Vietnam with Kennedy...
- Thread starter MacCaulay
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A two or three hour show came on yesterday about this exact same subject on the documentary channel.
The war was always second in LBJ's mind, JFK is way more of a cold warrior than LBJ I see more troops and a bigger war
Two words: NSAM 263, withdrawing 1000 US advisors by the end of 1963. That was issued the week before Dallas, and the plan was a complete withdrawal of advisors. McNamara persuaded JFK that a 1967 exit date was more feasible than a 1965 one.
That's the gist of it, if you look through the various "JFK lives" threads you'll find Norton and I discussing this in depth.
That's the gist of it, if you look through the various "JFK lives" threads you'll find Norton and I discussing this in depth.
JFK was not a cold warrior like LBJ. LBJ may have wanted the war to be secondary to domestic legislation, but his actions and the situation on the ground ensured that wasn't the case and that the war was the center piece of the decade.
LBJ did not support withdrawal, whereas Kennedy did. LBJ did not have the foreign policy knowledge or credentials like Kennedy did. LBJ thought he could bomb from the air, and send in the Marines, and the Vietnamese Communists would go running. That didn't happen.
See:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804#
I heard that Kennedy's decision to withdraw advisors were based on NSA memos that showed the South Vietnamese were doing well and did not need so much support. LBJ's decision to escalate was based on a subsequent NSA memo that basically reversed the first one and said the situation was more dire than previously thought. Therefore, if Kennedy was alive when the second memo was issued, he'd likley react in a similar way to LBJ. I think that was in Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson. I have not read that book in question, but one chapter dealt with Kennedy living.
There is a lot of mythology surrounding the Vietnam War and with Kennedy, so I am leery on a lot of claims. However, I would agree more with Black Angel's assessment than with Emperor Norton I.
There is a lot of mythology surrounding the Vietnam War and with Kennedy, so I am leery on a lot of claims. However, I would agree more with Black Angel's assessment than with Emperor Norton I.
The truth of the matter is we really don't know for certain what his exact aims were, but I like to extrapolate from JFK's and RFK's Cuban adventurism to guess that they wanted to fight a cheap`n'nasty CIA and Special Forces war in SE Asia, possibly with a strategy based around Operation Phoenix type operations. (IIRC the CIA weren't subordinated to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam [MACV] while Kennedy was alive, that comes later.)
I'm tempted to cite what Noam Chomsky (yes) has to say about NSAM 263, as it's a very good takedown of Oliver Stone's/Dick Goodwin's/Ted Sorensen's wishful thinking that JFK was a man of peace who would naturally have avoided LBJ's mistakes.
Yeah, I'm willing to invoke a Leftist polemecist I nomally can't stand.
Sorry Norton, but this is totally not congruent with history as it exists in the real world. In the real world it's kind of reversed--Kennedy is almost a militarist in his values (if not always his policy), while Johnson was the man who was strangely detached from warmaking policy. Of course even that is a simplification, but it's closer to the truth than what you wrote above.
You guys are relying too much on wishful thinking, thinking based on what you believe JFK should have done to avoid America's Shame.
I'm reading Robert Dallek's biography of JFK, and in it he points out that JFK's stated desire to withdraw after his reelection is actually a bad thing, as it involves the president continuing to let American personnel die just so he wouldn't have a Vietnam military withdrawal as a political negative on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, 1964.
For that reason alone it's impossible to take Kennedy at his (reported) word, as he was too much of a pragmatist to box himself into a corner on foreign policy, particularly if it made him look like a cynical political manipulator. Unilateral withdrawal from a non-communist nation isn't something he would commit to in advance.
Of course he was never confronted with the South Vietnamese' military disasters of 1964, but I'm willing to bet he would have addressed that in a manner close to that of Nixon's response to the 1972 NVA offensive. Which would count as a military intervention, one that actually reverses whatever drawdown he may have already overseen.
Discussions like this where we invoke real sources, okay, but fictional scenarios? No, they really don't count for anything when it comes to pointing people in the direction of reliable information.
I'm tempted to cite what Noam Chomsky (yes) has to say about NSAM 263, as it's a very good takedown of Oliver Stone's/Dick Goodwin's/Ted Sorensen's wishful thinking that JFK was a man of peace who would naturally have avoided LBJ's mistakes.
Yeah, I'm willing to invoke a Leftist polemecist I nomally can't stand.
Sorry Norton, but this is totally not congruent with history as it exists in the real world. In the real world it's kind of reversed--Kennedy is almost a militarist in his values (if not always his policy), while Johnson was the man who was strangely detached from warmaking policy. Of course even that is a simplification, but it's closer to the truth than what you wrote above.
You guys are relying too much on wishful thinking, thinking based on what you believe JFK should have done to avoid America's Shame.
I'm reading Robert Dallek's biography of JFK, and in it he points out that JFK's stated desire to withdraw after his reelection is actually a bad thing, as it involves the president continuing to let American personnel die just so he wouldn't have a Vietnam military withdrawal as a political negative on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, 1964.
For that reason alone it's impossible to take Kennedy at his (reported) word, as he was too much of a pragmatist to box himself into a corner on foreign policy, particularly if it made him look like a cynical political manipulator. Unilateral withdrawal from a non-communist nation isn't something he would commit to in advance.
Of course he was never confronted with the South Vietnamese' military disasters of 1964, but I'm willing to bet he would have addressed that in a manner close to that of Nixon's response to the 1972 NVA offensive. Which would count as a military intervention, one that actually reverses whatever drawdown he may have already overseen.
Discussions like this where we invoke real sources, okay, but fictional scenarios? No, they really don't count for anything when it comes to pointing people in the direction of reliable information.
As I recall, the initial one was out of distate with Diem. However, that does not negate the fact that Kennedy wanted withdrawal. He did not like the war. He felt it was some Ike had thrown into his lap, and was another Korean quagmire waiting to happen. As Rogue said, he ask McNamara to draw up a plan for withdrawal by '65, McNamara worked on one for a later date (I thought it was '68, he says '67).
LBJ escalated because he was inexperienced in foreign policy. He hadn't watched the situation for 3 years like JFK had, nor did he have the credentials to understand how to handle it or understand he could wiggle out of it. Vietnam was a non-issue which was proving a pain in the ass, which LBJ exploded into the death of American innocence because he made it a US war.
Watch "Fog of War". It's still on video Google. McNamara talks about this.
Oh dear God, don't bring Chomsky up in a civil discussion. The man is looking for bad in everything so it can support his pessimistic, anarcho-socialist view of reality.
Kennedy was not a militarist. I'm surprised you can read Dallek's biography and still think that (especially as Dallek pretty well says Kennedy was going to disengage). For one, the Bay of Pigs was a bit of a smack to the system. Two, he fought the damned militarists all the time. He and Curtis LeMay were enemies. Three, he hated the Vietnam situation; again, he felt it was something dropped into his lap by the previous administration, and that it could turn into another Korea. Fourth, by '63, he was a pragmatist; this is a man who was working on rapprochement with Castro and Cuba, detente with the Soviets, and -yes- withdrawing advisers from Vietnam and reverting to a policy of aid and supply because Americanizing the war would have been the wrong path, as we saw. And Kennedy was waiting until after 1964 because it would have been a pain in the ass campaign issue the GOP, already running a man who wanted to nuke the Commies, would exploit, and take what was then a non-issue and could explode it into an issue. Kennedy did not want Vietnam to become an issue.
To Kennedy, the Vietnam was was a war the Vietnamese were to fight, and the US could back them, but it was not an American conflict. Johnson wanted to follow that thinking too, but he was naive because he didn't understand the issue, and Americanized the conflict.
Cite. Seriously, cite. Yes, I know LBJ was disengaged and careless with his handling of the Vietnam war, Eliot Cohen in his book about wartime statesmen uses him as a perfect example of a failed wartime leader, but give me a cite from a respectable historian who says Kennedy was absolutely bound to avoid these mistakes because of his natural leadership abilities, and that these abilities had already been demonstrated in his handlng of the Vietnam situation.
Give me serious historians who comes to this conclusion. Seriously, Jack's record on Vietnam ends with him okaying the CIA coup to remove Diem (and some people think it ends with him giving the green light for the Diems' assassination, but that's another matter.) Just how is he the man who had a natural gift for responsible, careful leadership in this dirty little Proxy War?
Yes, he's normally a bad one, but I think he's more realistic on NSAM 263 than RB is. I take it you yourself don't use NSAM 263 as an excuse for everything you say.
Good call. As of course that plan only called for the withdrawal of 1,000 troops out of the total MACV contingent of 16,000. That figure is actually comparable to the kind of troop redeployments Bush did in Iraq before the Petraeus surge, IIRC. It's not exactly declaring victory and going home.
I didn't call him a militarist, I wrote "Kennedy is almost a militarist in his values", and then I said that even that was a simplification. And don't tell me he wasn't obsessed by military badassery like some kind of AH.com n00b going on about TR, because we know for a fact he was.
But I stand by those words compared to your screamer about LBJ being a cold war warrior yet Kennedy not being one at all.
I actually do like Kennedy, I'm deeply influenced by James Carroll's opinion of JFK in his 'House of War' (that JFK was a man who could see no good in continuing the Cold War methods of ultra-confrontation as per the Eisenhower admin), I'm deeply influenced by the popular accounts of the missile crisis. What I'm not influenced by is the revisionism of the leftliberal Camelot hagiographers like Goodwin and Sorenson et al, people who have an irrational belief in his abilities to miraculously use their late sixties hindsight in order to avoid an escalation in Vietnam in Alternate Timeline 1964.
That's wank, nothing but wank.
Oh, he implies it, but he doesn't actually come to that conclusion in as many words. Why? Because whatever JFK fanboy he might be he's tempered by the fact the historical record is very murky on this. But more on Dallek below.
I agree with this. This is why I believe he would have intervened (escalated) into Vietnam during 1964, when the post-Diem situation was deteriorating beyond what anyone had feared might happen.
This intervention would have involved the same airstrikes as LBJ launched, IMO. And I contend that in the new year the whole NSC establishment would've started moving towards calling for (more) boots on the ground, to one extent or another.
Wait, you accuse me of misreading Robert Dallek, yet apparently you haven't read Dallek's condemnation of the supposed withdrawal-after-reelection plan: "However calculating Kennedy was about politics... it is hard to credit his willingness to let boys die in Vietnam for the sake of his reelection."
Though I'm sure you would like this following sentence:
"What seems more plausible is that Kennedy never forgot that politics and policy making were the art of the possible. He had no intention of being drawn into an expansion of American groundforces in Vietnam and the possibility of an openended war."
But don't get too excited, Norton, as Dallek then inadvertently qualifies that disclaimer about St Jack not wanting to get in too deep in Vietnam by pointing out that JFK was involved in the planning for the coup to remove the Diem brothers.
Complicated, no? This account actually reinforces my view that Kennedy wanted to fight a black ops war in Vietnam. How does such a war entail withdrawing from Vietnam entirely? How does it remove the possibility that Kennedy may have decided on an escalation of regular forces if the situation demanded it, such as when it's demonstrated by 1965 that bombing won't stop the NVA getting substantial forces into the South?
You know JFK's declaration to Cronkite isn't prima facie evidence he would have avoided any new intervention into Vietnam, right? It's politics. And cleverly worded politics at that--it doesn't presage any withdrawal at all.
To quote Dalek again (this time him quoting William Rust's "Kennedy In Vietnam"): "On November 21, the day he was leaving for Texas, Kennedy told [a senior state department official] that at the start of 1964 he wanted him 'to organise an indepth 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 the top.'"
So, basically, you Kennedy fans have based your whole argument on the fact that; Jack said things in private to Mike Mansfield etc which Mansfield etc later made public after the war became unpopular; Kennedy wanted open-ended contingency plans drawn up, the kind of planning every POTUS relies on; and that he did plan to withdraw a small number of troops, but nowhere near enough to abolish the role of MACV or the US ambassador as a driving force in South Vietnam's warmaking policies.
Yet, reality shows that the Best and The Brightest, the men like McGeorge Bundy, the men who did get America to escalate into Vietnam, these were the men Kennedy was still to rely on when constantly revising his policy. These were the men JFK was relying on when he'd previously said America was in for the long haul when it came to supporting the Saigon regime. I find it very hard to believe that JFK can go against his entire NSC establishment when it comes to responding to the ARVN military disasters in 1964, the very year he supposedly was planning to minimise any conservative electoral backlash over his SE Asia anti-communist policy.
One of my favourite facts about Australia's misguided involvement in the Vietnam War is that the two politicians who would later become the staunchest opponents of the war are the two MPs who lead the Labor Opposition's parliamentary support for the original motion in favour of the US bombing campaign after the Gulf of Tonkin. Likewise, there's the fact that US liberals like Hubert Humphery and Paul Douglas supported the escalation to the hilt (Douglas ended up as a real deadender supporter of the war.) Yet somehow we're to believe that JFK had the amazing foresight to avoid any further involvement in the war, and that he would have somehow pulled off an amazing act of political and strategic jiu jitsu in fighting the war through the very conditions that IOTL led to Tonkin and then getting out once he was comfortably reelected.
That is just too much to believe.
Now I'm by no means an expert on Kennedy as others here seem to be, but my default position would be to think that Kennedy would not escalate in Vietnam. Simply put, the escalation was stupid--why fight a major ground war when the CIA and mercenaries can be sent in? It's not that I think JFK was some kind of genius statesmen that would have avoided Vietnam with foresight, it's more that LBJ was so naive and inexperienced in foreign policy that he thought the communist would be sent running at the sight of American power. Based on Kennedy's previous Cold War examples of using the CIA, it seems to me that this style would continue. I know far more about LBJ than I do JFK, though, but what I've learned has given me the impression that it was LBJ's mistakes that got the USA involved in Vietnam. Ultimately, I feel like people are saying the JFK would escalate in Vietnam because that's what LBJ did, and that just doesn't fly with me.
They think JFK would escalate in Vietnam after it's shown how incompetent the CIA are.
I don't think that Kennedy would have pulled out and be blamed for the one who lost Vietnam. As others have stated the decision to pull out adviser's were made prior to the election and may have been more political wishful thinking then reality. If Kennedy was there later he probably would have poured more resources in and not have been so antsy about the USSR's reaction to bombing Hanoi and the Red river dams . After his weak support of the Bay of Pigs and the Russian's response in the Cuban Missile crisis I don't think he would go soft on Vietnam and risking the possible Russian view as it being another sign of weakness.
It is hard to be sure. Some of what John Kennedy did suggests he was becoming less of a Cold War Warrior.
He did refuse military advice over Cuba, and thus probably avoided WW3.
I kind of wonder whether the fact that he was an authentic war hero made it easier for him to do such things
If he had not given extra backing to the South Vietnamese regime how much damage would the 'loss' of South Vietnam done to the Democrats in the late 60s
He did refuse military advice over Cuba, and thus probably avoided WW3.
I kind of wonder whether the fact that he was an authentic war hero made it easier for him to do such things
If he had not given extra backing to the South Vietnamese regime how much damage would the 'loss' of South Vietnam done to the Democrats in the late 60s
It would be a nasty blow all things considered, since "Truman Lost China" was still relatively fresh in public memory. The Republican would have a very easy time portraying the Democrats as being weak on Communism, which could hurt them badly at this point in the Cold War.As often happens with AH, people tend to apply too much hindsight when dealing with Vietnam-related AH. In 1964, the American public wouldn't see Vietnam as a horrible unwinnable quagmire; it would see Kennedy backing down in the face of Communist aggression.
It's also worth noting that this could hurt Kennedy's otherwise strong foreign policy record. Early blunders like the Bay of Pigs had mostly been forgotten after Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that he could stand down the USSR. Have him lose Vietnam, and his handling of the Missile Crisis looks less like him coming into his own on foreign policy, and more like a one-off fluke amid a series of failures.
Problem is, the 1964 election would inevitably be dominated by two topics; the Cold War, and Civil Rights. Kennedy's never going to have a strong Civil Rights record; he's far too much of a pragmatist to push Civil Rights to the point of severely alienating the Dixiecrats and losing the South (which will cost him progressive votes), yet too personally favorable to Civil Rights to win over the racists. He needs a successful foreign policy record to trumpet in his re-election campaign; having another big failure, especially one that couldn't be excused as an early-Presidency blunder like the Vienna Summit or the Bay of Pigs, would undermine his re-election chances badly.
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