Meanwhile, over in Iraq, crashing helicopters are giving resonance to a persistent mystery: What exactly was Kennedy planning to do, in the fall of 1963, about Vietnam? Some parallels between the two wars are uncanny. In both cases, U.S. intervention was driven by small, secretive, bellicose, conspiratorial factions within the government. In both cases, military intelligence was officially optimistic — but the optimism was believed neither by its authors nor its readers. In both cases, the question of how and when to exit had to be considered early on — and in light of an upcoming election campaign. In both cases, though details were energetically shielded from public view (and though neither North Vietnam nor Iraq had nuclear weapons), the specter of escalation to nuclear war hung over the conflict. The fate of millions depended (and today still depends) on how carefully and responsibly the decision-makers in Washington behaved.

In the Vietnam case, events took an ugly turn, beginning in November 1963, and spun out of control thereafter. As that happened, Kennedy’s exit strategy disappeared from history for decades. What will happen to us in Iraq remains to be seen. To be sure, there are those who wanted us in and do not want us to leave; their next move will be interesting to watch. Now, as then, the government is divided, and neither faction is anxious to lose. So it is worthwhile to read the history of Kennedy and Vietnam now, partly for its own sake, partly for general lessons about neocolonial war, and partly with a view to understanding how the questions of national security and domestic politics play out in Washington.

I believe the evidence now available shows that Kennedy had decided, in early October of 1963, to begin withdrawing 17,000 U.S. military advisers then in Vietnam. One thousand were to leave by the end of 1963; the withdrawal was scheduled to be completed by the end of 1965. After that, only a military assistance contingent would have remained. The withdrawal planning was carried out under cover of an official optimism about the war, with a view toward increasing the effort and training the South Vietnamese to win by themselves. But Kennedy and McNamara did not share this optimism. They were therefore prepared to press the withdrawal even when the assessments turned bad, as they started to do in the early fall of 1963. This was a decision to withdraw without victory if necessary, indeed without negotiations or conditions. In a recent essay in Boston Review, I assemble this evidence in detail.

At one level, it isn’t news. Certain facts — that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, that he encouraged Sens. Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse to keep criticizing his policy, that he told Kenneth O’Donnell that he would get out after the 1964 election, that he resisted all suggestions that main combat forces be sent to Vietnam — have been known for decades. In my family, we know that JFK sent John Kenneth Galbraith (then serving as ambassador to India) to Saigon in September 1961 because, as my father has often put it, “Kennedy knew I did not have an open mind.” JKG turned in a pessimistic report, reiterated in letters and discussions with the president thereafter.

Kennedy’s decision document, National Security Action Memorandum 263, has been in the public domain for a long time. As early as 1972, Peter Dale Scott called attention to it, and to its (then still-classified) successor, NSAM 273, which Lyndon Johnson approved on Nov. 26, 1963. Arthur Schlesinger mentions the withdrawal in “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” published in 1978. In 1992 Maj. John M. Newman, an Army intelligence officer and professional historian specializing in South Asia, published a book giving still greater evidence and detail. This provoked wide-ranging controversy, with objections flowing in from Walt Rostow, Noam Chomsky, and many others in between.

Newman received early support from a figure who had, up to that moment, remained silent on Vietnam for nearly 30 years. In 1993, Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense to both Kennedy and Johnson, gave Newman the relevant part of an oral history he had recorded in 1986. In that document — of which McNamara had made no public use — McNamara states that Kennedy had made a decision to withdraw in spite of growing pessimism over the conduct of the war. Neither then nor later has McNamara ever tried to use this history to change the perception of his own responsibility for how the war was eventually conducted.

McNamara’s book, “In Retrospect,” appeared in 1995. I bought a copy the day it hit Austin, Texas, as I knew it would test McNamara’s capacity for candor on this point. The statement that Kennedy made a “decision” to begin a withdrawal appears flatly in the table of contents. And there are several matter-of-fact pages that report on the decision meeting of Oct. 2, 1963, at which McNamara recommended, and Kennedy agreed to, the withdrawal plan. But how well could McNamara document his case?

An opportunity to find out came soon. On April 1, 1995, McNamara came to Austin to speak at the LBJ Library, to an enormous crowd. I drafted a question (of which, sadly, no copy survives) referring very specifically to the passages on Kennedy’s withdrawal decision and asking for details. I printed it on a full page in large type and sent it up to the panel of screeners who were assigned to sort through scribbled questions from the audience — a system designed, no doubt, to protect McNamara from verbal abuse.

My question ended up in front of Neal Spelce, then anchorman for the local CBS affiliate. I suppose Neal assumed that it had been planted by the chair. He started to read it, seemed to realize that his inference was incorrect, and swallowed the rest. But McNamara understood where my question had been leading. He confirmed the “decision” to withdraw, and gave an account of Kennedy’s taping system and of how he had gotten access to these tapes. The scene was recorded on a videotape, which I possess. I wrote an account for the Texas Observer, modestly neglecting to mention my own slightly subversive part:

“Why is this issue explosive? Because with only two obscure exceptions none of the dozens of books on the history of Vietnam decisionmaking over the past thirty years has winkled out the story of Kennedy’s decision to withdraw. It is not in David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest”, not in Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam”, not in Richard Reeves’ “President Kennedy,” not in any of the scholarly volumes. …

Now comes McNamara, with confirmation of Newman’s argument and the flat statement that there exists a tape as proof. … . It might be added that McNamara is on record as far back as July, 1986 confirming Kennedy’s decision to withdraw, in an oral history closely held since then by the Kennedy Library. McNamara’s oral history also makes plain, though his book fudges the issue, that Kennedy’s decision was based on McNamara’s own recommendation to withdraw in spite of the fact that the U.S. was losing the war.”

I had never met McNamara, and only learned from his memoir that he credits my father (who interviewed him in preparing what became “The New Industrial State”) with recommending him to Kennedy as Pentagon chief. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a few months later a letter arrived, asking permission to reprint my obscure Observer column. In 150,000 copies. And from whom? Robert Strange McNamara, the form said. My column appears in an appendix to the paperback edition of “In Retrospect.” In 1997 we did meet, in Vermont, and spent a long afternoon reviewing these issues in the company of two great newspaper people, both now deceased: Tom Winship and Katharine Graham.

Events took another twist thanks to the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, established under the 1992 JFK Records Act. Around 1997, the ARRB caused the release of over 800 pages of documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of them withheld from the Pentagon Papers. These documents show that the staff work that must necessarily precede a formal presidential decision on a national security matter did occur. Timetables were set (and then accelerated, on McNamara’s orders), units specified, guidance given as to how to treat the withdrawal for public relations purposes. (You can download some of these documents in PDF format here.)

But still nobody else had heard the secret Kennedy Oval Office tapes that McNamara had cited. As time passed, I called the attention of several historians working on Kennedy to their existence. None were able to gain access. Eventually I drafted a letter of my own to the ARRB. The tapes were released within a few months; I do not know whether or not in response to my letter. Transcripts (a very difficult task, and not flawless) have been compiled by the historian George Eliades, and are included in the packet of documents accompanying this essay. Kennedy’s voice is heard first, then McNamara (brackets represent my corrections).

McNamara. I believe we can complete the military campaign in the first three [corps areas] in sixty-four and the fourth [corps area in] sixty-five. Secondly, if it extends beyond that period, we believe we can train the Vietnamese to take over the essential functions and withdraw the bulk of our forces. And this thousand is in conjunction with that, and I have a list of the units here that are represented by that number …

JFK: Can’t they …

Bundy? . (the transcriber wasn’t certain the speaker was McGeorge Bundy): What’s the point of doing that?

McNamara: We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they’re not needed, I think is wasteful and complicates both their problem and ours.

A bit later in the conversation McNamara adds the following:

McNamara: I think Mr. President, we must have a means of disengaging from this area. We must show our country that means. The only slightest difference between Max [Taylor] and me in this entire report is in this one estimate of whether or not we can win the war in ’64 in the upper three territories and in ’65 in the fourth. I’m not entirely sure of that. But I am sure that if we don’t meet those dates in the sense of ending the major military campaigns, we nonetheless can withdraw the bulk of our US forces according to the schedule we’ve laid out, worked out, because we can train the Vietnamese to do the job.

To illustrate the point, we have two L-19 squadrons over there. These are very important. They are the artillery observers and the fire control observers. But it’s very simple to train Vietnamese to fly L-19′s. Now why should we leave our L-19 squadrons there? At the present time, we’ve set up a training program to give them seven weeks of language training, four months of flying school, three weeks of transition training with the L-19′s, and they can go out and do L-19 work. And we set it up in Vietnam. It’s being run by US officers, and it’s worked very well. Now I think we ought to do that for every one of our major elements.

Is Kennedy’s support completely unqualified? No, it is not. He says on the tape, immediately before McNamara’s last statement, that he is prepared, if things go badly in ’65, to “get a new date.” McNamara then reassures him that the schedule can be kept no matter what happens. Of course the war (which was not at that point very large) is not over, and will not be over simply because U.S. advisers will be withdrawn. The “major military campaigns” to which McNamara refers are South Vietnamese. And U.S. support for the government of South Vietnam was not going to disappear. Much could happen in two years, as events would prove.

But a decision to withdraw that might possibly be modified remains very different from either escalation or continuity in policy. McNamara is speaking plainly of withdrawal with or without victory in the passage just quoted. And it is McNamara’s recommendation that prevails. When JCS Chief Maxwell Taylor conveyed Kennedy’s decision to the Joint Chiefs on Oct. 4, the language is unconditional: “All planning” will be devoted to meeting the schedule laid down. Though the tape is hard to follow, Kennedy may be heard giving his final approval on Oct. 5.

The history of this episode has now taken definitive form with “Death of a Generation” by Howard Jones, published by Oxford University Press in 2003. Howard Jones makes two large contributions to this tale. One of them is simply range, depth and completeness. “Death of a Generation” is a full history of how the assassinations of Diem and then of JFK prolonged a war that otherwise might have ended quietly within a few years. Jones goes back to the start of the 1960s, chronicling the struggle for power and policy that marked the whole of Kennedy’s thousand days. And he presents a reasonably complete account of the archival record surrounding the withdrawal decisions of October 1963.

Jones’ reach extends to Saigon. In a fascinating section he outlines the intrigues that led to the murders of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu on Nov. 1, 1963. Here, Kennedy’s White House appears at its worst. It was fractious, disorganized, preoccupied with American politics, ignorant of the forces it faced in Vietnam. Diem’s mistreatment of the Buddhists, which provoked the monk Quang Duc to burn himself on a Saigon street in June 1963, traumatized the White House. And following that incident, Madame Nhu and her remarks about “barbecued bonzes” — a term for Buddhist monks — were an irritant out of proportion to their importance. Thus, in part, the decision to dissociate from Diem.

Diem was indefensible in many ways. But the coup went forward with no alternative in view; and as the French ambassador to Saigon put it at the time, “any other government will be even more dependent on the Americans, will be obedient to them in all things, and so there will be no chance for peace.” Meanwhile, there are tantalizing undercurrents of what might have been. Was Nhu in discussions with intermediaries for Ho Chi Minh, with the possibility that there might have been a deal between North and South to boot the Americans from Vietnam? It appears that he was. And had he succeeded, it would have saved infinite trouble.

What is the importance of all this for us today? At some level, it is less than one might suppose. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw U.S. advisors from Vietnam is not, in my view, the Rosetta Stone of the past 40 years. And because it was the right decision then certainly does not mean that it would be the right decision, right now, for Iraq. It is simply a stubbornly denied fact, which needs to be fitted into the larger mosaic of unresolved history of that time. It is a test of our own willingness to face history as it was. In my 1995 column I wrote:

“These issues, it must be stressed, are distinct from the question of what actually happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 — that black hole of history. They are, for the moment, more a matter of the integrity of historical inquiry when issues of high policy, reputation, longstanding myth and deep suspicion are involved.

The question is whether professional historians will now correct the incomplete or in some cases flawed record left to us by themselves and (often as part of otherwise admirable books) by the journalists such as Halberstam, Karnow and Reeves.”

This question remains unanswered. My Boston Review essay has received comments so far from three prominent figures that I am aware of. Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist, asked Ted Sorenson and Robert McNamara about it on public radio on the evening of Oct. 22, 2003. Here’s the key excerpt:

Anthony Lewis: There’s a … (inaudible) in the current issue of the Boston Review by James Galbraith. … the thrust of this one — and it refers, I think, to the very meeting you’ve just mentioned, Bob. The headline of the piece is “Exit Strategy in 1963, J.F.K. ordered a Complete Withdrawal from Vietnam.” It refers to the joint report of yourself and Maxwell Taylor. And it says that recommendation — it gives the number, so I’ll say it, Section I-B of the McNamara Taylor report — recommendations read that a (inaudible) — complete withdrawal be completed by the end of 1965, and that the Defense Department should announce in the very near future, presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 out of 17,000 U.S. military personnel.

Ted Sorenson: That’s absolutely correct.

Lewis: And he says Kennedy adopted that recommendation.

Bob McNamara: Now, there’s a tape. I didn’t know there were tapes made by Kennedy at meetings; his taping was not comparable to Nixon’s at all. But he did tape some meetings, unbeknownst to some of us who participated. He taped that meeting. … And when I got to the point in the story that that meeting was pertinent to, I wanted to be sure that my recollection of it was correct. By that time I heard there were tapes. So I called the family and I got permission to come up.

The tapes are such poor quality it took me about five hours to be certain I understood a conversation of 30 or 20 minutes. But there was not much controversy — this is the point I want to make — not by any means, unanimous view of his advisors. Many, many were opposed to approving a plan to remove all advisors and all military support within two years by the end of ’65.

Many, many were opposed to withdrawing a thousand within 90 days. And then after that decision was made, many, many were opposed to announcing it. And the proposal was made to announce it because those who favored the action knew enough about government to understand those who lost would live to fight another day unless they were put in concrete. The way they were put in concrete was to announce it.

And he went through those controversies and the tape is very clear on this. First, the controversy over whether to establish the plan and have it as an official government policy. And second, the controversy over whether to put it in concrete by announcing it. He did both. And as I say, believing as I do now and I think I understand it better now than I understood it then, that he believed the primary responsibility of a president was to keep the nation out of war if at all possible. I do not believe that he would have had 500,000 men in Vietnam.

He believed in the domino theory. With hindsight, I think it was wrong. He believed that we would lose. If we were to lose South Vietnam, as Eisenhower said, we’d weaken the security of the West across the world. Eisenhower believed it, Kennedy believed it, I believed it, we all believed in it; I think we were wrong.

But despite that he would have withdrawn, because I think he felt — and on this I think he was wiser than many others — that even if the domino theory was correct, the security of the West would be weakened across the world if we lost Vietnam, he believed it was unlikely we could retain it by the application of external military power. And he was absolutely correct in that. The issue was never properly debated. But that was the reason why I think, had he lived, we would not have had 500,000 men there.

Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, remains unpersuaded. He maintains his 1993 position, that withdrawal without victory was never contemplated — an assertion plainly at odds with McNamara on tape. An exchange on this point will appear in the next issue of Boston Review. Curiously, Chomsky also attacks me for failing to conform to what he calls “mainstream” history. Given Chomsky’s contempt for the “mainstream media,” this is a very curious line, coming from him. It is also a spurious characterization of the contending sides. Howard Jones is a mainstream historian. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is arguably the dean of mainstream history. And the authors of many of the famous accounts that now need to be revised are journalists. Not that it matters.

I am guardedly optimistic that the truth will now prevail on this limited issue. But the process is slow. There is a definite risk that we will not live long enough to see the record fully corrected in popular treatments and the public mind.

But of course, the withdrawal never took place. Which raises the next question: Why not?

Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. On Nov. 26, Lyndon Johnson signed an order authorizing covert commando raids on North Vietnam, using CIA speedboats, an order whose draft had been altered in a decisive way sometime following Nov. 21. The first phase of Kennedy’s withdrawal, the removal of 1,000 soldiers (in their units) by the end of 1963, became a paper exercise. The later phases were forgotten. More than that, they were eventually withheld even from the internal record that became the Pentagon Papers. Only the ARRB, an independent board of historians operating under the particular circumstances of the JFK Records Act, was able to jar loose the hidden records three decades later.

These events do not prove Oliver Stone’s alleged thesis, that Kennedy was killed in order to expand the Vietnam War. Johnson had compelling reasons to act as he did at that moment: he bought time, support, and the perception of continuity by allowing the withdrawal to lapse. And while the Nov. 26 order was definitely altered to give the go-ahead to commando raids, the final wording is murky and it remains unclear, to me anyway, whether Johnson knew this when he signed it.

It is also not yet clear to me exactly when Lyndon Johnson made his decision to send main combat forces to South Vietnam. There is evidence that places that decision much later — perhaps well after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the election of 1964, and even the start of Johnson’s full term in January 1965. Johnson’s 1963 decision not to withdraw on Kennedy’s timetable did not preclude a decision to get out later on. It did not commit Johnson at that time to the war that later occurred.

And large as Vietnam now looms to us, we know that Lyndon Johnson had bigger foreign policy problems in November 1963 — so much so, that by his own testimony they led him to direct the outcome of the Warren Commission report. That evidence is in plain view, in Johnson’s telephone call to Sen. Richard B. Russell, available for years. Johnson tells Russell that “you gonna be my man on it.” He told both Russell and Warren that it was a matter of millions of lives. He was not joking, and I do not believe he was exaggerating, either.

The reasons of state animating Lyndon Johnson at that moment are discussed toward the end of my essay in Boston Review and in more detail in a 1994 essay in the American Prospect entitled “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” The answer turns out to be: Yes, it did. Though Johnson told Russell that a war could cost “40 million American lives in an hour,” in late 1963 the Soviet Union did not have a nuclear force that could have destroyed more than a few major cities in the United States (and possibly not even that much). But we did possess, by that time, an overwhelming first-strike power. There were those who wanted to use it.

Johnson knew this. His task, overriding all others, was to prevent even an event so grave as the murder of the president from becoming the pretext for a preemptive nuclear war. J.Edgar Hoover had told Johnson, who told Russell, that an effort was underway to blame Castro and Khrushchev  an effort that involved falsified evidence linking Oswalds trip to Mexico City in September, 1963 to the KGB. Johnson says of Khrushchev, truthfully: “He didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.” The stated task of the Warren Commission was to save the world from a punitive nuclear war, by exculpating the innocent. It did as much, by inculpating a dead man.

What does this prove? So far as what actually happened in Dallas, only one thing long obvious to many others on many grounds: that the Warren Commission report cannot be trusted. Whatever the underlying history, the commission acted under orders, for reasons of state. They were reasons of the utmost seriousness. But the commission clearly had an overriding agenda. There were allegations of a “vast left-wing conspiracy,” to coin a phrase. Defusing those allegations was a matter of life and death.

Did Lyndon Johnson participate in a plot to kill Kennedy? Though this view is getting play on cable television this week, I don’t believe he did. Was Castro or Khrushchev involved? Of course not. Did Lee Harvey Oswald fire three shots, from an old rifle, along a difficult line of sight, striking Kennedy at least twice and Texas Governor John Connally at least once, as well as a bystander some distance away? No serious person can believe that, either. And so? A great many people since have attempted to solve the mysteries of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Some of this work is useless, some is dishonest; jumping to conclusions is the occupational disease of the genre. But much is valuable. And there are millions of pages of official records now in the public domain. The problem facing the historian now is how to assemble the whole body of evidence in a compelling way, taking account of both the conspiracy (for, once one rejects the lone gunman hypothesis, that is what it was), and the coverup. The task requires both narrative power and analytical precision; jigsaw puzzles properly assembled only fit one way.

Is it possible? Perhaps. But it is much harder to believe that the great forces of inertia, laziness, deceit — and television — in this matter can be overcome, even if the right synthesis eventually emerges. Certainly, the media divide is already such that the solution, when eventually published, may well lie in libraries (or possibly, on the Internet) to be discovered only by the small community of very serious readers.

Finally, one may ask, does it matter, except perhaps for personal reasons to those of us who were young then and had our lives changed? It is too late to think of criminal justice. But it is perhaps not too late to revise our American view of history, as a temple of republican myths. The reality is that we are a country like any other, with good and evil people, the strong and the weak, noble and criminal acts, with truth often hidden under deception and propaganda. Our recent experience in Iraq has exposed this truth in process, unusually quickly.

This is a good thing to realize. Yet the Vietnam experience also tells us that a full documentary account of why we went to war in Iraq may not emerge for some time. To know that the weapons of mass destruction justification was bogus is the easy part. But the relative importance of oil, the neoconservatives’ grand strategy for the Middle East, the simple desire to get Saddam? When this administration finally goes, forensic work will be needed, and it will not be a pretty task.

Perhaps we need a new scholarly discipline, a criminology of deception and deceit in American foreign policy. Such a field could perhaps teach us something more general about how to decipher and expose such public crimes. Perhaps by learning how to expose deception and deceit today we can eventually exclude certain people and their political allies from power and come closer, as a country, to the ideals many of us still share. But I digress.

Let me return to the darkest part of the dark side. Preemptive nuclear war was prevented in 1963, though the Vietnam War was not. The great untold story of the 1960s remains, in my view, how we managed to survive the decade, and how very close we the human race came to failing to do so. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, its immediate aftermath, and even the Vietnam War which eventually followed may prove, in the final analysis, to be pieces of that story.

This is a story with never-ending ramifications, so long as we continue to live in the nuclear age. For today, it has two lessons worth stating plainly. First, that to prevent the use of nuclear weapons of any type, by anybody, must remain the central goal of American policy at all times. Neither Kennedy, nor Johnson, nor McNamara in serving both presidents ever lost sight of this. Ask yourself whether you feel confident that the same care, on this transcendent issue, is being exercised today. For the second lesson, difficult though it may be to face, is that the largest danger that nuclear weapons will be used has come, so far in history, from ourselves.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer