Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture

Sara Stratton teaches history at York University.

Noam Chomsky, at one time an astute critic of U.S. foreign policy in the
Cold War, sees U.S. foreign policy, within and beyond the boundaries of
the Cold War, as a North–South rather than an East–West conflict.
Chomsky cites evidence of pre- and post-Cold War activity to bolster his
argument. In his view, the United States’ biggest fear has never been
the Soviet Union or international communism, but rather
“ultranationalism” and the threats it poses to U.S. access to
markets, materials, and labor. Furthermore, Chomsky argues, the United
States has enjoyed popular support for its actions overseas largely
because it has indoctrinated its elites and masses.

In this book, Chomsky debunks the idea, propagated most recently and
successfully by Oliver Stone in the film JFK, that there was a plot to
kill Kennedy, who, had he lived, would have pulled the United States out
of Vietnam. Chomsky’s reading of the scholarship on the American
involvement in Southeast Asia ably demonstrates that Kennedy, like his
predecessors, was committed to an increasing level of violence in
Vietnam in particular and the developing world in general. It is a shame
that this welcome antidote to JFK will not be as widely read as that
film was seen.