Would Kennedy have taken us out of Vietnam?

The second most-asked question about the brutally truncated Kennedy administration--the most-asked question being that truly idiotic one, Who killed Kennedy?--is whether the 35th president would have bogged us down in South Vietnam, as his successor did.

Lyndon Johnson's unflinching answer of "yes" was always self-interested, as, to some extent, are everyone's answers. Ordinarily they tell us more about the respondent--if he or she admires John Kennedy, then the answer is "no," with the corresponding opposite among non-admirers. Thus you can take my opinion for the worth I just assigned it.

My opinion is no, JFK would not have bogged us down in the manner of LBJ. Kennedy's learning curve in the White House spiked after the disastrous Bay of Pigs, and his education was immersed principally in suspicion--suspicion of U.S. intelligence, suspicion of military minds, suspicion of the best and the brightest and, above all, the hawkish.

Yet his public signals suggested confidence, as politically they had to. Kennedy was facing the aggressively anticommunist Barry Goldwater in the '64 campaign, so his support of that era's popular foreign policy theories, dominoes and all, was, for public consumption, indispensable. After Goldwater, however, Kennedy could more overtly be his own man, which as president he had indeed become. In reviewing his record of a growing intellectual independence from the assorted Wise Men of the early 1960s, I have come to believe that Kennedy would have pulled back from Southeast Asia, having recognized it as the bottomless sinkhole it was.

Perhaps the pithiest observation of Kennedy as president I've ever read comes not from a historian, but from the novelist Saul Bellow, who in Herzog meditated that Eisenhower's "tragic successor would have been interested" in difficult questions about our deepest "national purpose," but not Ike, "nor Lyndon. Their governments could not function without intellectuals--physicists, statisticians--but these are whirling lost in the arms of industrial chiefs and billionaire brass. Kennedy was not about to change this situation, either. Only he seemed to have acknowledged, privately, that it existed."

That, I'd say, is an incisively fair assessment of Kennedy's push-pull growth in office. And because of his overall growth, I'd venture that ultimately he would have drawn a line when came to the dire prospect of risking so many American lives in Vietnam. In sum I believe others' intellectual abstractions would, for Kennedy, have turned very real, and he, in turn, would have backed off.

 

Comments

[Turgidson]

Even if he did make the initial troop commitment similar to what LBJ did, I think, perhaps, freed from concerns about getting reelected and no big fan of VP and presumed heir apparent LBJ, JFK would have had more freedom to pull us out of there before we got lost in the quicksand.

I think post-JFK history bears it out that presidents are more willing to take big foreign policy risks in 2nd terms. In later years, the 2nd term presidents, who may be lurching into lame duck status on the domestic front, have taken stabs at getting peace deals done in the Middle East. Carter actually did it in his first, but then Iran decided it had had enough of the Shah, and Carter's reputation in foreign policy went with him, unfairly in my view. Reagan reversed himself on the red-baiting and negotiated with Gorbachev, Clinton took a stab at an Israel/Palestine deal. Bush II was a moron, so he doesn't count. Obama is moving toward detente with Iran AND trying to push Israel back to the table on Palestine (the latter seems destined to fail due to Bibi's intransigence).

At that point in history, not long after McCarthy had his fun, and when our schools did nuclear holocaust preparedness drills, it would have been awfully risky politically to back out of a confrontation with communists, anywhere, without being able to declare some sort of victory. A 2nd term JFK might have done it if he thought it was the right thing to do. But we'll never know.

[Charlieford]

JFK would have been in his 2d term, as mentioned, which is probably more important than his learning curve. He could have tried to "manage" Vietnam more carefully than LBJ. But he couldn't have "lost" it, for the same reasons LBJ couldn't afford to lose it--whatever his learning curve, the people and politics remained what they were. And, if he couldn't afford to lose it, what strategies were available to JFK other than that LBJ used?

[Peter G]

Yesterday I saw a brief clip from an interview in which he was asked point blank if he subscribed to the domino theory with regard to South East Asia. Without so much as a pause he replied that he did. I do not know what that portended for the future. Neither I nor anyone else can say. But I do not think it implied a diplomatic solution and if it did mean less military involvement I do not think it would have been before a sharp lesson had been learned.

[Peter G]

BTW Turgidson, I don't know if you've seen the story that AIPAC is backing Obama's strategy for dealing with Iran. Aside from losing American support for his position poor Bibi has some serious domestic opposition as well.