John Fitzgerald Kennedy´s Vietnam policy : a groundwork leading to war ?

Résumé du document

On November 1st, 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to train the South Vietnamese Army, which had about 200 Americans. Ten years later, almost 400, 000 GIs were fighting in Vietnam. 58, 000 of these people never came back. During this period, the United States of America elected one of their most famous presidents: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now, when exactly did the American Vietnamese story begin? According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., the involvement started with Eisenhower's MAAG deployment, although the war actually began after the Tonkin Golf incident, according to most history books. But that is not our focus here. For many people, the Vietnam War started under Johnson and went on even under Nixon. This common misunderstanding has led to this current research paper, which was originally entitled JKF and America's First Steps in Vietnam. The purpose is to demonstrate that Kennedy's policy in South West Asia was radically different in comparison to his predecessors and that the United States was involved in Vietnam even a couple years before Johnson arrived at the White House.

Extraits

[...] The power of this theory is that it is not just based on Kennedy's anti-colonial stands, but on real evidence which is the National Security Action Memorandum 263: an explicit order of withdrawal. In a certain manner, the question could be inversed. The purpose of this research paper was to discuss if John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Vietnam policy was a groundwork leading to war. The Virtual Kennedy theory led us to say that if he had lived, the Vietnam War might have been different. [...]

[...] He also contributed to the South Vietnamese war effort in introducing helicopters, in creating a US-South Vietnamese Air Force staffed with American pilots, and in allowing the use of free fire zone, defoliants and napalm. It must be said that he only partially agreed on the last two issues which were restricted to a minimum by him. When John Fitzgerald Kennedy died, South Vietnam had received $500 million in military aid. Internal and external reasons pushed John Fitzgerald Kennedy to change clearly the Vietnam policy of his predecessors. An unfavorable international context, a weakened western forward base and a blind administration made him significantly strengthen the US involvement in Southeastern Asia. [...]

[...] Moreover, the South Vietnamese military had a bad leadership, was poor and generally incompetent. So was Diem's administration. The US increased their support under Kennedy's administration, in order to strengthen one of the last pro-occidental governments in the region. When Johnson travelled to Saigon as Vice-President in 1961, he publically called Diem Winston Churchill of Southeastern but he said later to a Saturday Evening Post journalist that he also was only boy we get out there”. Two singular examples illustrate the lack of capacity of the South Vietnamese. [...]

[...] A small band of Viet Cong defeated a much larger and better equipped South Vietnamese force. They were unfortunately led in this battle by Diem's most trusted general, Huynh Van Cao, a Catholic who was promoted due to religion rather than skill. At the same time Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Special Forces were used by Diem's youngest brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his secret police to repress Buddhist mass protests. Parallel to these two external reasons, there is an important internal one. [...]

[...] But what about the following questions: JFK's death, an open door towards war in Vietnam? Did someone shoot the president in order to permit the escalation in Vietnam? Who were the beneficiaries of a war in Southeastern Asia? The conspiracy theory has not been evoked here, but the link between Kennedy's assassination and the US involvement in Vietnam, through an inverse causality, is another interesting topic. Bibliography -Books- The Best and The Brightest, David Halberstam Ballantine Books. [...]