Last August, the Economist put about this claim. I debunked it before the audience of the British Web site OpenDemocracy.net. Clive Crook of the Economist then responded to me, and I rebutted him. All of this is on record, here, here and here. But some people don’t learn, and here we are again.

This month, they’ve gone and made the claim again. And they’ve included, as evidence, the same pair of charts they already published last August. The charts come from a lecture given back in January 2003 by Stanley Fischer, a formidable economist and former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Fischer is a globalization advocate. But he is smart and careful and his lecture is studded with footnotes and qualifications. These the Economist cheerfully ignores.

Let’s have a little fun: How many ways can a picture lie?

The top chart shows economic growth for a large group of countries from 1980 to 2000 plotted against original income level. There is a point for each country. The scatter slopes upward, indicating more growth in the rich countries, and hence increasing inequality between countries, over the past 20 years. Poorer countries have been slipping, in general, during the age of globalization. Nobody disputes this.

The bottom chart weights each point by population. It reveals that two of the largest countries, China and India, grew among the fastest. Hence the claim: That if one considers people rather than countries, worldwide inequality has been falling under globalization. The chart qualifies this conclusion by noting that in sub-Saharan Africa the situation is terribly grim, with low and declining incomes in the past 20 years. No one disputes that either. But sub-Saharan Africa, the Economist tells us, is an under-globalized region, so it would not be fair to count it in the grand scorecard of the neo-liberal world.

What is wrong with the picture?

First, it ignores changes within countries. Yes, China’s average income grew. But not every Chinese got the average increase. We know that China became dramatically more unequal in the 1990s. (Fischer concedes this, incidentally; see my evidence here.) And it is possible to make a much broader statement. Looking over the broad range of developing countries, my University of Texas Inequality Project finds rising inequality in most of them, including India, and falling inequality in only a few.

Second, it is not reasonable to treat sub-Saharan Africa as apart from globalization. These countries have always been suppliers of minerals, rubber, oil, coffee and cocoa to the West, often under horrific conditions. (During the slave era they were, of course, great victims of that earlier wave of globalization.) They are not isolated now: Trade ratios in sub-Saharan Africa are not abnormally low. They are victims now of debt crises and so-called structural adjustment programs. To treat them as special cases is simply a way of evading globalization’s greatest failures.

Third, the two charts cover only the period 1980-2000. But the right comparison is between this period and what came before. For most developing countries, growth was higher in the 1950s and 1960s, under the regulated international monetary system known as Bretton Woods. It was also much higher in the 1970s, when the oil boom, high commodity prices and cheap credit briefly spelled good times for much of the developing world.

Fourth, countries created after 1980 are excluded from those charts, including the successor states to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. And what happened to income in these areas as they globalized? Inequality shot up, poverty exploded and life expectancies fell to Third World standards. No one disputes these facts, but the Economist ignores them.

In the new version of its article, the Economist does say of China and India that “Neither country is an exemplar of free market capitalism — far from it.” Funny, I used almost exactly the same words in my first critique of their earlier article, saying: “Anyway, neither China nor India is an exemplar of free-market globalisation.” This little bit of crypto-plagiarism tells you all you need to know about the standards the Economist applies, where this issue is concerned.

Both China and India steered free of Western banks in the 1970s, and spared themselves the debt crisis. Both continue to maintain capital controls to this day, so that hot money cannot flow freely in and out. Both continue to have large state sectors in heavy industry to this day. And China, for that matter, continues to be run by the Communist Party, which is not the institution most noted in history for devotion to the free market. (More analysis on China can be found here.)

(Confession: In the mid-1990s I served as chief technical advisor to a Chinese State Planning Commission project on macroeconomic reform, a job that centered on advising them as to which Western economists to talk to, and which ones to avoid. I loved the second part of that job.)

Of course, whether true or false, the claim that worldwide inequality across people has been falling is just an academic abstraction. Why should anyone care? What matters is whether particular policies lead to good or bad results, and policies tend to differ across countries. Yes, China and India have done well, on the whole. But is this due to their reforms or to the regulations they continue to impose? No doubt, the right answer is: Partly to both. The Economist and its allies simply refuse to face this complex and uncomfortable reality.

The Economist makes much of claims that global poverty has been falling in the past 20 years. This claim is probably true. If you measure global poverty as the World Bank does, by a living standard of less than a dollar a day, the numbers probably are falling. But where are all those people — hundreds of millions of them — who may have risen out of the very bottom? Once again, they are overwhelmingly in China and India. This point is made explicitly by Surjit Bhalla, one of the pro-globalization economists the Economist cites — but it doesn’t cite him on this point. They are not in Africa, where the world’s worst poverty persists. And they are also not in Latin America or the former USSR, where the poor live at a higher standard but where poverty rates are getting worse.

So once again, we have to ask: Is this the golden age of global capitalism, really? Or is it something closer to a golden age of reformed socialism in two places (China and India) — alongside an age of disasters for those who followed the prescriptions favored by the Economist? In truth, countries that followed the IMF-World Bank prescriptions to the letter — Argentina, say, or Russia in the early 1990s — have seen catastrophe worse in every way than the Great Depression of the 1930s was for us. Is it any wonder that the electorates in both places firmly reject the neo-liberal model?

Finally, it is not true that the remedy to the problems of globalization is “more globalization.” We often hear, for instance, that cutting trade barriers to farm goods from the Third World is the big solution to many development problems. Don’t believe it. Yes, some tropical products (sugar, orange juice) face severe protection. But most do not. And even if all the agricultural barriers came down, few developing countries could get ahead much just by expanding their farms. There are ecological limits. There are limits to the quality of the soil. Most of all, there are severe problems of oversupply. There is too much coffee in the world as it is: New supplies only drive the price down. Sugar would work the same way, and so probably would wheat and beef.

Confronting the problems of the stricken Third World will require a balanced approach. What the poorest countries need perhaps most of all is sustainable finance, permitting them to build their infrastructure, their human resources, their public health systems and their industries — both for domestic consumption and foreign trade. This is an old formula. But it is one with a track record: It worked in Europe after World War II, and then in Japan, Korea and in China, each of which saw decade after decade of sustained growth and industrial transformation.

Here’s the rub: Pursuing these goals will require placing the world’s private financiers under a degree of regulation and control — such as we used to have in the real golden age of development, from 1945 to 1970. That, of course, is not on the Economist’s agenda. But it should be on ours.

So far as we can tell from the numbers, it’s the Scotch Verdict: Not Proven. We can make this clear immediately. We need only extend the historical tail of the Krugman chart back in time, say to 1991 — as in the chart below. Our new chart shows that the Bush forecast did not imply unusually rapid job growth for an economic expansion. To the contrary. The growth track in the first set of Bush forecasts, published in 2002, is a bit lower than the actual rate of job growth under Clinton. And it is considerably lower (though probably for good reason) than the average growth rate of payroll jobs in non-recession years since 1952.

(Source: Economagic.com and my calculations.)

And so, the failure of the jobs forecast did not occur because economic recovery forecasts were abnormal. They were not. So far as we can tell, it did not occur because someone cooked the books, under instruction or otherwise. No. The true reason is worse than that.

Bush’s jobs forecast failed because a jobs recovery never began at all.

Look at monthly payrolls compared to a year before. The period through January 2004 is by far the longest episode of steadily falling payroll employment since World War II: 32 months, with the end still uncertain. The next worst was 26 months, roughly from the end of World War II to the 1947 start of the Cold War. Apart from these two periods, the average period of job losses on this basis (over 11 episodes) is just one year. And as Lee Price of the Economic Policy Institute points out, since 1939 full recovery of all jobs lost in recession has never taken more than 35 months.

Something’s happening here. Four years after the tech implosion, two and a half years after 9/11, one year after the start of the Iraq war — we are still not creating new jobs in serious or sufficient number.

And let’s therefore ask, why not?

Is it because, as many have said, Bush’s tax cuts are primarily for the rich, who do not spend their tax-cut gains? This argument has practical virtue. It makes a case for repeal of the worst Bush tax cuts, which is useful: The worst Bush cuts should be repealed. But the facts don’t support this particular argument as to why.

Bush did cut taxes on the rich — relentlessly, recklessly, wrongly. But most of those tax cuts have yet to be phased in. They are part of the revenue losses still to come in the decades ahead. They aren’t the big thing behind deficits we’re seeing now. Therefore, reconfiguring the tax cuts already in place to benefit only the middle class and poor would have helped some — but not that much.

Moreover, in 2001 and 2003, taxes were cut for the middle class. Those cuts were the sweetener for the enormous future giveaways to the rich. They happened first through cash rebates and then through an expanded child credit. Taken entirely alone, these cuts weren’t bad policy. Without them — and without the short-term deficits they caused — the recession and job losses would have been much worse. And in 2003 the middle-class tax cuts did deliver a burst of spending, leading to an 8 percent economic growth rate in the third quarter.

But it didn’t lead to new jobs.

And then too: In 2001 and 2003 Bush took us to war. That entailed large increases in public spending, boosting demand and economic growth. The macro effects of the Iraq war were roughly sufficient to double the growth rate in the second quarter of 2003, getting (as many thought) recovery underway.

But that didn’t lead to new jobs either.

Some people appear to believe that the root cause lies in the person of the president himself: Clinton good, Bush bad. Replace Bush, economy better. But this is economics for children.

Truth: The conditions for this disaster were set by the tech debacle, by the enormous and unsustainable accumulation of household debt, by the decline in our trade competitiveness and trade balance (under the “high dollar policy”), and by the unsustainability of regressive and opportunistic state and local tax structures. Not since the 1920s had growth been so dependent on speculative investment and mortgage finance. Not in history has our trade position been so weak.

Most economists missed the significance of this. Back in 1991, most of them just assumed that we were facing an ordinary recession and that an ordinary recovery would follow. Those who felt that way repeatedly made forecasts no less wrong than those adopted by Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. And that is why the official forecasts — apart from their natural obscurity — attracted little attention at the time.

But a few did not go along. It was possible to figure things out. The British economist Wynne Godley has been writing strategic analyses for years on the Web site of the Levy Institute.

What’s the difference? In general terms, it is that Godley is not engaged in the facile maneuver of the forecasting trade, which is mechanically to predict an “average recovery” starting some time in the near future. Rather, he presents the implications of a very specific theory of financial relations and behavior. And this approach, because it could pick up the unique financial signature of the late 1990s, got the essentials of our problem right.

(Godley was not alone, either — though very few cared to listen. I lectured on Godley’s thesis in the summer of 2001 — though in China, where no one could hear.)

The failure of Bush and his economists does not lie in faking a prediction. It lies in failing to understand what the underlying problems are. It lies in failing to propose policies suitable to their cure. It lies in the wanton pursuit of a strategy of tax cuts for the long term aimed at the political, not economic, objective of exempting plutocrats and their fortunes from federal tax. In lies in the rush into military adventures — from missile defense to Iraq — that achieve little, waste vast resources and make a proper jobs-and-security policy even more difficult down the road. Most of all, it lies in failing to care, one way or another, what might happen.

That we-don’t-care attitude showed up pretty clearly when Bush nominated his “manufacturing czar” — a steel-building man who promptly and sensibly withdrew. The nominee, a Nebraskan named Tony Raimondo, got a bad rap, momentarily, for being an outsourcer. It turns out he isn’t: His new factory in China is for the Chinese market, which is, of course, booming. And one can only admire the man’s frankness about the effect of Bush’s Iraq adventure on his domestic business: “They sure as hell don’t want to buy a building if there’s a war.”

It turns out that the job of “manufacturing czar” isn’t new: An existing post in the Commerce Department just got relabeled. It showed up again on March 11 when Commerce Secretary Don Evans said the administration had “57 … objectives in its plan to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing.” Fifty-seven objectives? Now there’s a number for you! Is there a list? Or does Evans have ketchup, or Theresa Heinz Kerry, on his mind for some reason?

And will the Democrats under the leadership of John Kerry do better? Let’s hope so. But let’s recognize that the challenge will be enormous.

To begin with, there is a good chance that things will get worse, not better, after the election. But even if a normal jobs recovery, at the normal growth rate, somehow got underway, would that be good enough? I don’t think so. We would be starting then from a deep hole and “normal” growth would leave millions unemployed and underemployed for many years.

We should aim for something better: A strong recovery brought on by good policy. Whether we can get it will depend on what President Kerry eventually does.

Right now, the test should not be whether enlightened policy emerges in the heat of the campaign. It probably won’t. But Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned against deficits in 1932 and embraced them in 1933 — and thank God for that flip-flop. If John Kerry wants to campaign on halving the deficit in four years, I won’t complain.

But when the policy is tried, and nothing happens, I ask only that he be ready to change, and quickly, to something much more substantial.

Kerry’s right move now is to make a broad and forceful commitment to the return of good jobs at decent wages — to the return of full employment. It lies in stating a willingness to do, in good time, whatever may prove necessary to achieve that goal. It lies in helping to prepare the public for big policy changes when it becomes necessary to have them.

The most important thing is to keep an open mind.

First of all, notice how closely the polls track. True, the ABC-Washington Post poll tends to run a little high. Pew and Zogby tend to run a little low. But the range is not large, and all of the polls move in the same direction at the same time. This suggests they are measuring something real. The pollsters may be redundant, but they have not been wasting their time.

What is the message of these numbers? One stands out: In his entire first term, only three episodes so far have gained approval for Bush. All were related to terrorism and to war. They were 9/11, the war on Iraq, and the capture of Saddam. Taken together, the five months when Bush gained popularity on these events account for 89 percent of all the variation in the change of Bush’s job approval, measured by the average of these polls.

It is not surprising that Bush’s State of the Union speech dwelt so heavily on war and terror.

But equally, consider what has happened in the other 32 months. The record is remarkably consistent: In the range of approvals above 48 percent or so — that is, among voters who did not vote for him in 2000 — Bush loses support, month after month. And he does so at what is nearly a constant rate. Tick, tock.

Measured by a number of different techniques (including regression analysis), Bush’s monthly loss of approval appears to be a little less than 1.6 percentage points — every month, on average. And the variation around that average (standard error) is quite small: less than one-fourth of that value. That means that in 95 percent of the cases, the decline is between 0.9 and 2.3 percent per month. Tick, tock.

It seems that Bush has done nothing to win the enduring allegiance of voters who did not already support him in 2000. After each rallying event, some give up immediately. Others take longer. But the trend is consistent: Gains accrued in crisis decay over time.

One might say that this is a judgment about character, a perception of who Bush is and what interests he serves. But it does not seem to matter what Bush says or does. Also, so far — though of course this could change — no effect from better economic news can be found. Tick, tock.

We cannot say that the erosion will continue as Bush’s approval slips into “red” territory — below the 48 percent or so who supported him to begin with. Indeed, there is no evidence that Bush’s Republican base has eroded at all. What we can infer, reasonably, is that there is a strong tendency in the electorate to revert, over time, to the sharp and narrow division of the last election. Tick, tock.

The numbers tell us one other thing: 9/11 was worth 36 points of approval over two months. The Iraq war was worth a bit over 12 points, again over two months. The capture of Saddam was worth five points in one month. In each case, we add the actual gain to the 1.6 points Bush would have otherwise lost, to read out the difference that the particular event made.

So, let’s assume (favorably for Bush) that Bush’s approval slide stops entirely at 48 percent. How much of a boost will he need to achieve a safe 53 percent or so by Election Day?

Clearly, another 9/11, arriving anytime this year, would guarantee the election. But 9/11, let us hope, was a one-time event. It is not obvious that a second attack, on a similar or even a larger scale, would have the same political effect. It might turn into a political disaster. In any event, let us suppose that the manufacture of such an atrocity is safely beyond the pale.

Theoretically, another war is within the administration’s power to wage or not to wage. There are well-known targets: Syria and North Korea. If a war against either one were launched in August, then on the Iraqi model Bush would be up about 10 points in November.

But a second war seems remote just now. Unlike Iraq, North Korea may well have the bomb — an authentic deterrent. Unlike Iraq, Syria is not seriously thought by anyone to pose a threat to the United States. The propaganda buildup isn’t there; the weapons-of-mass-destruction trick will not work twice. Bush would have no allies on such a mission; it is impossible to imagine U.N. support. And U.S. military forces remain more heavily stretched by the Iraqi occupation than the war planners hoped they would be. Even if they were nearly out by June — which is doubtful — it is hard to imagine their being ready to fight again in August.

What if on the other hand there is peace: an Iraqi government in place and our troops come home, safe and sound, over the summer? That could happen, and it might help Bush out. But the timing is delicate. Do it too early and the effect will wear off by October. Do it too late and the risk is that the fedayeen or the Shiites will spoil the endgame.

So what does that leave? Another Saddam. And, of course, he is conveniently out there. If the capture of Osama bin Laden is worth the same as the capture of Saddam, the answer to Bush’s electoral dilemma is plain: Get Osama in October.

Like all statistical analyses, this one is no better than its assumptions. We have assumed that Bush will bottom out at 48 percent, other things being equal. We assume there are no dramatic new events — such as a war not of our own making, or (say) an assassination attempt against Bush or his challenger. We assume that Osama, even after three years of hiding out (presumably in Pakistan), will be worth as much as Saddam. Of course, if al-Qaida hits us again this year, he might be worth more.

That leaves one question: What price would Bush have to pay — and to whom — in order to bring him in, just in the nick of time?

Here’s a chart, taken almost directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It shows the month-to-month change in total employment, and how it fell from an average gain of 236,000 during the Clinton presidency to an average loss of 66,000 per month under George Bush. (The chart shows payroll jobs, averaged over three months.) The arrow, which I added, shows when Bush took office.

Economic numbers don’t get more clear than this:

Next, notice when the deep dive ends. That’s right: It was just after Sept. 11, 2001. It’s true that President Bush ought not to be blamed for the job losses of the Internet bust. But neither can he properly blame his troubles on Osama bin Laden: Job losses slowed down when the war on terror began.

Bush should be judged on the record after that — on the creation of jobs in 2002 and 2003. After all, the recession officially ended in November 2001. How many new jobs did we get since then? An average loss of 22,000 jobs every month.

There are no new jobs. Total job growth in the Clinton years: 23 million. Total job losses so far in the Bush years: over 2 million. Total gains in the last six months, since the so-called recovery supposedly accelerated in the third quarter? Just 221,000. That’s less than a single month’s average under Clinton. And last month? One thousand new jobs.

How many jobs should there have been? Crudely, the Clinton pace over three years would have yielded about 8.5 million. Allowing Bush a pass for 2001, matching Clinton in just two years would have meant 5.6 million new jobs, not the loss of another half a million. Want more? Lee Price of the Economic Policy Institute has a very useful study here.

Bush’s minions whitewash these figures by pointing to the household employment survey, which shows more (though not great) job growth. Here’s the main difference: The household survey covers 60,000 households. The payroll survey covers 400,000 businesses (and millions of workers). The payroll survey measures real jobs. Most agree that the payroll survey, while not perfect (it misses some new jobs in the upswing), is the better of the two reports.

The household survey does pick up many people who call themselves self-employed, independent contractors and the like. (When academics do this, we call it “consulting.”) Some would have you believe that this is the future of the economy, but let’s hope not. Most such work is stopgap, a way to scrape by when regular work is hard to find. Most people doing it would abandon it for a real job, if they could, in a minute. Real jobs — with benefits and a semblance of security — are better.

True, the unemployment rate doesn’t look so bad. But why not? Partly because many people who can’t get unemployment insurance now get themselves on the disabled rolls if they can. (Disability, the refuge of the desperate, has been growing very fast.) And the jobless rate did fall in December. But why? Because many thousands of people stopped looking for work. Some retired; a few went back to school; most just went home to wait it out. Very sensible of them, under these conditions.

The Bush years are a study in deliberately wasted effort: Repeal of the estate tax. Tax exemption for stock dividends. Ballistic Missile Defense. The USA PATRIOT Act. The war on Iraq. Each of these initiatives has a clientele. None of them seriously aims to achieve its stated goal, be that economic recovery or homeland security or national security writ large.

The method is clear to any who choose to study closely: It is a method of subterfuge and deception. It is the systematic and relentless pursuit of partly hidden agendas, sold to the public with slogans. The tax cuts were not aimed to produce recovery and jobs; they were a reward to the rich. The war on Iraq was not waged to help the war on terror; it was about getting Saddam, as we have now had confirmed by Paul O’Neill’s report on the Iraq agenda Bush carried from the beginning. Missile defense is not about North Korea, and still less about Iran or any other “rogue state”; it’s about the contracts. In all these cases, the decision on what to do came first — then the circumstances of the day were arranged to suit.

So it is today on the economy. What does Bush want? He wants a growth rate high enough to get him through the election. That’s obvious. After that, he doesn’t care. His clientele — the military contractors, oil companies, pharmaceutical firms and big media that control this government — make their money on patents, contracts and the exercise of monopoly power. (Case in point: Bush is pressuring impoverished Central Americans, in trade negotiations, to add 10 years to the length of drug patents.) These people have no interest in full employment. They like unemployment, weak labor, low wages and a government that bullies on their behalf. And after the election, if Bush wins, that is what they will get for four more years.

Bush has levers to keep the economy warm through the 2004 vote. Child credits kicked in during the third quarter of 2003. Households spent them at once, hence the 8 percent annualized growth rate that mesmerized the country for a moment. Tax refunds are due in the next few months; that should give spending another kick. The cost of war was the first big push that the economy got last year. Now much military equipment needs replacing; spending on that may be felt soon.

Most important, monetary policy is toeing Bush’s line. Alan Greenspan and his deputies were all over the economists’ meetings in San Diego this month, promising that interest rates will stay down. Don’t misunderstand me: This is the right policy. But for how long will it last? Low interest rates imperil the global dollar. The pressure to defend the dollar is out there. Will it prevail once the election is past? Remember: After November, George Bush will not care.

And after the election, the stagnation his backers want will not be hard to achieve. Our economy still faces major barriers to sustained growth. Capacity utilization in industry is low: a barrier to sustained growth of investment. Household debt burdens are high: a barrier to accelerating consumer spending, which will be aggravated when the housing bubble eventually pops. Federal, state and local budgets are riddled with structural deficits; these will not go away with growth. In the states and localities, spending cuts and tax increases are the only agenda. At the federal level, the deficit hawks — a well-meaning group, but prone to obsess on the wrong issue — will be on the march next year.

In short, the most likely outlook is for strong growth in the first half of the year, and stagnation thereafter. Businesses know this. So they will ramp up production to meet demand, but remain resolutely reluctant to hire new workers for the long term.

The bad jobs picture is more than just a sign of the failure of trickle-down. It is a measure of the lack of confidence that ordinary American business has in the long-term future. Businesses in America are hard to fool, and they are not expecting another long boom.

The election, in short, will be a race between the campaign propaganda of growth rates and the realities of scarce jobs, low pay and stagnant living standards. But reality has a way of holding its own in people’s minds. It’s not yet clear, by any means, that truth won’t prevail.

And so now comes George Bush, with two more great proposals to get the country moving again.

The first is immigration “reform,” ginned up just before a big summit in Monterrey, Mexico, to play to the Hispanic vote. The proposal promises minor conveniences to the estimated 8 million undocumented workers in this country. But at what price?

The new class of migrants would have to leave when their permits are up, unless renewed. They would have to leave if fired from their jobs. In a word, employers would judge who stays in the country and who is kicked out. Forget labor rights. Forget unions. Also forget family, home, neighborhood, things like that. Anyone wanting to protect those things will stay out of sight.

Worse, workers coming into the program would in practice be giving up their path to political rights. They would, for the most part, never become citizens. They would never get to vote. No one will represent their interests. No one will speak for their schools, their clinics, their wages. No one will stand in their defense when they are abused on the job, hurt, sacked, blacklisted, and sent home.

There is worse still. Bush made clear that this program is not just for workers presently in the country, as the press has mostly been reporting. It is not just for those who may soon arrive. No, it is far broader than that. Here’s the president’s speech: “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.”

This program will permit any employer to admit any worker. From any country. At any time. The only requirement is that it be for a job Americans are not willing to take. But it is easy to create such jobs: Cut wages. Terminate the unions. Lengthen the hours. Speed up the lines. Chicken farmers have known this for years. Bush’s plan is a blank check for every bad boss this country has.

There is no reason why principal recruitment of new workers would be from Mexico. It might be, very massively, from China. Or perhaps from India, with its large English-speaking population. Temp agencies would go out on recruiting missions. Some of this competition may displace Mexican and Central American nationals presently working illegally in the United States (and hoping to stay). That would only drive them even further underground.

And for those who take up the program, register as temporary workers, and then see their permits expire? Bush is at pains to say that he expects this group to go home. But who will make them? Will the government organize a mass campaign of roundups and deportations? Or will the workers just quietly disappear back into the sub-underground of the truly illegal?

And for those who do go home, who will replace them? Another cohort of strangers? This is a program to create a rotating underclass of foreign workers, who never assimilate to American ways or adopt American values. It’s hard to imagine anything worse for our social life — more productive of petty crime — or for that matter, riskier for our national security.

For millions of citizen workers, what would happen? The answer is clear: Bad bosses drive out the good. Good bosses will turn bad under pressure. The terms of our jobs would get worse and worse. Who would want a citizen worker? A bracero will be so much cheaper, more loyal, and under control. And who among us, in our right mind, would want to look for work? Unless, of course, we needed to eat. Or pay the mortgage. I am not exaggerating: This is a threat to us all.

What indeed, would be left for citizens to do? Perhaps they will get first call on that other great Bush idea, the moon base and mission to Mars. Here we see the hand of Bush’s space science advisor, Karl (“Spirit”) Rove(r). NASA, you may have noticed, has just sent a mission to Mars. It was cheap as these things go, safe — and spectacular. Rove would take that money and put it into sending up a human: dumb, dangerous, and expensive. But I’d be for it, if we could send him on the mission. And his boss.

Happy New Year. We’ll know in November if it really is.

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.