Everyone agrees that the United States became involved in Vietnam by incremental commitments. Each President from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon took actions that increased the commitments of the United States to the non- communists in Vietnam. For John F. Kennedy, however, the commitments were still limited enough to have permitted some questioning of their premises. This does not appear to have happened. Our thesis is that Vietnam held a special place in Kennedy’s world view: namely, a struggle of paramount importance between the communists and the Free World. He said this on numerous occasions, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. We have attempted to place ourselves in his shoes, using his words and actions as the most reliable guide to his beliefs. If he began escalating the conflict in Vietnam to the level of a U.S. war during his first year in office, as we believe he did, it is important to understand why.
The grim rhetoric in Kennedy’s inaugural speech seems anachronistic after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire.1 Yet the speech was not out of the ordinary at a time when the Cold War dominated the foreign policy thinking of U.S. leaders of both political parties. The communists had taken over in China only 12 years prior to 1961, and the Korean armistice was barely 8 years old. Kennedy was an eloquent speaker, and we know from Theodore Sorensen that he was the true author of all his speeches.2
Was Kennedy fallible in his reading of communist intentions? Much has been made about his “misreading” of Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev’s speech two weeks before the inauguration and the subsequent attention Kennedy gave to counterinsurgency against what Khrushchev had called “national liberation wars.” The Soviet decision to precipitate a crisis with the West over Berlin in 1961 contributed to Kennedy’s perception of confrontation. But Kennedy was well aware that the challenge in Indochina was of a different nature than in Berlin, and he instinctively saw that it could not be met by lining up troops along a sector demarcation line.3 At a time when the divergence of fundamental interests between Moscow and Peking was still masked from view, it fell to Kennedy’s administration to devise an effective response to this new kind of challenge in Southeast Asia.
Moreover, Kennedy felt that if he failed on this score, he would be doomed at the polls. As John Kenneth Galbraith remembered him saying, “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one 12-month period. I’ve had the Bay of Pigs and pulling out of Laos, and I can’t accept a third.”4 The Republicans, led by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, were threatening to exploit any Kennedy weakness, as Stephen Pelz has documented.5
Vietnam at Center Stage
Since his visit to Vietnam in 1951, Kennedy had taken an interest in the conflict in Indochina. He had not allowed himself to be misled by oversimplifications frequently offered by administration and congressional spokesmen. He had seen that the colonial nature of the relationship between the French and the non-communist Vietnamese nationalists had led to the vicious circle of the former promising the latter independence once the communists were defeated, and the latter denying the former the one thing they needed most to achieve this—credible political support. Kennedy had drawn the appropriate conclusion: no superiority in numbers, finance, or equipment could make victory over the communists possible.6
Now the situation was different. South Vietnam had elected an independent government composed of men with strong nationalist credentials. Kennedy felt that the South Vietnamese, if given the means, could prevail over the communists. Moreover, Kennedy had met Ngo Dinh Diem in Washington in 1953, and had faith in him as President of the Republic of Vietnam.7 Far from being a “faraway country about which we know nothing,” as it is often assumed to have been by Americans looking back today, Diem’s South Vietnam was for Kennedy a litmus test of the West’s willingness to defend democratic principles.
An insight into Kennedy’s thinking on this last point lies in the text of a speech he gave before the American Friends of Vietnam in June 1956.
Vietnam represents a proving ground of democracy in Asia. . . . Vietnam represents the alternative to communist dictatorship. If this democratic experiment fails, if some one million refugees have fled the totalitarianism of the North only to find neither freedom nor security in the South, then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy in the minds of still more Asians. . . .
Vietnam represents a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia. If we are not the parents of little [South] Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future. . . . This is our offspring—we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence—communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest—then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible, and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low. . . .
America’s stake in Vietnam, in her strength and in her security, is a very selfish one—for it can be measured, in the last analysis, in terms of American lives and American dollars. It is now well-known that we were at one time on the brink of war in Indochina—a war which could well have been more costly, more exhausting and less conclusive than any war we have ever known. The threat of such war is not now altogether removed from the horizon. Military weakness, political instability or economic failure in the new state of Vietnam could change almost overnight the apparent security which has increasingly characterized that area under the leadership of President Diem.8
A number of developments in late 1960 and early 1961 made Vietnam the locus operandi of the challenge to Kennedy’s credibility in just such terms. The Third Congress of the Vietnam Workers’ Party in September 1960 adopted the thesis of the two revolutions in Vietnam. According to this thesis, the socialist revolution in North Vietnam would continue, while in South Vietnam the people’s democratic national revolution would be pushed ahead. In plain terms, Hanoi was giving up its reliance on the diplomatic-political effort—carried on fruitlessly since the partition of 1954— to bring about reunification, and was now prepared to sustain a military campaign against Diem’s government.
The Congress also marked the rise to second rank, after Ho Chi Minh, of Le Duan.9 In his address, later quoted by Kennedy in a letter to Khrushchev, Le Duan said:
There does not exist any other way outside of that which consists in the overthrow of the dictatorial and Fascist regime of the American-Diemist clique in order to liberate totally South Vietnam, with a view to realizing national unity.10
Thus, in typically veiled language, the Vietnamese Communist Party signaled the acceptance and ratification by its highest formal body of the decision to embark on war.
Two months later, in early 1962, the Vietnamese attended the Conference of 81 Communist and Workers’ Parties, where amid lively debates the delegates attempted to prevent a widening of Sino-Soviet divergences on such fundamental issues of strategy as support for national liberation movements. As R. B. Smith notes in his multivolume study of the international history of the Vietnam War, it is important not to underestimate the degree of genuine unity that emerged, which was nonetheless real for being so short lived. In return for concessions by the Chinese party on the issue of negotiating with the imperialists on such matters as trade and disarmament, the Soviets recognized national liberation wars as a distinct (and inevitable) form of warfare.11
On 19 December 1960, in Tan Lap Commune, Chau Thanh District, Tay Ninh Province, in a forest clearing situated near the sanctuary of Cambodia, the South Vietnam National Liberation Front was formed. Hanoi established a Central Office for South Vietnam to coordinate the actions of the southern guerrillas with the North’s incipient support in cadres, arms, and military units. By June, South Vietnamese troops occupied North Vietnamese reception centers on Route 9 near the border of Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they captured records indicating that some 2,800 infiltrators had passed through them during a four-month period.12
In April 1961 a member of Hanoi’s Politburo explicitly made the connection between the Moscow statement on “national liberation wars” and South Vietnam. In the party theoretical journal Hoc Tap, Truong Chinh wrote:
The development of the revolutionary movement in South Vietnam is fully consistent with the following view of the Moscow Declaration of November 1960: ‘The presence of the world socialist system and the weakening of the imperialist position have opened for all the oppressed new possibilities to recover independence. The recovery of independence by colonial people through peaceful or nonpeaceful means depends on the concrete conditions of each country.’13
The Vietnamese communists themselves, therefore, provide the firmest evidence that Kennedy did not misread the meaning of Khrushchev’s January speech. Thus was the stage set for Kennedy and Khrushchev’s tete-a-tete in Vienna on 3 and 4 June 1961 to discuss world issues.
The two men agreed that diplomatic steps should be taken to neutralize Laos. But it was Khrushchev’s threats over Berlin that attracted most of the attention at the Vienna meeting. Berlin was a flash point of East-West relations, and Kennedy knew that he had very little room for maneuver. If the Soviets crossed the sector line in Berlin, they would come face to face with U.S. troops, and it would mean all-out war—as simple as that. Kennedy, in fact, reacted with supreme sangfroid to the crisis.
The issue of communist support for national liberation wars, upon which Khrushchev lectured the young President,, was much less clear-cut and, therefore, full of peril for Kennedy. He saw that the non-communists could be forced back almost limitlessly, surrendering territory by successive bites and losing popular support and—sooner or later—legitimacy. Such movements—masquerading as locally representative movements, with support from the Soviets—could capture power in one Third World country after another. In order to match his words with action, Kennedy had to show that national liberation wars could be defeated. To show this, he needed a victory in Vietnam.14
Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalls no set agenda for the summit meeting.15 Kennedy came prepared to raise the issue of Vietnam with Khrushchev at the urging of Walt W. Rostow, who in a memo to Kennedy on 26 May had called Khrushchev the third front on which the administration had to work, along with building up South Vietnam’s strength and heightening the awareness of the international community on the border-crossing issue.16 Kennedy asked Khrushchev how his speech in January about support for wars of national liberation was to be interpreted. “If one takes the situation in Vietnam,” Kennedy said, “there are some seven to fifteen thousand guerrillas there. We do not believe that they reflect the will of the people, while the USSR may believe so. The problem is to avoid getting involved in direct contact as we support the respective groups.” Kennedy told Khrushchev that the United States believed in the right of people to choose their own government through free elections.17
“Kennedy came away concerned that Khrushchev blustered and thought he could bully the President of the United States,” Rusk recalls.18 In one of those moments of self-revelation of which he was capable, Kennedy showed the stress of his meeting with Khrushchev to James Reston of The New York Times immediately afterward. David Halberstam describes the scene in his book The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972). Reston was waiting in a room at the U.S. Embassy for an interview with Kennedy, which he had been promised in advance. Reston remembers Kennedy pushing his hat over his eyes like a beaten man and breathing a great sigh.
“Pretty rough?” Reston asked.
“Roughest thing in my life,” the President answered. He seemed to Reston to be genuinely shaken. About Khrushchev’s blustering, Kennedy had this to say:
I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it. I think the first part is pretty easy to explain. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.
Kennedy added, “Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”19
This is the clearest expression, as far as we are aware, of Kennedy’s view that events in Vietnam were moving in a direction that required him personally to act in accordance with his responsibility as leader of the Free World. In a column in The New York Times in 1979, Reston reiterated his belief—based on what Kennedy had told him—that the Vienna summit had been an event of historic significance and led Kennedy to confront Khrushchev by increasing the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. As William Bundy told a BBC interviewer in 1977, the effect on the Soviet belief in U.S. firmness was a significant part of Kennedy’s decision to escalate in Vietnam, “although it doesn’t appear in so many words in the records of deliberations at that time.”20 What were Kennedy’s actions in Vietnam?
Upping the Ante
Even before the Vienna summit, Kennedy had set the bureaucratic wheels in motion for increasing support to Diem. A State Department cable to the Embassy in Saigon on 1 March 1961 advised that the White House “ranks the defense of Vietnam among the highest priorities of U.S. foreign policy,” and mandated a search for those military personnel best qualified to give the South Vietnamese counterguerrilla training as an action to be taken immediately, without waiting for the South Vietnamese Government’s approval.21 On 2 May the Country Team in Saigon heard General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say that Kennedy was ready to do anything within reason to save Southeast Asia; valuable time had been lost in Laos, but there was still time to act in South Vietnam.22
One of the major obstacles blocking more effective U.S. action in South Vietnam had been the unofficial ceiling on the members of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) that the United States had adhered to since the 1954 Geneva Conference. Mainly at State’s insistence, the MAAG had been limited to 685 U.S. military personnel, and Kennedy’s advisers warned him that diplomacy might be necessary to change this, particularly with India chairing the International Control Commission in Vietnam. Kennedy told Lieutenant General Lionel C. McGarr, when the latter visited Washington at the end of April, that he was prepared to work outside the Geneva accords, and the MAAG ceiling could be increased “as necessary.”23
In fact, Kennedy used a meeting of the National Security Council on 29 April to approve an immediate augmentation of the MAAG by 100. In addition, Kennedy approved augmenting the MAAG with two U.S. training commands, consisting of about 1,600 instructors each, to establish two divisional field-training areas in the Central Highlands to accelerate the U.S. training program.24
McGarr responded by getting studies of MAAG reorganization under way, but Kennedy was obviously impatient at what he saw as bureaucratic delays. A State Department cable on 20 May transmitted the National Security Council decisions to Saigon under the heading, “Presidential Program for Vietnam to be carried out on priority action basis with high sense of urgency and dedication.”25 Included in this all-around program were an increase in the MAAG and support for a 20,000-man increase in the South Vietnamese Army, with more to be considered later. On 26 May the State Department advised the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to expect “considerable further increases” in the strength of the MAAG beyond those already discussed.26
In a letter to Diem on 8 May, the President proposed a collaborative effort in the struggle against communist aggression.27 Diem responded quickly and positively to Kennedy’s initiative. There was an exchange of preliminaries during Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Saigon that month, but the details were worked out during Secretary of State for the Presidency Nguyen Dinh Thuan’s visit to Washington in June. Diem’s morale had been bolstered by his re-election as President on 9 April. He had won 89% of the vote, running against two other candidates; 93% of eligible voters had gone to the polls.28 This was indeed a defeat for the communists. Moreover, Kennedy’s new ambassador in Saigon, Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., augured well for close relations with Diem’s powerful ally, in sharp contrast to Nolting’s predecessor, El- bridge Durbrow, whom Diem considered a nitpicker at best and an interferer in Vietnamese politics at worst.
After the Vienna summit, Kennedy’s actions accelerated. In a private conversation with Thuan in the White House on 14 June, Kennedy discussed a 100,000-man increase in the South Vietnamese Army that Diem was seeking. Kennedy asked that Diem’s letter be made immediately available to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was testifying before the Senate later that day, so that the Senators could better understand and appreciate the magnitude of the task involved in Vietnam. Far from expressing any reservation about the request, which would have been normal diplomatic practice, Kennedy opined that the main difficulty would be getting congressional approval for the necessary funding. He thus urged Thuan to see some Republican senators to pave the way.29
Kennedy followed with keen interest the details of the ways in which actions he had authorized in South Vietnam were being implemented. He read status reports and individual reports from all U.S. agencies in South Vietnam and regularly pressed Nolting with requests for assessments of progress, including answers to such questions as whether Diem’s reforms in military command, intelligence, and economic and social programs were taking hold and whether or not there were plans for following up a successful South Vietnamese military operation in the Mekong Delta.30 As chronicler and biographer of the Kennedy brothers, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has written that the impetus for counterinsurgency came from President Kennedy himself.31
As the summer wore on, however, Kennedy was finding that the problem of South Vietnam could not easily be isolated from other problems in the area. The Pentagon was working on a contingency plan to occupy southern Laos with a combined force of Laotian, Thai, South Vietnamese, and U.S. troops to block the North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam. Just when Kennedy was working out a strategy of deterrence inside South Vietnam, his military planners were talking about widening the war.
Previous planners had supposed that any North Vietnamese response to a move into Laos could be met on the ground in Laos. Now, most disturbingly, discussion centered on the possibility of meeting any such substantial North Vietnamese intervention with direct air and naval operations against Haiphong or even Hanoi.32 The picture looked so gloomy someone suggested (this in late July) that General Maxwell D. Taylor, Kennedy’s military representative, go and have a firsthand look at the situation.33 Taylor and Rostow put together a list of questions to be asked, but held that such a mission was still premature.35
With communist forces in South Vietnam demonstrating strength and mobility outside their traditional base areas along the Cambodian and Laotian borders—as exemplified by their capture and holding for several hours in September of the provincial capital of Phuoc Thanh— the question of how the United States would respond became urgent. Taylor was arguing the need for dispatch of a U.S. ground force to either the central highlands or southern Laos. On 11 October, the day the Taylor-Rostow mission was announced, Kennedy also approved the dispatch of the Air Force’s 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron with B-26s, T-28s, and C-47s to Bien Hoa Air Base to serve under the MAAG as a training mission and not for combat “at the present time.”35
At Kennedy’s bidding, McNamara developed plans to reorganize the military command structure in Saigon, and on 13 November he instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to give him their recommendations.36 If he were going to send a military man with four-star rank to be commanding officer in Vietnam, Kennedy mused, maybe he should choose a younger man. Kennedy also thought of George C. McGhee, the State Department man who had run the successful U.S. counterinsurgency program during the Greek civil war in the 1940s, and who now pointed out, as many of the military men did not, that “alien troops simply lack the bases for discriminating between friend and foe.”37 The Joint Chiefs’ preference was to call the new command “United States Forces, Vietnam.” Rusk, however, proposed calling it “U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam,” and this was ultimately adopted.38
The Taylor-Rostow mission came back from Vietnam with a plethora of recommendations, discussion of which occupied Kennedy’s advisers for the next several weeks. It was clear that the prevailing tendency was to view the Vietnam problem as primarily a military one, reflecting Taylor’s background. People who saw it otherwise, like Edward Lansdale, were in a distinct minority. Kennedy kept his own counsel. In the end, he did not authorize the sending of ground troops. A handwritten note by Lemnitzer on the discussion at a crucial meeting in the White House on 11 November attended by Rusk, McNamara, Rostow, Taylor, and others reads: “P: Troops are a last resort.”39 The semblance of unity of planning in the administration was preserved by various subterfuges, and the intention was to exploit the accumulating evidence (with the new dry season in Laos) of Hanoi’s growing intervention.
On 5 December Nolting gave Diem, who was reluctant to ask for U.S. ground troops, a memorandum of understanding which stated that while the “fundamental responsibility” for the conduct of the war would remain with Diem’s government, “a closer and more effective relationship will be established” between his government and the United States. In its key paragraph, the memorandum stated:
With the above objectives in mind, the U.S. has indicated its readiness to participate in a sharply increased joint effort with the GVN [Government of Vietnam]. This will involve increases in forms of aid previously furnished and, in addition, fundamentally new steps in GVN-U.S. collaboration, namely, (a) the participation of U.S. uniformed personnel in operational missions with GVN forces, and (b) closer consultation with U.S. advisers, as agreed, in planning the conduct of the security effort.40
In this connection, Kennedy indicated to Nolting that he appreciated Diem’s cooperation as being important to “both of us,” and was counting on the efforts of Diem and all his people.41
Decisions in Washington were being made so fast that they were not being communicated to the field in a timely manner, causing problems at the Embassy. Thus, for example, Nolting complained of learning from a conversation with its commanding general that an Air Force unit by the name of 2d ADVON had set up operations at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.42 This unit was to have operational control over the 4400th and aircraft to be used in aerial spraying of defoliants.
But the Pentagon was geared up to take over the whole show. Lemnitzer broke the news to McGarr bluntly: the new command, he said, “will ensure that the senior U.S. military representative in Vietnam has the controlling voice, both on the U.S. side and with Vietnam officials, on military matters.43 Expansion of the command to encompass Laos and Thailand, as well as Cambodia, was being considered.
By early December the authorized MAAG strength had reached 1,905. In addition, authorized strength of U.S. military units to be stationed in South Vietnam was 1,774.44 In that same month, two U.S. Army helicopter companies with 44 helicopters were unloaded at Saigon to provide greater mobility to the South Vietnamese Army. On 22 December, with Kennedy’s tacit approval, U.S. pilots of the 4400th began flying combat missions in South Vietnam; their planes had South Vietnamese markings and carried South Vietnamese trainees. The same day, four U.S. Navy minesweepers took up station five miles south of the 17th Parallel to try to cut down infiltration by sea in what was the first U.S. military step in the war directed specifically against North Vietnam.45 U.S. Air Force transports with aerial spray equipment began operating from Tan Son Nhut on defoliation missions; commanders were admonished to ensure that South Vietnamese personnel were on board “to assist in identification of target areas.”
Conclusion
In the space of seven months in 1961, Kennedy had nearly tripled the size of the MAAG and, in addition, had introduced other U.S. military personnel in unit formations in support roles for the South Vietnamese forces. The decision had been taken to establish a new command structure that would cover U.S. combat units as well as advisers. These actions fundamentally changed the U.S. role in Vietnam. Even if there were no combat battalions yet, the command structure that would be used by the military to fight a big-unit war was already virtually in place; U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam would be established in February 1962.
Kennedy’s role in this changing situation of challenge and response was central and unmistakable. He was too intelligent a man to allow himself to be led on by his advisers against his better instincts. Their motives were diplomatic, legal, bureaucratic; his motive alone (with the possible exception of Rostow’s, who shared Kennedy’s world view, as is evident in his frequent use of the phrase “on our side of the line”) was strategic. It was Kennedy who, in the final analysis, drew the fine line that defined his commitment. He orchestrated its military, diplomatic, and political facets. He succeeded in avoiding squabbles within the bureaucracy, and in holding together a public consensus on the U.S. purpose in Vietnam (Senators like Stuart Symington of Missouri wrote him letters from Southeast Asia to encourage his firm stand against communism.), which no one yet seriously questioned. These were singular accomplishments. Yet at the same time, they laid the groundwork for continuing the escalation process, by his own administration and by his successors’.
What is known of Kennedy’s exchanges with Khrushchev offers the best evidence of his thinking. Toward the end of the year, Kennedy wrote a long letter to Khrushchev in secrecy in response to two the Chairman had addressed to him on the German problem and on Laos and Vietnam. Khrushchev had dwelt at length on the situation in South Vietnam, presenting Hanoi’s viewpoint that the Saigon government was fascist, illegal, and without basis in popular support, and he had dismissed “in a phrase,” as Kennedy wrote, the evidence of external interference that governed the U.S. response. Kennedy responded to these charges directly:
It is the firm opinion of the United States Government that Southern Vietnam is now undergoing a determined attempt from without to overthrow the existing government using for this purpose infiltration, supply of arms, propaganda, terrorization, and all the customary instrumentalities of communist activities in such circumstances, all mounted and developed from North Vietnam.
The issue, he went on, was not one of some opinion or other concerning Diem’s government, “but rather that of a nation whose integrity and security is threatened by military actions, completely at variance with the obligations of the Geneva Accords.” Accordingly, Kennedy said, the threat to South Vietnam was “one seriously endangering international peace and security.”46
On the beginning of escalation in Vietnam, we can take Kennedy at his word. He had taken Khrushchev’s challenge at Vienna seriously. He had decided Vietnam was the place. Accordingly, the issue was not whether South Vietnam was a perfect democracy or not, but whether an armed minority was to be allowed to seize power in the name of “national liberation.”
A Poorly Mixed Compound
By Worth H. Bagley
As he began to crystallize his findings, General Maxwell Taylor sent tentative ideas as “eyes only” messages for President John F. Kennedy. One report de- scribed an experiment using U.S. Army engineers to explore the value of combining assistance to villagers with a uniformed military presence. The substance of this report became known to The Washington Post. Its account charged that General Taylor was preparing an outrageous proposal: to Americanize the conflict by placing combat forces in Vietnam. The effect of the revelation, reported as an isolated and unqualified conclusion, was to alarm official Washington, as well as the public, and to compromise the logic of the conclusions developing in Taylor’s mind. This haste to ridicule imprudence that had not occurred hampered Taylor’s mission and led him to fear that the White House might be indifferent to knowledge and unwilling to compare opposite arguments.
When they met in November 1961, therefore, the President was familiar with Taylor’s opinion of the situation in Vietnam. Taylor knew that deficient intelligence had not restrained the White House from drawing false hope from fanciful accounts of the situation. He wanted to give the President a coherent view of how to align U.S. interests with likely Vietnamese performance. He stressed that three conditions would have to be met before the United States would be well-advised to assist South Vietnam further.
First, President Ngo Dinh Diem would have to accept a personal envoy of the U.S. President, someone who was empowered to coordinate their joint responsibilities to repair deteriorating internal security. The two would consult on Vietnam’s national policies and work together to implement agreed courses.
Second, U.S. advisors or military units should be committed only when the United States was confident that it had the necessary quality of cooperation from Diem; once committed, they should be brought in at a pace and strength founded on the timeliness of Diem’s achievements. South Vietnam would have to improve its intelligence operations sufficiently for U.S. authorities to know what was happening politically and militarily. If the Vietnamese did not perform as expected, the President’s prerogative to change an initial decision or, subsequently, to make contingent choices—including withdrawal— would have been protected.
And last, a plan would have to be worked out to interrupt the overland and seaborne transport of supplies from the north for the Vietcong in order to limit the resources required of a U.S. commitment to help safeguard the population.
Once Diem agreed to these conditions, Taylor suggested that the value of a limited U.S. military initiative could be explored in a manageable situation. By placing a battalion of Army engineers in the badly flooded Mekong Delta, the President could evaluate the effect of a greater U.S. presence on the insurgent activity, on Hanoi’s willingness to continue support for the Vietcong, and on public morale and attitudes. The noncombat battalion would assist the villagers in recovering from flood damage and make constructive preparations to control flooding in the future. After a few weeks, as the waters receded and the work was completed, the engineers could depart from the country.
Kennedy was not moved. He accepted neither Taylor’s conditions nor his proposal to test the productive boundaries of the first U.S. initiatives. Instead, within the month— and on a basis entirely different from the one proposed by Taylor—the President expanded the U.S. role, presence, and liability in besieged South Vietnam, contracting a joint enterprise with Saigon. Letters requesting and agreeing to U.S. assistance to lift the threat from Vietnam were arranged and executed by Diem and Kennedy, respectively.
A poorly mixed compound of what good was supposed to be accomplished and what evil avoided, these letters raised the U.S. shield without obliging Saigon to prepare the ground. Diem made reluctant and imprecise concessions for action that did not include a presidential envoy at his side as Taylor proposed.
To make it appear that Diem’s fragmentary gestures conformed to Taylor’s recommendations, Kennedy picked out particular proposals from the larger arrangement Taylor had called for. Instead of adopting Taylor’s carefully balanced and integrated plan, Kennedy made piecemeal efforts to increase social and economic aid, add military advisors, and improve logistical support.
Editor’s Note: This sidebar was excerpted from “Kennedy & Taylor: Vietnam, 1961” by Worth H. Bagley. The full article was published in the May 1993 Naval Review issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings.
1. The speech is printed in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. John F. Kennedy. 1961 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1962), pp. 1-3.
2. Theodore C. Sorensen, “Let the Word Go Forth.” The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy, 1947 to 1963 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1988), p. 2.
3. Schlesinger maintains that Kennedy had believed ever since his visit to Vietnam in 1951 that “the characteristic mode of Communist military pressure was not direct confrontation but indirect aggression and especially guerrilla warfare.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 495. For Kennedy’s own words, see, for instance, his Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, 25 May 1961, printed in Public Papers, op. cit., pp. 397-98.
4. Quoted in Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 761.
5. Stephen Pelz, “John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Vietnam War Decisions,” The Journal of Strategic Studies (London), Vol. 4, No. 4 (December 1981), pp. 356-85.
6. See his speech to the U.S. Senate, 6 April 1954, quoted in Sorensen, op. cit., pp. 370-73.
7. For Kennedy’s luncheon meeting with Diem, see the memorandum of conversation by Edmund A. Gullion of the Department of State dated 7 May 1953, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952A954. Vol. XIII, Part I. Indochina (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 553-54.
8. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships. Part I. 1945-1961 (Washington, D.C. : Prepared for the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1984), pp. 303-4.
9. The significance of the rise of Le Duan is analyzed in R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War. Vol. I. Revolution Versus Containment, 1955-61 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 212-13.
10. Letter from President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, 16 November 1961, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963. Vol. I. Vietnam 1961 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 637. Hereafter referred to as FRUS. Large extracts from Le Duan’s political report to Congress are printed in Department of State, A Threat to the Peace: North Viet-Nam’s Effort To Conquer South Viet-Nam. Part II— The Appendices (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 4-5.
11. Smith, op. cit., pp. 224-25.
12. FRUS, p. 173.
13. Department of State, op. cit., p. 7.
14. This argument was enunciated most explicitly by Walt W. Rostow, Kennedy’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs in his memoranda to Kennedy of 29 March and 17 June 1961 (Kennedy Papers, National Security File, Boxes 65 and 192).
15. Arthur J. Dommen’s telephone interview with Dean Rusk, 8 April 1989.
16. FRUS, p. 158.
17. Memorandum of conversation by A. Akalovsky, Vienna, 3 June 1961. Presidential Office Files, John F. Kennedy Library.
18. Telephone interview.
19. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 75-76. See also Reston’s original report on this matter in his column in The New York Times, 18 January 1966 and his later comments in the 10 June 1979 edition.
20. Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 68.
21. FRUS, p. 40.
22. Ibid., pp. 89-90.
23. Ibid., p. 89.
24. Ibid., p. 108.
25. Ibid., pp. 140-43.
26. Ibid., pp. 160-62.
27. Ibid., p. 128.
28. Robert Scigilano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 96.
29. FRUS, pp. 172-74.
30. Ibid., p. 205.
31. Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 495.
32. FRUS, pp. 252-53.
33. Ibid., p. 255.
34. Ibid., pp. 256-57.
35. Ibid., p. 343.
36. Ibid., p. 589.
37. Ibid., p. 604.
38. Ibid., p. 746.
39. Ibid., p. 577.
40. Ibid., p. 714.
41. Ibid., p. 716.
42. Ibid., p. 665.
43. Ibid., p. 750.
44. Ibid., pp. 759-60.
45. Ibid., p. 724
46. Ibid., p. 754.
47. Ibid., pp. 636-38.