How President Kennedy is Partially Responsible for Vietnam

It would be difficult to imagine what our world would be without Plato, Alexander, Caesar, Muhammad, Napoleon, or Hitler. Similarly, we can only speculate how the tragic history of Vietnam might have developed differently without Ngo Dinh Diem or John Kennedy. While neither of these men held the fate of Vietnam in their hands entirely in the early 1960s, both were in positions that allowed them to influence the history of their two countries for years to come. For good or ill, we are still living with the consequences of their actions.

When he assumed office in 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy faced the unenviable task of guiding the American people through perilous times. The United States had already fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union and China in Korea and it seemed likely that the US would be forced to do so again in the near future. What if one of these proxy wars developed into an all out confrontation between the two great superpowers of the world? Given the immense destructive capacity of the weapons that the two nations had constructed since World War II, a direct confrontation between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics might result in the destruction of those two nations or even the destruction of the human race.

Kennedy and most American people felt that the United States had to be bulwark against Leninism and a bastion for democracy. While Kennedy believed that the United States should support anti-colonial movements, he also believed that the United States had to do everything in its power to stop the spread of communism in the developing world. He also believed that the United States needed to avoid appearing weak in the face of Soviet aggression. According to this view, if the Soviet Union did not believe that the United States had the ability and the will to protect its national sovereignty and its national interests around the world, the nations of the world would fall to communism one by one.

Unfortunately, the United States did not prove very successful at preventing the spread of communism. Before Kennedy took office, the United States had lost many countries including East Germany, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba. This trend did not reverse as soon as Kennedy took office. In 1961, the Soviet backed government of East Germany divided the city of Berlin with a cement wall and on October 22, 1962, Kennedy told the American people that the Soviets were installing long range ballistic missiles in Cuba. The resulting crisis, brought the world perhaps the closest it has ever been to nuclear war. While Kennedy managed to find a diplomatic end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, that and other trials strengthened his resolve to appear tough in the face of communist aggression. He had learned the lessons of the 1930s and was determined to regain some of the prestige that America had lost in its struggles with the communists. The pattern of Soviet aggression and Western capitulation had to end and Vietnam proved a logical place to make a stand.

American involvement in Vietnam was nothing unique to the Kennedy administration. Previous administrations had supported the French colonial government and later the French backed native government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. Those administrations had even committed a limited amount of funds and advisors towards helping maintain the integrity of the Diem government. Although Kennedy was reluctant to commit American combat troops to Vietnam to fight the North Vietnamese guerillas directly, he was equally unwilling to let the unpopular Diem government fall to a communist uprising. He therefore had little choice but to maintain the status quo by committing ever more resources and American personnel to propping up the legitimate government of South Vietnam. To that end, Kennedy sent over 16,000 Americans as advisors to the war-torn nation and gave the South Vietnamese government millions of dollars in mostly military aid.

Although Kennedy believed that the Vietnamese had to win the war for themselves, he also believed that American aid in equipment and training could help the South Vietnamese achieve victory over the communist insurgents, if not North Vietnam itself. Unfortunately, the situation in Vietnam never seemed to improve no matter how much the United Sates invested in it. Indeed, the situation only seemed to become more and more bleak, requiring more and more troops. The United States could postpone making a firm decision about Vietnam for only so long. At some point, the United States had to make the defense of South Vietnam its top priority or it had to withdraw its commitments completely. Given the geopolitical implications for a premature withdrawal and the poor prospects for Diems government being able to stand. on its own, however, withdrawal was unlikely.