Harriman said he would send the instructions the following week.[129] In fact Averell Harriman sabotaged Kennedy’s proposal for a mutual de-escalation with North Vietnam. In response to the president’s order to wire such instructions to Galbraith, Harriman “struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line,” as scholar Gareth Porter discovered by examining Harriman’s papers. Harriman dictated instructions to his colleague Edward Rice for a telegram to Galbraith that instead “changed the mutual de-escalation approach into a threat of U.S. escalation of the war if
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