OOC: I'll derail this thread no further after this.
Citation please on the many times he proposed a joint moonshot?
the only time that was said was in a speech to the UN and that was a Consideration, Not a certainty.
I never said it was a certainty. Little in politics is a certainty. But he had at least twice proposed it to Khrushchev and made it enough of an issue that congress had passed a law that would cut the NASA budget if such a thing did occur (which Kennedy and co were challenging and how that may have turned out is anyone's guest). And we've discussed this enough that the search button will give you citations.
And BTW, JFK was going on and on and on about the increased military budgets, like in Ft Worth just before he was shot.
And...? That's Cold war politics. You keep a stern hand, but use it to shake hands with a firm grip more than slap someone.
Kennedy had discussed with his staff and inner circle the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam following the 1964 election should he have won (which he would have). This consequently annoyed LBJ, but he held his tongue. Kennedy, as quoted by McNamara, saw it as a President's prime duty to avoid getting the nation into a war, which is why he did not want to Americanize Vietnam. Similarly, as only a third of the public paid any attention to Vietnam, disengagement would have been easy to come by from a public relations perspective. And keep in mind the minimal forces the United States had in Vietnam at the time, and whose goal was more to the end of training the South Vietnamese to fight their own war than anything else.
This by no means relates to surrender of the South to Communist necessarily, but at least curtailing the US commitment in a way to avoid Americanizing the war. Similarly, rhetoric and the real man are never one and the same, which I believe is a statement you may scoff at, but it is true. Were they, Kennedy would have been enthralled with the possibilities of space (as he was in rhetoric) instead of viewing it as simply a political tool with little care of space because it was so damn expensive. And as one of the more plain and simple facts, nobody wanted another Korea. Kennedy was weary of the United States' South Vietnamese allies, who had proven themselves unreliable time and again, the constant feeling of throwing more wood on a fire which quickly burned up, and feared what we had already seen in Korea would occur again if America wasn't careful.
***
JFK Lives, by Robert Dallek
Published in What Ifs? Of American History
Page 280-283
"...There is evidence on both sides of the [Vietnam] argument. Lyndon Johnson certainly believed that he was following Kennedy's design when he escalated U.S. involvement. He pointed to JFK's introduction of all those advisers and his words about blunting aggression in Vietnam, as well as a declaration in February 1962 by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy:"We are going to win in Vietnam. We will remain there until we do win.: Moreover, Johnson believed that in 1963 when Kennedy signaled off on a Vietnamese generals' plot to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem's government, which had lost popular support and seemed certain to lose the civil war, JFK was committing the United States to a long-term part in preserving South Vietnam's autonomy.
"At the same time, however, there are striking indications that Kennedy wanted to avoid significant additional commitments to Saigon, which could Americanize the war. He feared that growing U.S. involvement could produce irresistible pressure to do more and more. "The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer," he told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another."
"Throughout his thousand days in the White House, Kennedy consistently resisted proposals to have U.S. forces take over the war. In November, 1961, for example, Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy's handpicked successor to General Lyman Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recorded that Kennedy "is instinctively against introduction of U.S. forces." At an NSC meeting that same month, Kennedy "expressed the fear of becoming involved simultaneously on two fronts on the opposite side of the world. He questioned the wisdom of involvement in Vietnam since the basis thereof is not completely clear." Comparing the war in Korea with the conflict in Vietnam, he saw the first a case of clear aggression and the latter as "more obscure and less flagrant." He believed that any unilateral commitment on our part would produce "sharp domestic partisan criticism as well as strong objections from other nations." Between the summer of 1962 and the fall of 1963, Kennedy directed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to chart plans for a systematic withdrawal from Vietnam.
"Nothing openly signaled Kennedy's intentions toward Vietnam more clearly than his dealings with the U.S. press corps in Saigon. Journalists there were highly critical of U.S. policy. They decried the administration efforts to hide the extent of U.S. involvement in the fighting and the White House ineffectiveness in discouraging Diem from repression of Buddhist dissenters and compelling him to fight the Communists more aggressively.
"Kennedy believed that newspaper stories from Saigon criticizing the combined Vietnamese-American war effort made t difficult for him to follow a cautious policy of limited involvement. If people thought that we were halfheartedly fighting a losing cause, it seemed likely to create additional pressure to expand U.S. commitments. Kennedy's political strategy was to keep the war off the front pages of America's newspapers. Press accounts arousing controversy drew more attention to Vietnam than wanted, and an inflamed public debate would make it difficult to hold down commitments and maintain his freedom to withdraw when he saw fit.
"If Kennedy was going to limit U.S. involvement in the conflict, it made eminent good sense to mute public discussion. Indeed, if he believed it more essential to stop a Communist advance in Vietnam than restrict America's part in the fighting, he would have been more open about administration efforts to preserve Saigon's autonomy. As a student of American involvement in World Wars I and II and Korea, he knew that fighting a costly foreign war depended on steady public commitments, which could only follow a national discussion education Americans about the country's vital stake in the conflict. (Lyndon Johnson's failure to encourage a debate that could lead to a consensus provoked domestic opposition and drove him from office.) By trying to obscure America's role in Vietnam, Kennedy was making it more, rather than less, difficult to escalate U.S. involvement. But that is just what he intended; he rejected a large U.S. part in fighting Saigon's war as contrary to the national well-being.
"In an undated, unsigned memo in the president's office files from late summer or fall 1963 (possibly even after November 1), an adimistration official provided "Observations on Vietnam and Cuba." Since the Soviets seemed to feel trapped in Cuba and we in Vietnam, might it not make sense to invite de Gaulle to propose a swap with the Soviets of neutralization of both countries? this official asked. Whether Kennedy ever saw this memo or what reaction he might have had to it is unknown. Nonetheless, it is clear that by November 1963, Kennedy welcomed suggestions for an alternative to a Vietnam policy that had had such limited success. On November 21, as he was leaving for Texas, Kennedy told Mike Forrestal, a senior staff member on the National Security Council and an assistant to the president on Far Eastern affairs, that at the start of 1964 he wanted him "to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we've got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top," Kennedy said.
"It is imaginable that a review of alternatives in Vietnam would have led to a decision to leave the fighting to Saigon after 1964. With only about a third of the U.S. public paying any attention to Vietnam in the spring of that year, Kennedy had the flexibility to reduce U.S. involvement in the struggle without serious domestic political repercussions. As a president who had succeeded in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis and persuaded Moscow to sign a limited test ban treaty, Kennedy's credentials as a foreign policy leader were impressively strong. His standing gave him wherewithal to lead the country away from a war in Vietnam by arguing that such a struggle would be as costly as Korea, where the United States had lost almost thirty thousand lives. Moreover, he could have asserted that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would have limited repercussions.: the Vietnamese Communists were at odds with the Chinese, who were their traditional enemies, and Moscow was less interested in exploiting Communist takeover in Saigon than in better relations with the United States and reduction of Cold War tensions..."
I highly recommend this book, btw. While there are some errors (McKinley did not want to end the war in a ceasefire; he wanted it to continue but the Democratic party forced that as his platform officially -part of the reason he lost is that division between what he wanted and who the Dems wanted him to be, btw-. Similarly, I'd take Thomas Fleming with a few heavy grains of salt), and the sections can get sidetracked by regular history with little discussion of the parallel universes they set about to create (not a sin of all of the sections, but a few), it is a good book.
And if this quote violates anything (I tried to cite as much as possible), I won't make waves about snipping it from my post here.