Word: jfk
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...certain that in the writing of "JFK: The Untold Story," (Jan. 15) Michael R. Grunwald did not act alone...
...came into office warning direly of a missile gap, which he had to eliminate at no small cost, and also of the need for a flexible response doctrine. Where Ike's idea of international security was threatening to blow up the world if anyone annoyed the United States sufficiently, JFK preferred to meet small threats with proportionally small forces. That meant, in practical terms, building a whole array of conventional and covert task forces, and client regimes and proxies in the less developed parts of the world. Under Kennedy, the defense budget soared by $17 billion, the single largest peacetime...
This escalation is a key part of the history of America's involvement in Vietnam, but it is conspicuously absent from JFK...
Certainly, such figures as Dean Rusk, Bundy, Robert Kennedy '48, and George Ball (a dove who fought Kennedy's escalation) find nothing convincing or even particularly significant in that December 1963 decision--upon which JFK's conspiracy theory rests...
...POINT HERE is that JFK, JFK notwithstanding, was not actually Gandhi with a Brahmin accent. Stone has failed to grasp that the causes of the Cold War, and of its bastard child the Vietnam war, were more deep-seated than a shadowy cabal skulking around the Pentagon. In fact, that lets us all off the hook. But America's involvement in Vietnam cannot be explained by a couple of bullets--even magic bullets...