JFK's Vietnam: intentions, options, & results per the historical record

This is a pivotal subject for After 1900. A lot of assumptions people here have about the trajectory of postwar American history, indeed world history, rest on a certain reflexive attitude towards John Kennedy’s death and its aftermath. But unlike most of the turning points from the world wars, this important Cold War turning point doesn’t seem to have ever been discussed in much depth or consistency on this board.

I’m going to open up some of the historical literature, and cite reliable voices as to the pros and cons of President John Kennedy’s efforts during the thousand days he reigned, and of what President Lyndon Johnson then did differently (or didn't do differently, as I will argue). I'm going long here, real long, but look at it this way; this subject deserves a Sea Lion-sized fisking, it's never got that before here, so I'm just trying to level the playing field. (NB: Of necessity, my thesis is pretty open-ended, as you'll see; this is a look at verifiable history, so I've deliberately refrained from 'creative' speculation. And since this isn't school I'm using a lot of verbatim quotes instead of just summarising all the various points made in my sources. Also, I haven't bothered with placing my cites at the end, as that would seem too clunky; all I've put there are bibliographical details.)

DEVELOPMENTS FROM THE EARLY YEARS OF HIS PRESIDENCY

There can be no doubt that President Kennedy's infant administration was extremely activist in the emerging Vietnamese conflict. He came into the White House determined to change American policy vis-à-vis the RVN, to make it more aggressive. Historians of the conflict normally cite his insistence on counterinsurgency at his initial National Security Council meeting as a first step of the administration's escalation (Freedman, 288) yet it's also been noted that this enthusiastic student of military affairs had detailed plans in mind for Vietnam from before entering the Oval Office (Schlesinger, 541).

Briefly Laos would become the focus of US policy in SE Asia, with the breakdown of peace on the Plain of Jars and the imminent success of the communist forces there leading to the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommending the deployment of US Marines, in order to secure an anti-communist bridgehead during late April. Ultimately the president rejected this course. Instead, he supported peace talks that lead to a Laotian power sharing government between Left and Right (Freedman calls this a sensible policy of 'procrastination' on Kennedy's part, and it's hard to disagree with this approach being a good short-term way of avoiding war in Laos--p.303).

However, from this phase of his White House comes Kennedy's private declaration, "Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks the place" (ibid, 317); deliberations within the administration at this time did see the president make several important moves with regards American policy in Indochina. Despite having rejected the Chiefs' advice for an outright incursion into Laos, the president took hold of detailed recommendations touching on South Vietnam in this broader crisis (recommendations from a report by the deputy sec. of defense), and used them as a pretext to (a.) break decisively with Eisenhower's support of the 1954 Geneva agreements on foreign military levels, and (b.) order the deployment of the first U.S. battalion to South Vietnam--indeed, the first American special forces unit sent to that country. (Smith, 89/90)

This was Kennedy's escalation. And it would be a tortured, indecisive escalation. The remainder of 1961 saw the president faced with additional recommendations for the deployment of conventional U.S. forces, this time to fight Hanoi and its Vietcong subsidiary instead of the Laotian communists; for instance, by early October senior White House adviser Walt Rostow and the joint chiefs each had separate proposals for deploying tens of thousands of either American or SEATO forces to the RVN (Pentagon Papers, Part IV, B-3, p.65/66); while Kennedy's ordered response to all this, a factfinding mission to Vietnam of both General Maxwell Taylor and Rostow, saw Taylor report in late October that a smaller force of 6000 U.S. regulars would suffice to buttress the beleaguered Diem regime. Secretaries McNamara and Rusk wrote a concurring opinion supporting Taylor (though SecDef had immediate misgivings--McNamara, 39). Kennedy rejected the large conventional troop deployments in all these plans. But he had already established his adversity towards doing nothing (as he "knew that a reputation for excessive prudence might be used against him by his political opponents, both international and domestic"--Freedman, 300).

So, the president's response to the vaunted Taylor mission was muscular, if not as aggressive as many advisors wanted; the deployment of "American helicopter units. [These 300 U.S. pilots] were ordered to lead the ARVN into battle but not to engage in combat--unless in self defence." (Maclear, 61); and, more slowly, an even greater transference of U.S. ground advisers to serve with the ARVN. David Halberstam of the NYT would view this first hand after the midpoint of Kennedy's term. "The advisory mission placed young USA captains and lieutenants down at the battalion level. It meant that at every level the American had as a counterpart a Vietnamese officer, hopefully [passing on our] country's vast... military experience, trying to make the troops more aggressive, cutting down on mistakes, fighting the war the way we believed it should be fought. We also had men at regiment and division level--and sometimes [with individual companies]--all the way to the top at the Palace." (Halberstam, Ch.4,p.3)

(Halberstam also gives expert testimony about the way the American aircrew and their machines would be used once the post-Taylor buildup was in full swing: "The changes in the use of the helicopters mirrored the ever-increasing U.S. involvement. At first they were nothing but [transports] designed to ferry ARVN troops into battle, carrying two light machine guns for self-defense. Then, in late '62, [the gunships] arrived, with 4 mounted machine guns and 16 rocket pods; they were to escort [the transports into battle] and were not to fire until fired on. But this was too dangerous--it gave the VC too many opportunities--and the rules of engagement were further broadened. By mid '63 the armed helicopters were often serving as [ground attack aircraft], carrying out strafing missions."--ibid, Ch.4, p.6)

The quotes about the air-ground campaign in the above paragraphs reflects the quickly developing schizoid approach to Vietnam displayed by the president after his first year in office. Yes, he was capable of speaking out in White House conferences about the dangers of sending regulars to Vietnam (Freedman, 333/334, McNamara, 40) but this doesn't change the fact his policy was becoming entrenched as one of striving to keep South Vietnam non-communist at all costs: "Despite Kennedy's refusal to countenance direct [conventional military] involvement, [out of his early deliberations on Vietnam] came National Security Action Memorandum 52, committing the U.S. to preventing communist domination." (Freedman, 311)

Or, as Smith et al.'s booklength report on the Pentagon Papers sees it, "the ground troop issue so dominated the discussions that the president's ultimate decisions to approve the advisory build-up and the introduction of combat-support troops was made 'without a careful examination' of precisely what it was expected to produce and how." (Smith, 85)

But the geopolitical game of 1961 demanded this move. "There was a sense in Washington and generally in the world that put strong pressures [on Kennedy] to look for ways to take a firm stand somewhere [that year because of Laos and Cuba]... Vietnam was next under the gun." (PP, PartIV, B-1, p.58)

Thus originates the effective JFK doctrine for Vietnam, which, as described by the PPs, and repeated in the opening lines of the Camelot chapters from the NYT's report on that research, was "President John F. Kennedy [transforming] the 'limited risk gamble' of the Eisenhower Administration into a 'broad commitment' to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam." (Smith, 79)

(Basic number of American forces in-country; under Eisenhower, originally 300 when the U.S. took the fledgling regime under its wing, doubled to 685 by the end of his administration--Maclear, 55/57; Kennedy would increase the numbers to 948 by Nov '61, but after Taylor's report these forces surged to 2646 by Jan '62--Smith, 110--then more than 4000 soon after, Maclear, 61; then over 5500 by June '62, Smith, 110; "By late 1962 he had 12,000 military 'advisers' in Vietnam [carrying out] the tactics no one could agree on or define." Maclear, 62. At the end of his 34 months in office JFK had deployed as a baseline "roughly 16,000" American soldiers to the RVN. Smith, 83.)

THE DIEM QUESTION, AND THE STRATEGIC HAMLETS PROGRAM

Ostensibly South Vietnam found itself in a struggle where that Republic had to lead the fight, with only it and its leader President Ngo Dinh Diem being able to determine whether this 'domino' fell or not ("Diem needed the U.S. and the U.S. needed a reformed Diem"--PP, Part IV, B-3, p.7). And certainly JFK's administration would spend several years focussing on the defensive capabilities of that man and his regime; these abilities of Saigon civil leadership and the ARVN were the key to American success in that part of the world; America would succeed in Vietnam only if the South Vietnamese and their military proved able to succeed for itself. The question in Washington throughout 1961 to 1964 was typically, 'what do we have to do to make them capable of winning?', with, during most of 1963 at least, an added plaintive cry of 'yes, we can make them winners, but Diem isn't the one who will succeed'.

For a couple of very good examples of the former sentiment, see some of General Edward Lansdale's contributions to the Pentagon Papers, such as pages 29-40, 50-69, Part V, B-4, Book I; or, in a similar vein--if much more restrained--Deputy Sec William Bundy's single page memo to McNamara on page 341 of that same volume; "An early and hardhitting operation has a good chance (70% would be my guess) of arresting [the communists' advances] and giving Diem a chance to do better and clean up." For the anti-Diem attitude, Michael Maclear, despite his vagueness regarding just how, when and why the U.S. administration was divided on policy, categorises it as the belief that the difficult Vietnamese "was miscast--'a mandarin of the marshes'--a leader whose staying power was in not leaving his palace for most of nine years." (Maclear, 63) As time went by in the Kennedy era that position would grow, considerably. By mid 1963 it was quite simple: "The focus [of American] disagreement had generally been the policies of Diem and [his all-powerful brother] Nhu especially with respect to the Buddhists."(PP, Part IV, C-1, p.38.)

(Something to keep in mind: '65-era Arthur Schlesinger, the first great chronicler of the slain President Kennedy, frames the then still recent debate within that White House as one between anti-Diem voices who were in favour of a more politically savvy way of fighting the Vietcong--984/6, 998--versus the pro-Diemists, whom he practically accuses of being heavy-handed militarists--986, 995, 998. He makes no mention of any other policy divide, certainly not of any anti-war sentiment.)

Thus the handling of the Saigon regime was the source of the dominant infighting within the Kennedy administration for most of the president's term. Every other thought about Vietnam was supplementary during this time, and in fact these other questions would only come to the fore in the inner circle after the war had already progressed to full escalation (Robert McNamara in particular devotes much time in his memoir to exploring the lack of proper debate that existed in the highest levels of the U.S. government throughout this entire early- and mid-sixties period--see McNamara 107, 108, 116, 124, 125 for starters).

Any realisation that the war in Vietnam would be lost, or that America could chose not to participate in this loss, only ever entered the official cabinet-level record after Diem's misrule had already become an international scandal; indeed, as Smith puts it when recounting an NSC meeting called when it looked like Saigon's generals would not rid the U.S. of the swamp mandarin, "the most controversial position was advanced [by the head of the Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group]. He proposed disengagement--thereby, according to the Pentagon version, becoming the first official on record in a high level Vietnam policy meeting to pursue to its logical conclusion the analysis that the war effort was irretrievable, either with or without President Diem... His analysis was immediately dismissed by VP Johnson, Secretary Rusk, and Secretary McNamara." (Smith, 174). This is Aug 31, 1963.

Soon, however, the Kennedy administration would no longer have to countenance Diem. The Vietnamese leader's generals followed through on the encouragement given them by CIA Colonel Lucien Conien and the new U.S. ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, encouragement ultimately at the behest of JFK's national security adviser ("once a coup under responsible leadership has begun... it is in the interest of the U.S. government that it should succeed", PP, Part V, B-4 Book II, p.207), and the RVN found itself with a brand new military government, one the Kennedy administration thought would be more effective in holding the country together, defeating communism.

But the cost would ultimately be high to Washington: "'Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibility and our commitment in Vietnam', the [PPs] find... The coup, one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the American involvement in Vietnam, was a watershed. As the Pentagon study observes, it was a time when Washington--with Diem gone--could have reconsidered its entire commitment to South Vietnam [and disengaged from that country]... [however, getting out] 'was never seriously considered a policy alternative because of the assumption that an independent, non-communist South Vietnam was too important a strategic asset to abandon.'" (Smith, 158). I will return to the subject of geopolitics later in this essay.

Another reason for this absolute refusal to pivot at the demise of Ngo Dinh Diem strikes close to the heart of Kennedy's executive style--for, in fact, throughout most of 1962 and 1963 his administration had fooled itself into believing a convoluted formula was at work on their side in the war for South Vietnam. Counter-insurgency was the military strategy overall, and the Strategic Hamlet programme was supposed to be the unique application of COIN to victory in South Vietnam. And it had all stemmed from President Kennedy's direct intervention into war making. JFK, the innovative, aggressive leader, promoting the ideas of bold men who thought outside the box, in this case Deputy Secretary of State Roger Hilsman (Frd, 336/337).

While during the last year of Eisenhower's administration, the then tiny US military mission to Saigon had determined that Diem's regime was much too unwieldy to carry out effective COIN at the local level (PP, Part IV, B-2, p.22/23), nevertheless, thanks to the demands of topdown leadership, by early 1962 "the U. S. came to a roundabout decision to support as a 'test'... the 'Strategic Hamlet program', an operation about whose details they knew little, in an area that all recognized to be difficult, because it allegedly represented a long-sought example [of Saigon's] initiative in planning and civil-military preparation." (ibid, 31). However, these bold ideas of Kennedy's intellectual warriors were, when confronted with reality, less than victorious. "The Strategic Hamlet program was an ill-fated attempt to correct this imbalance [between the RVN forces' capabilities and the VC's]... it strangled in... mismanagement... for all their talk of 'winning the people', the American mission never understood the war as the enemy did." (Halberstam, Ch.5,p.3) The Pentagon Papers identifies this highly symbolic portion of anti-communist strategy as having ultimately been 'abortive' (PP, Part IV, B-2, p.52).

Yet the bulk of the senior administration in DC never heard about this failure of Kennedy-sponsored activism at the time, not through official channels. McNamara insists he was briefed throughout '62 and '63 about the continual 'progress' being made in the field. (McNamara, 46/50). Freedman adds that this optimistic environment went straight to the top: "[One reason for Kennedy not to consider peace talks] after the summer of '62 was confidence that counterinsurgency [worked against the Vietcong]. Until well into '63 the top figures in the administration had no reason [to doubt this]... As far as Kennedy was concerned, probably until his death, the problem in Vietnam was not insoluble and counterinsurgency was a valid model." (Frd, 356). There's also the possibility the commander in chief was sanguine enough to be able to simply largely ignore the RVN for most of his final two years (ibid, 339/356). Though Halberstam '65 is adamant that the president did indeed receive one realistic briefing about the failing Strategic Hamlets and war effort, and that this did effect his personal views (Halberstam, Ch.10,p.21); yet here the line between official Kennedy White House business and Camelot mythos/anecdotal evidence blurs, as the Pentagon Papers makes no mention of this meeting ever having occurred, though it is stated that the US official in question later had his report about the deteriorating situation in Long An province forwarded (cleared?) by Ambassador Lodge, for circulation in DC early during Johnson's administration. (PP, Part IV, C-1, p.45)

The former NYT correspondent did recount the anger felt by the US liberal hawk Saigon press corps RE this wilful ignorance displayed from up on top: "When reporters began to file stories which tended to show that the policy was not working, its authors, President Kennedy and General Taylor, clung to it stubbornly." (Halberstam, Ch.3,p18/19) The climax of Halberstam's truth telling came in August, 1963 when (assuming the senior Cabinet officer wasn't 'freelancing') the White House unleashed Secretary of State Rusk onto the journalist for daring to write a frontpage article summarising the failure of the previous twenty months of US policy for South Vietnam (ibid, Ch.7,p42). But the Timesman's reportage was accurate, and only later with the Pentagon Papers would official decision making circles admit to what many lower ranking officers and civilians knew to be true during the Kennedy years: "The intelligence and reporting systems for Vietnam during this period must bear a principal responsibility for the unfounded optimism of U.S. policy. Except for some very tenuous caveats, the picture was repeatedly painted in terms of progress and success." (PP's, Part IV, B4, p.10)

Shortly, the American misreading of the Strategic Hamlets programme, actually part of a larger, ill-founded "spurt of optimism" about the anti-communist war effort, would produce the great misconception of President Kennedy's historical record in Vietnam--the poorly understood subject of the conditional US troop withdrawal he ordered near the end of his life. (Smith, 111/112)

NSAM 263 AND PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S RESPONSE TO IT

Much has been made of the confidential decision of October, 1963, that the Kennedy Administration would begin a withdrawal of U.S. advisory forces from South Vietnam. Many see this as proof that the slain president was formally committed to complete withdrawal from that war. However, the real story of planned American reduction of force from the RVN under JFK is not one of anti-war realism, but one of misguided triumphalism; it was predicated on the notion that the president's policy had achieved a longlasting success, that it had reorientated the Saigon govt towards achieving the soon-to-be total defeat of the communist threat.

Indeed, it was planning not even begun during the pivotal year of 1963, but rather during what the PPs describe as American officialdom's "euphoria" of mid 1962. (Part IV, B-4, p.5) McNamara recounts it thus: "Thinking ahead, I asked General Harkins... how long he thought it would take to eliminate the military potential of the Vietcong. His estimate was something like this: one year after the ARVN and civil guard forces became fully operational and began pressing the enemy in all areas. Putting that together with other assessments, I ordered long-range planning for a phased withdrawal of U.S. advisers based on the assumption it would take three years to subdue the Vietcong." (McN, 49) The PPs credits the SecDef with at least being conservative enough to highball the figure at three years instead of Harkin's favoured one. (Part IV, B-4, p.24)

(Also, though McNamara in his memoirs declares he was primarily motivated in his '62 decision by a desire to force the RVN to truly either sink or swim, as the PPs makes clear this was not a policy aim of the White House he served--put simply, the central objective was irrational faith that they were winning, at all costs; "[Kennedy's men in Saigon] were not only wrong, but more importantly, they were influential. The Washington decision-makers could not help but be guided by these continued reports of progress."--ibid, p.11. And once again, incredibly optimistic reports about Strategic Hamlet successes underpinned further drafting of these plans--ibid, p.31.)

McNamara's withdrawal objectives throughout 1962 and early 1963 were all very long term, in fact projected out to men and resources being steadily reduced until the U.S. govt financial year beginning in 1968. In May of Kennedy's actual final year this scheme was accelerated, by a formal order from the Joint Chiefs to CINCPAC (i.e., America's Pacific command) requesting what would become the much vaunted 1000 man drawdown; one thousand and three servicemen were to be withdrawn by the end of December (Part IV, B4, p.32/33). The only thing that threatened to slightly delay the plan from being formally implemented in the months before October, 1963, was that the JCS wanted time for the controversy surrounding Diem's attacks on the Buddhists to subside. (McN, 49.)

After McNamara and General Taylor travelled to Saigon in September, 1963, the Secretary received a renewed shot of optimism (of the type that Halberstam et al. recognised as being a complete fantasy) and he was now inclined to speed up the drawdown (PPs, Part IV, B-4, p.39), as a sort of peace dividend, presumably; but also, when it came to the formal White House announcement made on 2nd October, regarding merely the possibility of future withdrawals, it was now all hoped to serve as a gentle "demonstration... intended to induce the South Vietnamese to increase the effectiveness of their military effort." (ibid, p.43) (Note, the White House press release of Oct. 2nd is not the infamous NSAM 263; the PR statement is mostly concerned with reaffirming the belief that victory was in sight, and that the Diem regime's ongoing trauma needn't prevent this; the national security action memo is actually President Kennedy ordering the secret implementation of the already extant withdrawal plans, as well as reiterating that Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was authorised to treat with any Saigon coup plotters--PPs, Part V, B-4, Book II, p.180)

Then fate intervened. "On 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. The consequences were to set an institutional freeze on the direction and momentum of U.S. Vietnam policy. Universally operative was a desire to avoid change of any kind during the critical interregnum period of the new Johnson Administration. Both the President and the governmental establishment consciously strove for continuity with respect to Vietnam no less than in other areas. In Vietnam this continuity meant that the phase-out concept, the... withdrawal plan, and [the military action programs] probably survived beyond the point they might have otherwise." (PPs, Part IV, B-4, p.45) Indeed, "The immediate Johnson stamp on the Kennedy policy came on 26 November. At a NSC meeting convened to consider the results of the 20 November Honolulu Conference, the President 'reaffirmed that U.S. objectives with respect to withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963.'" (ibid, p.46)

In other words, Johnson changed nothing about the 'withdrawal' policy he inherited upon taking office.

(McNamara in his memoirs focuses on a very interesting turn of phrase in his own reading of the overall continuity inherent in this new order, NSAM 273; he says that LBJ was following his predecessor's policy to aid and protect the people of the RVN from an "'externally directed and supported communist conspiracy'"--emphasis mine--McN, 102/103. Even in old age McNamara still thought Kennedy at the time of his death viewed the war as a Manichean struggle, and that Johnson inherited this struggle's philosophical underpinnings in toto; bare that in mind for later in this essay.)

Lyndon Johnson's most famous biographer describes what is perhaps the most important context of this change in war leadership: "The reaffirmation--all the conflicting parts of it--was given official status. [For] the day before Kennedy's death, Bundy had drafted a National Security Action Memorandum... Johnson approved the memorandum... Among the directives included in the document, however, was one for the planning of 'possible increased [military] activity,' a reference to the plan for covert military operations against North Vietnam... that had been discussed and approved at the November 20 Honolulu conference." (Emphases mine--Caro, 403.)

Put simply, while Johnson's NSAM 273 continued the optimistic forward estimates that underwrote JFK's 263, it also endorsed the final push for aggressive policymaking thought up by Kennedy's lieutenants under the slain leader's watch; and this was, after all, a draft plan that JFK's national security adviser had planned to submit to the late president as a matter of course, presumably under no fear at all that President Kennedy might reject it, seeing as it had the imprimatur of the President's entire war council behind it. And yet said aggression was still all within the framework of this American conflict's proxy war making, "the older philosophy of our intervention there, which was that the central function of the U.S. effort was to help the South Vietnamese to help themselves." (PP, Part IV, C-1, p.32) It wasn't total escalation, not yet. It was business as usual.

(As for the fabled thousand soldier drawdown: "'Strangely, as a result of the public White House promise in October and the power of the wheels set in motion, the U.S. did effect a 1000 man withdrawal in December of 1963.' But the study discounts this as 'essentially an accounting exercise' offset in part by troop rotations."--Smith, p.113. In fact, these thousand men withdrawn didn't even amount to a net reduction of 1000 in overall MACV personnel!--PP, Part IV, B-4, p.50. Yet exactly why this should have been some incongruous act, as per the PPs cite from above--"the withdrawal... lasted beyond the point..."--only becomes apparent when we see how the American government post-JFK quickly learned the truth about the Vietnamese situation left behind in the wake of that other president killed during late 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem. Or: "It was discovered [post-coup] that the situation in South Vietnam had been worse all along," as one of the Pentagon analysts sardonically puts it--PP, Part IV, C-I, p.6. Consequently, the first months of LBJ's administration saw him rely on the old Kennedy processes to delay and then slowly kill-off the planned troop withdrawal; indeed, the next Honolulu conference, the first held since the important Camelot CINCPAC forums, that was the meeting which ended long range projections of the type that had been used to justify the original phase out.--Part IV, B4, p.53)

NEW REALISATIONS IN THE AFTERMATH OF DIEM

In his memoirs McNamara blithely describes his 'in country' baptism to this harsh reality of true post-Kennedy, post-Diem policy making over Vietnam. Yet the language in his official report of this trip is anything but blithe: "The situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to a neutralization at best and more likely to a communist-controlled state." (ibid,p.50) (It's important to note that from this point on continuing analyses regarding the dangers of Saigon falling to either defeat, demoralisation or 'non-alignment' would fuel the rationale of moving towards full escalation.--see PP, IV, C-1, p11, p113, p132, among others.)

So, this inaugural fact finding mission for the Johnson administration, December '63, saw the SecDef finally waking to the fact that the fall of the old mandarin had exposed the ARVN high command for the disorderly bunch of political generals they were, saw him realising that the compilation of military statistics displaying all previous successes against the enemy had been subject to 'inflation'.(McN, 104/105.) CIA director John McCone also came to the same conclusion that trip. (ibid, 104.) (Note: the PPs say this turning point of a field investigation--the "harbinger of events" trip as Hedrick Smith calls it--was instituted because the new POTUS experienced "a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam" and wanted to be reassured with a new policy review--PP, Part IV, B4, p46.)

Smith puts these events of the end of 1963, as recounted in the Pentagon study, into greater context: "President Kennedy left President Johnson a Vietnamese legacy of crisis, of political instability, and of military deterioration at least as alarming to policy makers as the situation he had inherited from the Eisenhower administration." (Smith, 113)

Developments would shortly make the U.S. government decide that now was the time to pressure the North Vietnamese, directly. But this was not some radical new paradigm in American policy for Vietnam, this was more of the same old incrementalism that had begun with Kennedy; indeed, as mentioned above, the first tool to be used in this campaign against Ho Ch Minh's very borders was a black-ops programme tabled at the last senior war meeting of Kennedy's administration (and the NYT's Neil Sheehan emphasises that senior WH aide Rostow was on record advocating this form of escalation against Hanoi's territory since the earliest days of Camelot--Sheehan, 241). But it was a change in direction nevertheless: "What the PPs call 'an elaborate program of covert military operation against the state of North Vietnam' began on Feb. 1, 1964, under the code name Operation Plan 34A... ordered [by the president]... on the recommendation of Secretary McNamara, in the hope, held very faint by the intelligence community, that 'progressively escalating pressure' from the clandestine attacks might eventually force Hanoi to order [both the VC and the Laotian communists] to halt their insurrections. " (ibid, 235). What's more, the Pentagon study tell us this campaign was the end result of preliminary planning that stretched back as far as May, 1963, planning begun long before it was formally brought before Kennedy's senior advisors. (PPs, Part IV, C-2a, p.36)

Throughout this early post-Kennedy phase the situation in the RVN continued to worsen. McNamara and Taylor visited in-country again during March, and the result of their newest investigations was NSAM 288. Broadly, this new paper would be more than the usual 'stay the course' war policy, and historians of the official paper trail of escalation see it as a presidential turning point. For it escalated America's interest in Vietnam to one predicated on the demands of formal, grand Asia-Pacific strategy. (Part IV, C-1, p.75).

The Pentagon Papers points out an even more important aspect of decision making this new memo for the commander-in-chief threw up: "Secretary McNamara recommended... that plans be made so that the U. S. would be in a position at a later date to initiate military pressures against NVN within a relatively brief time after any decision to do so might be made." (ibid, p.8) This was a distinct move away from 'doing what is necessary to make the South win on its own' politics. Instead, this was foreshadowing of warmaking for after the Gulf of Tonkin--America employing its own conventional military might, not surrogate ARVN power, in an attempt to defeat the North, or more realistically, make Hanoi come to the conclusion that it couldn't achieve communist goals by force of arms. (Note, NSAM 288 is the document which prompted one of the Pentagon analysts to write that observation which had so impressed Timesman Hedrick Smith: "[It] stated U.S. objectives in Vietnam in the most unambiguous and sweeping terms. If there had been any doubt that the limited risk gamble undertaken by Eisenhower had been transformed into an unlimited commitment by Kennedy, that doubt should been dispelled internally by [this] statement of objectives."--PPs, Part IV, B-3, p.9)

So, as per everything cited above, it's apparent this string of decision making comports with escalatory movement previously taken by Kennedy. "The PPs, moreover, presents the picture of an unbroken chain of decision making from the final months of the Kennedy administration into the early months of the Johnson one, whether in terms of the political view of the U.S.' stakes in Vietnam, the advisory buildup or the hidden growth of covert warfare against North Vietnam." (Smith, 114)

As far as this poster is concerned there is no legitimate case to be made condemning President Johnson for somehow changing Vietnam policy radically during the first half-year or so of his term. Going by the literature, the only question we can legitimately ask is, 'but what, if any, divergence happens under/because of Johnson's rule the further they got from 1963?' I will try to address that below.

Personally, I see no need to recount in detail every further last official decision made by LBJ in the lead up to the permanent bombing campaign and introduction of U.S. regulars that came in 1965. It is important to note that as dramatic as Johnson's eventual move towards massive American engagement was, it tended to the same relatively glacial, bureaucratic pace as Kennedy's war policy. It's fair to say there was surprisingly little physical haste in this war, certainly when compared to previous American FP catastrophes such as the opening months of both WWII and the Korean War.

I leave it to one of the PPs to summarise the arc of that important year:

"There were no immediate or forceful U.S. reactions in 1964 to this continuing political instability and military frustration in South Vietnam. Declaratory policy raced far ahead of resource allocations and use decisions. As events continued along an unfavorable course the U.S. pursued an everexpanding number of minor, specific, programmatic measures which were inherently inadequate either to reverse the decline or to satisfy broad U.S. objectives. Concurrently, the U.S. began to make contingency plans for increasing pressures against NVN. It did not make similar plans for the commitment of U.S. ground forces in SVN.[Emphasis mine]

In the aftermath of President Johnson's landslide electoral victory in November 1964, and in the face of persistent instability in SVN, the Administration finally expanded the war to include a limited, carefully controlled air campaign against the north. Early in 1965 it deployed Marine battalions to South Vietnam. By April 1965, while continuing to follow the announced policy of efforts to enable GVN to win its own war, the U. S. had adumbrated a policy of U. S. military participation which presaged a high degree of Americanization of the war effort.

This evolving expansion and demonstration of commitment was neither continuous nor steady. The steps forward were warmly debated, often hesitant, sometimes reluctant. -- But all of the steps taken were still forward toward a larger commitment; there were none to the rear."
(Part IV, C-1, page 6).

WERE JFK AND LBJ EVEN MUCH DIFFERENT AS PRESIDENTIAL 'DECIDERS'?

When coming to the contentious issue of 'What would Kennedy have done?', I contend that, firstly, we need to take into account the verifiable historical record; so far this essay has done that.

For further speculation, we need to examine knowledgeable, balanced analyses of both presidents' formal and informal attitudes towards decisions made. As far as I'm concerned this is surprisingly easy.

Formally, President Kennedy spent his term declaring that America was opposed to a communist takeover of the RVN. In an official letter to Diem from late 1961, later released in a state department bulletin : "We are prepared to help the RVN to protect its people and to preserve its independence." (PPs, Part VA, Vol. IC, p.16) In his 1962 state of the union address: "The systematic aggression now bleeding that country is not a 'war of liberation', for Vietnam is already free. It is a war of attempted subjugation, and it will be resisted." (ibid, 17). In a televised press conference soon after: "There is a long [bipartisan, multi-POTUS] history of our efforts to prevent Vietnam falling under control of the communists... We have increased our training mission, and we have increased our logistics support, and we are attempting to prevent a communist takeover of Vietnam, which is in accordance with a policy which our government has followed... since 1954." (ibid, 19/20). And in his last public comments about the war before the assembled WH press corp, "We believe strongly in [a South Vietnamese struggle for independence]. We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but of Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." (Emphasis mine--ibid, 105) Needless to say, when Johnson assumed the presidency his pronunciations about America's interest in Indochina were the same.

(And Freedman identifies an interesting subtext to JFK's public communications; according to him, the usually press-loving Kennedy refused to do any personal background briefings on the war, even though his advisers wanted him to. The British historian strongly implies that Kennedy's personal style in handling Vietnam is the beginning of the U.S. government's deliberate campaign of deception towards its own citizens over the war--Freedman, 361. Another example of continuity between the two administrations?)

Informally, of course Kennedy was always alarmed about the prospect of escalation towards full conventional warfare involving his country; but, paradoxically, this alarm needn't lead us to conclude he was in anyway realistic to the challenges his administration faced, such as the very real possibility Saigon's regime might fall to communism (which, based on the faulty information available to his circle of govt. while he lived, is a situation he never had to face or consider, as I argued above, and which Freedman is adamant about in his analysis--399, 400, 405.)

Freedman does show us how the cavalier president handled 'uninformed' pessimism at the off-the-record level: "George Ball told JFK that he opposed sending troops to Vietnam, [citing the French ordeal] of '300,000 in the paddies and jungles' in 5 years. Ball was surprised at the 'overtone of asperity' in JFK's respone: 'George, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys... but you're crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen.' Ball... was uncertain whether [the president] was making a prediction that events [could not possibly deteriorate] or that he would not let such a situation develop." (ibid, 331) Of course this asperity (the word is a synonym for harsh) in Kennedy's conviction, conviction that things wouldn't get out of hand, this could easily by interpreted as meaning the young president knew exactly where he was heading on Vietnam. Yet, as cited above, Timesman David Halberstam claims to have seen it manifest as an illiberal, wilful ignorance from that presidency towards the RVN's real predicament. This is certainly what the liberal hawk American press corp at 'the front' thought (Halberstam, Ch.11,p.3,4,5). However, much of the succeeding years' conventional wisdom has it that it was Johnson's administration that was the first overly defensive, secretive, indeed authoritarian, U.S. protagonist in South East Asia.

Yet even supposing Kennedy had exhibited a cool, properly briefed attitude when considering the prospect of further longterm war aims beyond what he'd already committed to, an unfortunate fact for JFK-wanted-no-further-into-Vietnam advocates is that we have the example of another strongwilled, indeed more thoroughly researched Vietnam-era leader being sceptical, sensitive even, towards conventional escalation to save an obviously failing RVN--his name is Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Johnson as VPOTUS had already gone on the written record arguing that sending conventional American forces to Vietnam was a great risk, one to be avoided. (His own words from 1961: "American combat troop involvement is not only not required, it is not desirable"--PP, Part V, B-4, Book I, p.192.) Kennedy never even did this; his scepticism was, at best, confined to the minutes of WH meetings. Admittedly JFK as a 'chairman of the board' was not obligated to give briefs in writing for the decision-making forums of his own administration, but the fact that LBJ is the president who once formally enunciated non-engagement during these administrations, and then later turned against said non-engagement, this demonstrates the political realities of the era more than any vague idea that Kennedy 'secretly had everything under control'.

Indeed, throughout literally the entire period leading up to Rolling Thunder, i.e. the continuous bombardment of North Vietnam which opened the door into Indochina for America's foot soldiers, the reliable sources have Johnson hedging, prevaricating, not seeking escalation; "Johnson [in early '64] showed a preference for steps that would remain 'noncommitting' to combat." (Sheehan, 238). "A Chief Executive who was determined to [protect the RVN] yet who was holding back on actions to achieve this goal until he believed they were absolutely necessary." (ibid, 245) "In its glimpses into Lyndon B. Johnson's personal thoughts and motivations between the fateful September meeting [which determined that bombing the North was needed to achieve U.S. aims] and his decision to embark on an air war, the Pentagon study shows a president moving and being moved to war, but reluctant and hesitant to act until the end." (ibid, 310) "His basic political instincts were the same as Kennedy's--to avoid withdrawal or escalation" (Freedman, 404). "At this point Johnson showed no interest in taking the war to the North and was sticking to a policy of training the South Vietnamese to fight their own war." (ibid, 411). "[LBJ's] admirers and detractors agree that while he did not seek war he sought quick solutions." (Maclear, 89).

These observations about LBJ's attitudes from the various phases of 1964 are supported by administration veterans: "'I stress that I don't see that Johnson was plotting to escalate the war from the moment Kennedy died. I think that if in the next six months the counter-insurgency policy of giving aid and advisors had worked he would have been content.'" (Roger Hillsman to Maclear, page 90): "If Lyndon Johnson had in mind a plan to escalate the war, he never told me. And I believe he had no such plan. He never indicated to me or the Joint Chiefs that he wanted us to hold back in Vietnam because of the election. In fact, there was still no consensus among his advisers about what to do." (McNamara, 145); "Throughout the campaign [NB: presumably he means almost all of 1964, not just Labor Day to Election Day] the administration struggled to balance two objectives in Vietnam: avoiding the introduction of US combat forces while safeguarding the RVN from communist control." (ibid, 151); "Critics later charged that POTUS had carried [a war powers resolution] around in his pocket for months waiting for an opportunity--or hoping to create one--to 'slip' it through an unsuspecting congress. That was not the case." (ibid, 122)

Baring in mind the cites of LBJ's leadership style in the above paragraphs, consider what this PPs analyst writes about that of his predecessor: "Kennedy never makes a clear-cut decision but some way or other action is always deferred on any move that would probably lead to engagements on the ground between American units and the Viet Cong... We do see a similar pattern at least twice and possibly three different times [during 1961]... In each case, the record seems to be moving toward a decision to send troops, or at least to a Presidential decision that, in principal, troops should be sent if Diem can be persuaded to accept them. But no such decision is ever reached. The record never shows the President himself as the controlling figure. In June, there does not seem to be any record of what happened, at least in the files available to this study. In May and, as we will see, in November, the president conveniently receives a revised draft of the recommendations which no longer requires him to commit himself." [emphases mine] (PP, Part IV, B-1, p105). As previously addressed in this essay, JFK's decision to reject full escalation during his first year in office can be read as moderate, restrained leadership; yet, just like Bismarck's maxim about the creation of laws and sausages, this particular account from the Pentagon study makes clear that the apparently cautious decisions cited earlier are also readily interpreted as being the offshoot of weak, indecisive executive management. Perhaps weak and indecisive leadership comparable to the first year of President Johnson's very own war?

(And if the aforementioned Pentagon analyst is merely a second-hand observer of weak management coming from John Kennedy at a pivotal moments of American involvement in Vietnam, we have McNamara's first hand account of JFK losing control of his administration's handling of the plot against Diem, "[He] failed to pull together a divided U.S. government. Confronted with a choice among evils, he remained indecisive far too long."--McNamara,70).

It may be the only difference between the leadership skills of both presidents is that ultimately one of them could no longer prevaricate in bringing the full, awful military might of America to bare, while the other was never in office long enough to face that desperate choice. (NB: This doesn't change my opinion that full U.S. escalation was a mistake, I'm merely looking at what was forced on imperial presidential authority at the time because of Vietnam.)

To help explain why both leaders' actions in this war are rarely ever viewed in a similar light, even though said actions are, to all extents and purposes, functionally identical until the beginning of the second term of the Democratic administration, I cite Maclear on the widespread reading of the insecure Johnsonian persona, a reading often used to explain every aspect of his war leadership: "[LBJ] made it clear to Doris Kearns that it was initially the advice at hand... which dictated his decisions. He had retained JFK's inner circle and, says Kearns... he felt 'so long as his policies were approved by these who represented the established wisdom he was, at least, insured against appearing foolish or incompetent'." (p. 89).

Perhaps this well-documented portrait of Johnson as a deeply neurotic man explains the refusal of many to acknowledge the similarities between the two presidential decision making processes. Or, perhaps the fact he was the one who finally implemented massive escalation in Vietnam makes it impossible for many observers to countenance any similarities between his actions and Kennedys. Maybe it's because Camelot mythos has it that the '62 Missile Crisis is the only version of President Kennedy's exercise of authority we need consider.

Yet I fail to see how Kennedy's presidency in this war is as enigmatic or unfathomable, let alone peacelike, as a certain kind of popular history would have us believe. In my opinion a mix of indecision, overreaction and denial is the common thread between these two presidents' leadership over Vietnam. It isn't restricted to Lyndon Johnson.

SOME POPULAR SUPPOSITIONS ABOUT JFK'S 'REAL' INTENTIONS

Freedman alludes to the beliefs of popular and polemical historiography; "The anecdotal evidence that Kennedy wanted to get out is considerable." (Freedman, 399). Yet then, somewhat mordantly, this most important of 21st Century JFK military scholars refers the reader to this anecdotal 'data' via the slimmest of footnotes--"For a collection, see Schlesinger, 'Robert Kennedy', 710-12." (ibid, 485). Otherwise, apart from citing calls for negotiations from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senator Richard Russell, that author feels no need to mention any claims that have been made regarding Kennedy's alleged secret decision making, and indeed qualifies the above sentence from the main text of his work with, "But no account suggests that [JFK] expected to be able to extract the U.S.... until after [the election]." (ibid, 399).

Interestingly, Schlesinger in the first edition of his dedicated work about John Kennedy's administration mentions nothing at all of American military withdrawal from Vietnam. His summation of the war as he then saw it: "[JFK] always believed there was a point at which our intervention might turn Vietnamese nationalism against us and transform an Asian conflict into a white man's war. When he came into office, 2000 American troops were in Vietnam [NB: this figure is incorrect, it was less than a thousand]. Now there were 16,000. How many more could there be before we passed the point? By 1961 choices had already fatally narrowed; but still, if Vietnam had been handled as a political rather than a military problem, if Washington had not listened to General Harkins for so long, if Diem had been subjected to tactful pressure rather than treated with uncritical respect, if a Lodge had gone to Saigon on '61 instead of a Nolting, if, if, if--and now it was all past, and Diem miserably dead... [President Kennedy said] it should not have ended like this." (Schlesinger '65, 998). Considering the informed, accusatory tone against Gen. Harkins and Ambassador Nolting in this paragraph, and more importantly of general doubts Schlesinger expresses about the abilities of both Rusk (545, 986) and McNamara (982/984, 995) elsewhere in his chapters relating to Vietnam, it's very odd that the former special adviser to President Kennedy didn't also have insider knowledge of any thwarted Vietnam-withdrawal-plans from before Dallas, at least not for publication in 1965. Perhaps this dovish anecdotal evidence Freedman alludes to had to be 'massaged' for several years/decades before any of it could assume believable status?

For my mind, the most authoritative 'JFK Wouldn't Have Fought Johnson's War' claim I've found is McNamaras: "What would Kennedy have done about Vietnam had he lived? I have been asked that question countless times over the last thirty years. Thus far, I have refused to answer for two reasons: Apart from what I have related [in this volume], the president did not tell me what he planned to do in future. Moreover, whatever his thoughts may have been before Diem's death, they might have changed as the effect of that event on the dynamics in South Vietnam became more apparent. Also, I saw no gain to our nation from speculation by me--or others--about how the dead president might have acted.

"But today [i.e. 1995] I feel differently. Having reviewed the record in detail, and with the advantage of hindsight, I think it highly probable, had he lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam. He would have concluded that the South Vietnamese were incapable of defending themselves, and that Saigon's grave political weaknesses made it unwise to try to offset the limitations of the ARVN by sending US combat troops on a large scale. I think he would have come to that conclusion even if he reasoned, as I believe he would have, that the RVN and, ultimately, Southeast Asia, would then be lost to communism. He would have viewed that loss as more costly than we see it now. But he would have accepted that cost because he would have sensed that the conditions he had laid down--i.e., it was a South Vietnamese war, that it could only be won by them, and to win it they needed a sound political base--could not be met. JFK would have agreed that withdrawal would cause a fall of the 'dominoes' but that staying in would ultimately lead to the same result, while exacting a terrible price in blood." (McNamara, 95/96)

McNamara then cites JFK's handling of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, referring to both events as being examples of the president displaying the wisdom inherent in a man who wanted to avoid repeating history's worst mistakes, a view I'm inclined to support when it comes to the man's refusal to accept recourse to thermonuclear brinksmanship. But imminent global catastrophe was never central to Kennedy's Vietnam dilemma.

"So I conclude that John Kennedy would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in. I express this judgment now because, in light of it, I must explain how and why we--including Lyndon Johnson--who continued in policy-making roles after Kennedy's death made the decisions leading to the eventual deployment to Vietnam of half a million US combat troops. Why did we do what we did, and what lessons can be learned from our action?" (ibid, 97)

("The president did not tell me what he planned to do..." "his thoughts... might have changed" "I think he would ... as I believe he would have"; these qualifications, piled upon qualifications, do not inspire any confidence in this poster. While I think McNamara's book is invaluable history, I must admit that if I refer to this small part of his text as being 'most authoritative', it's not with any faith that what McNamara says about the dead Kennedy's supposed real intentions means anything at all, other than to be both infuriating and contradictory.)

Some deeper problems with McNamara's brief analysis; (a.) Considering the rest of 'In Retrospect' is his mea culpa for having been the most influential hawk for so long during the sixties (until 1966 at the very latest), then why does the former SedDef not address the fact that, initially, he himself would've almost certainly been at odds with any unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces in the face of total RVN collapse, and presumably would have tried to advise the president out of any such action during 1964 and 1965? (b.) What sort of chronology is he on about with "would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in"? This is surprisingly vague. Are we to assume he's talking about a withdrawal to take place before all further post-Diem escalation, or a withdrawal after partial escalation (i.e. the bombing campaign and the deployment of the first marines), or a withdrawal only when General Westmoreland started to request that U.S. ground forces be increased to more than, say, 100,000 men strong?

And what sort of negotiations with Hanoi are needed for any of this to transpire? As it was, McNamara under Johnson was a hardliner against any talks being initiated without the U.S. first having achieved dominance over the North via its bombing campaign. (PP, IV, C-1, p8, Sheehan, 393/394) It's easy to speculate about Kennedy being adverse to jumping straight into a mid-'65 land war in SE Asia, but fact is the ten-or-so months of Johnson's rule leading to that point was all about America first deciding on an attempt to beat down the North's regime (and thereby save the Souths) through the gradual increase of ruin from the air, or 'calculated doses of force'. I see little sense in making claims that JFK wouldn't have attempted to win a limited strategic victory in this manner, or that he would have had some magical insight that made him realise that Hanoi could never be bombed to the negotiations table on terms favourable to him. Then there is the fact that associated actions against the communists taken at this time were in the realm of irregular warfare; Freedman raises the fact that the use of black- or special-ops as a substitute for conventional landwar is exactly the sort of policy Kennedy would have found inspiration in (page 405).

But the central problem with McNamara's brief opinion about a living Kennedy goes beyond these more tactical details; the real problem with his claim is that he believes a living JFK would have been every bit the intellectual hawk when it came to assessing the potential of communism to win regional hegemony in the event of Saigon's government falling. We are expected to believe this president surrenders South Vietnam despite him continuing to obsess over the dangers of a monolithic, expansionist red empire. (Interestingly, Lyndon Johnson would later claim that the motivating reason for his own policy was that he could not allow his administration, or his party, to appear weak on national security; that he feared a return to the nadir of the early nineteen-fifties when Truman Democrats suffered at the hands of Republican demagoguery over issues like China and Alger Hiss.--Maclear, 85. If that was truly Johnson's incentive for his eventual hardline Vietnam policy, then it's actually a less hawkish posture than what McNamara believes 'de-escalationist' Kennedy held true.)

CONCLUSIONS OF SEVERAL BALANCED HISTORICAL SOURCES; IS IT REALISTIC TO ATTRIBUTE HIDDEN 'OPTIONS' TO A LIVING KENNEDY?

How then are we to view the analysis of historians who are more dispassionate that the likes of McNamara, Schlesinger, or the even more polemical-minded Ted Sorensen? What do our reliable writers say regarding the late President Kennedy and Vietnam?

"Despite the tens of thousands of words in the [Pentagon Papers'] account of the Kennedy administration, backed by scores of documents, the study does not provide a conclusive answer to the most vigorously debated question about JFK's Vietnam policy since his death... 'if Kennedy had lived until 1965, would he have felt compelled by events, as Johnson was, to undertake fullscale landwar in the South and an airwar against the North'?

"The situation, as the PP's disclose, had changed significantly between 1961 and 1965. In 1961 Kennedy was confronted by other crises--Berlin, Cuba, Laos--while he faced his harshest decisions on Vietnam, and these acted as retraints; President Johnson did not have quite the same distractions elsewhere. Too, Diem never pushed so aggressively for U.S. escalation as did Gen. Nguyen Khanh, the RVN leader in 1964 and 1965. Nor, as the analysts note, had other measures short of fullscale air and ground combat [appeared exhausted during Kennedy's years].

"The Pentagon account, moreover, presents the picture of an unbroken chain of decision making from the final months of the Kennedy administration..." (Smith, p114)

Smith of the Times then quotes this surprisingly hawkish conclusion from one of the PPs: "No reliable inference can be drawn... about how Kennedy would have behaved in 1965 and beyond had he lived. (One of those who had advised retaining freedom of action on the issue of sending U.S. combat troops was Lyndon Johnson.) It does not prove that Kennedy behaved soundly in 1961. Many people will think so; but others will argue that the most difficult problem of recent years might have been avoided if the U.S. had made a hard commitment on the ground in South Vietnam in 1961." (Part IV, B-1, p.105/106) (NB: This is from the analyst I quote above RE Kennedy's observable lack of strong executive posture in these war councils; I disagree with this anonymous researcher's implication that JFK could have avoided his eventual Indochina problem by use of massive escalatory force so early in the piece; the opposite would seem to be true--if that president had been fully engaged with the situation, at any point in his term, then from our vantage point ideally he would have formally attempted a reversal of policy back to pre-1961 levels of American interventionism, not forward to post-1964 war making.)

Freedman takes an optimistic if realistically guarded view towards the Kennedys. "[For him] to get out of Vietnam was less of a definitive decision than a working assumption, based on a hope for stability rather than an expectation of chaos. Kennedy died not knowing whether political stability could be restored after [Diem's assassination] and with perceptions of the state of the war on the edge of a qualitative change... There is certainly no reason to doubt his dismissal of the suggestions that he might end up fighting a major land war in Vietnam, but then LBJ, too, professed himself resistant to the idea. [Emphasis mine]

"In 1964 Robert Kennedy was asked what his brother would have done if the South Vietnamese had been on the brink of defeat: 'We'd face that when we came to it.'" (Freedman, 399) However, this same author also raises, and IMO fails to properly explore, the fact that RFK vainly attempted to bring sense to the administration's plans during the October/November coup planning debacle (ibid, 393/394).

Unlike the implausible McNamara assessment, the British historian offers the possibility that we might be able to find real 'options' for Camelot if Dallas had never happened: "[Had he lived] Kennedy.... may have been tempted to allow [Ambassador Averell] Harriman the chance to deal directly with Hanoi..." (ibid, 416/417).

But negotiation for what? Neutralisation? A political settlement where the NLF could organise at will? Freedman is a strong proponent of the belief that Kennedy naturally preferred to talk himself out of any conflict where possible, but Vietnam was one place where the man himself is on record as a pessimist; "[Kennedy] was convinced neutralisation had not worked Laos and doubted it would work next door." (McNamara, 62.) Indeed, at the time the president had gone as far as to tell Ambassador Ken Galbraith that the neutralisation of Laos was a political defeat for him, (Maclear, 60) this despite the fact it had allowed him to keep his non-escalatory options alive during his first year in office.

It's apparent that every discussion of neutralisation talks throughout the eighteen months leading to full escalation is, at best, a dead end, or, particularly after Tonkin, a source of outright anxiety in the administration (for instances of this, see McNamara, 185, PPs, Part IV, C-1, p.8, ibid p.64, ibid p.79, Sheehan, 317, ibid, 339). Perhaps the culminating high administration statement on the realpolitik dangers of neutralisation comes from national security adviser Bundy after a field trip to Saigon in February, 1965: "The stakes in Vietnam are extremely high. The American investment is very large, and American responsibility is a fact of life which is palpable in the atmosphere of Asia, and even elsewhere. The international prestige of the United States, and a substantial part of our influence, are directly at risk in Vietnam. There is no way of unloading the burden on the Vietnamese themselves, and there is no way of negotiating ourselves out of Vietnam which offers any serious promise at present. It is possible that at some future time a neutral non-Communist force may emerge, perhaps under Buddhist leadership, but no such force currently exists, and any negotiated U.S. withdrawal today would mean surrender on the installment plan." (Emphasis mine, PP, Part IV, C-3, p.66.)

But, continuing, Bundy explains what avenues for talks he did favour: "The policy of graduated and continuing reprisal outlined... is the most promising course available, in my judgment. That judgment is shared by all who accompanied me from Washington..." (ibid, p.66.) Of course Hanoi was welcome to come begging to the table on American terms.

MacNamara is right to believe that neutral options were never treated with any real merit by the administrations he served (page 62). (NB: One important factor to take into account is that the U.S. policy deciders genuinely thought that America's fight in Vietnam was an extension of the West's containment of the Peoples Republic of China--Sheehan, 255, ibid 342, McNamara, 116-- "William Bundy, then McNamara's deputy, says LBJ was 'carrying on exactly the basic policy that JFK had pursued regarding containment of China.'"--Maclear, p89. This underwrites a general hawkish dismissal of 'third way' options for Saigon.)

But even Freedman's most optimistic projection of Kennedy's options end up being problematic, IMO: "It is possible to imagine JFK facing the same pressures that led to [the bombing campaign in the North]--and by extension the introduction of US ground forces in a combat role--but his approach to this and similar crises suggests that he would have resisted this pressure. This is not to say he was determined to withdraw. This may have been his preference, but as likely he would have persevered with established policy, possibly providing more military and economic support just so long as he could claim that this was still a Vietnamese war." (Freedman, 416/417). If this is meant to imply America could get by merely standing its ground with its lower levels of advisory troops, instead of going the full escalation route, then this is difficult to credit; for, on separate occasions in both 1964 and 1965 Johnson's advisors rejected any plan to create 'fallback' contingencies of the type that even hinted at the possibility U.S. personnel should plan for a fighting retreat out of South Vietnam (Sheehan 323, McNamara192).

It's apparent that escalation was a default position for an American government that remained engaged with Saigon; McNamara points out that briefing papers for Rolling Thunder made no mention of the fact that simply using short range USAF planes to bomb the North would entail sending American ground forces to protect the South Vietnamese airfields from which said planes flew out of. (page 152). It seems those calculated doses of force were a fait accompli for the U.S. finding itself deeper and deeper in war, regardless of whatever restrain the WH wanted to exercise.

At the beginning of this essay I declared I would not engage in any creative speculation. But ultimately I can only reach one conclusion: that the NYT summation of President Johnson's decision to commit to full conventional escalation must be viewed as the leading option that would have befallen President Kennedy, if he had lived and won a second term in the White House. That is to say, after reading of the decision making processes and broad, if ill-defined, objectives of the administration men originally chosen by the slain president, it takes an act of creative speculation for me to even consider how John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have possibly avoided this fate: "President Johnson decided on April 1, 1965, to use American ground troops for offensive action in South Vietnam because the administration had discovered that its long-planned bombing of North Vietnam--which had just begun--was not going to stave off collapse in the South..." (Sheehan, 382.)



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http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/ , The U.S. National Archives

A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Houghton Mifflin, The Riverside Press Boston Cambridge, 1965

Kennedy's Wars--Berlin, Cuba, Laos And Vietnam, Oxford University Press New York, 2002

In Retrospect--The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert S. McNamara, Vintage Books New York, 1996

The Making of a Quagmire--American and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (Revised Edition), David Halberstam, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008

The Pentagon Papers--The Report On The Top Secret Vietnam Study As Published By The New York Times, Bantam Books New York, 1971, Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, et al.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson--The Passage of Power, Robert A. Caro, The Bodley Head London, 2012

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, Michael Maclear, Thames Methuen London, 1981

Fascinating, authoratative, and deeply probing and curious. A joy of an essay to read.

Great job Mag! Also what Veej said.

Thank you two kindly.

And I just realised that V/Bulletin is a really visually ugly format for posting ten-thousand-word posts in, so I praise anyone who's willing to read something this long.

I had no problem with the formating or reading it tbh.

Bookmarking this.

Fascinating stuff, well done Mag.

Well done Mag.

In this section however:

McNamara then cites JFK's handling of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, referring to both events as being examples of the president displaying the wisdom inherent in a man who wanted to avoid repeating history's worst mistakes, a view I'm inclined to support when it comes to the man's refusal to accept recourse to thermonuclear brinksmanship. But imminent global catastrophe was never central to Kennedy's Vietnam dilemma.

"So I conclude that John Kennedy would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in. I express this judgment now because, in light of it, I must explain how and why we--including Lyndon Johnson--who continued in policy-making roles after Kennedy's death made the decisions leading to the eventual deployment to Vietnam of half a million US combat troops. Why did we do what we did, and what lessons can be learned from our action?" (ibid, 97)

("The president did not tell me what he planned to do..." "his thoughts... might have changed" "I think he would ... as I believe he would have"; these qualifications, piled upon qualifications, do not inspire any confidence in this poster. While I think McNamara's book is invaluable history, I must admit that if I refer to this small part of his text as being 'most authoritative', it's not with any faith that what McNamara says about the dead Kennedy's supposed real intentions means anything at all, other than to be both infuriating and contradictory.)

Click to expand...

I wonder if the Bay of Pigs example isn't worth chewing over a bit more since imminent global catastrophe was also never central to the Bay of Pigs dilemma.

I have to concur with those said above. It also puts JFK in a more realistic light than has been frequently given, to put things mildly.

This was incredibly informing. It's even changed my opinion.

V-J said:

I had no problem with the formating or reading it tbh.

Click to expand...

I think it's very much a laptop v. desktop thing.

For what it's worth I've reformatted the page cites.

Chris S said:

I wonder if the Bay of Pigs example isn't worth chewing over a bit more since imminent global catastrophe was also never central to the Bay of Pigs dilemma.

Click to expand...

Good point; I only put the two together because McNamara '95 has them in the same category, but to be honest in that book he's a bit waffly about assessing all non-Vietnam FP subjects from his period as SedDef.

And it's not just this book, it's his general output in the last years of his life. Robert McNamara in old age is... unfocussed on many subjects that aren't the Big Two of Vietnam and the Missiles.

I suppose the next logical question is would Kennedy have operated differently from Johnson post-Rolling Thunder? That's impossible to answer, but is still interesting.

Magniac said:

Good point; I only put the two together because McNamara '95 has them in the same category, but to be honest in that book he's a bit waffly about assessing all non-Vietnam FP subjects from his period as SedDef.

And it's not just this book, it's his general output in the last years of his life. Robert McNamara in old age is... unfocussed on many subjects that aren't the Big Two of Vietnam and the Missiles.

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Well, judging by the essay you wrote, President Kennedy seemed to get more hawkish with the time(relatively speaking), and eventually got backed into a corner, in some ways, in regards to the escalation he faced.

Bay of the Pigs came before he got backed into that corner, and additionally, maybe actually reinforced the viewpoint that brute force solutions won't work out.

But, this is purely speculation on my part, and what I've seen from your essay with his behavior.

hcallega said:

I suppose the next logical question is would Kennedy have operated differently from Johnson post-Rolling Thunder? That's impossible to answer, but is still interesting.

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The literature I cite says the majority of senior national security council and DoD personnel were convinced that introducing regular troops is the necessary step by mid 1965, though McNamara, MacGeorge Bundy and George Ball all proposed having the option of capping troop levels at less than 100,000 (though obviously McNamara and Bundy let that option slip away). And these were all original Kennedy men, natch.

But even then those lot were all counter balanced by the Joint Chiefs and Westmoreland, who wanted a 'go large' policy by that point (even if interestingly Westmoreland had been more in line with the civilians during '64).

Okay, even if one speculates about Kennedy putting Bobby in as SecDef at the beginning of the second term, and rearranging a bunch of other appointments on the NSC and at the subcabinet level in both DoD and State, and, most importantly of all, giving absolute priority to the CIA's more fatalistic analysis about Rolling Thunder (they thought it wouldn't accomplish much) then there's the brickwall situation of "we are NOT going to plan on some sort of Dunkirk evacuation of our 16,000 men from a defeated RVN." That has to be taken for granted as American policy bedrock. No way round that. And no way he sees the extent of this coming in '64.

My guess is a 'mild escalation' by Kennedy involves giving Westmoreland somewhere around half of what he initially wanted (the general wanted 175,000 in the first big build-up), firing him when he complains and replacing him with a more 'optimistic' field commander (is Taylor still okay for that?), not going for comprehensive pacification across so much of the RVN, instead merely plugging one hole at a time with USMC/Air Cav/Airborne, and making Rolling Thunder into a more Operation Linebacker-ish campaign. I think this allows them to hold on for a couple years, though it means a U.S. 'surge' down the line; mid to late 1967? No doubt they label it a 'go long' policy.

The only other options are the full Johnsonian escalation, Dunkirk, or enter negotiations that allow the 1975 endgame to take place sometime shortly after mid-'65. I discount the possibility of either Dunkirk or proto-Ford taking place under President Kennedy.

Forget the specifics of of what we do or don't think about Kennedy the man. No POTUS elected in 1960 is adopting a 'go home' policy for Vietnam in 1965, not if they've got to the point where 'go home' means turnning their back on the largest peacetime combat advisory mission America has ever had.

Killer300 said:

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I don't want to humble-brag, but I'll be upfront--I haven't done any comparable reading about Bay of Pigs as I did about that area of Indochina policy above.

As far as I'm concerned that was Kennedy acting on what he thought was a gentlemen's agreement gone awry, so if anyone wants to challenge my popular historical misreading of Jack v. Allen Dulles I'm happy to stand corrected.