Chapter 13

Hersh Shows How Kennedy Assassinated Diem — By Trying to Save Him

In his Hersh-itted history, Hersh even blames the war in Vietnam on Kennedy!

With the American involvement there dating to the Eisenhower administration, with the first American troops there also sent there by the Eisenhower administration, with Kennedy's determination to get out of there when it could be a political possibility, and with the actual war that of Lyndon Johnson, perpetuated by Richard Nixon.

Here is how Hersh begins his "Vietnam" chapter:

John Kennedy's enduring legacy as the thirty-fifth president of the United States was not the myth of Camelot or the tragic image of an attractive young leader struck down at the peak of his career. It was the war in Vietnam, a war that in the decade after his death would kill many thousands of the young Americans he had inspired and propel many others to the edge of insurrection.

Kennedy's personal responsibility for the November 2, 1963, overthrow and murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam, has been obscured by the lies of the men who worked for him, and the lies of his ever-loyal brother Bobby (page 412).

Or, everyone who did not say what Hersh wanted said or who said what Hersh did not want said was a liar — according to Hersh, who is the biggest of liars.

What was public that was not consistent with Hersh's need to blame the Diem/Nhu assassinations and the war in Vietnam on Kennedy compelled Hersh to include some of it. Hersh proves once again, as he does throughout the book, that Hersh was not honest and knew he was not being honest when he made up his case of Kennedy's alleged responsibility for the Diem/Nhu assassination and for the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. So much of it was public Hersh did not dare ignore it. Instead he does include some, pays no attention to it, and states the opposite. This gives the writing a schizoid character.

Hersh says that after many earlier reports of a coup,

This time coup took place as expected, and early in the morning of November 2 it succeeded. But what was not expected in Washington, according to histories of the time, took place after the coup: Diem and Nhu were seized by General Minh's troops in a Roman Catholic church, blindfolded, and executed by gunshots to the back of the head. There were press reports that the brothers had refused an American offer of sanctuary before the coup.

Americans who followed the newspaper accounts were pleased by the coup, which was seen as giving the South Vietnamese government a chance to fight the communists with more vigor and more internal cohesion. The American press corps also cheered Diem's demise. "Americans are gratified by a sense of joy that they find in Saigon," the New York Times commented in an editorial on November 4. The unnamed and perhaps imaginary Americans cited by the editorialists were also said to be hoping "that the repressive political climate that weighed heavily on the population and the army has been lifted for good."

President Kennedy was said to be shocked and distraught by the murder of Diem, a fellow Catholic (page 415).

(As becomes clear, what Hersh says "was not expected in Washington" was the assassination, "execution" to Hersh. He soon leaves it without question that in saying this he knew he was telling other than the truth. Why he is not truthful about this has to be conjectured but the he is not truthful is not conjecture. The most obvious of the possible conjectures is that Hersh lost himself in his making up his non-existing case against Kennedy, the Kennedy he blames for these "executions.")

Hersh covers himself with his references to these "press reports." He knew very well that the only reason that Diem and his murderous brother, Nhu, were killed is because the refused to be saved. Refused, Hersh knew it. They refused repeatedly, as we see in Hersh's schizodrama.

That this particular part was accepted by all those involved at Little, Brown and adds it to their knowingness, to their intended involvement in this Goebbelsization of out history.

If there was one thing of the era that Hersh knew beyond any question is Goebbels-like it is his pretense that there were only "imaginary Americans" who regarded the Diem dictatorship as of a "repressive political climate that weighed heavily on the population." The persecutions of the majority Buddhists in particular was an enormous international scandal and was fully reported throughout the world. Monks were setting themselves on fire in protest.

Pictures of this were on TV, in papers and magazines word-wide.

However, it is not true, as Hersh states in making it part of what is true to make it appear to be true, that the vicious, murderous regime "weighed heavily on . . . the army." The Vietnamese army was the means by which the tyrannical Diem regime kept itself in power and inflicted its tortures and assorted other brutalities on those who did not support it or were suspected of not supporting it.

Hersh does not say that Kennedy was shocked by the assassinations. Instead Hersh says "Kennedy was said to have been shocked and distraught" by it (page 415).

Kennedy, the President who had a few other things on his mind, to Hersh's knowledge had to have been "shocked and distraught" because of his personal efforts to prevent what happened which Hersh admits while misrepresenting it.

If there is any American responsibility for the assassination it is that of those Hersh finds it impossible to be critical of, the CIA on which he depends in his writing and whose words he never questions or doubts. Instead Hersh attributes the CIA's sins to the President who wanted the opposite of what the CIA wanted. In his revisionism, Hersh has Kennedy responsible for it all. He says what he refers to is the result of disclosures in The Pentagon Papers under FOIA but it was well known earlier. Hersh says that these disclosures give

a more nuanced picture of the Kennedy administration complicity in both the coup and the executions emerged. It was learned Ambassador Lodge and the CIA station in Saigon had worked closely with General Minh and his plotters before the coup and had supplied weapons and cash on demand. President Diem had clearly received advance word of the time and place of the coup. "I want to know" Diem asked, in a chilling last-minute telephone conversation with Lodge, according to a transcript, "what is the attitude of U.S.?" Lodge's answer was classic "I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you."

Thus the essential account has remained — until a series of interviews for this book revealed that Jack Kennedy, as he had in the plotting against Fidel Castro, both actively sought Diem's ouster and knew that the Vietnamese president would be murdered in the coup. The most telling new information was supposedly Lucien Conein, a longtime clandestine operative for the CIA, who in October 1963 served as a middleman between Henry Cabot Lodge and the Vietnamese coup plotters. Conein told me in a 1996 interview that there was never any doubt that General Minh, leader of the military plotting, was going to have Diem and his brother killed. "I discussed this with Lodge," Conein said. "I'd been told by Big Minh a month before [that] they were going to knock off Diem. I said, 'Don't do it, because there could be trouble.' Big Minh said, 'We will not discuss it.' I reported this to Lodge" (page 416).

Consistent with the determined and obvious lying without which Hersh could not have written this chapter, this accusation in particular, is his insistent lie that Kennedy was part of the assassination plots against Castro. We have seen that this is not true and Hersh knew it is not true. But he drags it in at every opportunity he can create.

This is also tricky writing.

Knowing that Kennedy did not want what happened and sought to prevent it, Hersh, by his writing, by his references to what the CIA was part of and Kennedy was not, his references to what the CIA was part of and Kennedy was not, his references to "the Kennedy administration's complicity," with this Goebbelsization, Hersh blames the assassinations and the overthrow on Kennedy. That is the only reason for Hersh's choice of words.

Hersh does not tell his readers that the United States ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, was a Republican who had been Kennedy's opponent. Kennedy had him there to make it all bipartisan.

As Lodge well knew, the attitude of the United States toward the Diem regime was not favorable to it and to murderousness and unspeakable barbarities by which it was kept in power. Its atrocious excesses would at some point been enough to cause its overthrow. Most Vietnamese detested and feared it.

Hersh then says that the false version he gives "remained" until his interviews. His own footnote makes a liar of Hersh on this, on which he takes, as unusual without question, what he was told by the CIA's top dog of that moment in Vietnam, Lucien Conein.

It was, as Hersh admits, Conein who was in contact with "the Vietnamese coup plotters." It is informative about both Conein and Hersh to compare what Hersh wrote that he says he got from Conein with what Hersh could not hide, knew he could not get away with omitting, that he relegates to his footnote after the dishonesty of his text:

Conein gave a slightly different account in 1975 to the overburdened Church Committee which was able to conduct only a perfunctory investigation into the Diem assassination. Conein testified that he learned of the pending assassinations of Diem and Nhu in early October 1963 and relayed the word to Ambassador Lodge. Three weeks later, Conein testified, Lodge informed him that John McCone the CIA director, after consulting with the president, had sent a cable instructing the embassy that "we cannot be in position actively condoning such course of action and thereby engaging our responsibility therefore [sic]." Conein told the Church Committee that he followed the CIA's instruction from the president, informing one of the Vietnamese plotters, an army general, that the United States opposed assassination. The general responded, Conein testified, "All right, you don't like it. We won't talk about it any more." In its final report the committee noted that Conein's "detailed after-action a report" did not mention his conversation with the general.

Conein could lie his head off to Hersh, which would not be all that unusual for the CIA, and nothing would happen other than Hersh would love and repeat it. But Conein was under oath before the Senate and lies to it could lead to jail. Lies to it could be perjury and perjury is a felony. That also could embarrass the CIA.

Hersh, who has written of the alleged "Kennedy administration's complicity in both the coup and executions," says that his prime source, Conein, "gave a slightly [Sic!] different account to" the Senate. "Slight different" when it is that the United States "cannot be in a position actively condoning" exactly what Hersh has said was "complicit" in it? "Slightly different" for Conein to"inform" the Vietnamese "plotter," who was a Vietnamese army general, "that the United States opposed assassination"?

To Hersh this clearly stated official opposition to them makes the Kennedy "complicit" in both the coup and the executions."

If to Hersh this is only a "slight" difference, what is there that he cannot find is only "slight"?

Just before this footnote Hersh again says that "The president's distress upon hearing of the death of Diem may certainly have been real." Real if the President was "complicit" in it?

On the very next page Hersh has what is a bit less "complicit" in the Diem assassination he has referred to as the "execution." Hersh actually admits that the President he blames for the assassination tried to stop it:

. . . in the days immediately before the coup, Kennedy, once again operating through the back channel, sent a trusted personal emissary, a friend who had nothing to do with his administration, to meet privately with Diem. The message for Diem, who was still an ally of the United States, was a blunt warning: Get rid of your brother and accept sanctuary in the American Embassy or face certain death in the coup. Diem ignored it (page 417).

The United States efforts to save Diem's life ended when

shortly after the coup, Lodge offered Diem safe conduct by airplane to a neutral country, but the proud Diem rejected the offer as apparently was expected.

That the United States, in context again meaning Kennedy, expected Diem to turn down the offer to save his life is without source and is Hersh being Hersh. Many efforts were made, with much cost involved, for those efforts to save Diem not having been intended to save him.

Hersh actually admits that even one of the plotters, one of the, in the end assassins, sought to save Diem's life. With to Hersh his ever-trusted, ever-dependable CIA source, which means never dependable without substantiation, the Hersh version ends up blaming Kennedy again for the Diem assassination. Kennedy did not want and did, to Hersh's admitted knowledge, try to prevent:

. . . In his 1975 testimony to the Church Committee, Lucien Conein claimed that at about six o'clock on the morning of the coup he was asked by General Minh to procure an aircraft to evacuate Diem. He checked with the CIA station in Saigon, Conein said, and was told that it would be impossible to get a plane to Saigon within twenty-four hours. The aircraft had to be capable of flying Diem to a suitable neutral country without being forced to land for refueling — no one in the Kennedy administration wanted Diem to hold a plane side news conference. The only plane available, Conein said he was told, would have to be flown from Guam. By eight o'clock that morning, as Conein surely knew Diem was in the hands of the military men who would murder him. In any case, a suitable aircraft could easily have been provided in advance but was not. Jack Kennedy had written off Diem, and everyone in Saigon knew it (page 429).

(Minh is Duong Van Minh, a successor tyrant and murder as head of the South Vietnamese state.)

All plans to save Diem required an airplane. As we saw earlier, the colonel who then had that responsibility on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man who provided all its secret airplane assistance to the CIA, Fletch Prouty, told me years before Hersh visualized this private mint of his that they had a suitable plane at Saigon and Diem refused to take it, even to go to the airport.

But if none of this was true, with the airplanes on the aircraft carriers we had in the area it would not have been any problem at all to save Diem if he had not rejected every effort, as in his left-handed way Hersh does let the reader who pays close attention pick up.

Hersh then makes passing reference to what he says was a Kennedy effort to "separate Nhu from Diem" (page 429). That is mentioned here, distorted here, and then gets a special Hershian twist several pages later.

Congressman Torbert Macdonald was a close and trusted friend of Kennedy's going back to their youth. His mistress, Eleanore Carney, is quoted as having told New York University Professor Herbert Parmet, in a taped interview in which she quotes Macdonald, as repeating what, when he was Kennedy's special emissary, he learned:

He [Kennedy] was hesitant about using the embassy in Saigon because he could not trust his own people there. Nor did he have enough confidence in Lodge . . . Finally, there was no South Vietnamese he could trust. So he called on Torby, who then carried the President's personal plea [to Diem], which was to get rid of his brother and take refuge in the American Embassy." It was at that meeting, Carney told Parmet, that Macdonald warned Diem: "They're going to kill you. You've got to get out of there temporarily to seek sanctuary in the American Embassy." But Diem refused. "He just won't do it," Macdonald reported to the President, according to Carney. "He's too stubborn; just refuses to" (page 432).

This is in accord with all other accounts, if not with the Hersh line: Kennedy sent his friend Macdonald to save Diem's life, the life the loss of which Hersh blames on Kennedy. The Kennedy warning to Diem, which Diem knew without that Kennedy warning, "They're going to kill you," and he told Diem to take immediate "sanctuary in the American Embassy". (Obviously, Hersh interprets this, too, as Kennedy responsibility for the Diem assassination.)

Before Hersh's gibberish about there being no plane he also says that "Shortly before the coup, Lodge offered Dim safe conduct by airplane to a neutral country, but the proud Diem rejected the offer" (page 429).

Going back to the United States getting out of Vietnam, what Hersh refers to as "the most detailed account of Kennedy's withdrawal plan"

was provide by Kenny O'Donnell in Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. O'Donnell quoted the president as privately telling Senator Mike Mansfield in the spring of 1963, after Mansfield had publicly criticized American involvement in the war, that he would order a complete military withdrawal in 1965. "But I can't do it until 1965 — after I'm reelected," Kennedy told the senator. "After Mansfield left the office," O'Donnell's account continued, "the president told me, 'In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.'" In later interviews, Mansfield confirmed the O'Donnell account (page 430).

Hersh did not dare omit this, well-known as it was. Instead he seeks to give it a meaning it does not have by pretending that Kennedy could have just gotten out of Vietnam at any time with no preparation and with no political consequences, at home or abroad. There is no such legitimate "debate" as Hersh next says there was. And the dirty twist with which Hersh ends this paragraph is, Hersh being Hersh, again giving the impression that the Kennedy who did all he could to save Diem's life was responsible for its loss:

The O'Donnell passage has become the centerpiece of an ongoing debate about Kennedy's responsibility for the war in Vietnam, which is increasingly seen as one of America's most tragic foreign policy entanglements. O'Donnell, at the time he wrote, may not have known the full story of the plotting against Diem; he surely could not have foreseen that Jack Kennedy's probable advance knowledge of the death of Diem would be made public (page 430).

Anyone who was alive and mature then, as Hersh was, knows very well that what O'Donnell quotes Kennedy as saying was beyond question true. If Kennedy had just pulled out of Vietnam before the election he would have been defeated in a resurgence of McCarthyism and it would have been impossible for anyone who ran against him to stay out of Vietnam. The only way it was at all politically possible was with Kennedy reelected, during his second term, when he did not have to worry about re-election, which was prohibited by the constitution and thus had no worry about the political consequences.

It is significant that the respected veteran Senator Mike Mansfield confirmed O'Donnell on this.

But it is the Hershniks who pretend that there is a legitimate "on-going debate about Kennedy's responsibilities for the war in Vietnam" that, despite all, Kennedy kept us out of. He tried, as Eisenhower had, to prepare the Vietnamese and its military but he did no more and he planned no more.

With what we have seen, that Hersh then seeks to hold Kennedy responsible for Diem's assassination is the most disreputable dishonesty for a responsible writer. Kennedy did everything but go there and grab Diem by the collar to pull him out.

We have not yet dredged this Hershian sewer completely:

If O'Donnell, Mansfield and [reporter Charles] Bartlett are right, the president always planned to disengage from Vietnam. Yet he chose not to act in the fall of 1963, when Diem's unpopularity and pending overthrow gave him the perfect opportunity. Again, assuming that O'Donnell, Mansfield, and Bartlett have it right, Kennedy's policy was not to save South Vietnam but merely to postpone the inevitable until after his reelection. Ngo Dinh Diem was killed because he wanted to do something in 1963 — get the Americans out of Vietnam — that Kennedy wanted to do only after the election. Kennedy thus kept up the American involvement in the war for the most expedient of reasons — to ensure his reelection in 1964. He also chose to stand aside and, at the minimum, acquiesce in the murder of a fellow Catholic and fellow anticommunist (page 430).

Hersh has to cast doubt on, if not call a liar, one of the most respected and experienced Senators of the era, Mike Mansfield, because Hersh requires that doubt for all he makes up. Hersh does not inform his reader that Kennedy inherited the situation he faced in Vietnam and then Hersh could not have told a bigger lie, no source for it naturally, it being a lie, to say that what he finally makes brief mention of, Diem's unpopularity, was what "gave him [Kennedy] the perfect opportunity" to get out.

The international reaction against it and the McCarthyite campaign against it and against Kennedy at home for it cannot be exaggerated.

If it could have been done safely Kennedy would have gotten us out in any way he could have.

It is another of the gargantuan lies without which Hersh would not have this book for him to say that Kennedy could "save Vietnam." When Johnson and Nixon could not do that with a half-million troops at a time and with all the tanks, planes and ships they used, there is no possibility that Vietnam could have been "saved." If keeping a series of bloody murderers of the Vietnamese people in power constituted saving it.

That actuality is what General Gavin told me Kennedy was telling his generals and did tell Gavin, that Vietnam was "a political problem and political problems are not susceptible of military solutions."

It is another monster Hershian lie to say that Diem was killed because he wanted to "get the Americans out of Vietnam." He was killed because he was a bloody tyrant and a failure, as his own military recognized. The real tragedy, as Hersh does not mention, is that none of the Vietnamese military was any better, none could get the popular support required for any democratic society, which Vietnam never had, to survive.

Despite what Hersh says, again sourcelessly, the real reason Kennedy had to delay his planned getting out was to make it a political possibility.

It likewise is by now clear that Hersh knew it was a lie for him to say that Kennedy "chose to stand aside and, at the minimum, acquiesce in the murder" of Diem.

What the CIA did that Kennedy knew nothing about yet gets blamed for by Hersh, who did his share of that, Hersh did know, as a footnote he intended for other purposes made clear. He reported a phone conversation between Kennedy and Roger Hilsman, who Hersh says was Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East at the time.

In that conversation

The issue, as explained by Hilsman, was the suspicion of Norodom Sihanouk, the ruler of Cambodia, that the U.S. was plotting his overthrow.

Hilsman: "Behind all this is fear of what's happened to Diem and Nhu. Fear of his own military. This is bothering Sihanouk; he is a highly emotional fellow, And also, as the [American] ambassador [in Cambodia] is frank to say, there's history during the administration of President Eisenhower where the Agency did play footsie with opposition groups there."

Kennedy: "Did they? Was that a true story about '59 or something?"

Hilsman : "It really is true."

Kennedy: "CIA did it?"

Hilsman : "Sure. They supplied the money and they were involved in the plot against Sihanouk back before this administration."

Kennedy: "Christ! They did it in Indonesia, they did in Laos, they did it in Cambodia."

Hilsman : "We're paying for it all over Asia for ineptitude . . . The Agency in those days wasn't responsible to the State Department . . . Every time I go on Capitol Hill I get this thrown in my face: 'Are you in control?" (page 434).

This is precisely the Hersh-it method with Vietnam. Blame Kennedy for what the CIA did that he knew nothing about. And was other than he wanted.

Despite what we have quoted that Hersh did not dare omit he actually says that "Perhaps getting out of Vietnam was not Jack's [sic] real intention." He follows this, which he has already proven to be false, with one of his endless and indecent and undocumented conjectures, "that John Kennedy had put his re-election ahead of the well-being of the soldiers and civilians in Vietnam, and the life of a former ally," the latter referring to the Diem who insisted on staying around to get himself killed (page 436).

"Perhaps" is a new kind of proof. For Hersh, anyway. It is every bit as probative as his endless conjectures. Almost as important as statements that have no source. Like Hersh's last words in this chapter,

Whatever Jack Kennedy's intentions were, Vietnam was his war" (page 437).

How did it become Kennedy's war? By his issuing instructions to Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to his fellow joint chiefs from various services, prepare the Vietnamese to take care of themselves and we get out in two years, in 1965.

Knowing as he did that Little, Brown was going to accept anything he did, Hersh did not have to make any mention of preparing the Vietnamese for the withdrawal of — and despite Hersh this is all they were — the United States' advisors to the Vietnamese military.

Despite what Hersh writes so his reader will believe it, the United States was not fighting a war in Vietnam under Kennedy. He had added to the advisors Eisenhower had there. The United States fighting began after Kennedy's assassination, under Johnson and it continued until it was defeated and driven out under Nixon.