John Kenneth Galbraith by Richard Parker

Author:Richard Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

At the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, no less enthusiastic, implemented the White House’s newly authorized lifting of the fiscal constraints inherited from Eisenhower, even as he sought to “rationalize” military spending economically by imposing rigorous cost-benefit analysis, pioneered at RAND in the 1950s.27 As the Defense Department’s 1962 Annual Report proudly put it, the Pentagon was now applying the new military doctrine “in accordance with the President’s directive that military requirements should be considered without regard to arbitrary budget ceilings.”28

All this came to a head under President Johnson, and it led Galbraith from being a senior administration insider to being a passionate government outsider and critic in just two years. From the very first he had voiced his alarm at the interweaving of fundamental economic growth policy with a costly, aggressively expansive new military doctrine, and by the summer of 1963, he had thought his views were finally making headway with President Kennedy.

As we have seen, in the spring of 1962 Kennedy had ordered aides to work several of Galbraith’s ideas—for containing the Indochinese conflict and avoiding further U.S. troop commitments—into proposals for Harriman to discuss with the Russians at Geneva. And in the spring of 1963, Secretary McNamara had ordered General Harkins and other senior military commanders in the Pacific to lay out a detailed plan for withdrawal of all American forces from Southeast Asia. As now-declassified U.S. records show, six months before his death Kennedy was in fact prepared to begin a first withdrawal of a thousand American troops by the end of 1963, and planned to have the rest withdrawn shortly after his anticipated reelection in November 1964, and he made the withdrawal a formal objective of his administration with National Security Action Memorandum 263 a month before his death. Henceforth, all Pentagon planning was to “be directed towards preparing [South Vietnamese] forces for the withdrawal of all U.S. special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965.”29

But all that had changed after Dealey Plaza. Four days after President Kennedy’s assassination, on November 26, at the urging of his advisers, President Johnson approved a top-secret NSC action memorandum, NSAM 273, that reaffirmed Kennedy’s order to remove the thousand troops but then declared that the “central object of the United States in Vietnam [is] to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy.” This was the carte blanche that Kennedy had refused to give in November 1961, and it eventually spawned its fateful consequences.

Whether Johnson understood that he was reversing Kennedy’s policies has never been clear—and remains controversial. Some historians have concluded that Kennedy’s troop withdrawal was merely a tactical move intended to pressure Diem to reform his government. After Diem’s assassination, they argue, Kennedy would necessarily have reexamined the situation and been prepared to reverse course. And Kennedy’s aides were certainly encouraging a reversal: McGeorge Bundy had drafted NSAM 273 for Kennedy’s consideration just before Dallas. But there is no evidence or reason to believe that Kennedy would have approved it; he had repeatedly overridden his advisers before.

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