If President John F. Kennedy had lived, would he have committed U.S. ground forces to Vietnam, as his successor Lyndon B. Johnson eventually did? Few historical “what ifs” have haunted the minds of Baby Boomer Americans more than this one, a generation for whom the Vietnam War became the great defining historical event of their lives. As the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s became large, indeterminate, costly, and divisive, the question of what JFK might have done became central to the JFK historical legacy. Kennedy’s own advisors, then writing the first drafts of this history, were keen to assert that JFK would not have escalated as LBJ did in 1965. They pointed to a plan that the Pentagon had devised in 1962-63 to withdraw all U.S. military advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1965 as the best indicator of JFK’s inclinations. Marc J. Selverstone, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center there, provides what may stand as the definitive answer to the question of whether Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. forces from Vietnam or not. His answer: maybe, but quite possibly not, and, ultimately, we can’t know. “As much as it signaled an eagerness to wind down the U.S. assistance effort,” he argues, “the policy of withdrawal—the Kennedy withdrawal—allowed JFK to preserve the American commitment to Vietnam.”[1]
JFK himself is a surprisingly opaque and distant presence in Selverstone’s study. There are several reasons for this. First, Selverstone shows that the “Kennedy withdrawal” was actually the McNamara withdrawal.[2] After a cursory initial blessing by JFK, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his staff developed the plan, apparently with little further involvement by JFK. Eventually, there were two plans: one to withdraw all U.S. military advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1965 and a smaller plan to withdraw 1,000 by the end of 1963, an action not meant to supersede the larger withdrawal. Both were contingency plans. The use of the larger plan, it was understood from the outset, depended on conditions on the ground in Vietnam, specifically whether the counterinsurgency efforts by the non-Communist government in Saigon succeeded or not. But plans belong to the subordinates who devise them until their bosses decide to implement them. While Kennedy ordered implementation of the smaller plan, largely, Selverstone asserts, for public relations purposes—to show the American people that he was not committed to escalation and the government of Vietnam that it needed to do more and could not depend on U.S. escalation–he died without authorizing or repudiating the larger McNamara withdrawal plan.[3]
The second and more important reason that JFK is not more prominent in Selverstone’s book is because Kennedy was temporizing on Vietnam, hoping that the situation would resolve satisfactorily as the government in the South acquired legitimacy and won the support of the people, sparing U.S. leaders from two very unwelcome alternatives, withdrawal under adversity or military escalation involving U.S. ground forces.[4] Leaders in such situations often choose silence to avoid unwelcome focus on their quandary. Kennedy, who in 1951 spent time in French Indochina, including Vietnam, said little as president about Vietnam in public or private. For the United States, Vietnam in the early 1960s was very much about everywhere else: the hope that showing action, resolve, and ultimately success in one place—Vietnam—would make U.S. power credible in all places around the world.[5] Of course, Vietnam was a bad place to attempt this demonstration, which would be the near-universal conclusion in 1975. However, JFK and his advisors keenly understood this difficulty. By November 1963, they knew that counterinsurgency and legitimacy efforts were failing, and perhaps had failed conclusively. Only the small chance of the emergence of a stronger, more competent government in Saigon following the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem or large-scale direct U.S. military intervention were likely to alter the trajectory of events. The unwelcome choice between two bad options now loomed closer, yet Kennedy at this point, Selverstone suggests, “seemed very much committed to remaining in the fight.”[6] Kennedy almost certainly would have done as LBJ did in 1964 and temporize through the November 1964 presidential election. What then?
Selverstone does not go out of his way to stress JFK’s foreign policy acumen. The evidence on his specific topic is so slight that it does not invite larger judgments. Even so, his book can be read as complementary to the view that Fredrik Logevall advanced in JFK of the future president as a close, lifelong student of international affairs.[7] Temporizing and saying little while monitoring developments was the smart choice on Vietnam in the early 1960s. JFK surely knew as much, and that such situations were unremarkable, even if unwelcome. He also knew that choices between bad options often eventually do need to be made.
In his June 1963 American University commencement address JFK tried to begin to slowly lead the country away from the rigid binaries of the early Cold War. His final 1963 position on civil rights also showed that he had the courage to make difficult decisions in order to do the right thing, even when there were potential negative political consequences. If there is a case still to be made that JFK would not have intervened with U.S. ground forces in Vietnam, it is along these circumstantial lines rather than pointing toward McNamara’s withdrawal plan.
[1] Marc J. Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 246.
[2] Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal, 242-243.
[3] Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal, 194, 209-210.
[4] Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal, 143.
[5] Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal, 31.
[6] Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal, 203.
[7] Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (New York: Random House, 2020).
About the Reviewer
Tom McCarthy is professor and chair of the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy. He holds an MBA from Columbia and a PhD in history from Yale. He is the author of Developing the Whole Person: A Practitioner’s Tale of Counseling, College, and the American Promise (Peter Lang, 2018) and Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (Yale, 2007).
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My experience teaching numerous courses on both John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War, as well as doing considerable research on Kennedy and his administration, have moved me to believe that it would have been HIGHY UNLIKELY that JFK would have escalated U.S. military involvement in VN in anyway close to what happened under LBJ. This is not the place to lay out my argument, except to say that the public-relations (or cynically political) and delaying elements of JFK’s decisions and comments in 1963 were aimed primarily at getting him over the hurdle of his 1964 re-election; they were not accurate indicators of his longer-term behavior regarding Vietnam.
Granted, no one (me included) can propose counter-factual scenarios with authority; such is the nature of even the most well-informed speculation. Yet I would caution all historians against falling into the trap of inevitability. Yes, there were strong Cold War pressures threatening to suck the US into the quagmire. But the personality, background, and foreign policy expertise and international goals of JFK and LBJ were so gigantically different that it is foolish to assume that JFK would have followed the same path.
Over the past fifty years historians have justifiably jettisoned the Great Man Theory of History (which, incidentally, JFK bought into!). Yet the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. If dramatically different leaders cannot be expected to result in significantly divergent outcomes, then why get excited about whether Harris or Trump wins the next election?