Would John F. Kennedy have pulled US out of Vietnam?
In 1963 JFK's public statements on Vietnam suggested he fully supported the South while privately supporting a South Vietnamese generals' coup against Diem. Modern historians have searched the archives and suggest that JFK would not have surged in US forces and would have drawn down the 16,000 advisers in country. He was considering a way out when he made his trip to Dallas.
It is a short read for those interested in this part of history.
In the last weeks of his life, President John F. Kennedy spent a lot of time worrying about the rising foreign-policy problem of Vietnam.
Whether he would have avoided successor Lyndon B. Johnson’s tragic escalation of US involvement in Southeast Asia remains one of the great “what ifs?” of 20th-century geopolitics.
It’s possible he would have dispatched hundreds of thousands of US combat troops to the country, as did LBJ. Kennedy was a cold-war Democrat, meaning he was a committed anti-communist. His brother Robert Kennedy said in a 1964 oral history that JFK never thought about pulling out of Vietnam and was convinced the United States had to stand there against Soviet expansionism.
Some modern historians think otherwise. The Cuban missile crisis had taught Kennedy to be distrustful of the hawkish advice of national security officials.
Meanwhile, from the Oval Office in 1963, Vietnam looked like an unstable country in a far-off, roiling corner of the world.
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But Kennedy was already thinking about a second term – and its possible greater freedom of action. On Nov. 21, 1963, he told Bundy aide Michael Forrestal that at the beginning of 1964, he should organize an in-depth study of every Vietnam option, including means of withdrawal.
“We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top,” Kennedy said, according to Dallek.
That same day, he left for a political fundraising and fence-mending trip in Texas.