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Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture

Noam Chomsky
Reviewed by By Stephen E. Ambrose
September/October 1993
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Noam Chomsky
South End Press
1993
172 pp.
$14.00

One of the few remaining Marxists, Noam Chomsky here undertakes to scold fellow leftists such as Oliver Stone for succumbing to the Camelot myth and asserting that JFK was assassinated by big business, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Mafia, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff (take your choice) because Kennedy intended to pull out of Vietnam. Chomsky rightly ridicules the notion of a Vietnam pullout but-typical of his past political assays-he sees dark, conspiratorial forces directing most actors on the public stage. In Chomsky's world view, presidents are puppets manipulated by America's economic managers (corporations and their lackeys in politics). Thus Kennedy had no freedom of choice but merely did as he was told.

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