The OP as I understand it is about how Nixon would have handled Vietnam. Nixon was not Kennedy and less constrained with Eisenhower's foreign-policy mixture of idealism and incompetence as a starting point. Nixon did not rely on fearmongering about a gap that did not exist to make himself legitimate. This gives him much more freedom to maneuver than the son of the political boss had.
Exactly my point, which I've made repeatedly. Even in 1960 the Democrats with a few exceptions were as stridently anti-communist as the Republicans, so even if Nixon is working with the majority Democratic Congress that was elected OTL he is not likely to run into much opposition regarding Cuba. And in the aftermath of a successful Cuba invasion, Congress is even less likely to put up roadblocks.
My father was in college then and my mother was working as a nurse.
Cool. Was this in the 1960s or 1970s? I was entered college in Maine in 1968, had some involvement with the antiwar movement in the Northeast. Ended up in the Air Force, of all things, stationed in the Midwest.
So let's see, Cuba, an island the USA has invaded and occupied more than once and directly tied to the USSR is deliberately invaded and the Castro regime, with direct ties to Moscow deposed? Nice job, you've just guaranteed a Soviet response that will be very unpleasant for the United States. Occupying a Cuba that was not interested in having the USA there would also be relatively unpleasant for our army. No triumph here except in a purely Tacitean sense.
Not the point, especially from an early 1960s viewpoint. As you've already noted, Ike and (presumably) Nixon knew the truth about the missile gap and the USSR's relative weakness. Certainly the Soviets will want payback. That's a prospect I raised in my initial post.
The USA never directly declared war in that scenario, and it never really understood who it was fighting or how to fight them. We had a lot of individual tactical victories that got us nowhere and nothing gained from round-the-clock bombing under LBJ. Nixon is not a Mary Tzu, he will have limits on what he could and could not do, they just aren't the ones Kennedy'd have. A real war in Vietnam would be well over those limits.
Tell that to LBJ in OTL. A war president, especially a successful war president, can get away with an awful lot. As for the innumerable mistakes made in Vietnam, many of them had their tap roots running right into the White House and Foggy Bottom. (And the Pentagon, which didn't realize it was fighting the wrong war for way too long.) It would be interesting to speculate what Vietnam would have been like without Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara setting policy on everything from M-16 bullets to the Saigon leadership.
And Nixon in an alternate 1960-4 term will see much less direct benefit *from* outright intervention in a war in a pissant little country on the far side of the world. It'd be a continued involvement of US advisors for at least four years, *if* he goes in directly it would be in his second as opposed to his first term.
You might be right. Cuba would be enough to keep him busy in the first term. It's another variable in the mix. The real ramp up in American numbers in Vietnam didn't start until 1965 OTL, after LBJ had won an overwhelming victory at the polls in 11/64.
So does Diem survive in a Nixon presidency? He wasn't great, but as someone else has already said, he was the best of a bad lot.