-Caveat Lector-
http://www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/rechom1.htm
Rethinking Chomsky
Rethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993) is
Noam Chomsky's worst book. I don't think it merits a
detailed review, but we should be clear about the
stand that "America's leading intellectual dissident,"
as he is often called, has taken on the assassination.
It is not significantly different from that of the
Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment
journalists and government apologists, and
diametrically opposed to the view "widely held in the
grassroots movements and among left intellectuals" (p.
37) and in fact to the view of the majority of the
population.
For Chomsky, the only theories of the assassination
"of any general interest are those that assume a
massive cover-up, and a high-level conspiracy that
required that operation." These he rejects out of hand
because "There is not a phrase in the voluminous
internal record hinting at any thought of such a
notion," and because the cover-up "would have to
involve not only much of the government and the media,
but a good part of the historical, scientific, and
medical professions. An achievement so immense would
be utterly without precedent or even remote analogue."
These arguments can be as glibly dismissed as Chomsky
presents them. It is simply foolish to expect the
conspirators to have left a paper trail, much less in
the "internal record," or that part of it that has
become public. It is equally foolish to confuse the
notion of conspiracy and cover-up with the much more
broadly applicable phenomenon of "manufacturing
consent," to use Chomsky's own expression. You don't
have to be a liar to believe or accept or perpetuate
lies. This is exactly what Chomsky himself and Edward
Herman say about the media, and it applies to the
"historical, scientific, and medical professions" as
well:
Most biased choices in the media arise from the
preselection of right-thinking people, internalized
preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the
constraints of ownership, organization, market, and
political power. Censorship is largely
self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who
adjust to the realities of source and media
organizational requirements and by people at higher
levels within media organizations who are chosen to
implement, and have usually internalized, the
constraints imposed by proprietary and other market
and governmental centers of power (Manufacturing
Consent, NY: Pantheon, 1988, p. xii).
Nevertheless, Chomsky admits that a "high-level
conspiracy" theory makes sense if "coupled with the
thesis that JFK was undertaking radical policy
changes, or perceived to be by policy insiders."
Rethinking Camelot is devoted to refuting this thesis.
I've addressed this subject before ("Chomsky on JFK
and Vietnam," The Third Decade, Vol. 9, No. 6, pp.
8-10), so I won't repeat myself. But two things should
be clear. First, Chomsky has loaded the deck. The
theory that Kennedy was secretly planning to withdraw
from Vietnam regardless of how the military situation
developed is not the only one that supports a
conspiracy view of the assassination. This is John
Newman's highly speculative argument in JFK and
Vietnam (NY: Warner Books, 1992), which is so easy to
refute that one wonders if it was not created for this
purpose. Why else would the CIA, in the form of
ex-Director Colby, praise the work of Newman, an Army
intelligence officer, as "brilliant" and "meticulously
researched" (jacket blurb)? In any case, accepting the
fact that we cannot know what JFK's secret intentions
were or what he would have done, the fact that he was
planning to withdraw by the end of 1965 is
irrefutable.
Secondly, it should be clear that Chomsky's view of
the relation, that is, non-relation, of the
assassination to subsequent policy changes is
essentially the same as Arthur Schlesinger's. They are
both coincidence theorists. Schlesinger says Johnson
reversed the withdrawal plan on Nov. 26 with NSAM 273,
but the idea that this had anything to do with the
assassination "is reckless, paranoid, really
despicable fantasy, reminiscent of the wilder
accusations of Joe McCarthy" (Wall Street Journal,
1/10/92). The assassination and the policy reversal,
in other words, were coincidences.
I suspect Chomsky knows he would appear foolishly
naive if he presented his position this way, so he has
constructed a tortured and sophistic argument that
"there was no policy reversal" in the first place,
which, if true, would obviate the question of its
relation to the assassination. A neat trick if you can
pull it off, and Chomsky gives it a good try, but in
the end he fails. In fact, he undermines his own
position by making it even clearer than it has been
that the reversal of the assessment of the military
situation in Vietnam, which caused the reversal of the
withdrawal policy, occurred very shortly after the
assassination, and that the source of this new
appraisal was the intelligence agencies:
The first report prepared for LBJ (November 23) opened
with this "Summary Assessment": "The outlook is
hopeful. There is better assurance than under Diem
that the war can be won. We are pulling out 1,000
American troops by the end of 1963." ... The next day,
however, CIA director John McCone informed the
President that the CIA now regarded the situation as
"somewhat more serious" than had been thought, with "a
continuing increase in Viet Cong activity since the
first of November" (the coup). Subsequent reports only
deepened the gloom (p. 91).
By late December, McNamara was reporting a "sharply
changed assessment" to the President (p. 92).
The only difference between this and Schlesinger's
view is that Chomsky says the assessment of the
military situation changed first, and then the policy
changed. So what? The point is that both things
changed after the assassination. The President is
murdered, and immediately afterward the military
assessment changes radically and the withdrawal policy
changes accordingly. It matters not a whit if the
policy reversal occurred with NSAM 273, as Schlesinger
says, or began in early December and ended de jure in
March 1964, as the Gravel Pentagon Papers clearly say
(Vol. 2, pp. 191, 196).
Nor does it matter what JFK's secret intentions may
have been. It is more important to note that according
to Chomsky's own account, whose accuracy I do not
doubt, the source of the radically changed assessment
that began two days after the assassination was the
CIA and the other intelligence agencies. Furthermore,
this change in assessment was retrospective, dating
the deterioration of the military situation from Nov.
1 or earlier. Why did it take the intelligence
agencies a month or more to suddenly realize, two days
after the assassination, that they had been losing the
war instead of winning it?
This question may be insignificant to coincidence
theorists like Schlesinger and Chomsky, but not to me.
Rethinking Camelot has shown me -- sadly, because I
have been an admirer -- that Chomsky needs to do some
serious rethinking of his position, and that I need to
do some rethinking of Mr. Chomsky.
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