As for Vietnam, what Kennedy would have done after November of 1963 now seems increasingly clear, thanks not only to the testimony of his former aides but also to a growing documentary public record. Here, too, his wariness of his military chiefs' advice had begun to shape his outlook.
Most of his advisers in the Pentagon wanted to increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam's civil war. But Kennedy would have preferred a settlement like the one he had reached in Laos, whereby Moscow and Washington agreed to restrain the factions battling for control of the country. With Hanoi and Saigon unwilling to reach a truce, U.S. fears of losing South Vietnam to communism forced Kennedy to escalate America's economic and military commitments—providing Ngo Dinh Diem's regime with more money, equipment, and advisers to fight the Vietcong. Still, any suggestion that the conflict should become a war fought principally by U.S. troops was directly at odds with Kennedy's convictions about America's self-interest.
Admittedly, Kennedy wanted a military tool with which to combat communist insurgencies in Asia and Latin America. The creation of the Green Berets, in 1961, to meet the communist threat in Vietnam and elsewhere, was an indication of how determined he was to use limited force in the contest with Moscow for Third World client states. It is true, too, that the Kennedy Administration repeatedly announced America's determination to preserve South Vietnam's independence. In February of 1962 Robert Kennedy declared, "We are going to win in Vietnam. We will remain here until we do win." And JFK was willing to subsidize the expansion of the South Vietnamese military and to have more than 16,000 members of the U.S. military advising and directing Vietnamese combat operations—a project that would cost some American lives. Moreover, in August of 1963 Kennedy reluctantly signed off on a plot to have Vietnamese generals overthrow Diem's government, which had lost popular support and seemed certain to lose the civil war. But although all this risked greater U.S. responsibility for the fate of South Vietnam, Kennedy did not see it as leading—and certainly did not want it to lead—to the Americanization of the war. Indeed, his support for a coup rested on the hope that it would help South Vietnam to defeat the Vietcong and would greatly reduce the need for ongoing military support. And public statements like RFK's were more a device for bolstering Saigon's morale and intimidating the communists than a reliable expression of intentions—as the President's actions in Vietnam, especially in 1963, would show.
Kennedy had seen the Boer War, the Russo-Finnish conflict, and the Korean War as cautionary tales against getting bogged down in Cuba; now he perceived that the lessons of those wars applied even more strongly in Vietnam, a less familiar, more distant land with political crosscurrents even more formidable than those presented by Havana. He feared that U.S. involvement would 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, "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 tenure in the White House, Kennedy consistently resisted proposals to have U.S. forces take over the war. In November of 1961 Maxwell Taylor, a Kennedy military confidant, reported at a meeting of Administration and military officials that Kennedy was "instinctively against introduction of U.S. forces." According to notes taken at a meeting of the National Security Council that same month, Kennedy "expressed the fear of becoming involved simultaneously on two fronts on opposite sides of the world," and "questioned the wisdom of involvement in Viet Nam since the basis thereof is not completely clear." JFK thought that whereas in Korea the United States had responded to a case of clear aggression, the conflict in Vietnam was, according to the NSC notes, "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 ... [and] could even make leading Democrats wary of proposed activities in the Far East."
From the summer of 1962 to the fall of 1963 Kennedy directed Robert McNamara to chart plans for a systematic withdrawal from Vietnam by 1965. Possibly as a concession to his own reluctance to abandon South Vietnam before its survival was assured, McNamara drew up a five-year schedule for the reduction of U.S. forces. He did not anticipate a full departure until 1968, when he expected to remove the last 1,500 advisers and reduce military aid to $40.8 million—less than a quarter of the sum spent in 1962.
Further evidence of Kennedy's intentions toward Vietnam comes in a backhanded but telling way from his dealings with the U.S. press corps in Saigon. The conventional wisdom is that Kennedy tried to censor news stories from Vietnam for fear that they would turn American public opinion against the war effort. And the press was indeed critical of the Administration's determination to hide the extent of U.S. involvement and its inability either to discourage Diem from repressing Buddhist dissenters or to compel him to fight the North Vietnamese aggressively. But the real reason Kennedy was intent on repressing these negative reports was not to prevent the spread of anti-war sentiment but, rather, to avert demands for escalation.
According to poll data from the period, few Americans were following the situation in Vietnam. By 1962 Kennedy had decided that to sustain what he believed was the proper level of commitment in the region—enough to keep South Vietnam afloat without any involvement of U.S. troops or direct military action—he needed to keep public attention to a minimum. He recognized that public debate might arouse the political left to call for total withdrawal. But the greater danger, he seemed to believe, was that people would think America was fighting too halfheartedly: press accounts that called attention to the U.S. military's limited advisory role might lead evangelical anti-communists on the political right to demand that involvement be increased.
In April of 1962 Averell Harriman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, directed the U.S. embassy in Saigon to lower America's profile in the conflict as much as possible. The press had begun describing the struggle as more an American than a Vietnamese war. The names of combat operations, such as "Sunrise" and "Farmgate," suggested U.S. planning, and American advisers were making themselves too conspicuous. Reports that a large group of U.S. colonels and civilians had inspected a stockade in Operation Sunrise were a case in point. "Why do large groups of Americans inspect anything?" Harriman asked in a memo. Moreover, U.S. officers were talking too freely about their role in planning operations. "It cannot be overstressed," Harriman declared, "that the conduct and utterances public and private of all U.S. personnel must reflect the basic policy of this government that we are in full support of Viet-Nam but we do not assume responsibility for Viet-Nam's war with the Viet Cong."
In September of 1963 Kennedy was still trying to avert widespread public discussion of America's role in the conflict. He instructed the State Department's public-affairs officer, Robert Manning, to avoid press interviews and television appearances on the subject. When Manning reported in a memo to Kennedy that Roger Hilsman, the director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence, had been turning down calls from the press and TV stations, the President agreed that was wise.
In October, Kennedy asked Arthur Sulzberger, the newly appointed publisher of The New York Times, to remove the reporter David Halberstam from Saigon, where Halberstam was writing irrefutable accounts of U.S.-South Vietnamese failings in the war and implying that greater American involvement was necessary. (Halberstam, although he would later turn against the war, took the same position in his 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire.) Sulzberger refused.
Had Kennedy believed that it was more essential to stop a communist advance in Vietnam than to restrict America's part in the fighting, he surely would have touted the Administration's efforts to preserve Saigon's autonomy—and would have been more supportive of Halberstam and other reporters in their efforts to make the case for more-effective U.S. involvement. As a student of America's role in World Wars I and II and Korea, Kennedy knew that fighting a costly foreign war depended on steady public commitment, which could come only after convincing Americans of the country's vital stake in the conflict. The converse, as he saw it, given the political context, was that obscuring America's role and muting public discussion would help him to preserve the flexibility to reduce U.S. involvement or maintain it at the same level. (This is what Lyndon Johnson failed to understand. He, too, suppressed information about what the United States was doing in Indochina, but he did so in the mistaken belief that it would make it easier for him to intensify U.S. involvement. His effort to pursue this course without adequate public support ultimately doomed his presidency.)
After the November 1963 coup in Saigon that took Diem's life, Kennedy regretted encouraging an action that, he now believed, would deepen rather than reduce U.S. participation in Vietnamese affairs. In a tape recording made in the Oval Office on November 4, he said, "I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged [Ambassador Henry Cabot] Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined ... The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether ... public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, et cetera, will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future." More than ever, Kennedy seemed to feel that U.S. involvement in so unstable a country was a poor idea.
In an undated, unsigned memo in the President's office files from the late summer or fall of 1963 (possibly even after November 1), an Administration official provided "Observations on Vietnam and Cuba." Since the Soviets seemed to feel trapped in Cuba and we in Vietnam, this official asked, might it not make sense to invite Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, who maintained calculated relations with both Cold War superpowers, to propose a swap with the Soviets? (In other words, in exchange for the Soviets' leaving Cuba, the Americans would leave Vietnam.) Whether Kennedy ever saw this memo, or what reaction he might have had to it, is unknown. Nonetheless, it is clear that by November of 1963 Kennedy welcomed suggestions for an alternative to a Vietnam policy that had had limited success. On November 20, the day before he left on his fateful trip to Texas, Kennedy told Michael 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." He said, "We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top."
If Kennedy was opposed to a substantially larger U.S. role in the war, why did LBJ believe that he was simply following JFK's lead by escalating U.S. involvement? He believed it because Kennedy had significantly increased U.S. commitments during his presidency, and because three of Kennedy's principal foreign-policy advisers, Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, departing from what Kennedy's final posture had been, told Johnson that expanded involvement would have been JFK's choice. More important, Johnson enlarged the U.S. role because he could not walk away from the conflict as Kennedy could have done, given enough time. By November of 1963 recent events had eclipsed memories of Kennedy's stumbling efforts at the Bay of Pigs and in Vienna. In fact, his record of success in the missile crisis and in the negotiation of a test-ban treaty with Moscow in the summer of 1963—a process he cut his military advisers out of—gave him considerable personal standing as a foreign-policy leader. Pulling back from Vietnam would not have undermined international or domestic confidence in Kennedy's direction of foreign affairs, especially given that poll data from as late as April of 1964 showed only 37 percent of the American public paying any attention to developments in Vietnam. Even in the spring and summer of 1965, after Johnson had begun a systematic bombing campaign and had dispatched 100,000 soldiers to the region, few Americans expected to see a victory in South Vietnam. In April of that year 45 percent of Americans polled predicted that a neutral or pro-communist government would take control of Saigon within the next five years; only 22 percent believed that Saigon would remain on Washington's side. By August most Americans assumed that the war would end with a compromise or, like the Korean War, with a negotiated settlement. In short, if a second-term Kennedy Administration had withdrawn U.S. fighting forces from Vietnam in 1965, few Americans would have felt that the United States had forfeited a chance at victory.
Johnson, in contrast, had few credentials as a world statesman and did not think he could deal effectively with communist adversaries abroad or conservative critics at home if he retreated from a Cold War challenge in Vietnam. When his need to demonstrate his foreign-policy toughness was coupled with his sincere belief in a war he saw as essential to containing communism, the result was a foreign-policy disaster.