Long before JFK committed US troops to Vietnam, the Kennedy men had burnished their reputations as diehard anti-Communists, a predilection that later guided JFK’s hand in appointing national security advisers who bought, lock and stock, Kennan’s hard-edged policy of containment. But was Kennedy’s hand forced on Vietnam?
Questions:
How instrumental was the Bay of Pigs fiasco (and the subsequent backlash of conservative outrage) in shaping JFK’s decision to intervene in Vietnam? In short, did JFK–a man who had witnessed the “red scare” and “soft on Communism” cries of the 1950s–feel politically compelled to shore up his tarnished anti-communist credentials by sending troops to Vietnam?
Had JFK become an overnight dove in early 1962, could he have likely recalled the US military advisers AND politically weathered a probable withering GOP outcry alleging cowardice and appeasement?
Many historians have harshly judged Kennedy for committing US troops but, upon reflection, wasn’t Vietnam really a case of JFK being damned if he did, damned if he didn’t? Aren’t US conservatives of that era for more culpable for our disastrous involvement?
What makes this a hard judgement to make is the high probability that JFK paid only scant attention to Viet Nam, as did most of us. Laos was a bigger deal at that point, the trouble in Viet Nam hadn’t really gotten “hot”, outside of the routine violence. At this point in time, American interference (and subversion, where required) in foreign governments was largely routine, and found wide support amongst Americans. In his daily briefings, Kennedy most likely heard words like “Nicaragua” or “El Salvador” far more often that “Laos” or “Viet Nam”.
We should not have supported the Catholic elite of Viet Nam against the Buddhist minority. But American foreign policy was the arena of hard nosed realists, not dewey eyed humanists such as you and I. In that context, Viet Nam was a middling nasty autocracy, worse, maybe, than the Phillipines, not so bad as S. Korea.
I would be surprised if more than 1% of JFK’s time was spent on Viet Nam.
Kennedy was eager to get involved in Vietnam; he was looking for any excuse to send in troops. He and Bobby discussed ways to do this, in one meeting he said “we have to make our power credible…and vietnam looks like the place”.This gives the lie to the idea that Kennedy opposed the war-on the contrary, he was looking for any excuse to get involved!
which looks at Kennedy’s use of rhetoric in his speeches about Vietnam. After looking at the balance between idealism and pragmatism in his use of rhetoric, it argues that Kennedy, by making our involvement in Vietnam a moral imperative, committed us to involvement.
More generally, to answer the OP, while the Bay of Pigs fiasco undoubtedly had an effect on Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam, remember that Kennedy was a pretty committed anti-communist in his own right. When he was in the House, he was one of the voices blaming the Truman administration for “losing” China, he supported a millitary buildup and expanded troops in Europe, he advocated bringing Franco’s Spain into an anti-Communist coalition, he introduced a bill to put sanctions on Communist China.
His record in the Senate was also consistant, calling for millitary build up and commitment to resist Communism.
I can’t speak to the influence that the Bay of Pigs had on his decision-making. However, the CIA had established a “military mission” in Vietnam and Eisenhower had pledged military support for South Vietnam six or seven years before Kennedy became President.
Kennedy was an unusually popular President and could have endured a lot. But the early 1960’s were not as war weary as we are today. And we hadn’t had the experience of losing a war. We really believed in the domino theory. What reason would JFK have had for bringing that small contingent of troops and military advisors home?
Yet, I think he would have if he had lived to be re-elected. That’s because he listened to people and he was a clever man surrounded by intelligent people.
I’m a liberal and would love to put all the blame elsewhere. But all are punished, kiddo. Eisenhower sent men in. At the time of Kennedy’s death there were approximately 16,000 troops in Vietnam. **Compare that with Johnson’s high in 1968: 536,000. ** Then Dick Nixon cut back only a little and started bombing North Vietnam and screwing Cambodia.
Remember, too, that, first, we were obligated by treaty to defend South Vietnam. Also, popular opinion was for our involvement in Vietnam.
So, I think that if Kennedy had gone “dove” in '62 or '63, it would have been unpopular, and not just with Republicans. It would have been seen as a betrayal of a US ally and a surrender of South Vietnam to Communist dictatorship.
We now know that far from being the picture of health, JFK was a VERY sickly man. he was taking hige doeses of steroids (to counteract his Addisons disease symptoms), and in addition, he had his own personal “Dr. Feelgood”-who supplied him with injections of methamphetamines 9and other stimulants). He was also addicted to sex-he carried on regualr affairs with two Whitehouse secretaries/whores (“Fiddle and Faddle”)-I have read of one account where he had sexual intercourse while in the Whitehouse swimming pool. In any event, I see Kennedy’s behaviour (esp. after the Bay of Pigs disaster)as increasingly erratic-does anybody know more about his mental state?
I think his decision to go to dalls was very rash-he was advised by many people not to go.
He was unusually popular only in retrospect. When he looked at his own polls he saw that he was about as popular as his predecessors Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Johnson, too, carried a roughly equivalent approval rating through much of his presidency, and it is universally acknowledged that the Vietnam issue did him in in 1968.
So I don’t know that he could have endured as much as you think.
While it’s off topic, no, I don’t think his decision to go to Dallas was irrational. Dallas had a bunch of big political donors, and he needed to start raising money for the reelection. Plus, Kennedy had only won Texas in 1960 by 45,000 votes, and the Texas Democrats were divided between the liberal and conservative wings. He had to broker some sort of a truce between the two factions and restore party discipline if he had any chance at winning Texas in '64.
And while having affairs and committing adultery isn’t a nice thing to do, and is probably immoral, I don’t think it’s a sign of irrationality.
So they weren’t obligated at all then. They chose to interfere in a Civil War having created South Vietnam out of whole cloth and not abiding by the Geneva Accords.
True – but he had promised to do it in 1968, and in 1974 settled on the same terms he would have gotten then. So he was responsible for six more years of needless destruction and needlessly wasted lives.
Well, the French created South Vietnam, and by that point, nobody was abiding by the Geneva Accords (to which nether South Vietnam or the US were signatories). But yea, that’s a topic for another thread.
But, regardless of what the US’s actual obligations may have been, the Kennedy administration felt that the US had an obligation.
Have historians been that hostile to JFK because of our subsequent debacle in Vietnam? I think the key point is here . . .
. . . and I think most histories of the period recognize that fact.
I don’t think that Kennedy’s commitment of a few thousand military advisors to South Vietnam was necessarily wrong. It’s easy to smirk after the fact, now that Communism is buried in the ash heap of history. It’s also true that the Diem government wasn’t a horse on which one wanted to bet a lot of money.
But it’s equally true that Communism was an aggressive and expansionist ideology at the time, well funded and implacably opposed to the United States, and we didn’t have a lot of options in picking our allies. If we had limited ourselves to pluralist democracies, we would have been limited to western Europe, the former British dominions, and Japan, all of which were either recently defeated or exhausted by warfare. We played the hand we were dealt.
The mistake in Vietnam wasn’t in trying to prop up a faltering regime, it was in committing half a million American ground troops and having them fight a style of warfare that was completely inappropriate for the job at hand. And the blame for that excessive and catastrophic level of commitment is rightly placed with Johnson, not Kennedy.
