It’s central to the conspiracy theory in the movie JFK. Which as a film, is excellent, but as history, is garbage. If it were presented as fiction, I could like it.
There would still be homophobia, but at least the homophobes would be buffoons instead of heroes.
No.
The USA had neither the military wherewithal nor political will, no matter who the President was, to adopt a substantially different approach. The people of Vietnam simply had no appetite to be a colony of the USA or anyone else.
It’s possible that a VERY different strategy might have prolonged the existence of South Vietnam, but I don’t believe it would have saved it. Ultimately Vietnamese reunification was going to happen, and the harder the USA bombed them the likelier it was that reunification was going to be led from Hanoi, not Saigon.
In any event, JFK’s approach wouldn’t have been that different.
I suspect forceful reunification by US force of arms would have worked as well as it had in Korea 15 years earlier.
I don’t think so. I’m not an expert on Vietnam, but from what I’ve read, the United States didn’t really understand the situation on the ground. We just wanted to stop Communism, but a lot of Vietnamese people were pissed at prime minister Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnman, a devout Catholic, who had a tendency to spend the country’s money on Catholic institutions and oppress the Buddhist majority. He also limited the amount of land a rice farmer could own, pissing off many of his supporters who owned large rice farms. Most of this was happening prior to the United States ramping up their involvement in Vietnam. A lot of us tend to think of the situation in Vietnam as being between the north and south sides of the country acting as proxies for the United States and the USSR, but it was a much bigger mess than than.
By 1963, the Department of State was interested in a regime change but the Department of Defense favored keeping Diệm. So even the United States didn’t really have a unified vision of what to do in Vietnam. Diệm would eventually be assassinated in 1963 with the tacit approval of the United States. A lot of people didn’t like Diệm, but nobody thought he was a puppet of the United States. That wouldn’t be the case for new South Vietnamese leaders.
In a nutshell, no, I don’t think Kennedy would have meant victory for the United States in Vietnam. By the time U.S. forces got a handle on what to do and started seeing some success, it was too late. The war was unpopular and the US was looking for an exit. Kennedy wouldn’t have given the United States victory.
There is no reason to think so and plenty of reasons not to. What JFK was doing wasn’t working, as JFK continued escalating US involvement the position of the South Vietnamese government was continuing to get weaker. The Battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 was a display of the failure of the massive US advisory mission to South Vietnam to make the ARVN an effective fighting force; the VC took on the ARVN in open combat and won:
The South Vietnamese units participating in the battle took heavy losses in their failed attempt to destroy the VC forces. South Vietnamese casualties included 83 killed in action and at least 100 wounded.[1] The American participants, who included advisors and aircrews, counted three dead and eight wounded. Of the 15 American helicopters sent to support the operation, only one escaped undamaged, and five were downed or destroyed.[1]
For the VC, the Battle of Ap Bac marked the first time they stood and fought a large South Vietnamese formation—despite being outnumbered by more than five to one. Against overwhelming odds, the VC had achieved their first de facto victory; they had successfully held off well-equipped ARVN forces supported by artillery and armored units as well as by American airpower. VC casualties were limited to 18 soldiers killed and 39 wounded, even though their positions had been hit by more than 600 rounds of artillery, napalm, and other ordnance released by 13 warplanes and five UH-1 gunships.[1]
Ap Bac had far-reaching consequences for the South Vietnamese government and the American involvement in Vietnam. The battle was a milestone for the VC. For individual VC soldiers, the battle demonstrated they could defeat nominally superior ARVN forces, well equipped as they were with up-to-date military hardware and significant support and funding from the United States.[61] Militarily, the morale and confidence of VC commanders and soldiers, who had experienced serious setbacks in the previous year, were greatly boosted. Politically, the VC 261st and 514th Battalions were able to exploit the prestige gained from having inflicted disproportionate losses on the ARVN forces to exercise greater influence in their areas of operations.
Note also the involvement and casualties taken by US advisors in the combat, and the delusional belief on the behalf of MACV that things had gone well:
General Paul D. Harkins, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), made a much more optimistic assessment of the battle. He considered the operation a major success; after the VC abandoned their positions, the South Vietnamese units captured the hamlets of Ap Bac and Ap Tan Thoi. Harkins’ evaluation of the battle’s success was based on US military doctrine from World War II, in which opposing forces fought a conventional combined arms battle with the objective, on each side, of gaining control of the opponent’s territory.[59] The VC, however, was more interested in exposing the weaknesses of Diem’s regime and its military. Moyar (2008) argues that Harkins’ resolutely optimistic assessments based on conventional doctrine avoided recognizing shortcomings in tactics and battle readiness and in the arrangement under which ARVN commanders and their American counterparts and advisers were operating. Largely because of his attitude, neither the South Vietnamese nor the American commands learned useful lessons from the battle.
From here to Johnson’s decision to commit US ground forces first to defend airbases in South Vietnam and then to a massive infusion of US ground troops to directly fight the war was a pretty straight line of the ARVN’s position deteriorating and that of the VC improving despite everything JFK was doing. Johnson made the decision to commit US combat formation to offensive action against the VC because it was clear that without such an intervention it was only a matter of time before the South Vietnamese government would fall.
Excellent post! Very informative.
I’ll just note, in support, that the “architect” of that war, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, began under Kennedy. Johnson kept him on for continuity, but we would expect that his views and advice regarding the war - which were woefully misguided, as he later acknowledged - would have been the same if delivered to JFK instead.
While I don’t have that much knowledge of the matter, all that I’ve read from historians agrees with the sentiment that JFK would not have withdrawn.
What I interested in is the origin of the idea that he’d have withdrawn troops (or not escalated, but especially withdrawn). Where did it begin? When did it become widespread? Who spread it - was a true believer or a foreign operation to further the conspiracy on who killed him or just made up to sell books? Does anyone know?
Because nowadays, I see the belief casually stated even sans conspiracy theory (just as something that makes his death more tragic)…
I also agree that JFK would not have withdrawn from Vietnam. In his last interview her was all over the place on the subject. This thread reminds me of a post in another thread, from 12 years ago, on a detail I missed in The March of Folly
That reminds me of people I know who go to the doctor and don’t like the diagnosis, so the get a second opinion. The second doctor agrees with the first, so they get a third-- the third doctor agrees with the first two. They continue this-- and also move on to quackier, and quackier doctors, until they finally find someone who was stripped of his credentials in his own country, or uses a title he made up-- “Doctor of Self-healing through Wholeness,” or something, who didn’t even finish college, and that guy finally tells the patient something he wants to hear.
Johnson was following JFK’s plan in Vietnam, and doing it with JFK’s advisors, and a country that wanted him to keep doing the things JFK did.
So if he lived, and if he was re-elected, which he probably would have, then as a lame duck maybe he would have done all sorts of things differently. But it makes more sense that he would maintain policies that people like, and fighting the Commies where ever the hell Vietnam was, indeed was one of those popular policies in 1964. For the next 4 years in office JFK would have been working to get his successor in office, either his brother or his VP. Changing course in Vietnam was not going to help with that effort.
I think it is also useful to consider that US policy was not just “anti-communist” in some war of ideologies. It was also neocolonial, that is, the US economic and political policymakers wanted access and no competition from other blocs or superpowers. It was not just about stopping communism, but expanding US hegemony. That makes it hard to “declare victory and leave,” because some folks actually want what’s there.
It’s also not so clear how popular the war was in 1964. It was never popular among working class families, though a sort of nationalist spirit may have been a thing. “Opinion leaders” were more likely to support the actual war, even in its early days.
Yeah, it’s difficult to pin down because there is rarely any consistency with JFK assassination theories. I’ve definitely heard/seen that one “JFK was going to pull troops out”. Also the XO 100011 blah blah whatever it was, something something about printing treasury notes versus federal reserve notes. Lizard people, aliens, Joos, CIA, FBI, Kennedy was caught in a hail of crossfire from 73 different directions.
I’ve been hearing it for years, sometimes with conspiracy theories, sometimes without.
I think it comes down to Kennedy’s status as a martyr. A martyr for what? Exactly! The circumstances of his death lend themselves to an epic tragedy in the modern sense (of being something very sad). As a result, much of the popular history about him is viewed through that lens.
So even though he was fairly milquetoast on civil rights… in retrospect he must have been a great champion of civil rights. Even though his chief accomplishment in foreign affairs was the equivalent of a quarterback recovering his own fumble for a loss of only a couple yards… he must have been a brilliant statesman. Even though US involvement in Vietnam escalated throughout his term… he must have been a peacemaker at heart.
His supporters like to imagine that he (and they themselves) would have done all of the good things and none of the bad, if only he’d have had five and a half more years in office, and his detractors, for the most part, had either the shame or the political savvy to realize they might as well let them have their martyr. After all, dead men can’t run for office, so what’s to fear?
Our collective memory of him is that he was whatever we wanted him to be. A projection.
Are you sure?
Sure, we could have won the war. Bombed Hanoi to the ground, sent over twice as many troops, etc. But that was politically dangerous.
Win here would mean South Vietnam continues being independent.
Do you not understand how a military chain of command works? Do you not know what MACV was? Do you imagine 16,000 members of the US military all decided to go and attach themselves to ARVN military formations without orders from the US chain of command? Do you imagine that that is an activity that the chain of command of the United States or any other military in the world ever allowed its soldiers to do?
No, it wouldn’t have been “politically dangerous”, it’s a Rambo fantasy with no basis in reality.
Probably not. The only realistic way that North Vietnam was going to stop fighting was if American troops invaded, occupied, and pacified North Vietnam. China wouldn’t have accepted an American military presence like that on its border, so this would have led to a direct war between China and the United States. American policy makers didn’t feel (correctly in my opinion) that Vietnam was worth a war that size.
Just to reinforce your well-made point, I’d add two things. One is that this time, unlike Korea in 1950-53 China had the bomb. I for one wouldn’t want to take that scenario out for a test drive to see if neither side used nukes in a conflict which historically involved US forces in direct ground combat from 1965-72. The second thing is that a direct US invasion of North Vietnam wasn’t just going to lead to a hypothetical Chinese direct involvement in the war because they would not accept an American military presence on its border. China already had troops in North Vietnam; 320,000 rotated through with a peak of 170,000.
China in the Vietnam War - Wikipedia
To counter these U.S. overwhelming airstrikes, Ho requested Chinese Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) units in a meeting with Mao in May 1965. In response, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces began flowing into North Vietnam in July 1965 to help defend Hanoi and its major transportation systems.[7]: 217 The total number of Chinese troops in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968 amounted to over 320,000.[1]: 135 “The peak year was 1967 when 170,000 Chinese soldiers were present.”
Continues from when? South Vietnam was never much of a country. The people of Vietnam overwhelmingly disapproved of the government it’s corrupt government. That’s why the war was unwinnable.
Who said anything at all about “Chain of Command”? The Army simply asks men, many in special units like the Green beret,s to volunteer for that conflict.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1804&context=parameters
The article concludes that a military victory was possible, but not a political one. Which is what I said.