Final_Judgment

[114] Final Judgment 175
position to judge. Nor to this department, which sought and failed to get
even the outlines of the agency's case in rebuttal.
"But Mr. Kennedy will have to make a judgment if the spectacle of war
within the Executive branch is to be ended and the effective functioning of
the CIA preserved. And when he makes this judgment, hopefully he also
will make it public, as well as the appraisal of fault on which it is based.
"Doubtless recommendations as to what his judgment should be were
made to him today by Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor
on their return from their fact-finding expedition into the embattled official
jungle in Saigon." 309
It is ironic, indeed, that Krock's column concluded with its reference to
the trip by McNamara and Taylor to Southeast Asia.
For, as Col. Fletcher Prouty points out, upon their return they
"reported to the President that it looked to them, after their visit to Saigon,
as though things could be put under control and that we would be able to
withdraw all personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1965.
"Now we can see why they chose that date," comments Prouty. "This
was the date the President had used in his own discussions with his closest
advisers. They all knew that he planned to announce a pullout once he had
been re-elected." 310
It was soon thereafter, however, that John F. Kennedy was indeed gone
from the scene and the president's plans for withdrawal from Vietnam, so
carefully drawn, were now being reversed by the new President.
THE CIA PREVAILS
In his book Plausible Denial, Mark Lane summarizes the events which
occurred: "Just four days after the death of President Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson signed NSAM 273 that began to reverse the policy of withdrawal
from Vietnam and signified the beginning of the escalation of the conflict.
The CIA had prevailed. The effort in Southeast Asia was to become a
massive land-based war."
"During March, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM 288 that repudiated
Kennedy's plan to end the U.S. military participation in the war that year. In
the months that followed, Johnson increased the military commitment from
under 20,000 troops to approximately a quarter of a million." 311
"Years later . . . after the deaths of more than 50,000 Americans and
more than a million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the war finally
ended with the military defeat of the United States. " 312
However, as we have seen in Chapter 6, the war in Vietnam proved a
boon to the CIA's allies in Israel, allowing the Middle East state to flex its
muscles in the region.
And in Chapter 12 we shall see that a joint CIA-Meyer Lansky Crime
Syndicate venture in the international drug racket out of Southeast Asia
proved so very profitable, conducted under military cover in the midst of
U.S. involvement in Vietnam.