Reviewing "The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam"

A review of Marc J. Selverstone's 2022 book

The Kennedy Withdrawal by Marc J. Selverstone is a history of the ideological struggle between Kennedy and his various aides and cabinet members (i.e., “Camelot”) regarding the path forward in Vietnam, from the start of Kennedy’s presidency to his assassination in 1963. Selverstone seeks to reveal Kennedy’s personal views regarding the Vietnam War immediately prior to his death, and if the President was in favor of removing US troops at the time. Selverstone concludes that Kennedy was not in favor of a complete withdrawal of US troops at the time of his death. Of course, any study of Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam will, at least indirectly, result in a consideration of the evidence for the various conspiracy theories surrounding his murder. By arguing that Kennedy did not want to remove troops, Selverstone pushes back against the idea that he was killed by forces from within the US National Security State.

The conspiracy theory that the Kennedy assassination was orchestrated by individuals within the United States National Security apparatus hinges on Kennedy moving towards troop removal from Vietnam, thus blocking an increase in size of the US military industrial complex. Selverstone uses documentary evidence from the Kennedy administration as well as JFK’s secret recordings to attempt to reveal the thought process and ideological position of Kennedy and other members of his administration, including Vice President Johnson, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and others. Selverstone concludes that any claim that JFK did want to remove troops is based on incomplete evidence and an implicit comparison to LBJ’s policies which led to a massive expansion of the War. Selverstone compares Kennedy’s handling of Vietnam to President Obama’s supervision of the war in Afghanistan, and thinks that Kennedy would have been moved by the technocrats in the US government to expand the war in Vietnam just like Obama was in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Withdrawal ignores the forces of capital behind each of the individuals in the Kennedy administration, and how those forces drove Camelot’s ideology and perspectives on Vietnam. The result is an argument that individual members of Kennedey’s administration had their own ideology which existed in a vacuum, purely based on their own personal feelings and moral inclinations. Regardless of Selverstone’s feelings on whether there was a conspiracy orchestrated by elite global capital (i.e., the “Deep State”) to kill Kennedy (on a recent appearance on the podcast “American Prestige” Selverstone says that he does not believe in this conspiracy theory, though he admits that he is not an expert in the theory), the result of Withdrawal is an exculpation of the Deep State and US Capital without considering how those forces shaped the decision-making in Vietnam. Lukacs’ points out that a purely ideological history is a bourgeois history: “Bourgeois thought judges social phenomena consciously or unconsciously, naively or subtly, consistently from the standpoint of the individual. No path leads from the individual to the totality; there is at best a road leading to aspects of particular areas, mere fragments for the most part, facts bare of any context, or to abstract, special laws.” (History and Class Consciousness, p. 39). Whether he meant to or not, Selverstone has created an ideological history that serves the needs of the bourgeois and is not historically accurate.

A historically accurate analysis of the reasons for Kennedy’s decisions regarding troop levels in Vietnam would consider the forces of capital behind Kennedy and the relevant decision-makers in his cabinet, and the existing state of global capital at the time. What contradictions existed in November 1963 in the realm of global capital, and how much control did elite global capital wield over the global capitalist system as a whole? Where did JFK and the rest of Camelot come from before finding themselves in the driver’s seat of the Vietnam War? How did the forces of capital which propelled each of those individuals into power continue to act on them while they were in office between 1961 and 1963? Not only would answers to these questions clarify Kennedy’s feelings about troop withdrawal from Vietnam, such analysis would provide a much more compelling case for whether President Kennedy was murdered in a conspiracy.

In Withdrawal, Selverstone points out the ways that President Kennedy frequently waivered in his decision making and preferred to keep as many options open as possible as the situation evolved in Vietnam. Specifically, Selverstone argues that Kennedy did not have strong feelings one way or the other about keeping troops in Vietnam. This could be seen as evidence of a rift in capital and the elite class. In other words, it is possible that elements of capital were torn about the extent to which the US should have a military footprint in Vietnam. Perhaps one camp (possibly including elements of the military industrial complex) was driven to force an increasing presence in Vietnam, and Kennedy, as the final decision-maker in US military policy, became the primary obstacle in the way of that objective. By presenting the history of the Kennedy administration as a history of battling ideologies and individuals with personal objectives, Selverstone does not consider this material perspective in his analysis. Therefore, the forces of capital driving decision-making in Vietnam remain a mystery to the reader.

Another hint at the indecision of elite global capital regarding how to proceed in Vietnam is the way they handled US involvement in 1962. Selverstone describes the rise of counter insurgency programs orchestrated by the US National Security institutions beginning in 1962. In the context of the Vietnam War, counter insurgency programs can be seen as the way that capital chose to address the contradictions that the War presented. From an over simplified standpoint, capital’s justification for fighting the war was to stop the spread of communism, but to do this meant throwing US bodies into conflict, which could have progressed into mass civil unrest. In fact, the 1960s did become a period of great civil unrest in the US, and one wonders if capital was already aware of the discontent brewing under the surface at the beginning of the decade. Through use of counter insurgency programs abroad (and COINTELPRO operations domestically) capital tried to simultaneously address the spread of communism in Vietnam while appearing to keep the conflicts abroad at arms-length.