What do you think of Robert McNamara and his term as Secretary of Defense?

[norseamd]

Thoughts?

 

[ivwshane]

What? Are we doing homework for you?

 

[alien42]

way before my time and everything i know about RM i learned from the documentary The Fog of War, which i would highly recommend.

 

[rpanic]

His middle name is Strange

 

[norseamd]

What? Are we doing homework for you?

If by homework you mean learning by sheer interest then maybe, but then again me starting this thread would be me doing homework to learn about him. I am not so naive to think that books are the only and best way to learn about something. I also find primary sources, AKA asking individuals from India or Germany or Kurdistan as good a way as books to learn about a culture, or more accurately both are essential sources that cover a subject in different ways.

This has nothing to do with any formal education. I read geopolitics for fun. Yes really.

 

[norseamd]

way before my time and everything i know about RM i learned from the documentary The Fog of War, which i would highly recommend.

Will watch it. Thankyou.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have a peculiar interest in Cold War history, and particularly that "one thing" that occurred when I was 16 (I just turned 68, so you can infer . . . )

McNamara had come into the Kennedy administration with some substantive experience under his belt. Right out of Harvard, he was applying certain aspects of "quality control" to analyzing the results of bombing missions in World War II -- working under (or with) Curtis Lemay.

Then, he was CEO for Ford Motor. We owe him now the universal application of seat-belts in our cars.

McNamara was politically in crossfire and shift in Vietnam policy at the time of the JFK murder. On or about October 10, 1963, he had traveled with General Maxwell Taylor to Vietnam to "assess the situation." In fact, any "assessment" only supported Kennedy's plans to leave Vietnam by December, 1965. The seminal document of the trip was the "McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report."

According to L. Fletcher Prouty -- a USAF liaison to CIA and subordinate of Maj. General Edward Geary Lansdale -- there were some 15 draft versions of the trip report being passed around within the Kennedy circle before McNamara and Taylor even left for Vietnam. The one usually cited is the "Gravel edition" of the trip report, named for Alaska Senator Mike Gravel.

Johnson reversed NSAM 263 (the cover memorandum to the trip report, ordering the first withdrawal of "advisors" [troops]) with NSAM 273. McNamara was then on a course to support the policy shift.

The Trip Report already contained troubling information about the war from US officers on the ground. NSAM 263 order the first withdrawal of advisors to occur at beginning 1964, with the remainder to be withdrawn by December, 1965.

David Corn authored a biographical CIA history entitled "Blond Ghost," about Ted Shackley -- a CIA careerist. Shackley's assignments had ranged from Cuba to Laos and then Vietnam. Corn presents enough data to argue that Shackley began sending erroneous data back to CIA pertaining to successes, failures and body-counts.

Some of my friends blame McNamara for the casualties of their brothers and cousins. It wasn't long thereafter that McNamara left his DOD-Secretary office and was given an award by Johnson.

"Fog of War" is hindsight wisdom. If McNamara fell down in helping facilitate the expansion of the war after the Gulf of Tonkin incident (which may likely have been a provocation engineered by Lansdale and "super-agent" Lucien Conein), he redeems himself with his memoir and the Fog of War movie.

 

[werepossum]

I think Robert Strange McNamara is probably THE worst figure in the Vietnam war. He tried to run a war as a business, which is about the worst way possible. He figured that if our body count was higher than their body count, then we were winning. Ho Chi Min said it right: "You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it." We did, they did, and we did. War is a test of national will; they had it, and we had spread sheets pretending we were outscoring the enemy. Score in war is not body count, and a strategy of attrition is just another way of saying you have no strategy.

The Marines were actually making headway one village at a time. They knew that what most people want isn't capitalism or communism, it's peace, security and opportunity. The economic and/or leadership of a nation means nothing if you and your family are dead. The Vietnamese had suffered a variety of rulers over the ages, most of them bad, and were not about to trust and side with the Americans unless they were convinced the Americans were in it for the long haul and thus would and could protect them and their families. McNamara ended this and instead put the Marines on a static line at the DMZ, a line easily bypassed and within NVA artillery range whilst their pieces remained out of range for our own tubes. That is simply unforgivable.

 

[unokitty]

Long Answer

...the story of McNamara and his failures is straightforward and not very
complicated. He had a number of character flaws that made him unsuitable for directing U.S. national security policy. He was hard-wired to produce disasters. It was unfortunate that he was at the pinnacle of power when his country was deciding whether to escalate the Vietnam War. One can never be sure what would have happened in Southeast Asia if a more able person had been at the Pentagon helm in those years, but a good case can be made that we might have avoided the disastrous policy that McNamara championed...

Short Answer: David H. Hackworth
"If McNamara is so smart now, why was he so dumb then?"

My perspective:
Because of McNamara's arrogance, millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands Americans died needlessly...

Uno
Sentry Dog Handler
US Army 69-71

 

[norseamd]

...the story of McNamara and his failures is straightforward and not very complicated. He had a number of character flaws that made him unsuitable for directing U.S. national security policy. He was hard-wired to produce disasters. It was unfortunate that he was at the pinnacle of power when his country was deciding whether to escalate the Vietnam War. One can never be sure what would have happened in Southeast Asia if a more able person had been at the Pentagon helm in those years, but a good case can be made that we might have avoided the disastrous policy that McNamara championed...

From John Mearsheimer?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Actually, I think it oversimplifies things to judge that running a war using business logistical models or ideas of "costs and benefits" is a bad idea.

Not long ago -- around 2007 when it was revealed that Halliburton had scammed the Defense Department for upwards of $8 billion -- Congressman Issa of Orange County remarked that waste, fraud and abuse occurs in all wars. But war is no less an economic contest than one of will or "ideological commitment."

World War II was actually an impetus to the development of digital computers, management science and/or operations research. We were waging war on two fronts. It required careful planning.

There is a concept in the economics of business of "sunk cost." Sunk cost is the amount that had been cumulatively invested in a business enterprise shown to be failing. The temptation -- and the trap -- would be to continue spending money hoping to recoup the accumulated investment.

But the problem with war in that view is that sunk cost also includes a cost in lives -- if only the lives of one side in the equation. The families and friends of those lost will not see decisions of reversal as justifying or validating those losses.

So it is the initial decision to go to war that counts.

With Vietnam, we were supporting a post-war French ally with a colonial outpost, and the French dropped out after Dien Bien Phu. Lansdale had been prominent in establishing the American "Saigon Military Mission" before the fateful battle. Afterward, the assessment about elections concluded that Ho Chi Minh -- a hero in the war against the Japanese -- would win hands down. A relocation of some 1.6 million Vietnamese from the North would serve as an electorate for the outcome CIA and Lansdale wanted.

But neither Truman nor Eisenhower wanted to engage in another major military conflict on the Asian mainland. Whether those opinions reflected "business" attitudes or not -- I leave to the reader. Yet, it was CIA's war, after successes in Greece and other places at stemming the tide of communist insurgencies.

The approach of "Vietnamization" had been the approach all along, inserting small numbers of advisors, which had grown to some 16,000 men before November, 1963.

And all of the eventual escalation derived from a strict adherence to George Kennan's white-paper written for the JCS in the late '40s, together with the idea of a "Domino effect." The only domino effect that arose after the exit of US troops and the fall of Saigon around 1975 occurred about 4 years later: The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia; the Chinese invaded Vietnam some 20 miles inside the latter's border to get the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia. They did -- and the Chinese withdrew their own troops.

I have a personal suspicion that Americans coming out of World War II and Korea had some sort of subliminal "Yellow Peril Myth" operating in the logic. The Japanese had actually obtained a foothold on certain Australian islands before MacArthur's New Guinea campaign, propelled by the concept of a "Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

We transferred our perception of that experience to the Chinese -- who had in turn suffered Japanese occupation and the Rape of Nanking.

Moreover, the notion of a monolithic Monster Plot of international communism was a myth. While it would seem from a distance that the Russians and the Chinese were working in unison to unify a partitioned Korea, the original, blustery Elder Kim had lobbied with them separately, and they were reluctant. The arrangement with the Chinese involved insertion of Chinese troops only if the Americans crossed the 38th parallel, which occurred when we had all but captured the entirety of North Korea with our soldiers merely miles from the Yalu River. From the Chinese view, unifying Korea even in response to North Korean aggression was tantamount to violating the original agreement. The Russians had merely furnished war materiel.

And it is likely that the Korean War would not have occurred but for a public misstatement by Dean Acheson about the limits of America's defense perimeter.

In the end with Vietnam, losing 59,000 men and many times that in disabling casualties was the human cost to the US in a psy-war or propaganda outcome which can never be proven in its effectiveness. It totally ignored the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and the Chinese, and the North Vietnamese view that it was a civil war -- not part of an international conspiracy.

If Kennedy had lived, McNamara would've been demonized for pulling out of Vietnam. But it was Johnson who determined the policy, and it was a hawk faction in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who influenced Johnson.

But there is now little doubt that Kennedy would've extricated us from Vietnam following a successful 1964 election, and taken the heat because of it. The plan for the initial withdrawals had been splashed across the front page of the military newspaper "The Stars And Stripes" Pacific Edition about the time of the trip to Vietnam with Maxwell Taylor.

The notion of sunk cost with it's trap of human losses suggests that a more careful use of military power is always more prudent. Don't engage in military conflicts that are high in risk without a significant coalition of the willing; don't attempt to "prove" you can wage war on two fronts if your homeland isn't threatened directly -- immediately, or an ally hasn't been attacked. And avoid using military power to simply stifle a bad idea that appears to take hold in some third-world country.

You can't kill an idea, but an idea can fail on its own. If the notion of the Idea one is trying to defeat derives from Cold War hysteria and a mythology of past experience, a more careful assessment of options should leave military intervention as a last resort. And then, the issue arises as to just what actual risk is being addressed.

The Russians had experienced three major invasions over a long history: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. The Chinese had the curse of the Japanese. By comparison, we had the War of 1814, which seems minor by comparison.

 

[norseamd]

The Russians had experienced three major invasions over a long history: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler.

Muscovy was not a state when Genghis Khan or Kublai Khan were invading Central Asia, Siberia, or Europe. They did however conflict with successor states that were already established by the time Muscovy came around. The Crimean Khanate was one of these successor states. They also had to deal with a few other wars than just Napoleon and Hitler, as they had wars with the Teutonic Knights and Swedish.

 

[woolfe9998]

way before my time and everything i know about RM i learned from the documentary The Fog of War, which i would highly recommend.

I would second this recommendation. It's an excellent window into the mind of Robert McNamara, even if everything he says must be viewed with some caution.

 

[ForumMaster]

I recommend ready this book:

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam

 

[werepossum]

Actually, I think it oversimplifies things to judge that running a war using business logistical models or ideas of "costs and benefits" is a bad idea.

Not long ago -- around 2007 when it was revealed that Halliburton had scammed the Defense Department for upwards of $8 billion -- Congressman Issa of Orange County remarked that waste, fraud and abuse occurs in all wars. But war is no less an economic contest than one of will or "ideological commitment."

World War II was actually an impetus to the development of digital computers, management science and/or operations research. We were waging war on two fronts. It required careful planning.

There is a concept in the economics of business of "sunk cost." Sunk cost is the amount that had been cumulatively invested in a business enterprise shown to be failing. The temptation -- and the trap -- would be to continue spending money hoping to recoup the accumulated investment.

But the problem with war in that view is that sunk cost also includes a cost in lives -- if only the lives of one side in the equation. The families and friends of those lost will not see decisions of reversal as justifying or validating those losses.

So it is the initial decision to go to war that counts.

With Vietnam, we were supporting a post-war French ally with a colonial outpost, and the French dropped out after Dien Bien Phu. Lansdale had been prominent in establishing the American "Saigon Military Mission" before the fateful battle. Afterward, the assessment about elections concluded that Ho Chi Minh -- a hero in the war against the Japanese -- would win hands down. A relocation of some 1.6 million Vietnamese from the North would serve as an electorate for the outcome CIA and Lansdale wanted.

But neither Truman nor Eisenhower wanted to engage in another major military conflict on the Asian mainland. Whether those opinions reflected "business" attitudes or not -- I leave to the reader. Yet, it was CIA's war, after successes in Greece and other places at stemming the tide of communist insurgencies.

The approach of "Vietnamization" had been the approach all along, inserting small numbers of advisors, which had grown to some 16,000 men before November, 1963.

And all of the eventual escalation derived from a strict adherence to George Kennan's white-paper written for the JCS in the late '40s, together with the idea of a "Domino effect." The only domino effect that arose after the exit of US troops and the fall of Saigon around 1975 occurred about 4 years later: The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia; the Chinese invaded Vietnam some 20 miles inside the latter's border to get the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia. They did -- and the Chinese withdrew their own troops.

I have a personal suspicion that Americans coming out of World War II and Korea had some sort of subliminal "Yellow Peril Myth" operating in the logic. The Japanese had actually obtained a foothold on certain Australian islands before MacArthur's New Guinea campaign, propelled by the concept of a "Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

We transferred our perception of that experience to the Chinese -- who had in turn suffered Japanese occupation and the Rape of Nanking.

Moreover, the notion of a monolithic Monster Plot of international communism was a myth. While it would seem from a distance that the Russians and the Chinese were working in unison to unify a partitioned Korea, the original, blustery Elder Kim had lobbied with them separately, and they were reluctant. The arrangement with the Chinese involved insertion of Chinese troops only if the Americans crossed the 38th parallel, which occurred when we had all but captured the entirety of North Korea with our soldiers merely miles from the Yalu River. From the Chinese view, unifying Korea even in response to North Korean aggression was tantamount to violating the original agreement. The Russians had merely furnished war materiel.

And it is likely that the Korean War would not have occurred but for a public misstatement by Dean Acheson about the limits of America's defense perimeter.

In the end with Vietnam, losing 59,000 men and many times that in disabling casualties was the human cost to the US in a psy-war or propaganda outcome which can never be proven in its effectiveness. It totally ignored the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and the Chinese, and the North Vietnamese view that it was a civil war -- not part of an international conspiracy.

If Kennedy had lived, McNamara would've been demonized for pulling out of Vietnam. But it was Johnson who determined the policy, and it was a hawk faction in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who influenced Johnson.

But there is now little doubt that Kennedy would've extricated us from Vietnam following a successful 1964 election, and taken the heat because of it. The plan for the initial withdrawals had been splashed across the front page of the military newspaper "The Stars And Stripes" Pacific Edition about the time of the trip to Vietnam with Maxwell Taylor.

The notion of sunk cost with it's trap of human losses suggests that a more careful use of military power is always more prudent. Don't engage in military conflicts that are high in risk without a significant coalition of the willing; don't attempt to "prove" you can wage war on two fronts if your homeland isn't threatened directly -- immediately, or an ally hasn't been attacked. And avoid using military power to simply stifle a bad idea that appears to take hold in some third-world country.

You can't kill an idea, but an idea can fail on its own. If the notion of the Idea one is trying to defeat derives from Cold War hysteria and a mythology of past experience, a more careful assessment of options should leave military intervention as a last resort. And then, the issue arises as to just what actual risk is being addressed.

The Russians had experienced three major invasions over a long history: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. The Chinese had the curse of the Japanese. By comparison, we had the War of 1814, which seems minor by comparison.

Good post. To be clear, I have no problem with using certain business models and practices in warfighting. I have a huge problem with using body count to determine whether you are winning, and adapting your methods on that basis. To be accurate, it wasn't just body count; tons of rice captured was also counted, as were captured or recovered weapons. But by the McNamara theory of warfighting, the Germans were whipping the Soviets' asses right up until they had strategically advanced backward to their own capital.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Muscovy was not a state when Genghis Khan or Kublai Khan were invading Central Asia, Siberia, or Europe. They did however conflict with successor states that were already established by the time Muscovy came around. The Crimean Khanate was one of these successor states. They also had to deal with a few other wars than just Napoleon and Hitler, as they had wars with the Teutonic Knights and Swedish.

State or no state, there is a basis in ethnicity, demography and culture. Russia is as much a part of "The West" as you could see from the origins of the word "Tsar," when there were four Caesars.

I'm no expert on that part of history, and anything I know about it was picked up in bits of information coming from several sources.

I learned enough about the Cold War in the process of searching for discoveries of "that other thing" -- when I was 16. It has had a profound effect on my reading habits, attitudes, politics and activism.

Soon, I'm going to publish something. It will not be a book. I don't want to contribute to the industry that covers 360-degrees of different explanations. Instead, it will be a long magazine article, not to be published in any particular magazine. I will make it available to maybe four or more forum and news websites, offering them the opportunity to link it in their pages as a sort of "research paper."

From some of those sites, I'll solicit editorial comments; there will be revisions. But none that I don't approve.

 

[norseamd]

Russia is as much a part of "The West" as you could see from the origins of the word "Tsar," when there were four Caesars.

Und Kaiser.

 

[rudder]

He knew justification (Gulf of Tonkin incident) for escalating things in Vietnam were sketchy at best... But he succumbed to the pressure.

 

[norseamd]

Soon, I'm going to publish something. It will not be a book. I don't want to contribute to the industry that covers 360-degrees of different explanations. Instead, it will be a long magazine article, not to be published in any particular magazine. I will make it available to maybe four or more forum and news websites, offering them the opportunity to link it in their pages as a sort of "research paper."

From some of those sites, I'll solicit editorial comments; there will be revisions. But none that I don't approve.

What is your article about?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

What is your article about?

Proof. There are several waves or surges in the history of "JFK assassination" research. In 1998, the 35th anniversary, the metropolitan magazine "Texas Monthly" published a list of some 20 different theories and variations. Several other theories also appeared at that time: "The Madam-Nhu and Corsican Mob" theory, the "Mac Wallace and LBJ" theory.

The original Warren Report and the Commission itself was manipulated by people who were themselves persons of interest, or emerged as such after the `1992 JFK Records Collection Act and the bumbling history up to the establishment of the ARRB in 1993 as Clinton chose to follow -- not stonewall -- the Act's requirements. They were told "for reasons of National Security" they had to find Oswald entirely guilty, without any other supporters or conspirators.

Oswald was a ready-made patsy. Since we've found at least a few documents and one in particular among the 50 boxes of his CIA "201" file which substantiate his use as a low-level intelligence pawn, his return to the US and prior history made it easy for an average person to suspect him as a hypno-assassin made and ordered by the USSR. But 5 days before his appearance at the US Embassy to sew up his return to the US, he was:

"assigned to work in a counterintelligence operation in the states" to work under James McCord and David Atlee Phillips.

The 201 file was not released by CIA to the archives until at least 1995 under the Records Act. In 1994, under the requirement that various people be held harmless from non-disclosure agreements of previous investigations or CIA, an investigator with the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations ~1979) wrote and published an account of his role with the HSCA and his various discoveries.

He went to ten publishers in the US. He was only able to use an Australian company to publish the book.

He didn't bother to examine books published by persons-of-interest, like Phillips and his senior colleague E. Howard Hunt -- the Watergate burglar.

In research or speculation of the mid-1970s, an idea floated around that there was somehow a connection between the movie "Manchurian Candidate" released on the 7th day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination a year later. Oswald's "story" reads like a real-world parallel to that of Raymond Shaw, the fictional character created in Richard Condon's novel. Eventually, that idea of a connection grew stale and was never revisited.

CIA had a requirement for aspiring careerist authors. Their manuscripts had to be vetted before publication by the agency, or they couldn't be published -- for obvious reasons you can understand without my assistance. This would present a peculiar challenge to at least one person-of-interest who couldn't help himself, after he read his colleague's Bay of Pigs memoir published in 1973. That person would have a temptation to play games with himself and his colleagues: "I'm smarter than you are" is one way to describe a facet of it. Such a person would have a narcissistic personality defect: the pattern has been described or evidenced in many real cases of murderers or serial killers, and it has been used in movies about such persons.

Every time Citizen X (Phillips) was called to testify in either the Church Committee hearings or sit down in private with the HSCA investigator with a third party who could identify him, he would publish a book.

And when he got Vincent Bugliosi to represent him in a lawsuit against London Observer for their insinuation that he was involved in the JFK murder, and while he was coaching Bugliosi for the BBC mock-trial of Oswald opposing Gerry Spence, he . . . published another book, which provides both excerpts and pointers to an earlier work. He was coaching Bugliosi's own research in letters I've found at Library of Congress.

So you might wonder how much of a fool Bugliosi and his readers are. Bugliosi's "REclaiming History" is some 5 pounds in weight.

 

[norseamd]

The 201 file was not released by CIA to the archives until at least 1995 under the Records Act. In 1994, under the requirement that various people be held harmless from non-disclosure agreements of previous investigations or CIA, an investigator with the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) wrote and published an account of his role with the HSCA and his various discoveries.

He went to ten publishers in the US. He was only able to use an Australian company to publish the book.

Can you tell me who this guy is and what book it is?

 

[alcoholbob]

He knew he dun goofed which is why he resigned in the middle of escalation.

 

[werepossum]

He knew justification (Gulf of Tonkin incident) for escalating things in Vietnam were sketchy at best... But he succumbed to the pressure.

Although the August 4 attack was almost certainly firing at radar ghosts, the August 2 attack was certainly by real North Vietnamese attack boats.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Can you tell me who this guy is and what book it is?

Gaeton Fonzi, "The Last Investigation," 1994, and later revisions:

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Investig...8&qid=1449204457&sr=1-3&keywords=Gaeton+Fonzi

There's a $15 Kindle edition.

Also, you might want to look at the ARRB's Final Report released around 1997 or 1998. It should be online, probably a NARA website. If you read the Fonzi book, you can appreciate how its discoveries are suppressed to some extent even in a report that was supposed to examine all areas. It was done to keep the spotlight off Phillips, which I can only speculate is so.

There was a conference in Nassau in the mid-1990s, attended by Fonzi and other researchers. Fabian Escalante, Castro's intelligence director from the Kennedy years and now retired, was also there. The published proceedings and paper submittals are probably available online.

Also, once you read the Fonzi book, or otherwise if you're impatient, look at the CTKA "Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination" website, edited by Jim DiEugenio, and read the signed statement by Antonio Veciana, commented and submitted by his daughter after the beginning of the millennium.

This was the problem I had in explaining my "find" to friends over the last ten-some-odd years. They've seen all the various propaganda together with serious documentaries over the years, which pointed them in all directions of the compass. Trying to explain something like this verbally to someone who can't bother to read Fonzi's book (just for starters) doesn't get a serious reaction.

All the assassination books contain the makings of a huge database in facts, persons, events, associations, testimony, affidavit, interview, and folklore. But many of the authors choose a theory, and try and cherry-pick data to support it. For the wider field, it is useful and necessary to cross-validate the facts if possible.

Unless you read my "article," which is still in a painstaking stage of compilation, the best place to start is Fonzi's book. With that also, there was a memoir published around the same time by Marita Lorenz, CIA's mole inside Cuba and Castro's one-time lover. [She was supposed to poison the Beard, but it melted in her cold-cream.] She knew many of the "cowboys" (as Corn called them) working out of South Florida's Zenith Technology building -- Frank Sturgis, Hunt, Morales and others. Ironically, Fonzi discounts her information, but her information is consistent with his.

Start with the Fonzi book. I was about to rattle my fingers off the keyboard and give an extensive bibliography of useful information, but I'll follow the KISS principle.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Although the August 4 attack was almost certainly firing at radar ghosts, the August 2 attack was certainly by real North Vietnamese attack boats.

Well, McNamara said that the North Vietnamese denied it vehemently: "It never happened." This was in face-to-face conference with them. Certainly, that's not conclusive.

When they declassified documents from NSA and other parts of the national security apparatus following the '92 Records Act, it turned up a plan written be Lansdale pertaining to creation of a provocation against Cuba, justifying a second invasion with US troops instead of the Cuban exile brigade.

It detailed features that included phony radio calls/traffic, and blowing up a real American ship in Gitmo Bay with whatever real casualties occurred.

After Dealey Plaza, an associate of Lansdale -- Lucien Conein -- appeared in Vietnam under military cover: Lt. Col. Conein. That was the winter of '63 and '64. Eight weeks before the Gulf of Tonkin, Lansdale returned to Vietnam.

I think Oliver Stone and the historian Kuznick had found White House tapes of Johnson, insinuating that Gulf of Tonkin had been manufactured. You could argue that it meant "something else," but the history series for HBO appeared long after I saw the Operations Northwoods document myself. And I only wish I'd snagged a facsimile of it, even if it, too, can't be damningly conclusive.