Exit Strategy

[catdat]

Exit Strategy

In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam

Forty years have passed since November 22, 1963, yet painful mysteries remain. What, at the moment of his death, was John F. Kennedy’s policy toward Vietnam?

It’s one of the big questions, alternately evaded and disputed over four decades of historical writing. It bears on Kennedy’s reputation, of course, though not in an unambiguous way.

And today, larger issues are at stake as the United States faces another indefinite military commitment that might have been avoided and that, perhaps, also cannot be won. The story of Vietnam in 1963 illustrates for us the struggle with policy failure. More deeply, appreciating those distant events tests our capacity as a country to look the reality of our own history in the eye.

(rest of the article here)
http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

[hist2004]

This issue has to be analyzed looking at the state of the World in 1963. During his inauguration, President
Kennedy vowed to meet the scourge of communism at any shore, at any cost. the cold war was going
great guns at this time. Kennedy already stood his ground during the "Missiles of October" incident that
brought us to the brink of nuclear war. The US and Soviet Union were exerting their influence all over the
world. The "domino theory" (if one nation falls to communism, the nations around them will fall like domino's)
was on the lips of policy makers. Trying not to use what I now know through the course of history, I feel
that Kennedy may have wished to exit Vietnam, but would probably have been drawn into the conflict as
Johnson was, maybe not as fast, or through the ruse of the "Gulf of Tokin" incident, but surely as a commit-
ment that he made to himself and the world to stop communist aggression. From 1961 to 1963, President
Kennedy invoked idealistic terms to encourage Americans to view the conflict in Vietnam as one small part of
the larger struggle between freedom and communism. According to the President, the United States had to
do whatever was necessary to defend freedom in Vietnam. Below is an interesting quote by Kennedy which
goes to his state of mind at that time...

In a 1963 magazine article, he described nations as actors who personified the principle of freedom or the principle of communism. Kennedy wrote, "Two great forces--the world of communism and the world of free choice--have, in effect, made a 'bet' about the direction in which history is moving." South Vietnam, Laos, and other countries were "points of uncertainty [that] remain" and new nations, too, would have to "choose between two competing systems."Similarly, the President discussed Vietnam in terms of the challenge free nations faced from what he classified as: "the Communist conspiracy"; "the communist tide"; "Communist efforts"; and "the Communist advance."In a typically idealistic fashion, Kennedy defined nations in terms of the principles he claimed they held in common and then applied that genus to advance his policy of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Regards,
Hist2004