening to this, transcribing it, trying to make sense of it.

it's a difficult task just from a technological point of view, and i definitely don't do it alone. we've we get we have at least four scholars go over every tape independently. and all we're doing is looking for one another's mistakes. and that's a that's a good thing, because everybody makes mistakes. we found that like professional transcribers, people at court, stenographers who have to give absolutely accurate records were baffled by the white house tapes, mainly because they didn't know what they were talking about. these are old, obscure for political ends. right. and strategic issues. i've listened to some of the xcom tapes. that's the cuban missile crisis with kennedy. you know, it's like a speakerphone somewhere or a microphone that's far away from the table. the the nixon tapes, for instance, it all sound like kissinger is right in front of the microphone and nixon's far off. and you can always understand what he's saying. it's echoey. they talk over each other, but

quite a task. quite a task. so, all right. let's start talking about our main focus here. they're not so remembered assassination. just 20 days before kennedy himself would be murdered in dallas. you've say you've said rather, you've shown definitively what kennedy's role here was in the coup d'état of no dan jm we'll talk a little bit more about him in a moment. in south vietnam, based on new evidence, obviously the white house tapes are the new evidence. anything else that you've come across as a researcher that had been hidden prior to this? well, the jfk assassination records review board was a treasure trove of classified information, as you know. congress set that up because conspiracy theorists were basically excited by oliver stone's movie jfk and that got enough people interested in getting out every document, having anything to do with the kennedy assassination. so congress empowered the citizens board to do that. but fortunately they took a very

broad view of their task and included the political and diplomatic context that they called it. in other words, what i call the real government conspiracy is conspiracies involving presidents, the cia, state department, pentagon in trying to overthrow other countries, governments. church committee in the mid-seventies, of course, got into this. i want to emphasize this point once more for our listeners. the information that you've gathered here is new historians are going to be going over your work now to see if they agree or disagree with or they can add to it. and that's really exciting. that 60 years later, we're still digging up new fresh information as i often say, subject may be old, but the issues are fresh. in this case, the information is also fresh and i neglected to mention you're actually writing a book now, too, about the kennedy tapes. is there a title working title of clandestine? campbell at which ian campbell is going to focus on operation

mongoose and the dm coup to get your kennedy's to signature your covert operations. mongoose was the cuban government. yes. the attempt that failed to overthrow the communist government of cuba. okay. and we already talked about zim. we're going to get more about more him in a moment. and i mentioned your other books, fatal politics and chasing shadows. all right. now. all right. who was know then, zim? the last name is spelled diem. it is pronounced zim. south vietnam's president. how did he come into that position? and when zim was a product of the french colonial system. vietnam had been a french colony for many years, and it it worked with a combination of french colonial administrator trs and vietnamese who worked with the colonial government and them from a young age, trained to be

part of the civil service and as a fairly young man in his thirties, he became ministry of minister of the interior under the emperor bao di. who is you know, the figurehead emperor? yes, the french held all the cards and had all the power and once he realized that he was not going to have much power as a minister resigned, his. america. he went to america eventually, but that was a while off for a while, the japanese controlled vietnam during world war two and once they surrendered, the communist states under ho chi minh then organized as the viet minh, which we later renamed the viet cong, took over in 45 and took diem, the captive. but it wasn't to keep him as a prisoner, was to persuade him to become part of their government. they wanted a catholic constituency and zim and his family had a a fairly good

reputation among the colonial auxiliary, the vietnamese colonial. workers. but jim, uh, refused, and he got out and he went into self-imposed exile. so while the viet minh were struggling with the french to liberate vietnam, at least from being a colony, jim was out of the country in the united states or japan or france, where it became a noted anti-communist. he had a kind of the constituency in america. justice william douglas, senator mike mansfield and senator john f kennedy all thought, well, this might make you might make a good anti-communist leader. so eventually the french lost their colony in 54 battle of denbigh and phu is the final straw there. yeah.

and of course, the united states had been backing and bankrolling the french war effort. yes, that was that was how we first got involved. and we were we were paying for the french effort and for the french colonial government and that would become a key factor in the power that president eisenhower and president kennedy had over south vietnam since the united states paid most of the government's bills, really, the story may start with fdr, his death, because he opposed colonialism. he did. harry truman also did, but not as vehemently as fdr. so after world war two ends, the surrender in august of 1945, you mentioned how ho chi minh and the viet minh, they declare independence. ho chi minh even cites thomas jefferson's declaration of independence does. and he declares independence for vietnam. but the french want to try to reestablish colonial authority. they finally lose that awful war in 1954. so this is during the middle of the eisenhower administration. eisenhower just doesn't want to

hand. quote unquote. hand. indochina. over to the communists. even though china is now three countries today, vietnam, laos and thailand. so he gets behind and. yeah, yeah, yeah. who was i think, prime minister under emperor about die. and this is where vietnam is partitioned. vietnam is partitioned. the north is where the communists regroup under ho chi minh. the south is where the french. and there are vietnam. there are vietnamese auxiliaries. regroup. and originally there was supposed to be, under the geneva accords, a vietnam wide election. but they refused to take part in that. he said, because the communists have not held any, you know, free and fair elections. but also he he knew he would not win. he had ho chi minh probably was the most popular. definitely was the most popular individual in vietnam at that time. he probably would've won. yeah. despite his communism there, the attitude toward communism in vietnam was very different from

the attitude here in america. he was also a nationalist as well. he was a nationalist who had definitely fought for his country's independence and one of the ironies of vietnamese history was that south vietnam owed its independence from france to the communists in north vietnam. and so this partition happens at the 70th parallel. these are invention is there's no such thing as a north vietnam in south vietnam until 1954, there are no elections, as we mentioned, because of the fear that the communists would have won. and our man in saigon was. you know, then. zm he becomes the autocratic leader of south vietnam and an american ally to prevent it from becoming a communist state in ho chi minh is in charge in the north. okay, so we get to john f kennedy, 1961. he inherits this policy on south vietnam or vietnam. i want to talk about continuities and structures is but one thing that's frustrating at least from my perspective today, is that kennedy, the

candidate, had a different or more subtle view of wars of national liberation or national liberation movements. post-world war two than, say, eisenhower. right. he had some respect for people's attempts to establish independence from colonialism. he even was in vietnam in the 1950s, where he kind of concluded was not a war for us to fight. john f kennedy like other senators and even, you know, members of the eisenhower administration, realized that colonialism was a losing proposition. all the empires were being broken up and the post-world war two environment, everybody wanted independence and we recognized that south vietnam needed independence in order for the people to rally against the communists. but at the same time, south vietnam never really had independence because it was utterly dependent on american

aid for its survival. we paid for most of their military effort and most of their government budget and that meant that that while in name, south vietnam was a democratic government elected by the people, in reality it was an authoritarian government and american presidents could choose who ran south vietnam because of the aid weapon. yes, in 1954, the first coup attempt against diem started organizing under the army chief of staff of general hand and he said he could have he could have overthrown the government easily, except the united states told him, if you overthrow him, we are going to withdraw all of our aid. and he said, well, there would be no south vietnam if they did that. that's right. so eisenhower was able to thwart a coup just by threatening to

turn withdraw american aid. i mean, the generals often were not happy with zim ize-iyamu say that's okay, you pronounce it a little bit better. yeah, because i mean, the whole idea was to stop the insurgency that had started to build up in the late fifties and explodes in the early 1960s, which was the vietcong by then calling in the vietcong in south vietnam, because the communists wanted to unify the country under communist rule and. zam lacked legitimacy in the countryside. he was basically the mayor of saigon. you might want to call him. maybe that's an exaggeration. his his regime lacked lack legitimacy in the countryside of the peasantry. but that doesn't mean the peasantry wanted to live under a marxist authoritarian state either. so there was that dynamic. that's very true. i think the main strength that the communists had wasn't communism, it was nationalism. as an agrarian country.

yes. so, you know, communism is built for industrial societies, but nationalism was very, very strong in these former french colonies because nobody wants to be the first definition of freedom for a lot of countries is freedom from foreign domination. that's right. and the viet minh now, the viet cong had spilled their blood fighting the french while zam was not in the country. in the country at that point. so i said, kennedy inherits this policy. and i mentioned that as a candidate, he was a pretty keen observer of the international arena. we got no nobody in kennedy. we've got two things. we've got one, a cold war skeptic who really does sense that we don't have to get involved in a lot of international struggles in that it's better move better off if we don't. he's very reluctant to intervene in cuba, but kennedy, the

politician, knows that rattling the saber and taking a very tough cold war stance makes him more popular. we were talking about this a little bit before. yeah. so, yeah, the 60 election. yeah, the 60 election in august of 1960, kennedy was six points behind nixon. and he turned to this political consulting firm known as symbol maddox, which claimed to use the computers of the era era to do computer simulations of how the voters would react. if you try different tactics and in august, they say to kennedy, the top three issues are all foreign affairs. it's who can be the strongest in negotiations with russia, who can make sure that we are scientifically and economically competitive, and who is going to make sure that our missiles are strong enough and numerous enough to deter russia and they trust nixon more than they trust eisenhower as vice president,

more than a senator from massachusetts. so what they say, what they recommend to him is you have to launch an aggressive part of an attack on the republican foreign affairs record. now, in retrospect, we look at the eisenhower years as a time when america had this unparalleled power, the missile gap. right. but kennedy said there was a missile gap in the soviets favor. it was quite the opposite was quite the opposite. we had like a 20 to 1 advantage and that and the day after similar maddox gives him this report saying you got to do an aggressive partizan attack. kennedy declares cuba to be an enemy of the united states. he says they will stop at nothing to bring about our destruction. and the reporters were like, are you sure you wanted to call him an enemy? and he says, yes. i mean, and this is the this was the the most. this is the greatest

denunciation that any prominent american politician had made of cuba up to that point. and it starts working. i mean, when we think about the kennedy eisenhower soft on communism, that's something. yes. but somehow this works. we think about the 60 campaign. remember, three things like remember the debates, the religious issue and the importance of the black vote in the cities. but cuba, when you look at the debates, kennedy hijacked the first one, which is supposed to be about domestic policy and turned it into a partizan, aggressive attack on republican foreign policy when he did his speech on religious freedom before the houston ministers, he said, you know, i have to talk about this, but we should be talking about the threat of cuba and the black vote in the cities made the difference in the end, in a very close election. but it wasn't a close election until kennedy started hammering nixon and eisenhower on cuba. so he comes out of that election

knowing that those attacks work and knowing that, you know, if if he can succeed by blaming the republican house for losing cuba in 60, then revolution. yeah, the castro revolution in 59. if he can blame that, he can win an election by pinning that on the republicans, then the republicans can win the 64 election by pinning the loss of vietnam on him. that's right. and of course, it was eisenhower who started planning his administration, the bay of pigs invasion. so the idea that eisenhower somehow losing or going to lose cuba when he's actually planning an illegal invasion, covert operation that kennedy, of course, then picks up, you know, this idea of continuity and structures is important because as you've just explained, and as i mentioned before, kennedy did have a different or more subtle approach to what was then called the third world. i guess it's the global south today. but at the same time, he was a cold warrior. he was an anti-communist.

he subscribed to domino theories or psychological domino theories. there's a subtle difference between those two things. he also bought into notions of credibility, national credibility, personal credibility. you just mentioned how he was worried about being painted himself as soft on communism or just inexperienced and young and naive. i mean, that was an attack that was made against him and i guess what i'm thinking about here is what one of my old ithaca college politics professors used to tell me. pneumonitis was his name. he just retired. actually. he said, this is a think of an airplane as the ship of state. and the pilot knew pilot gets into the cockpit and he wants to steer the ship of state in the way he thinks it needs to go. and he thinks he's actually in control. then all these other currents and fortresses are sort of buffeting the plane and the plane continues to head in the same direction as his predecessor. and he feels now constrain in his decision making.

it's another way of saying that once you're in charge, you're not a candidate anymore. and you sit down with your advisors and they say, well, now that you're president, we got to let you know that we have all these things happening in this country. we've got all this going on over in this country. oh, and you're now inheriting three administrations worth of support for south vietnam. and there's this guy named jim. so now now you own the problem. yes. and of course, in addition to all the ideological things i mentioned, too, about domino theories and anti-communism and his rhetoric kind of box to me, like even though he he knew that we didn't have to invade cuba, that we could we could coexist with cuba's communist government. he knew if he just said that we accept it, then then 64, a nixon or a barry goldwater would say the president has state said he accepts a communist government 90 miles off our shore and you know publicans did that to democrats and truman democrats did it to republicans then and vice versa. yeah, sorry to interject there, but that's true. and and even when it came to

vietnam, we're going to eventually get to the coup here. yeah, this is how, you know, my meandering interview style by now. ken hughes setting the foundations. yeah. even there, kennedy understood that vietnam was of peripheral national security interest to the united states. it was not a vital one. it was peripheral. that doesn't mean it was of no interest to us or that he was ready to give it up. so he comes to office in january 1961. he gives that soaring inaugural address. i got to start waving my papers around here, but. i don't know if he had a teleprompter. he probably had his papers in front of him on that freezing cold day in in january in washington. but he gives a soaring address in which he again talks about respect in the developing world. and we'll be there for you as you throw off the yoke of colonialism. vietnam is not at the top of his priority list in january of 61, but it eventually does come to his attention. even when did jfk and his closest advisers, mcnamara and

the others, maxwell taylor, start to have serious concern about? zm meaning this guy might not be the right man to defeat the communist insurgency pretty early on. and you can actually trace those concerns back even to the eisenhower admin situation. there were always concerns that ssm couldn't rally the public of south vietnam to to fight the communists, that he didn't really have a great base of support there, that it was very autocrat, that he wasn't doing the things necessary to broaden the base of support for the government, things like, you know, land reform and also legitimate criticism. those are legitimate criticisms. but the mistake that was being made at the time was they were blaming blaming zim for a fault. that was the entire south vietnamese government's. once they got rid of zim, those faults would continue of course,

because the government was built on american foreign aid. it's not built on south vietnamese support. and zim was his own man as well. he obviously knew how dependent he was on american aid and military support there were by the time of kennedy's death, 16,000 military advisors in the country. he actually chafed at that. he wanted some of them to leave because the larger the american presence, the less authority it looked like he had. but zim was his own man as well. he wasn't just a puppet. he he was able to assert himself and that also, i think, probably rankled people in washington. he had what they call agency. he and his family. i think while they had very little their power was constrained by their dependance on american aid and the constant threat of the communists who, you know, did have enough power to take over the government in the absence of american support. but they did have a great deal of, i think, technical, tactical acumen.

they they knew what they were doing strategically and they were able to play, i think, american politics fairly well because whenever, you know, the us government pressured them to reform or to change their ways, they would just argue that the us government was falling for the propaganda of the communists and that they had to. they had to take repressive measures in order to fight a dastardly enemy. and this this kind of rhetoric did work. they. well and well, kim did some crackdowns on communists. oh, yes. yes. and also crackdowns on noncommunist to get to the buddhist crisis and criticize his regime. yeah. to the point about when did the kennedy people start to have serious concerns about gm? you mentioned that they preceded kennedy's administration, but i'll give you one example here. october of 1961. so kennedy's in office are just ten months. he sends maxwell taylor to tour vietnam. taylor then recommends a troop deployment to save the situation. kennedy's opposed to this, but during this debate, dean rusk,

who is the secretary of defense, if i'm correct, said a deploy ment would tie washington's fate to zim, who he referred to as a losing horse. yeah. according mark silverstone's book that i actually have over here called the kennedy withdrawal, you're you know, mark silverstone is a colleague of yours. yes. he worked on these transcripts. we were coeditors. great. so his book is a terrific book. the kennedy withdrawal. so even there, it looks like sam's not going to save the day. so why don't we get to 1963 then, and something called the buddhist crisis. zim had a brother who was the head of his security services or a secret police. no, deny knew and news. my wife, madam knew. she was something else. she was mocking the buddhists as they were lighting themselves on fire self-immolation to protest the repression of the zam regime. what was going on in the buddhist crisis of 1963, and how did that influence kennedy's decision making? the buddhist crisis started out

as as a protest of religious discrimination. in a way, the old imperial capital, which was under the thumb of another brother of the you know, didn't come on. and basically the government there allowed catholics to demonstrate, to wave their flags during their parades, but not buddhists to do the same. it was it was genuine discrimination and just a no here. vietnam's overwhelmingly a buddhist country. yes. and the autocrats how vietnam is a catholic religion of the colonizer, the french. but go ahead. yes, yes. so the buddhists protest and one of the protests becomes bloody. the government forces kill some of the protesters. and what starts out as a protest against religious discrimination becomes a much broader protest of the entire authority area and regime and it it becomes a

worldwide scandal, partly for the way that jim reacts, which is very autocratically, using police state methods in mass arrests. also for the things that madam nu says, such as if there's another buddhist barbecue, i will clap my hands. and that was, you know, she was always making these these politically politically incendiary comments. and there were some famous photos taken of that time there. this is the era of mass communication. we don't have the internet, but self-immolating buddhist monk, yes, i think was an ap photographer maybe who caught that famous photo. i mean, that's seen all over the world. yes. and then madam nu is marking it as a buddhist barbecue. yeah. yeah. and the conscience of the world is really shocked as self-immolation was something the rest of the world had not seen. and even you know, people, even robert mcnamara said we had to

take this seriously, this moral witness against the south vietnamese government, because, you know, they'd taken such a drastic and and dramatic step. so you add the buddhist crisis onto the list of issues that are troubling the kennedy administration about zim. so here's our first real hinge point in the story. finally, we're getting there. you know, it's impossible to do this job without a whole bunch of papers. so i'm going through your transcripts that you've produced and also a wonderful essay you've written about this whole affair. so for people like me, so i don't have to go back and listen to all the tapes myself. august 15th, 1963. so we're still a couple, three months away from the actual coup. kennedy sits down with henry cabot lodge, his republican foe. he actually beat him in a senate race few years before that, eight years before that, ten years before that. he's about to send lodge to south vietnam to be the new u.s. ambassador and they sit down.

i said, was august 15th, 1963, what do they talk about? why is this important? kennedy chose henry cabot lodge to be his ambassador to south vietnam for the crisis for a couple of reasons. one, political cover lodge was a very prominent republic, and things were going bad in south vietnam. and this was one way to make the republican zone it as much as the democrats also lodge was kennedy admired as a young man he thought lodge was just the kind of senator he wanted to be before he took senator lodge. his job in 1952. when lodge spent less time on his own senate reelection campaign and more time trying to elect dwight eisenhower and became a very big part of the eisenhower administra ation as un ambassador lodge was a boston

brahmin, an old style, but sincere. he uh he quit the senate to fight in world war two. he didn't have to do that, but he did. and, you know, he's he has a name that every american schoolchild has to learn because he's named after his grandfather, the first henry cabot lodge, who i think was a was the first american ph.d. in history and also just a very notorious imperialist. we all had to learn that he was the guy who who killed the league of nations under. right. woodrow wilson, a family was a force in politics, no doubt. yes. yes. so this august 15th meeting, 1963, henry cabot lodge jr. now i should refer to him as talking to kennedy before he's about to be sent to south vietnam and lodge had been speaking to madam news. mother. yes. who expressed some real concerns to her about what's going on.

yeah. lodge ordinarily the president's aides are very ginger about raising the subject of assassination but lodge gets straight to it. he had met the night before with madame nus parents. her dad was the south vietnamese ambassador to the united states for nine years for the entire history of the south vietnamese government until he resigned in protest during the buddhist crisis, he was protesting diem's repressions, even though he was a relative of diem and his wife was, a south vietnamese representative to the un. and she resigned and as well, they were both highly critical of their daughter. but when they spoke to lodge they said the mother's so told him they're going to get assassinated. diem knew my daughter there. that's going to happen unless you can convince them to mend their ways or get out of

vietnam. kennedy is silent. kennedy on the subject of assassination. is at first completely silent. he doesn't say anything about it. and that's important because kennedy has the power to either save gm and use lives or to leave them to their fate at the hands of the coup plotters. so at first he's silent and lodger raises the issue a second time. and that's when kennedy responds with what sounds like a non sequitur to our ears in the 21st century, he says. is madame nu a lesbian? yeah, i actually have the transcript here. this is bizarre. it does sound bizarre. yeah. lodge goes or says, but if they all get assassinated, then you're going to have to. kennedy yeah, yeah, yeah. then you're really going to have to be on top of it all, meaning this is going to be a real bad problem of zam is shot and killed or whatever and going to own this. and then kennedy says, well, what about madam nu? she a lesbian or what she seems

like an awfully masculine woman. yes. and the lodge responds, i've got to get my papers straight here. lodge responds, well, i think she's probably a lesbian. and then kennedy kind of acknowledges that, lodge says. i think she was also very promiscuous, sort of a nymphomaniac to people who loved gossiping about madam newt. but i don't think this was gossip. i think i don't think jfk was changing the subject. if you look at early 1960s pop culture, there's this real strong link between homosexuality and violent death. oh, yeah. and in movies, all homosexuality was still a crime at that point. and crime could not pay. and so in in movies that featured homosexual characters they'd either die at somebody else's hands or at their own hands. and that was a i think i don't want to read too much into it. you can't say that kennedy is

giving him a signal that it's okay. but we should note that he definitely did not say anything that suggested that lodge should try to save her life or dm's or news. and that would become that's the first of what become a consistent pattern of silence on the subject of assassination, even when it's very straight them. yeah. so let's pause the narrative here because we're up in mid-august, 1963 as a historian and as a researcher, how do you interpret silence on a subject? it's difficult. you know, tapes are great. they do offer irrefutable evidence of what people said at that moment. but it's not the entire picture. right. we have to look at all the instructions that jfk gave henry cabot lodge and after the meeting at the meeting and after every, you know, all of them and there are not at any time any instructions to preserve the

lives of gm and new or any member of the no family or to there's no instruction to make sure that the coup plotters give them passage out of the country. and as i'm sure you bring up, there are times when the coup plotters and then coup plotter, big man brought up assassination himself. that's a little bit later at this early meeting. a coup is kind of a just an abstract possibility, but not regime change. right. kennedy does say he's okay if the circumstances warrant it, he'd be okay with replacing zim. not necessarily violently. i mean, he had the he had the aid weapon, right? he did have the aid weapon. and he was he was contemplating a coup, but he said he wanted one lodge to go there and, make an assessment before jfk made a decision that he would change his mind pretty soon. okay. well, in that same conversation, i'll try to do a better job of reading these transcripts. kennedy says. i don't know whether we'd be better off meaning without them, whether the alternative would be

better. maybe it will be. if so, then we have to move in that direction. but i think i'd like to take a good look at it before i come to that conclusion. so nothing decided here in august, right? then we get to cable 243. this is a this is a fairly well known aspect of this drama that you shed some new light on. lodge goes to south vietnam to make a long story a little bit less long lodge goes to south vietnam in august and he the situation's a disaster he sends a cable to washington about the fact that there are people in south vietnam who would be happy to see. zm out of the way, here is actually the cable or this is this is not cable. 243 this is the one that lodge sends back to washington from saigon. suggestions been made that the us only has to give the nod or only has to indicate indicate to generals that would be happy to see zam or the news go in. the deed would be done, but

lodge don't do this action on our part in these circumstances would seem to be a shot in the dark. so lodges in south vietnam he's made aware that some generals want to get rid of them. he tells washington, let's not go ahead with this. that cable arrives in washington and what happens? a scene worthy of a conspiracy thriller that i would love to see. uh, you know, turned into a movie or prestige television series. it is always a chance for that. there's a lot of tv out there. it's. it's saturday, august 24th, 1963, the new frontier is top guns are out of town. jfk is in hyannis port. secretary of defense robert mcnamara is in the tetons the cia director, john mckone is at his estate in san marino, california. and dean rusk, the secretary of state, is at a yankees game and at that point, the highest

ranking u.s. official in the state department is undersecretary of state george ball. and he is getting in a golf game and he sees two other second levels. state department guys, undersecretary of state averell harriman and assistant secretary of state for far eastern affairs is the guy in charge of vietnam, roger hillsman show up at the at the golf course and they want his help and approve a coup d'etat in south vietnam. and these second and third tier officials will fairly high up. they're not the deciders on rice. they're not the michael forrestal who is the deputy national security adviser. this sends a draft cable up to jfk in hyannisport and says, look, we want to we want to give this, okay. to a coup. what we're basically saying is, you know, we will if you if the

if gm doesn't get rid of madame nu and nu, if he doesn't get them out of the country, then we can't support him any longer with american aid. and while we want to get rid of his brother and his brother's wife. oh, yeah. i mean, because they were looked at as sort of the evil geniuses of the of the regime. i don't think that's fair. i think what they did was, were things that. zm them to do and they did them with his approval. but america had been boosting him for so many years that it was, you know, hard to publicly acknowledge that his own people so cable to 43 then with the second and third tier kennedy administration officials with jfk although they did let him know about this but he's not in town. he's not in town. he doesn't hold any meetings with his advisors about it. he doesn't talk with any of his top guys. he just says, well, if you can get the top civilian available at the pentagon to clear it,

then you can go ahead and send it. that's amazing to think that kennedy was that what's the word? lackadaisical kind of move? i think he was. i it makes sense to me if he thought there has to be a coup to end the buddhist crisis and put this issue on the back burner for the 1964 election and he would have been better off if it happened while he was out of town. and everybody else was out of town because it would have been it would be extremely controversial politically in america because the dems had a lot of support and it would have been controversial with within within his own administration, because he was betraying an ally. yeah, of course. yeah. this was an american ally, which is different than some of the previous coups under the eisenhower administration, where we toppled perceived enemies or people who just didn't want to go along with the american so-called world order. and that early juncture of the cold war. but not to digress about that yet. so kennedy kind of greenlights

this idea that cable 243 is sent back to lodge, quietly informing him, i'm actually quoting your work here, quietly informing key south vietnamese generals that if zim fails to resolve the political crisis, release the buddhist prisoners and remove, as you mentioned, his brother and his sister in law the scene, then the u.s. would find it impossible to continue to support saigon military and economically. in other words, if you want to get rid of him, go right ahead. yes. you know, maybe the generals in the abstract could have gotten rid of jim on their own. but the reality is they always consulted, it seemed, with the united states through all of this. shortly after this cable was sent, though, kennedy says, wait a second, we better actually start thinking about this. and here's the second major meeting august 28th, 1963, kennedy asks about the fate of gm and his brother. why is this meeting? late august, 1963 important in this story? what happened was as soon the

bigwigs got back in town, they were extremely angry, especially the pentagon. secretary of defense mcnamara and jcs chairman taylor. both were strongly against a coup d'état. not that they thought zim was a great leader, but that they thought there's no replacement on the horizon. there's nobody in the south vietnamese military who shows any sort of indication of being a better leader. so kennedy has to have these kind of tense meetings with his top advisors who are who are split down the middle. most of the guys at the top of the pentagon and the cia oppose a coup. and yeah, mcnamara was against it. mcnamara was against it. i was against it. john mccain was against cia, cia director and most of the top people at the state department and in the national security council, especially mcgeorge bundy, the national security advisor, who was very influential with with jfk, very

highly respected by jfk. they were in favor of a coup. and so they spent the week arguing it out. and by wednesday, that's the first time kennedy brings up the safety of gm and knew and he says, i don't know if you want to read it. let's see. i don't know if i have the exact book right in front of you, but go ahead. yeah, he says, what's going to happen to them? we we want them to get out of the country safely. if we have any say in it. and so that's the strongest piece of evidence that he wanted them to be safe. but when we look at that in the context of all the cables he was sending to south vietnam, he never turns that into any instruction to henry cabot lodge or to the cia inside, gone in the cia is conducting all the contacts with the south vietnamese generals on the day on the day of this meeting or the day after the cia approaches, us, south vietnamese general, you about to say something before i get to this

next thing you want me to move on to this? i can. well, you just that there was there there's no instruction to tell the generals hey give him a new safe passage out of the country. they have served america maybe not well, but loyally. and, you know, we owe them at least their physical safety could have been done at any point during this. right. all this month long deliberating over what to do about south vietnam, kennedy could have said whatever happens, don't touch a hair on his head. so the cia approaches. general delong then then, who is known as big man, big men, because he's he's six feet tall and he's just under 200 pounds. i think. and most people in vietnam are not that big. his other major physical characteristic is he has only one tooth because the japanese tortured him by prying out his teeth during world war two, he is the general with the best, the biggest stature in metaphorically as well as physically in described as as

close to an authentic hero as south vietnam has right now, according to the new york times today, they were. yeah. so the cia approaches men to say, okay, if you want to get rid of zim. so they ask him if he's interested in overthrowing the government. big men doesn't know whether the cia is serious or whether they're working for new figures. the cia is very tight with new as since he was the regimes. so they can be entrapping him. yeah, they could be a trapping. i mean, you know, they could just be identifying generals for for a new to put in prison. and so the cia has actually asked them how can we prove we're serious? how can the us government prove you that's serious? and he says, oh, that's easy, just cut off aid. the zam regime that will that will prove that the united states wants the government replaced. okay, so here we are in late august position is yes on a coup. if if circumstances require it on assassination.

he's i mean he's not for it, but he's not necessarily saying don't do it right, which is wavering. he's put himself on the classified record as against it, but he has not followed through. he's still with with regards all the key people in saigon, henry cabot lodge, the ambassador, cia folks there, and especially the generals, they are not getting any indication that assassination is forbidden, that it's not allowed. kennedy does suspend aid to the zam regime in early october 1963. we mentioned how the cia approaches big men. at the end of august. in early october, men comes back to the cia and says, okay, now it's time to get rid of them. we have this. we have three options available. which one do you prefer? so we'll talk a little bit about what those options were and how the kennedy administration responded to those big men meets

secretly with a cia agent named lucien conine and. he says, i now represent a cabal, a coalition of south. these generals were willing to overthrow the government, but we absolutely have to know what the us position is on that. we cigar neck out. we need to know if you're behind us. right? we need to know that you will thwart the way they thwarted the coup plot against him in 1954 on eisenhower. and we need to know that our regime will get american aid the same as zim. now, these are, you know, these are essential requirements for any south vietnamese government because the south vietnamese government is completely on american aid. he mentions a dollar figure, $1.5 million a day in american history. that's what keeps south vietnam afloat. that's amazing. and he says, you know, we've got three alternative plans to overthrow the government. one of them is to assassinate

new and another brother kong, who's like the warlord and way central vietnam. but keep zim around, he says that's the easiest coup plot accomplish. it doesn't really say how zim will react to losing his brother after after you know how he'll treat the people who murdered his brothers. but conine apparently didn't ask him about that. the other two plot they were to plans were to encircle saigon and militarily with rebel forces or to have street by street block fighting between the rebel forces and the loyalist forces in saigon. the assassination plot is kind of the easiest of all those. it's the easiest. and when cronin gets back to saigon station, the acting chief of station, dave smith, it happens to be his first day as acting chief of station sends

cia headquarters a summary of big man's coup plot, which immediately goes to the state department, the pentagon and the white house. so kennedy has a copy of it as well, laying out the three alternatives and. dave smith says, i recommend we do not set ourselves irrevocably against assassination because the other alternatives would lead to a bloodbath. yeah. yeah. he had a problem with the some of the details of big minh's plan. yeah. but at the same time, he said these other ones aren't very, you know, these alternatives. he said it wasn't realistic to kill two of jim's brothers and keep him around ho chi minh had killed one of cinema's brothers and had made him into an enemy for life. yes. so another key piece of context here in october of 1963, the war is going badly from the americans perspect of it's not clear yet to the pentagon that the war is going badly and it

won't become clear until after the coup. the the pentagon still thinks that war is going fairly well. can be salvaged at least. yeah, but kennedy thinks that there's no way that the political crisis can remain contained in the cities. he thinks it's going to spill off and he's worried that it'll get much, much worse in 64 and in the election year. and then we have like a big problem. i mean, his two big fears were that, one, he'd have to send in american troops to save it and that that did not happen until 65 or completely. we withdraw. and then the problem would be that the communists would over and that would be a problem for america's credibility in the world. and particularly for his credibility in america as an anti communist. again, you know, if he can win the 60 election by hammering eisenhower and nixon for losing

cuba, where americans weren't even fighting, then the republicans could hammer him in 64 for losing vietnam as a story. and frederick logevall has argued, i think convincingly credibility was higher up on the causal hierarchy. if you don't mind me using that term, then domino theories. i mean, kennedy never totally divorced himself of domino thinking, but the idea of credibility, especially for johnson, lyndon johnson personal credibility, was higher up on the list here as far as driving the american commitment to vietnam, what would our allies think if we give up on one of our allies or give up on saigon is what i'm trying to say. so we and also i want to mention about how the war was going, the issue of whether the war is going well, poorly. mark silverstone in his book the kennedy withdrawal, talks about all the different reports that are hitting kennedy's desk at this time. most of which say we need to salvage this or we can salvage this. as bad as the situation is very few, if any at this point are

telling the president, we need to get out of there entirely. very, too. so, you know, he doesn't want to give up on saigon. he's hearing that from some people in the senate. but it's nowhere near a majority yet. yeah, we also have to remember that most americans didn't want the us to cut and run from vietnam. even they don't understand that the war was not something that we do. they were being told that it was going okay. yeah, that's right. that's another important point. they weren't getting always very accurate information from what were called official sources. they were being told that there was an overwhelming popular leader up until the evidence of the buddhist crisis showed that he was widely, you know, opposed interesting all this context. so important context is critical. okay. so the key meeting, october 8th, 1963, we talked about how big men approaches the administration with these three different plans. one of them involves assassination, although not of gm himself. kennedy holds an off the record roundtable conference at the white house, citing your work

here to consider how they should reply to big man's plans. no written records of the meeting have emerged. the american people would have no record of this discussion had it not been secretly tape recorded and it had not been for my colleague here. ken hughes and his editors transcribing it for the for the record, cancer marks elvis. and we got to give everybody credit here. kennedy doesn't record the entire meeting begins at 530 that night continues till around 615. so it's not a very long he gets about 25 minutes, 25 minutes in this month's long drama. what's the gist of this meeting after kennedy presses the record button? what is ultimately decided here? the the august 24th decision gets compared to the bay of pigs. a lot of the october 8th decision, kennedy decision making process is more like it was during the cuban missile crisis. he hears from everybody who opposes the coup.

he hears from defense secretary. a lot of people at this man. yes, defense secretary mcnamara speaks against a gesture. man taylor mckown has prepared a response saying, let's tell our cia guys to say we can't even we can't even bring your proposal to any responsible figures in the us government until we have more information. it's a basic basically way of saying no without using the word no. but kennedy, after having spent weeks hearing his aides, debated at numerous xcom meetings after sending more than one mission fact finding mission to south vietnam after exploring all of the issues, says or position, here is if he overthrows the government, okay? and if he doesn't, okay. the difference here is in august we went and asked them to

overthrow the government and now we're not going to. he's deciding to give to give big men a green light, to tell him yes, we will give the new regime american aid. we will not thwart the your coup attempt. so this is different than, say, what eisenhower did with patrice lumumba in congo. evidence indicating pretty despite to decisive evidence, i think, or definitive evidence eisenhower ordered the murder of lumumba in august of 1960. the cia actually not the ones who got to him. he was killed by his his domestic rivals in. this case, it's the generals in south vietnam coming to kennedy, saying, we want to do this. and he says, go ahead if you feel like you need to do it. yes, i should point out that and on that tape, they don't discuss this at all. and when you read the cables and the cables are super important,

when kennedy approves the response to big proposal, the proposal was explicit assassination is our first option and it's the easiest. the reply that kennedy gives them says to the cia people in saigon, we want information about their plans, but do not get drawn into reviewing or advising them the best line is no line. okay, that's that's a different cable. that's a different cable. that's but that's that's a very relevant cable because people want to know what kennedy's silence on assassination means. and john mccone filled it out. and the only explicit guidance that the cia station in saigon got on assassination in its it's a very important cable. it didn't come out in its entirety in the church committee report. and the church committee report

is actually very, i think, mislead thing because it leaves out the first two sentences which are basically here is your guidance for assassination discussions in general the best line is no line we we're not in favor of assassination, but we're not going to try to stop assassination. our approach is going to be hands off. we want all the information that the generals can give us, but we will not take any line. so according to marconi's testimony in the church committee later. yes. and in 75, long after, you know, he spoke with kennedy about this, with president kennedy, we got this. and he felt that kennedy agreed, which basically removes plausible deniability. now that's we have to make really specifically clear. it's not that kennedy says it's okay to kill diem. he's silent on the subject.

he doesn't say it's not okay to kill gm or anybody else. he's silent on the subject and but he could have he could have if he wanted to. he could have told mccone, make it clear that if you kill gm, you're not getting a penny of american aid, for instance. right? yes. he could have made it a condition and he chose not to. and unfortunately don't. we don't know why he didn't say why. we can speculate, but we're just speculating. it's amazing how you've been able to navigate cryptic language, silence, cable, a bureaucratic kind of euphemism to understand what happened here. well, i think it would not have been completely clear without john mccain's testimony on it, which included the best line is no line cable, which really makes it very clear where that the kennedy administration left it to the generals to decide. and william colby and i'm sorry

to interrupt that and that, but they knew that the generals had assassination on their mind. they did. so, yes, they were not it's not like they never thought of this. they in large had brought it up face to face with kennedy. so kennedy knew that assassination was a possibility and kennedy had brought it up himself after the august 28th xcom meeting and we're going to go ahead and big man had made it. yes. big men brought this. here's your menu of choices. this is a conscious choice, president kennedy, not to take a position. we're going to wrap up in a bit with the kennedy mystique and what this story means for that. and of course, he was assassinated shortly after zam is murdered for the record, the actual coup does not happen until november 2nd. and zam and his brother knew are shot to death by the plotters. shot and stabbed, shot and stabbed. i have a high tech here. i'm going to play something off of my iphone. this is available on youtube.

actually november fourth 1963, jfk, if he had an iphone in those days, would have been talking into it. the way i'm holding it up here. he he he reflects for the historical record on what just happened, i want you to interpret of what this means. monday, november 4th, 1963. the over the weekend, the coup in saigon took place culminated three months of conversation about a coup. how much conversation is divided the government here and in saigon goes to a coup is general taylor the attorney general secretary mcnamara, to a somewhat less degree john on partly because of it all the hostility to laws because of him but confidence in my judgment

some of my colleagues as a result of a new hostility even though the law just shifted is station chief. mean in favor of the coup was state led by abraham harriman. george ball roger hill supported by mike marshall at the white house. i feel that that we must dare to be a responsive ability for it beginning with our cable of early august, which we suggested a coup in my judgment that a while as badly drafted comments should never be sent on a saturday i started doing my consent to it. without it. i'm table conference in which mcnamara and taylor could have presented their views. they. we did redress that balance. and later, while at it that

occurred while encourage law along costs to which he was in any case inclined then to continue to oppose the coup on the ground. that the military efforts doing well. there's a sharp split between saigon the rest of the country politically the situation, the hysteria rating militarily did had not had its effect. there was a feeling however was deployed it for this reason secretary mcnamara and general taylor supported applying additional pressures to them and knew in order to move them. that's his son entering the room there. i played two and a half minutes of that. he does go on to say that he liked zim. he had met zim. do you feel this is a president kind of trying to exonerate himself for what happened? i want to put that in political context, because monday,

november 4th, was when clemons a block who was the chairman of the foreign affairs subcommittee that handled vietnam, stood up in the house and said that he was not satisfied with the administration's explained nation for what had gone. he thought that the cuts were a signal for a coup to take place, which wasn't right, but was don't close and. he he said, if we did not insist on the of zim and we if we did not insist on safe passage for zim, then we're response able. so by monday after the coup, kennedy's is facing, this is a brand new threat. this is a democrat. this is one of kennedy's most prominent supporter, as he was during the primaries of 1960. kennedy said, i cannot win the

nomination. i don't win wisconsin and he couldn't win it without clemens. block, who had been the congressman? yeah, there's this greg called primary. and you can see. block you know, he's introducing kennedy. he holds this huge rally for kennedy in in milwaukee right before the election. and he's you know, he's he's really proud of that. a very supporter of jfk. and he says, i even you know, we we broke the fire code to get extra people in there. and a few people fainted. but i think it was worth it. but he is angry on november 4th because he had spoken with kennedy right before the coup and, you know, he had said to kennedy had told him i don't think zm could hold and block he said if you support him he'll hold on as long as you support him if you withdraw your support then there's going to be a coup. so the blocking understood how

power was working there. when i listen to kennedy's edict about the voice memo it's too bad he didn't an iphone there'd be less crackling heather be less crackling i think he's he's admitting things that people already know cable 243 had leaked to the new york herald tribune. that's the august one. yeah, that's the august one. and so he he mentions that he he mentions also that had approved it, which is something that hadn't leaked. so that is that is a substantial admission. but when he goes through like what he's saying, who's what side of the coup. he leaves out two people whose on the coup would indicate his secretary of state dean rusk not allow any daylight between and the president on any foreign policy decision. and rusk was a supporter of the coup. and another guy who was, you know, compared to robert kennedy

as sort of like a other president's alter ego, was mcgeorge bundy. and he was also for the coup. and kennedy just doesn't mention them. he expresses some remorse, too, that he was killed. he says he was shocked that zia and nu were killed. i don't see how he could possibly have been shocked that new was killed and the brother the brother, you know, especially since big men said that was planned. and also he ahead as much since jfk had as much sense as dave smith the acting chief of station of the cia and had to realize that you know, it was just unfeasible for them to murder two murders. dems brothers and leave him alive. so before we wrap up with the kennedy mystique issue, you've also done here, that's i find truly remarkable. you've been able to debunk. with your new information, the stories that have been out there have been repeated in footnotes in history books for decades.

and we'll focus on one that's really important briefly here, maxwell taylor writes a memoir at some point saying that when kennedy heard that. zm was killed and his brother, he stormed out of, there was a meeting going on he storms out of the meeting he's looking all distraught shocked and dismayed. it's a way of saying kennedy had nothing to do with the assassination yeah this was was a fantasy this was a fabrication. it's a it's a beautiful one, though. he he sets the scene very dramatically he says it's november 1st. it's at the xcom meeting, the first after the coup starts. and we know that took place from a m to 1215 and somebody comes in with a cable saying that zm and nu are dead at that point in the was that they had committed suicide. but kennedy of course instantly realizes that that can't be true, given their religious background. and he is he leaps to his feet and leaves the room with a look

of shock and dismay on his face and maxwell taylor says that that's because he had always insisted that z be unharmed. and the nothing in the record to suggest. i told you before my parents were scientists. they raised me the falsification. scientists try to theories by disproving them they you you haven't tested a theory until you've tried to prove it false. so when i see a historical claim or a theory, i try to prove it false and the first thing i noticed was that during xcom meeting, zm and nu were both alive. they had not died and that there were no false reports that they had died. and then i looked for all the evidence that that kennedy had insisted on their safety. and there just there was only that one comment at the 28 august 1963 xcom meeting, which in context is never turned an

instruction. that's right. so yeah, we have the tapes of the meeting but what's matters is what was told to the people on the ground in saigon. all right. and i think there was also a cable the day before the coup or the coup is already underway, saying something about what we don't maybe don't kill these guys, but at that point, it was too late, right? yes. on the day of the coup, like when? just a few hours when. zm and you just have a few hours to live. there's a state department cable saying to lodge, you know, if we know that the are making their own decisions and they might not be open to your suggestions, but we'd like them to keep in mind safe passage. for zm in new i mean it's a very mild suggestion. the amazing thing about this maxwell taylor story, i mean, why wouldn't you believe it? maxwell taylor was a key decision maker. key player. he was there. it's an eyewitness account. eyewitness account gets repeated, picked up by historians. you know, as a reader of history, i also often read footnotes to see where certain things are coming from. you trust that there accurate.

i it gives me pause in not want to overstate case but in this case this is a story that was bush is now 6060 years total total nonsense. yeah i mean it's he told the story first in the early 1970s so for it's been repeated for over 50 years in over 50 books. and these are not just minor books. they're like wrote one. yeah, pulitzer prize winners have won. professors of history. a famous journalist liberals and conservatives both back of this story and no way it could possibly be. and i go through all the different versions of it. arthur schlesinger, who was a kennedy speechwriter, as well as an historian, repeats the tale. he takes off all the all the details that can prove it wrong. the date at the time and the idea of it. and that's no small figure historical. no he's arthur schlesinger he's he won two pulitzer prizes and he was a harvard professor of history. and then mcnamara directed record. go ahead.

i hope so. i'm saying mcnamara. mcnamara did his own bogus eyewitness account, switching it to november second at the xcom meeting on november 2nd morning. but that can't true either because kennedy have read that zeman knew were dead in the new york times. you would have read it in his daily intelligence brief the first cable had come through more than 10 hours earlier and the the mencken, the member of the meeting shows that his aides discussing the deaths of gm and knew before kennedy arrived and kennedy brought up their deaths himself. and we can listen to him discuss it. and he's he's a very calm. yeah, you know, he talks about the thing being bothersome that that they're he's a pragmatist in the recordings. he's not he doesn't get emotional. he's a very cool customer. yeah. analytical thinker. so part of the kennedy is had he only lived had he only come back from dallas alive after his trip

there on november 22nd. the he have pulled the united states out of vietnam and our country would have avoided the vietnamese people would have that horrible war. what do you think that before move on to other aspects of the darker side of camelot is what we're getting at here. but go ahead. well, actually, it into the darker side of camelot, because i think by the time he died, jfk had figured out how to get out of vietnam. he he seems to have understood it was a losing proposition. he only solved short term problems by greenlighting the coup that only that resolved the buddhist crisis. so that was not an indication of his commitment to vietnam getting rid of them. that was just a short term, short term fix that would get south vietnam off the front pages in 64. but he he did he apparently discussed this with one of his closest and oldest aides, kenny o'donnell, and said, you know, i can't get out now, but i can do

it after. i'm reelected. so we better make sure i'm and i'm reelected and get out. i be one of the least popular presidents in american history. he compared what would happen to him to the joe mccarthy red scare, which was built around who lost china in was of course never ours to but a lot of politicians including the young jfk, blamed the us state department not giving the national s chinese enough backing and was a very powerful political argument. it doesn't make much sense in retrospect. it doesn't seem like a little more aid would have done it. but kennedy, i think, was was correct in predicting that if he got of vietnam in 65 and the communists took over, he would definitely be attacked for snatching defeat, the jaws of victory and sending american boys to die vain.

because by 63, about 100 already had died vietnam, even though they were not technically in combat, they were advisors. they were being shot at and but he said to them, they asked him how he would do it. and he said, easy, i'll just put a government that will ask me to leave. and i think by learning about the gm coup and leverage that american aid gave american presidents, the south vietnamese government, we see how easily he could have done that in. it was still fairly obvious to the newspapers that the us government was responsible for the coup and it would have been even more obvious in in 65 because that would have been a much more unpopular decision. as you know, frederick and logue, of all the great vietnam scholar, i think he's made the convincing that johnson had an opportunity to get the united states out of vietnam and pay a minimal political price or a

short term political price that the american people would have eventually forgotten. because in the vietnam was not a vital national security interest of the united states. we see that now. you know, in china, yes, china was not a vital interest. the national security of the united states. the communists took over china, america had the 1950s, a period of relative peace and prosperity and strength and i think i think fred was a great scholar, underestimates the the level of political price that jfk or lbj would have to pay in 1965, when his opponents would be able to say, hey, we wouldn't have had to do much to win the war in vietnam. just just keep backing them or, you know, or stick with zim, which is one of the arguments that some conservatives make in retrospect i think it's a false argument.

it's based a fantasy that things would have worked out. but that fantasy is is not is not politically ineffective through, you know, good leadership, though. you can go the american people and say why we're this and for the reasons and you can you listen, there's going to be a problem after we leave. i'm not saying it's going to be, you know, the garden of eden over there, but here are the the negatives if we stay hypothetical of. but november 22nd, 1963, i was not alive. course my parents were. they have told me, you know, everyone remembers what they were doing or, how they felt at that moment. people watching television at home the afternoon had their soap operas or whatever it was interrupted. and walter cronkite breaks the news. you weren't alive either, but i'm sure your parents have talked to you about it. kennedy so young and full of vital quality and his beautiful family, these little children roaming around the white house after basically, what, 30 years of old men being president.

fdr, truman, grandfatherly eisenhower talking about camelot, the kennedy mystique. and when you die young and tragically, you know, that's frozen. that's robert kennedy will always be young. and, you know, he didn't have an opportunity to screw up his second term or make really bad mistakes that people ought to remember him for because the first thing that comes to mind is he was assassinated. what are your thoughts on the kennedy mystique, how it had such staying power? i mean, people to this day get emotional when they think about the. i, i understand it, my parents both voted for jfk and. he was the last presidential candidate that they could vote enthusiastically for. and, you know, i grew up with as a household hero. uh, i think my parents three kennedy books, they had a bunch them but three of made a big impact on me profiles in courage which is about the need for political leaders to demonstrate

courage. the making of the president in 1960, which is a very hagiographic account of kennedy's election victory and, johnny b hardly knew, which is written by kenny o'donnell and dave powers and a journalist, who was coincidentally named joe mccarthy, oddly enough. and that's where this the account of kennedy's idea of how to get out of comes from. and basically you know both my books are they're about those those subjects political courage versus, political calculation, presidential politics and how presidential politics affect decisions about foreign policy to the detriment of american foreign policy. right. very often with nixon, we saw very clearly and to a lesser extent, we see clearly with johnson and kennedy that presidential electoral considerations played a role in their decisions about vietnam

and, certainly with nixon and the decent interval. but yes. yeah, not to digress about tricky --, but please do not regret. but no, but. yeah, but the kennedy mystique has had a hold on us and i guess what i'm trying to get at here is not to destroy entirely his reputation. there's the good and the what i mentioned earlier, the continuing rise in the structural causation. eisenhower had the coup in iran in 53, guatemala in 54 orders. the assassin nation of lumumba in 1960, kennedy in the bay of pigs, and then operation mongoose and his brother seemed obsessed with trying to get rid of castro. they even tried to hire mafia hitmen to kill castro, cigars, whatever it was. then we have this in south vietnam where he greenlights the coup of an american and the man winds up dead hours after he's toppled. i want people to think of these continuities in these structures rather than these. yeah, he can. or both. both can do both. i mean, i was not alive in those

those years, so i never bought into the kennedy mystique. but certainly the reagan aura affected me as young person. and as i've gotten to know more about reagan's real record, i don't look at him the same way i did as when i was a teenager. so what we learn, it complicates things. the presidents, even the best ones, have dark sides. you know, franklin roosevelt and even you know abraham lincoln and. it's it's important for us. i think, like you say, as an historian, i 100% endorse it. we need to learn more of what they're like as politicians, human beings, trying to lead a diverse and often contentious country that often a lot of people just don't pay much attention these life or death issues until. they become crises or a catastrophe is. yeah so it's good important to also recommend to or i'm sorry

recognize what i'm trying to say the weight of the structure is to because it's very easy for us to sit here and i think we probably right the united states should not have greenlighted the coup of gm should not have gotten involved in vietnam, should not have ordered the killing of congo's first democratically elected leader. but when you're in the chair, right, you feel the of these structural causes, ideology, notions of personal credibility, national credibility. it's just a it's a way putting yourself in their shoes, if that's and it's and if you understand history rather than judge it, i guess, is the way i'm trying to say in the better we understand the better we can as citizens lead them. you know, we can we the relationship is all not just president over citizen. yeah we a great say as long as we exercise it and direction of the government i it's a problem with covert operations it's undemocratic yes. unaccountable these are decisions made behind closed

doors. i want to say everybody who is wedded to the idea that a president was overthrown in a coup in november of 1963. that was the of a conspiracy at the highest levels of the government. please check our transcripts and the essay i wrote about the zim coup to see how an actual international conspiracy that results in a coup and a presidential assassination. miller center dawg is the website i i'm so so prepared. i was like, well, i work there and i think it's miller said, well, you know, there's that thing called google. you can do. miller center, ken hughes kennedy coup and you'll find all the materials can use of the university of virginia, author of fatal politics and chasing shadows. thank you for being here. thank you to our listeners for this special episode o