The most Kennedy did, despite some private doubts in his last months, was to undermine Diem's crooked Saigon regime--not exactly a profile in courage, especially after all Kennedy had tolerated from Diem and his cronies. At no point did Kennedy, after three years of steadily increasing violence, fundamentally rethink the rationale and feasibility of the American entanglement in Vietnam. Much to his credit, Kennedy was leery of committing combat troops; but he died with almost 17,000 Americans in Vietnam (a terrific increase from 800 in 1960), and almost 70 American deaths there. As Halberstam writes, "[Kennedy] had markedly escalated the rhetoric and rationale for being there." He left that ideological legacy to his vice president.

Kennedy also left his staff; the Johnson Administration, remember, started out as the Kennedy Administration minus Kennedy, but complete with such hugely influential Cabinet members as McNamara at Defense.

This is not the stuff out of which one easily makes a heroic dove, but Stone, relying on the hagiography that still surrounds the martyred President, blithely does it anyway. All we ever see of the Kennedy Administration are countless agonizing reruns of the fateful motorcade in Dallas, Kennedy's excellent speech at the American University and some of Stone's faux documentaire black-and-white footage of nasty military-industrial types cursing over a note from Bundy that threatens their jobs. (Bundy has said that "I don't think we know what he would have done if he'd lived. I don't know, and I don't know anyone who does know." McGeorge Bundy, meet Oliver Stone.)

Does Stone really believe that one reshuffling of Pentagon personnel is tantamount to declaring war on the military-industrial complex, or that Kennedy was the only President ever to juggle staff? It is only "beyond the looking glass" that a one-time decision to withdraw 1000 Americans, as Kennedy committed to shortly before his trip to Dallas, out-weighs a long-standing policy that led to the deployment of about 15,000 others. In the course of a three-year war, such a move means precious little, and could far more easily have been motivated by a desire, for instance, to prod Saigon to greater self-reliance. As Johnson and Nixon would later prove, troop withdrawals were in no way inconsistent with war escalation.

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.

What Stone has given us is anything but a representative portrait of the Kennedy Administration. I'm not quite sure what a "counter-myth" is, which is how Stone has described his film, but I have a pretty good idea of what a myth is.

LYNDON JOHNSON also seems to have thought his predecessor was a hawk, or at the very least found a justification for his own hawkishness in that interpretation. Riding Air Force One back to D.C. immediately after the assassination, Johnson writes, "I made a solemn private vow: I would devote every hour of every day during the remainder of John Kennedy's unfulfilled term to achieving the goals he had set. That meant seeing things through in Vietnam...I made this promise not out of blind loyalty but because I was convinced that the broad lines of his policy, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, had been right. They were consistent with goals the United States had been trying to accomplish in the world since 1945" (my italics). Thus began a policy on Vietnam that Johnson called "steady on course."

It was in that vein that, on November 27, the new President told both houses of Congress that "[w]e will keep our commitments from South Vietnam to West Berlin." In that same speech, Johnson also said: "In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint." By Stone's standards of historiography, that might be enough to prove that, say, Johnson was a restrained leader saddled with onerous commitments from a hardline predecessor. At the very least, how on earth did the conspirators know they were bringing in someone who would be more of a Cold Warrior or, indeed, be in any way different from Kennedy?

In fact, there were reasons to suspect that Johnson was more interested in domestic affairs than in the war. To be sure, on taking office he promptly swore that "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." But above all, Johnson wanted his Great Society, not a mess in Indochina. As Halberstam, hardly a Johnson apologist, explains it, "[h]e intended to secure the Kennedy legacy, prove his own worthiness to accept the torch by pushing the Kennedy legislation through Congress" and then move on to his own agenda. But "[a]ll that would take time, and for a start he wanted to hold the world at bay; he did not need any additional and extraneous problems from the world, and particularly not from Vietnam." Stone makes much of footage of a Johnson meeting with advisors just after the assassination, as if the new President couldn't even wait for his predecessor to be decently buried to start bombing hamlets. What Stone doesn't mention is that the people eager for fighting were the advisors, top Kennedy men like Bundy, Walt Rostow and McNamara.

Saddled with such staffers, and with the rhetorical justifications of any number of Cold Warrior speeches by Kennedy, Johnson found himself haunted--and his domestic agenda threatened--by the Kennedy legacy in Indochina. "I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world," Johnson said after he had escalated the disaster.

That in no way excuses Johnson, but it does give a more nuanced understanding than Stone's crude sketch of Johnson as a pro-war putschist.

THE 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.