Eisenhower started Vietnam. JFK planned to pull out
Not touching the anarchist thread topic, but since I often try to respond to JFK points:
The US involvement with Vietnam colonization had been in our supporting our ally the French.
The Vietnamese people had long been colonized - IIRC the Chinese before the French.
When Ho Chi Minh decided to fight for freedom for Vietnam, he wrote President Wilson around 1920 asking for the US to help them - and was ignored.
In WWII, Japan captured Vietnam from the French. At the end of the war when Japan left, Ho Chi Minh wrote a declaration of Independence copied from the US and asked the US to not back France returning. The US backed France returning, and helped France more and more financially, at one point paying 90% of the war costs for France against the rebellion under Eisenhower, and helping devise a plan to partition the country into two parts, for a short time until elections - which the US blocked, because it saw Ho Chi Minh would win them, rather than being able to get a puppet into power to serve US interests. Kennedy inherited it when Laos was the hot spot.
JFK did a number of things. While he supported reducing US support for European colonization, he did not just leave Vietnam. He tried to have his cake and eat it too, continuing the Eisenhower policy for its creation South Vietnam against the North, saying he believed in the 'Domino Theory', but drawing a hard line against formal US combat troops the military, Republicans, and even many of his own advisers supported - but increasing 'military advisers' who got involved in combat up to about 16,000.
JFK supported the 'strategic hamlet' program which forcibly relocated farmers, and created a lot of opposition for the US and South Vietnamese governments, greatly increasing the forces for North Vietnam - between that and Diem's repression of Buddhists, JFK backed the removal of Diem. Pro-war advisors consistently misinformed Kennedy that a little more could defeat the North Vietnamese.
Kennedy had suspicions he was not getting accurate information, and sent his own agents to report - the LBJ trip was a sort of disaster, with LBJ becoming close to Diem and making unauthorized promises the US would back him, calling him "the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia"; better was his sending Mike Mansfield, his friend and the US Senate Majority Leader.
In one meeting between JFK and the state and defense department officials he sent, he asked them getting very different reports, 'did you visit the same country?'
Mansfield was reported to say that JFK - who had been been advised by Charles De Gaulle, for example, that the US would get in a 'bottomless pit of violence and politics' in Vietnam if it went to war based on what he had learned from France losing - had told Mansfield, who advised JFK strongly to leave Vietnam, that he 'secretly determined to leave in his second term, but it had to wait until after the election'. However, this was largely kept from even his top aides, if true, though McNamara and Sorensen later concluded they thought he likely would have decided to leave. JFK both said he supported the Domino theory - but also paved the way for political grounds for withdrawal, saying he would send advisers and materials but not listing any combat forces, and saying the war was South Vietnam's to win or lose; and he ordered a symbolic reduction of 1,000 advisors.
JFK also shifted the military strategy towards anti-guerilla warfare, including 'special forces'; he created the Navy Seals.
His successor, in contrast, was given bad military information about an attack on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and appears to have made the decision that his domestic program was in jeopardy unless he 'gave Republicans war in Vietnam' even as he was privately saying he did not see how the US would win, and sent hundreds of thousands of combat troops, again with advisers misleading him that a little more could defeat North Vietnam.
The false information was exposed by the Tet Offensive in 1968 that was a disastrous loss for the North Vietnamese, but showed the American people they had been lied to.
US public opinion continued to turn against the war to the point LBJ could not be re-elected (see other posts for LBJ's peace talks and Nixon's treason).
JFK faced great political pressure to send combat troops to Vietnam and always refused; but he did not leave, and increased other efforts.
There is some evidence he had privately decided to leave in his second term - which history might have condemned as a 'war we could have won'.
Some suspect he was seeing if the war could be won, with limited aid, his first term, while he was obligated by his cold war rhetoric to 'bear any burden' against enemies.
He was already at risk on that for the failure of the Bay of Pigs, where he refused to send US forces to invade Cuba, as the CIA had tried to trick him to be forced to do.
While he fought a hard battle and kept combat troops out of Vietnam, he did not support 'freedom movements' in Cuba, where he ordered huge terrorist operations, or Vietnam.
The US politically, the military, other leaders, were not ready for leaving the cold war justifications for backing tyrants, even if JFK had wanted to.
It was still about the idea that battles against US-backed tyrants were Soviet initiatives, and/or Chinese initiatives, to take over the world.
This was reinforced by the USSR having support for 'wars of revolution' - but it was not much appreciated how tyrannical the US-backed leaders were.
It's not all that different from the situation in the Middle East rebellions today - with the US-backed regime in Egypt guilty of torture and 'disappearing' people and creating great animosity towards the people, leading to revolt - but differences are that times have changed, there's no more USSR to say is behind it, and the reporting prevents the creation of stories like Egypt's government telling lies about it.
Instead, the same things that might have worked before, are blocked so that the government is clearly seen as lying in trying to say the protesters are just 'anti-Egypt and violent', which is why the Egyptian government has ordered violence against the media who are exposing its lies and by telling the truth helping the opposition. In Vietnam, people had little more than what the government told them.
Of course, it turned out that Vietnam was not a 'domino' of a global communist plot, but people wanting not to be occupied.
Save234
Facebook
Twitter