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[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk podcast, glad you can be with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm going to start with a good news story.
[SPEAKER_02]: The lighthearted intelligence news, the Texas man, tried repeatedly to sneak into the CIA.
[SPEAKER_02]: After two warnings at the front gate, he came back again a third time and they finally arrested him.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's a good news story.
[SPEAKER_05]: But he didn't have any weapons.
[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't have any weapons.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's just trying to drive in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so as we all have at times anyway they call them so yeah, that's good just like they call the gunmen It's a good to know.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're still in obscurity Yeah, well, they should be every number of people were shot up a couple died And attack at the CIA gate back in January 1993
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and that was a sort of self-motivated jihati who, uh, then drove to, uh, National Airport, or Dallas Airport and got our planes flew back to Pakistan.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, again, was a lesson a decade before the 9-11 attacks, for speaking of 9-11 in Al Qaeda, a good new bad news story is that rebels in Mali, in Western Africa have ousted the remnants of Russia's Wagner group, a Wagner group, who were helping maintain a corrupt regime in power.
[SPEAKER_02]: The bad news is that they're Al Qaeda.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Molly has for a thousand years, been across roads of culture and language and philosophy.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a big gold producer and they are threatening to take the capital and that's not good.
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they al Qaeda or ISIS?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll kind of is what I read this morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all kind of affiliated.
[SPEAKER_02]: Affiliate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, which is different then.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll kind of lead.
[SPEAKER_01]: I suppose.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, and I'm not really sure about the strength of all kind of these days.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this group, these, these couple of groups actually that have coalesced in Molly.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know the jihadist presence in africa is long standing predates 911 predates our paying attention to it and so it's actually I mean I know we're kind of surprised to see this back in the headlines but if you've been paying attention this has been coming for a while and it's not the only place that we're seeing kind of whether it's the Taliban and Afghanistan or whether it's in Syria where we're seeing kind of the the efforts of jihadists come to some
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I just want to add one small point.
[SPEAKER_05]: If it is indeed al-Qaeda, it's worth mentioning as I wrote in SpyTalk a few weeks ago that the head of al-Qaeda, the de facto leader, is in Iran.
[SPEAKER_05]: and has been for years, safe auto.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't hear much about him.
[SPEAKER_05]: But in, you know, United Nations reports and other reports from people who track this, they say he's still there, he's still active, he's still dispatching, you know, folks terrorists around the world to stir up trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, as Karen suggested, absolutely true, they have their, you know, this affiliate has its own local
[SPEAKER_02]: But very interesting guy who's running this rebel group, by the way, is a former rock and roller.
[SPEAKER_02]: Marble smoking, whiskey, sipping rock and roller who fronted a band that played in the Europe and played in the U.S., so.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he got the religion, he met a guy who turned him around and, you know, this endemic horrible corruption that affects everyone's lives in Molly.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, again, we call this an affiliate.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't know how much they have adopted the original ideas of Al-Qaeda, and what is they would use Molly as a base to attack Europe and us.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to be seen.
[SPEAKER_02]: worth noting because a lot of people weren't paying attention to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan back in the 1990s and and look what happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: What else is going on?
[SPEAKER_02]: We have this company case.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, you know, back in court, and his flimsy indictment, we have the Iran situation ongoing, uh, former CIA director Bill Burns was a long time Middle Eastern hand at the state department, um, sort of gave a tutorial to Trump, so to speak, and the New York Times last week.
[SPEAKER_02]: and which he counsels that, you know, these peace agreements stick a whole time.
[SPEAKER_02]: He goes, don't fly in, put cough in, and Kushner, and expect to wrap up a deal, and which they're demanding the complete surrender of Iran.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a weekend.
[SPEAKER_02]: So.
[SPEAKER_02]: that ain't going to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't see Trump is having a lot of patience.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I don't know how he gets out of this.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's, you know, his poll numbers are just in the toilet or deeper in the toilet.
[SPEAKER_02]: When he took office, he was at 47% approval.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I read today it's down to what?
[SPEAKER_02]: 34% those are horrible numbers.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't appear to give a damn about Republican chances.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a
[SPEAKER_02]: in the midterms.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's thinking about this ballroom in anyway.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, if you read this new piece in Atlantic magazine, Trump no longer even bothers to compare himself to U.S. Presidents.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, if you can't wait to be honest, and he looks at himself as a world historical figure along the lines of Alexander the Great Julius Caesar,
[SPEAKER_05]: and Napoleon.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you view yourself through that lens, you know, who cares about poll numbers, who cares how the Republicans go do in the midterms, you know, your, your transformer, you're changing the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you care about your art atrium, your ballroom, having slapping your name on the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, etc.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the earlier thing it cares about is vengeance against his critics, hence the indictment this week, which if I got to say, on its face, it seems like one of the flimsyist indictments I've ever seen.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's no details in there that back up its claim that when Colmy put on Instagram, a photograph
[SPEAKER_05]: he intended that as a to promote violence against the president.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think the message is, and this is the same message we're seeing on the international you know, sphere as well, which is that I don't give up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care what the law says.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care what the process says.
[SPEAKER_01]: I go after what I want to go after.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't need to take these other things into, sorry, into consideration.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just think it's, I mean, we tend, I feel like when we focus on the, you know, arch that you want to build or the golden stuff for the ballroom.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we're missing is, you know, because that's all does have a humor aside to it that we can make fun of, that we're really missing the larger, which I know you guys aren't, but just in general, the larger destructive capacity of what is going on, and particularly in terms of this war that
[SPEAKER_02]: We are now in the middle of without any sense of what the where the eggs it is or what the path to I'm not missing that at all and I went on things I worry about which I worried about last month When he seemed to be back into a corner and he was talking about a racing their civilization I thought my God this guy wants to drop a nuke on a ran and in my fears of that Resided you know as the negotiation started and blah, blah, blah, blah
[SPEAKER_02]: But now I see him in a corner and I wonder if he'll out of his, you know, he's an emotionally unstable yet man.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we'll try to nuke around.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's what, so the Higgs S. hearing yesterday and today actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at how the questions he was answering in the way he answered them, you know, why did we go to war?
[SPEAKER_01]: What was the reason for this war?
[SPEAKER_01]: Over and over again, he said the same thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't about the nuclear reality, although that mattered.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't about other political issues.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about the fact that they had nuclear ambition.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he kept focusing on the word ambition.
[SPEAKER_01]: as opposed to what was buried underground, opposed to what had been destroyed, as opposed to what could be contributed by other countries.
[SPEAKER_01]: Any of that, it was the actual fact of wanting to have a nuclear capacity.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, but that's what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the idea of imminence when you're talking about ambition, it was clear yesterday that the original reasons, whether it was regime change or an imminent threat, were not really part of how they're explaining this war now, which really gets to the heart of how do you negotiate when you don't even have an understanding of what it is you wanted out of this war or why you started this war.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, we keep blaming them for the diplomatic problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what about our diplomatic problems?
[SPEAKER_01]: What exactly do we want?
[SPEAKER_01]: And how do we define the proof that you no longer have nuclear ambition?
[SPEAKER_01]: I found that sort of a new wrinkle to be my friend.
[SPEAKER_05]: By the way, excess actually made some news in his Senate hearing.
[SPEAKER_05]: today.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, today.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was being pressed by Senator Kane about the more powers resolution.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, which was, is set to expire what I think tonight or tomorrow tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tomorrow, okay, Friday and hex says no, no, no, that doesn't matter because once the ceasefire began, then the plug is pulled.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's no longer, the clock is no longer
[SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, with the ceasefire.
[SPEAKER_05]: So this is a new interpretation.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I had not heard that before.
[SPEAKER_05]: Creative wiring by somebody in the Pentagon or the White House.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't know.
[SPEAKER_05]: But that's how they're going to get out of the war powers resolution.
[SPEAKER_05]: But Jeff, we got a, we got a great guest.
[SPEAKER_05]: We do this episode.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, we do.
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... and it's a really fascinating uh... historical subject uh... the the the the the the the the the the
[SPEAKER_05]: and a coup that took place under John F. Kennedy's watch and on again, off again, encouragement, which is a really, really fascinating.
[SPEAKER_05]: subject to explore Jack Chiever's veteran journalist who will be talking to in a moment has done unbelievable research.
[SPEAKER_05]: His book is like nearly 700 pages.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's called through, you know, a mountain of declassified documents, memoirs, and has really told a very gripping story about one of the most momentous events of the Vietnam era.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one that hasn't gotten as much attention as
[SPEAKER_05]: Many of the stuff that took place later under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
[SPEAKER_02]: The book is called Kennedy's coup, a White House plot, a Saigon murder and America's descent into Vietnam, and this happens to be the day in 1975 that North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, and the war was over.
[SPEAKER_02]: So after this break, we'll be back with Jack Chievers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jack Chiever's welcome to Spy Talk.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have written a very lively compelling, I might say account, of one of the most consequential and yet haphazard foreign policy decisions in American history, set the scene for us as this drama unfolds in the summer of 1963.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, President Kennedy was just a few months away from being assassinated in that summer, and he was juggling a number of issues among them, what to do about the situation in Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in Vietnam, the president, note in Xiam, was facing two big problems.
[SPEAKER_03]: One was an increasingly dangerous insurgency by the communist Vietnam guerrillas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the other was also an increasingly dangerous, national uprising by the Buddhists in South Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were significant because they represented
[SPEAKER_03]: 70% of the population.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ziem was an ardent Catholic, but he was in charge of a largely Buddhist country.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Buddhists had a number of grievances against his government, and they were pressing a set of demands.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was dragging its feet on on, uh,
[SPEAKER_03]: on meeting those demands.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there are a number of incidents that took place in in 63, which I guess we can get to later on.
[SPEAKER_03]: That that did very very much damage to his reputation in the United States made him look like a religious bigus who was persecuting the the Buddhist majority in South Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that in turn put pressure on President Kennedy,
[SPEAKER_03]: because he was a big supporter of the M, he had launched a major program of military and economic assistance to South Vietnam at the end of 1961, and he was starting to come in for a lot of criticism from the press and from Congress that summer because of his support of the M.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was interesting that, you know, I found it so ironic as I read your book, that we were losing faith in the South Vietnamese government because they were violating the civil rights of Buddhists.
[SPEAKER_02]: That hasn't been a concern of the United States for very long even when they mouthpies about the Iranians.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so, uh, in that summer, Kennedy, everyone seems distracted, Kennedy's going up to Hayanna's a lot, uh, his key advisors are all on vacation, and yet, uh, uh, and, and a mid-level or a senior level state department bureaucrat writes a cable that will change the course of history.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and that was a gentleman by the name of Roger Hillsman, who at the time was the assistant secretary of state for far eastern affairs, and he felt that Xiamu was becoming too much of a burden for the United States to too much of an embarrassment, and he wanted to put some distance between the United States and in Xiam, the president of South Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he came into his office on a summer Saturday.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was an August 24th and he came into his office at the State Department.
[SPEAKER_03]: He sat down and wrote, what became known is the green light cable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was a set of instructions to Henry Cabot Lodge.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was the brand new US ambassador's outfit.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'd only been there for about two days when this cable arrived.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the cable made a lot of different points, but the bottom line was that large was instructed to start looking around for alternative leadership in South Vietnam to start thinking of ways that Ziem might be pushed out and also to reach out to South Vietnam's generals.
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... who were already plotting to overthrow them and tell them that uh... if uh... the suffit news coverage suddenly collapsed and the generals were in charge they would they would continue to receive full uh... military and economic support from the united states
[SPEAKER_05]: So, Jack, I found this so fascinating, these days when we think of coups, U.S. sponsored or engineered coups.
[SPEAKER_05]: We think of the CIA in the 1950s, Iran, Guatemala, but in this case, it was actually liberals who were pushing the idea of a coup
[SPEAKER_05]: to depose DM.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one of the most fascinating startling things is you point out that the idea to Kennedy first comes from of all people John Kenneth Galbraith.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kennedy's ambassador to India, you know, one of the foremost, uh,
[SPEAKER_05]: with intellectuals of the day, Harvard professor and all, and he's telling Kennedy in late 1961, DM may have to go.
[SPEAKER_05]: You may have to go and military may have to take over because that's the only way to save Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_05]: Talk about the arguments that we're being made by moderate to liberal Democrats pushing Kennedy about the idea of deposing this longstanding U.S. ally.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the whole issue of what to do about CM really divided Kennedy's advisors, and as you point out, most of them were liberal to moderate to liberal Democrats, one of them was
[SPEAKER_03]: And at that time was one of the two underserved territories of state, Dean Ross Cookhorse was a pretty liberal Democrat from Georgia and so forth.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they divided into two camps of pro and con camp.
[SPEAKER_03]: The con camp said that Zam was just becoming too much of the liability to the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, he was too repressive to continue to receive, uh, you know, American support, uh, and we needed to find somebody else to run the country.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the, the pro camp, uh, the people who supported Zam thought that, uh, he was, he, we've one of the best, if not the best leader in South, South East Asia, that he was, in fact, winning the war against, uh, against the Vietnam, and that, yeah, he was a bit of an authoritarian, but maybe that's what a country like South Vietnam needed, uh, to hold it together.
[SPEAKER_03]: South Vietnam was, at that point, less than a decade old, it had been created as sort of a rump state by the Geneva agreements in 1954, the, the divided Vietnam and half north under the Communists in Ho Chi Minh and the South, which was an independent nine communist nation under under Zam.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I mean, it, it, it caused a big rift in the, in the liberal White House.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, and it was, and the CIA leadership, John McCone, I, William Colby were against the idea of a coup.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were adamantly anti-coup.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they, they, they, they both felt that, that CM was a good leader, that he was winning the war and just leave him alone.
[SPEAKER_03]: He had these problems with the Buddhist, but he would figure it out in his own way, had it out of his office.
[SPEAKER_03]: keep, you know, it's hands off and let him do his thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, one of the problems was that they didn't have anybody lined up to take his place.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were just starting to a gaggle of generals, but they didn't have one guy who's actually going to step in.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, they didn't have ever replacement, which is one of the remarkable things about this coup.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why would you move forward with regime change when there was no backup regime?
[SPEAKER_03]: The generals had promised a couple of times that if they took over, they would turn over power to a civilian government.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when they did take over, when they did topple, ZM, they did exactly the opposite.
[SPEAKER_03]: They formed a Hunta and installed the military government.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jack, can I ask a question in reading your book, which is just fascinating because of all the details in it and the narrative sort of push of it, I'm just wondering what you think the actual lesson is, you know, here in your book that's new in terms of was it.
[SPEAKER_01]: negligence?
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it not really understanding what the green light message would cause?
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a question of just the United States of not really having their act together in terms of understanding consequences?
[SPEAKER_01]: What exactly is your takeaway from what the United States and Kennedy in particular,
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Karen, it's all of the above.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's the laundry with the things we just went through.
[SPEAKER_03]: You summarized it very well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the bottom line was that Kennedy was negligent.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wasn't paying a lot of attention to Vietnam at the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And suddenly it blew up in his face with this Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam that made one of his closest allies look like an intolerant oppressive religious bigot.
[SPEAKER_03]: What, the interesting thing about Kenny, I didn't know this about Kenny, but he was secretly taping his conversations in the, in the, in the Oval Office, as well as the, the cabinet room were a lot of these discussions on Vietnam were held, and, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: You can, you know, you can call the the tapes are publicly available through the Kennedy library.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can call them up on your laptop and listen through them in their fascinating.
[SPEAKER_03]: I listened to a lot of them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's the two things struck me about about these discussions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is just Kennedy and his closest advisers, that would be Dean Russ, the Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary, John McCone, the CIA director, Hillsman, Michael Forestall, who is the Vietnam Specialist on the National Security Council at the time, and others in the room.
[SPEAKER_03]: But basically his closest foreign policy and defense advisers were in this group.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what struck me was the superficiality of the discussion, you know, if you're talking about knocking over a foreign government, which by the way has been a staunch ally of the United States since its inception, you should at least have some concept of what's going to replace it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what is the post-Coo government?
[SPEAKER_03]: You think.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the post government going to look like?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, who's going to run the country?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it going to be more effective at winning the war against the Vietnam?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it going to be inclined to make democratic reforms that Washington has been pushing for nearly a decade in South Vietnam?
[SPEAKER_03]: And a lot of those issues were discussed in very superficial terms, if they were discussed at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other thing that struck me is it was about Kennedy's particular focus, which was very narrow, very myopic.
[SPEAKER_03]: His big concern and he raises this question over and over in these discussions is,
[SPEAKER_03]: Do the rebel generals have the military strength to overthrow XI's loyalists if it comes to fighting in the streets of Saigon?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, his question repeatedly throughout the summer and fall of of uh, uh, 1963.
[SPEAKER_03]: And uh, I think what was in the back of his mind, he never says this explicitly, but I think he was very concerned about having a repeat of the Bay of Pigs.
[SPEAKER_03]: to bot call and I'm sure everybody on this podcast remembers this is the attempt to buy Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961 and and topple Castro will you know the the invaders were basically all killed are captured on the beaches by Castro's forces are huge embarrassment
[SPEAKER_03]: right at the beginning of Kennedy's administration in April 1961.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm sure he didn't want to repeat that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he actually said this, he tells his aides on a couple of occasions that the worst outcome here would be failure.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even the appearance of indecision is better than failure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we're going to do this, we have it as to succeed.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the most interesting characters in the book is Luka Nene, who is the Frenchborn.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think Corsican wasn't he?
[SPEAKER_02]: Agent of the CIA, who was the goal between with the generals.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us a little bit about him.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I agree with the Michael, who's my favorite character, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was actually born in Paris, and he was shipped to Kansas as a young boy.
[SPEAKER_03]: His dad died, and he went to live in Kansas with his mother's sister.
[SPEAKER_03]: His mother was in Paris, and she shipped him to Kansas to be raised with,
[SPEAKER_03]: her sister and her American husband, and so he grew up there and went through the great depression in Kansas, and when the war broke out in Europe, he enlisted in the French army initially, and then his unit was overrun very quickly by the German army on the Belgian front, and he later enlisted in the American army.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's probably one of the
[SPEAKER_03]: a very few number of people actually served in both armies during the war.
[SPEAKER_03]: For the end of the war, he was recruited into the famous office of strategic services, the OSS, which was basically well-trained agents who were parachuted behind the lines in France to fight with the resistance forces against the German army.
[SPEAKER_03]: Towards the very end of the war, he was transferred to China,
[SPEAKER_03]: and he fought with the against the Japanese army, which was occupying Vietnam at that time.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think he even knew the whole team in, or worked with O.C.
[SPEAKER_02]: men who was our ally against the Japanese.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he said that he had a long conversation with O.C.
[SPEAKER_03]: men at one point in, and O was so persuasive that Conan was tempted to join the men army himself.
[SPEAKER_03]: But he went on to do other things, other covert activities in the in the lake 40s and in the 50s.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wound up in Saigon in the mid 50s, a working under another famous CIA agent named Edward Landstale.
[SPEAKER_03]: Landstale was in charge of a group of agents who were sent to South Vietnam in the mid 50s.
[SPEAKER_03]: basically to do everything they could to prop up Ziem's fledgling government and everything they could do to damage host fledgling government and the north.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they did all sorts of black operations.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the goofiest was they went and poured contaminants into the fuel oil for a Henry bus company and managed to knock themselves out with the chemicals they were using.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they did some serious things too.
[SPEAKER_03]: After the Geneva Accords split the country in half, there was a 300-day window where people could move freely between North and South Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if that triggered this enormous outpouring of refugees from North Vietnam, most of them Catholics and Buddhists were afraid that the comments were going to...
[SPEAKER_02]: including the ZMS.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were afraid that their religion was the communist wouldn't let them practice their religion or they were going to seize their property or their businesses.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Koneen and Landstale took advantage of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: They went into South Vietnam, that excuse the North Vietnam, and did all sorts of things to encourage people to
[SPEAKER_03]: They handed out flyers saying that Chinese soldiers, that whole was allowing Chinese soldiers to come into North Vietnam and rape women, that the, you know, the US was going to wait for every bit of the leave, and that was going to drop atomic bombs on Hawaii.
[SPEAKER_03]: and I'm sure that added to the panic of all these people trying to get out of the north.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the period we're talking about 1963, he wound up as the main conduit between the generals were plotting the coup and the U.S. embassy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the reason for that was that the generals didn't trust the Americans.
[SPEAKER_03]: They did trust Blue Kane because they knew him from the warriors.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of them
[SPEAKER_03]: when Coneyne arrived as part of the OSS, and they were friends, they went out, drinking together, they went out night clubbing together, and when push came to shove, the generals insisted that Coneyne was the only person they would talk to in terms of their coup, and they didn't even tell him very much about what they were doing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want to take this back to Kennedy a bit because, you know, you rightly focus on the Hillsman Greenlight memo, which is just unbelievable story gets approved without any interagency review.
[SPEAKER_05]: Everybody else is away the weekend that Kennedy hastily signs off on it.
[SPEAKER_05]: from a hiatus port and that's August 24th, but nine days earlier Kennedy has that faithful meeting with lodge in the Oval Office that he secretly tapes and he's clearly open already to the idea of a coup, one of the things he says is the time may come we're going to have to do something about DM.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then later he says, and it's all in your hands ambassador lodge, I'll let you take care of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he's basically set the tone for everything that's going to follow right there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it clearly he was thinking about getting revs him even before the green light cable was drafted and the upshot of that was when large arrived.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was eager to get rolling with the coupe.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, he, he, that was he devoted a lot of energy to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was fully supportive of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he remained one of the, you know, the main spearheads of the American involvement of the coup throughout, you know, the fall of of 63.
[SPEAKER_05]: right.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then Kennedy after signing off on the Hillsman memo, then is plagued with doubts and reservations and doesn't know if he's done the right thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, but never counterman's the original Hillsman coup.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can see that throughout the meetings in the summer fall over this issue.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that, you know, he realized that the Greenlight cable was a mistake.
[SPEAKER_03]: He realized that it was drafted very precipitously.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was sent with sent out to psychone with not enough, you know, senior review as it should have received as you pointed out everybody was out of town that that weekend in Washington was a, you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... McNamara was climbing mountains in Wyoming uh... rush was up in New York to see a Yankees game and attend some u.n. sessions John McCone was yodding and in the music sound Kennedy himself was in uh... with his fate was his family at the school island in Massachusetts
[SPEAKER_03]: And as another side note, Kennedy had just lost a son, his son Patrick had just died after about two or three days of life in the first week of I think it was August 9th of 63 so they were mourning the loss of their son is what on top of everything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: So.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can he knew that the cable had gone out too fast with not enough review?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was brought home to a money called the meeting about it, the following Monday when everybody was back in town, and McNamara started voicing concerns.
[SPEAKER_03]: His brother Bobby started voicing concerns, McCone started voicing concerns, and that that fed his doubts throughout this whole period.
[SPEAKER_03]: But as you say, he never put the brakes on.
[SPEAKER_03]: He continued to continue to.
[SPEAKER_05]: And why is that?
[SPEAKER_05]: Why did he,
[SPEAKER_05]: not counterman the earlier cable after hearing from all as advisors who were arguing against it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, don't forget for all the people who are doing against it, there were people who are doing for it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was very much a Caesar battle.
[SPEAKER_03]: These two camps were almost equally weighted.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think, you know, can he, like most politicians wants to keep his options open to the last minute.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think he, he naively felt.
[SPEAKER_03]: that he could stop this thing, even at the last minute, I think what was in his head was the idea, he wasn't gonna turn the generals over to ZM.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were just gonna go to the generals and say, look, we changed our mind about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: We want you to get behind ZM.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you, if you overthrow him, we're going to cut off all American aid.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that was what was in the back of his mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: He could do that at any point.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, right up to the very eve of the coup, he's actually said that to Lodge.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Lodge came back, Lodge, much more pragmatic about this whole thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It said,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Mr. President, this is a self- Vietnamese operation.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't have that kind of power.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is something the generals have organized.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're going to carry it out with their people.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're gambling their lives on this thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: If they fail, they're going to all wind up at the end of a rope with a bullet hole in the back of their head.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you just don't have the power at this point to stop it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is fascinating, and I have a number of more questions that I'm sure Karen and Mike do also, but we have to take a short break to thank our sponsors and let them give their message.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, we're back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Karen, you wanted to ask about the role of the press of the Atonement, particularly the New York Times David Halberstein.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I actually, it's about, I want to ask about the media in particular, because I think that's one of the most interesting things that you've unearthed in this book is just whether it's Shin or Halberstim or others, the way in which they played such a significant role, the way you tell it, in terms of what happened with ZEM, with Kennedy, with the larger configuration, and can you just talk about that and how you assess their role, not, you know, the role they play, but also how you evaluate it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a good question, Karen.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, remember that the media landscape in the early 60s was a very different from what it is today.
[SPEAKER_03]: The media landscape in the early 60s was basically the three
[SPEAKER_03]: television networks, the New York Times, and then everybody else.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, if the story turned up in the New York Times, it sort of set the news agenda for the rest of the media in this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was much more of a kind of a monoculture than it is today with, you know, social media and blogs and, and, and, and,
[SPEAKER_03]: podcasts and all sorts of other media outlets, very different, much less fragmented, much more unified.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the journalists who are in Saigon at the time, I think had a much, much more influence not only over American public opinion, but in terms of how they were perceived by policy makers in Washington.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you had the New York, you had David Halberstein from the New York Times, it kneels she and who represented United Press International.
[SPEAKER_03]: You had Malcolm Brown who represented the associated press.
[SPEAKER_03]: Peter Arnett also worked for the AP at that time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those, just those three organizations had an enormous impact on public competing in the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was on the front page of the New York Times.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody from Kennedy, on-down in Washington, read the story.
[SPEAKER_03]: If Diel Xi and Emerald Malcom Brown put a story out on the wire services, that story turned up in hundreds of newspapers across this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: Small meeting with large newspapers.
[SPEAKER_03]: So these guys had a big, they had a big impact on what was going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was great trust in these reporters and these outfits back then.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: The mitigating factor was that at that time, not a lot of people were paying attention to Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was kind of a thunder cloud on a distant horizon in terms of the public, the general public.
[SPEAKER_03]: In Washington, they were paying attention to it because it was costing a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was starting to cost American lives as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyways, the Halberstam, she and Brown, I think they arrived in Vietnam with very conventional cold war views.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're a very supportive of a non-continent government and it's existential struggle against these communist gorillas.
[SPEAKER_03]: But as time went on, they began to see problems with
[SPEAKER_03]: They began to see that the U.S. advisory and assistance program wasn't working as intended, the Bitcoin war started to figure out counter tactics to deal with all the new American weapons technology that was being delivered to the South Vietnamese Army.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they started writing those stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Kennedy, for one, I mean, he's
[SPEAKER_03]: He would read, you know, five or six newspapers a day.
[SPEAKER_03]: He used to be a reporter himself.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, early in his career, he covered the the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco for the Hearst Syndicate.
[SPEAKER_03]: He liked reporters.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of his closest friends were reporters.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was very close friend with Ben Bradley, the future at the Washington Post.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when they wrote things, he took it seriously.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he knew that other people took it seriously too.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he didn't like the criticism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And most of what was coming out of these reporters in Vietnam was pretty critical.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it became more critical, especially as Jim was trying to cope with the Buddhist crisis and not doing a very good job.
[SPEAKER_03]: So
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Kennedy's reading these stories, everybody in Congress is reading these these stories and people are starting to ask me Why are we supporting this guy so so strongly he doesn't deserve support.
[SPEAKER_02]: I also think it's important to point out that these guys in Washington, they didn't know anything about Vietnam really.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Halberstam and she and in others they were going out with the troops into the fields and seeing how poorly the Arvin as we call them the Republic of the Vietnamese Army South Vietnamese Army
[SPEAKER_02]: that they weren't performing well, and there's the comment that the comments were making in rows in the villages.
[SPEAKER_02]: They saw it with their own eyes, so they weren't in today's environment.
[SPEAKER_02]: They would be bloggers in New York or Washington or California, you know, reading other people and dispensing their opinions.
[SPEAKER_02]: These guys were actually in combat, and they were seeing what was going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it wasn't as they had critical opinions.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a reporting reshowing that the official story was a lie.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and their sources were American combat advisors in the field with the South Vietnamese Army.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were foreign service officers attached to the U.S. embassy in Saigon, who, you know, these guys were circulating through Vietnam themselves all the time and picked up a lot of information.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, I mean, they weren't just, you know, this was, as you point out, this wasn't somebody's opinion.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were basing their reporting on facts.
[SPEAKER_05]: a couple of nuggets in your book on this score.
[SPEAKER_05]: First of all, Kennedy constantly grossed about Halberstam in that meeting with Lodge, he's complaining about Halberstam's stories.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then he meets later with Arthur Solzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and he tries to get
[SPEAKER_05]: Sol's Burger to Yank Halberstamp to take him out of Vietnam, which I thought was, you know, kind of heavy-handed pressure on the news media from a US president, but the other nugget, which I found fascinating is, uh,
[SPEAKER_05]: As you write, the New York Herald Tribune sends another report or Margaret Higgins to Vietnam, who does a long series contradicting everything Halberstam has written, and the times editors start to give Halberstam a hard time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why are you not finding what Higgins is finding?
[SPEAKER_05]: Why are you constantly writing the opposite?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I found that fascinating.
[SPEAKER_03]: Here, just as there was a split in the government, over whether or not to support GM, or we winning the war, losing the war, there was a split in the press.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were kind of two different wings of the press that were people who were like Margarie Higgins, who were pretty supportive of the GM government and U.S. policies there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there were people who were pretty critical of it, like Calberstein, Cheyenne and Malcolm Brown.
[SPEAKER_03]: And even today, people are still arguing about, you know, what was the role of the press in the Vietnam War?
[SPEAKER_03]: Did the press lose the Vietnam War and so forth and so on?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, what these guys did in the early 60s, Halberstein and Cheyenne and Brown,
[SPEAKER_03]: made them among the best-known war correspondence of all time, American war correspondence, and the reporters who followed them to Vietnam later in the war, I think took them as models about how to report, and the bottom line for them was be skeptical of everything that the government says, be skeptical of everything that the military says,
[SPEAKER_03]: check everything as much as you can.
[SPEAKER_03]: Malcolm Brown actually, he was in charge of the AP Bureau in Saigon.
[SPEAKER_03]: He advised the younger reporters to actually count enemy bodies on the battlefields to make sure that the government wasn't inflating the members of people killed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to ask, I have to play Devils Advocate here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there something to that idea that the press put such pressure on the candidate administration and something going to the administration, it's LBJ, Nixon, such a negative light on Vietnam and they got sort of on a roll and sort of the entire press or
[SPEAKER_02]: Great deal of the press or the most influential reports sort of all bought into it and got on that train.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there anything to them at all?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, people certainly argued that at the time, I have there were conservative newspaper comics we've made that exact argument that that the press's negative coverage was misleading Kennedy was causing him to make bad policy decisions.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I personally, I don't think.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the people who lose wars are not the people who cover the war, so the people who direct policy on the two people decide to go to war and decide to carry out the war and execute the war, not people who cover the war, and you know, I mean to use one of many examples, you know, when morally safer from CBS News,
[SPEAKER_03]: is filming a U.S. soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese-thatched hot with his cigarette lighter and burning into the ground and all the people who live there are sitting around crying helplessly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that, I mean, is the press damaging the war effort or is the press presenting realistic picture of the war effort?
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to interject briefly and I know Karen has a follow-up question.
[SPEAKER_02]: I regularly have lunch with an old CIA hand from Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mentioned recently, our last lunch, I said, you know, I was in Vietnam for three weeks and I could see it with a loser.
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, I was inside gone for three minutes and I knew it was a loser.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, Karen.
[SPEAKER_01]: From the point of view of historian, the revisionist aspects of this book are kind of interesting, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So taking the focus off of Johnson to some extent, putting it on to Kennedy, do you see this as having revisionist rethinking the JFK presidency, particularly in terms of his foreign affairs, as you say, he has the bay of pigs in the back of his mind the whole time, no, I'm not going to repeat, I'm not going to fail.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then this, what do you think this fits into the general legacy of JFK and how we understand him as students of history?
[SPEAKER_03]: I should put my bias out there up front.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I grew up outside Boston, Irish Catholic, when the Kennedys were gods to us, they weren't just heroes, they were gods to us.
[SPEAKER_03]: In many cases, they still are.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I still think John Kennedy was a pretty good president, but I think that he has a very mixed,
[SPEAKER_03]: record on foreign affairs.
[SPEAKER_03]: This coup was certainly not his finest hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: He did have his finest hour in dealing with the Cuban missile crisis.
[SPEAKER_03]: He negotiated an amazing diplomatic breakthrough with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons and restricting atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons toward the end of his presidency.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you can go back and forth on a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: He
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the military who's advising him early in his presidency to send troops into louse, which he resisted, because he thought it was a horrible place to try and fight a war.
[SPEAKER_03]: I happen to agree with him about that, but I think it was very much a mixed bag in terms of foreign affairs, his presidency.
[SPEAKER_05]: So let's complete the loop of this story and go to the events of early November 1963 in Saigon and tell us what happens to Dem and his brother, her new, who was the head of the secret police and perhaps the most fear man in Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just walk us through what happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I want to get to the reaction in Washington.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the coup went forward and it started on the afternoon of November 1st, when the rebels laid siege to Zam's palace in Saigon, they brought in tanks, artillery infantrymen, Marines, and they started attacking the palace.
[SPEAKER_03]: At the time, Zam and his brother, New, was head of the secret police as well as the
[SPEAKER_03]: South Vietnamese special forces were both in the palace and the siege went on all day into the night.
[SPEAKER_03]: Finally, the the the rebel sent in more ground troops and they they they entered the ground's early in the morning of November 2nd.
[SPEAKER_03]: They started going through the palace and Xamanua got
[SPEAKER_03]: and it seems that I mean they'd slipped out of the palace the night before they had somehow managed to elude the you know the encirclement of the rebel troops of the palace they got into a car and they drove into the chinese section of of sategon known as colon and they spent the night with the with the an old ally of theirs and the next morning
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Zamit spent the night calling around to a various military commanders trying to line up support trying to bring in loyal, loyalist forces into Saigon to Repel the rebels and he discovered that there were no more loyal forces.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody was on the rebel side at that point, 18 of the 19, South Vietnamese generals had joined the rebellion.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, he got in touch with them, agreed to surrender, both him and his brother knew.
[SPEAKER_03]: They went to a Catholic church and go on, and the General sent a small convoy out there that included the rebel leader's bodyguard.
[SPEAKER_03]: The rebel leader was a general by the name.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they took, they found Sam and knew they put him in the back of an armored personnel carrier and then just murdered them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, they didn't just murder them, they'd just viciously slaughtered these guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: New was bayoneted more than 30 times.
[SPEAKER_03]: Both men were shot and when the armored personnel carrier cut back to the generals, headquarters, they opened the door and they were these two bloody bodies.
[SPEAKER_03]: So of course the word quickly got back to Washington.
[SPEAKER_03]: that this had happened and Kennedy was in a meeting at the White House of the National Security Council when somebody came in with a news dispatch.
[SPEAKER_03]: And according to Maxwell Taylor, General Maxwell Taylor, one of his his aides Kennedy had a look of shock and dismay on his face that Taylor never seen before he jumped up and rushed out of the room.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he later was by himself in the, in the Oval Office.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he started dictating into a dictifone of the events, you know, during the coup and said that he felt that the United States bore a large degree of response and bloody for what I had.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have that, we have that tape before, before we get to it, though, I just, the code add to the Maxwell Taylor account of Kennedy,
[SPEAKER_05]: shocking his face rushing out of a national security council meeting, horrified by what he's just learned, and Taylor said, what did he expect?
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, which I thought was pretty telling, but let's we've got a tape an excerpt from that Dictipelt tape that Kennedy made for his diary shortly after the brutal murders that he had responsibility for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's listen to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: beginning with our cable of early August, which we suggested to crew hear it in my judgment that while I was badly drafted, I'm going to should never have been sent on a Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should not have given my consent to it without it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm table conference in which Matt and Matt are in Taylor could have presented their views.
[SPEAKER_00]: at the first wire and carry large along the coast of which he was and in case you find.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he's still kind of blaming Lodge a bit there, although he's taking responsibility.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and as someone mentioned earlier, he had basically delegated a lodge to decide whether or not the U.S. should back the coup.
[SPEAKER_03]: Lodge was the guy on the ground that made sense to some extent, but the flip side of that was that he was abrogating his responsibility as the commander chief.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's an interesting passage also in your books that is parallels what happened with LBJ in Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's that Kennedy said, well, you know, this is a loser.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to get out of here, but I'm going to do it in my second term.
[SPEAKER_02]: LBJ, you know, he thought, what's kind of a loser himself.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he couldn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know get out in 1964 he said well do it in the next administration and the can was kicked down the road and of course the casualties kept mounting up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and yeah, and I'll leave that to the psychoanalyst to speculate on the differences between Kennedys personality and Johnson's personality.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think Kenny was, he was much way more wary of U.S. military entanglements abroad than Johnson was.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think he was more experienced in foreign affairs than Johnson.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that Johnson had some sort of deep,
[SPEAKER_03]: set psychological need to prove himself as as command and chief, you know, he told his aids very early on that, you know, I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war, so go out and win this war.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Kenny's attitude toward the end of his life was we, we need to get out of this place.
[SPEAKER_03]: We prefer for a bad place to be fighting.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he was trying to break in on that because there has been this long standing debate among historians what would Kennedy have done if he had lived.
[SPEAKER_05]: And certainly you include a lot of comments that he made about his desire to get out, but I should point out number one, he said a lot of contradictory things about Vietnam and his very last
[SPEAKER_05]: speech he was set to give on November 22, 1963 at the Dallas trademark.
[SPEAKER_05]: He talks about the global cat clash with international communism that requires unflagging U.S. support.
[SPEAKER_05]: He lists South Vietnam as first among the nine foreign countries on the front lines of that war and then he says,
[SPEAKER_05]: our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky, and costly as is true in Southeast Asia today, but we dare not weary of the task reducing our efforts to train a quip and assist their armies can only encourage communist penetration.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that was his last words.
[SPEAKER_05]: Never spoken, but that was the last words he planned to say about Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, it does raise the question, yeah, his instinct was to get out, but he was trapped by the Cold War consensus, and, you know, political realities, I mean, is it clear to you that Kennedy had he lived, would have taken a different course than Lyndon Johnson did.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Kennedy was a master, allotition.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think he understood that he could
[SPEAKER_03]: He could maintain what the U.S. was doing, which was supplying dollars and guns to the South Vietnamese indefinitely.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said publicly that this is South Vietnam's war to win or lose.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not America's war to win or lose.
[SPEAKER_03]: As you point out, Michael, I mean,
[SPEAKER_03]: He was a staunch anti-communist, you know, as famous and not real speech, we're gonna bear any burden to, you know, push back the communist tide.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when it came down to sending U.S. combat troops, particularly in Asia, I think he was really a charter member of the Never Again Club, the group of Americans who decided that the Korean war had been such a nightmare that we would never, ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: We should never ever get involved in another land war in Asia, I think he understood the difficulties of fighting in that kind of environment and he didn't want to do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: What would have happened in 64 and 65?
[SPEAKER_03]: went particularly when Ho Chi Minh started infiltrating regular North Vietnamese soldiers into the South, and which to me was a dramatic escalation of the war.
[SPEAKER_03]: What Kenny would have done in those circumstances?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's anyone's guess.
[SPEAKER_03]: But he announced that the end of 63, he was going to start pulling US combat advisors out of South Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think his idea was, we can do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can stop spilling our blood there, but we'll still maintain our military and economic support.
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll keep these guys as alive as long as we can without sending our own people in there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And after that, who knows what would have happened, that's pure speculation.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, a good point, I should just add one more bit, which is Johnson keeps all his main, all of Kennedy's main advisors on when he
[SPEAKER_05]: assumes the presidency.
[SPEAKER_05]: All of whom are hawks, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, they're all pro-defend the South Vietnamese at all costs.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if Kennedy still had those same advisers telling him,
[SPEAKER_05]: in what they later would tell Johnson, you have to wonder how that would have played out.
[SPEAKER_05]: But in any case, I just want to say it's a really fascinating book, a great read.
[SPEAKER_05]: It opens a lot of doors that I think people haven't walked through and quite some time.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think it's a really great book.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, can I just follow up with something that you can just say, you don't want to think about this, but um, but um, I'm just a long list today, but um, but you know, we just watched Pete Heggseth testify before Congress and use the word quagmire and refer among our, you know, mistakes one way or another to Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my question is, when you're looking at today and what's happening right now with this war in Iran, the way the decisions are being made, the way the president is acting and reacting, do you have any thoughts about lessons that we should have learned that we didn't learn or or any other ways in which just where you've been and your historical mindset says, I've seen that before or I haven't seen that before or I wish I'd seen that before
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, sure we could talk about this all the rest of the day, but well, wrap it up here, Jack.
[SPEAKER_03]: My man thought is, I mean, wars are dangerous.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're very, very dangerous.
[SPEAKER_03]: You get involved in a war and good luck.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have no idea how it's going to turn out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just no matter how much money you have, no matter how many troops you have.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's tricky business in you to self very, very quickly, despite the best laid plans.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in more than a few cases, we have not had the best laid plans.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we went into Iraq with no idea of how we were going to try to cover that country once we occupied it.
[SPEAKER_03]: What Trump is doing in Iran, it seems really chaotic to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It seems like they didn't think it through very well.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, they had no idea that around would close the straight to foremost, even though, you know, experts have been predicting that for years, you know, people can be very impulsive, you know, even even the people we elect to the highest office in the land and that's why it's so important to, like people who are experienced, who are surrounded by good advisors and who have stable personalities.
[SPEAKER_03]: and above all want to avoid a war if it's if it's at all possible.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, on that happy note, Tech, it's great to have you on the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's it's interesting how this event in November 1963 continues to resonate in American foreign policy.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you're not the first to come along and write about in a home, certainly, or even Kennedy and ZM.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think you must have been motivated, at least in part and say, here's something we can learn.
[SPEAKER_02]: from a review with some new information about how things can go wrong when you don't really know what you're doing and you don't have an orderly interagency and expert consult on these momentist decisions.
[SPEAKER_02]: So thanks for coming on the show Jack and I wish you the best of luck with this book and I hope it gains a wide audience.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's it for this week's ByTalk.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And if you haven't already, do check out thespytalk.co news site on Substack, where we offer a steady diet of scopes in the original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just Google SpyTalk, you'll quickly find your way there.
[SPEAKER_02]: This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced, as always, by can I and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: See you around.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Jeff Stein.
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I going to go to the golf?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Karen Greenberg.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks for listening.