58 YEARS AGO TODAY

It was a Friday. The old USS Rustbucket was docked at India Pier at NAS North Island in San Diego. We had a personnel and ship’s inspection that day. Once the personnel inspection was done, while the ship was inspected, we crewmen were released to go on North Island. “Be back by noon,” they said.

My friends and I decided we’d head for the EM club and get burgers. We were walking down the street when a big, barrel-chested Gold Braid Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate in full dress uniform rounded the corner ahead and came toward us. As he got closer, we could hear what he was yelling:

“The president’s been shot!”

One of my friends yelled: “Hey, Chief, that’s not funny!”

He stopped. Stared at us. Came over to us.

For those of you who were never in the Navy, allow me to explain that any Chief Petty Officer sits at the right hand of God and is treated as such. A Gold Braid Chief Petty Officer (his “crow” and hashmarks of service on his dress blues are in gold braid - signifying perfect service with no “demerits”) IS God. You do not question God.

He stood in front of us and looked us up and down. We were not passing inspection.

And then, in that “Chief voice of command” he said:

“I. Said. The. President. Has. Been. Shot. Isthatclear???”

In unison and harmony, we answered, “Yes, Chief!”

“You men had best return to your ship. We have no idea why this has happened.”

“Yes, Chief!”

He headed off, yelling “The president’s been shot!”

Thus I learned that John F. Kennedy, the first politician whose campaign I worked in (hanging Get Out The Vote cards on front doors on Election Day), the cause of the first of many political disagreements I would have with my father over the next 17 years, was dead.

We conferred. Should we go back? When in doubt, do what the Chief says. We went back.

Everyone aboard the ship was in shock. We arrived just in time to see Walter Cronkite announce that the president was, definitely, dead.

Everyone who didn’t have the duty was released for early liberty.

There wasn’t anything to do over in town other than wait for my friends from another ship to show up - we had a weekend of adventure planned.

So much for that.

In the end, we went out to Margaret’s house. She was a girl we knew, a “Navy brat” whose home was always open to young sailors. We ended up staying there for the weekend.

Staring at the TV. Saying nothing. It was the longest weekend I can remember.

Six months later, I was in Vietnam.

When we first learned we were going, I had a reaction similar to that my now-friend Phil Caputo wrote about in his Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War.” (Still one of the best books on the war ever written - you should get hold of it if you can). “I knew when I came home from this, if I came home, I would finally be able to look my Tarawa-veteran father in the eye as an equal.”

In my case, it was looking the survivor of the Kamikazes and three days in the sea with the sharks in the eye. As an equal.

Only that didn’t happen. It turned out not to be that kind of war, the kind you came home from and people said you’d done a good thing.

Over these 58 years, the shine has come off of JFK to me. I wasn’t all that upset when the truth about JFK’s sex life came out 50 years ago. Who he fucked had no bearing on what happened in the country.

No, the shine came off over 58 years of trying to make sense of Vietnam.

According to the Kennedy Myth, which has been assiduously promoted for all of those 58 years, JFK was reluctant to get involved, and eager to get out when he saw the truth of the war. All the bad stuff was done by the evil LBJ.

The only problem with that myth is that it is ALL BULLSHIT. Every word.

Here’s the truth:

In 1953, after he became a Senator, JFK made a fact-finding trip to French Indochina, where a war was raging. The First Indochina World. He talked with many of the French officials, and to those Vietnamese who served the French. He didn’t speak to the other side, since they were not usually invited to the soirees in the salons of Hanoi and Saigon where a U.S. Senator would be found. And yet, he came home and said that the French were wrong to be there, that they were not going to win, that we should not get involved, and that any state that was created when the war was lost that was run by the Vietnamese he had met would fail.

And then, on June 4, 1961, JFK met Nikita Krushchev in Vienna. He was woefully unprepared, and suffering from the then-unknown malady of “jet lag” having been the first president to cross six time zones in a jetliner, and he tried to debate his opponent. Krushchev made mincemeat of him. Kennedy was publicly humiliated. This on top of the humiliation from the failure of the Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Castro two months earlier.

The Vienna Summit may be the most-consequential political failure in history.

Krushchev went back to Moscow and told his fellow members of the Politburo that Kennedy was a fool, and that he would be incapable of opposing anything the USSR did. The result of that was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy went back to Washington determined to oppose Krushchev on everything. Once home, he read a speech Krushchev gave in the aftermath of the failed summit, in which he announced that the USSR would support “wars of national liberation” in the Third World, because the West could never defeat such “just events.”

A month later, a bomb went off in downtown Saigon, killing several Vietnamese legislators in the south Vietnamese government, announcing to the world that the guerilla struggle that had resumed in 1958 after the failure of the Geneva Accords that ended the First Indochina War, was a Force To Be Reckoned With.

Despite what he had learned eight years earlier, JFK decided that Vietnam would be the place where the West demonstrated to Nikita Krushchev that wars of national liberation could be defeated. The first American military advisors went to Saigon that November, and the first American military death in the war happened that December (this has changed in light of the decision to list the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam back to 1955).

More Americans arrived over the next two years, and the war became worse, more unwinnable, over those years. By the summer of 1963, Major John Paul Vann would write a memorandum that the president would read, stating that the National Liberation Front controlled the majority of the country and that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was incapable of defeating them. That fall, David Halberstam’s first book was published, “The Making of a Quagmire,” based on his year in Vietnam as a reporter for the New York Times.

JFK didn’t like Vann’s report or Halberstam’s book, and the result was the overthrow and (unplanned) assassination of the President of the Republic of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem.

Followed three weeks later by the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In all that time, Kennedy had made no move to get out of Vietnam. Every decision he made was an attempt to retrieve a failing situtation.

The people who made all the mistakes in Vietnam were the New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy Administration that LBJ made the mistake of retaining in government despite being advised to get rid of the top two - Defense Secretary McNamara and Secretary of State Rusk - and put his own stamp on his administration.

That’s the hard fact I learned, researching two books on the Vietnam war, in the digital age where - if one asks the right question - Google will present PDFs of previously Top Secret reports, where one can read the truth of what was going on.

It was JFK’s war.

I pretended to be sick on January 20, 1961, so I could stay home and watch the inauguration of my hero, John F. Kennedy.

When I heard the words “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Pretty much everything I have done since is the result of hearing those words.

Except they ended up having a far different meaning from what was on John F. Kennedy’s mind when he first said them.

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