memes

[Noam] Chomsky, [Alexander] Cockburn, and others claim that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no large-scale effect on policy, not even on tactics. In other words, if Kennedy had lived, he likely would have fabricated a Tonkin Gulf casus belli, he would have introduced ground troops in a massive land war, as Lyndon Johnson did, he would have engaged in merciless B-52 carpet bombings of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, as Richard Nixon did, he would have risked destroying his own electoral base, proving himself a mass murderer as bad as Nixon.

Chomsky and Cockburn don't tell us how they know that. All we know is the one surviving Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, in fact, went a different way. He became an anti-war critic, he opposed the war, he broke with the Johnson administration, and he said that his brother's administration—his administration—had committed terrible mistakes.

The evidence we do have, in fact, is that John Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a ceasefire and coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor (they preferred to back a right-wing faction that continued the war). Chomsky says much about troop withdrawal—he just wrote a whole book on this, [Rethinking Camelot] and all that, but he says very little about troop escalation, other than to offer Roger Hilsman's speculation that Kennedy might well have introduced US troops—ground troops—in South Vietnam. Maybe so, maybe not. In fact, the same Hilsman noted in The New York Times not long ago, and Chomsky doesn't note it, that in 1963, Kennedy was the only person in his administration who opposed the introduction of US ground troops. He was the only thing preventing an escalation of the war. Forget the question of withdrawal or not withdrawal; he was a barrier, in that sense.

—Michael Parenti ^[https://tankie.tube/w/kLVqSTXSEMG3c9j4zJZpvP?start=39m45s]