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JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power
This book reveals an intense power struggle that plagued the Kennedy Administration before the Vietnam War & contends that the president's advisors conspired to deceive Kennedy & push the United States into combat.
524 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1992
29 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
John M. Newman
8 books19 followersJohn M. Newman is an American author and retired major in the United States Army. He served on the faculty at the University of Maryland from 1995 to 2012, and has been a Political Science professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia since January 2013.
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September 24, 2021
John F. Kennedy learned it would impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam ten years before he became President of the United States.
In 1951, when he was a young member of Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his younger brother Robert. At the time France was trying to regain its pre-World War II colony of Indochina. Although the French army's commander in Saigon insisted to the Kennedy brothers that his 250,000 troops couldn't possibly lose to some Viet Minh guerrillas, the young congressman knew better. He was convinced by Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate, who expressed skepticism in regard to Vietnam. At an evening meeting on top of a Saigon hotel, he told John Kennedy: "In twenty years there will be no more colonies. We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The homefront is lost. The same thing would happen to US."
Kennedy trusted Gullion, who had helped him earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy, and after becoming President, he would often cite his far-sighted comment to his hawkish military advisers, who were pushing hard for the ground troops Kennedy would never send to Vietnam.
On the eve of his inauguration, Kennedy had expressed his doubts about war in Southeast Asia. When he was given a briefing by President Eisenhower, the president-elect asked an unexpected question. It pertained to the rising conflict with Communist forces in Laos, Vietnam's western neighbor. Which option would Eisenhower prefer, Kennedy asked, a "coalition with the Communists to form a government in Laos or intervening [militarily] through SEATO [the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, to which the U.S. belonged]?" Ike was surprised by his successor's suggestion and said it would be "far better" to intervene militarily because any coalition with the Communists would end with Communist control. Even unilateral intervention by American troops was preferable to that. It would be "a last desperate effort to save Laos."
Kennedy listened carefully but skeptically and thought that what he was hearing was a recipe for disaster coming from a man who in a few hours would no longer be responsible for it. "There he sat," the new President told friends later, "telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years."
Three days after Kennedy became President, on November 11 1960, South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem was almost turned out of office by a military coup. The November 1960 attempt foreshadowed the November 1963 successful coup that would kill Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. In 1960, however, Diem survived and reasserted his control over South Vietnam. Claiming initially that he had reformed his ways, he continued his despotic rule, relying on American support to defeat both the democratic opposition and a Communist-led guerrilla movement.
The Pentagon Papers describe the unique American commitment to Vietnam that existed when John F. Kennedy became President: unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was "essentially the creation of the United States," as was the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. Without American support Diem almost certainly could not have maintained his hold on the South during 1955 and 1956. Without the threat of American intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Viet Minh armies. Without continued American aid, the Diem regime certainly, and an independent South Vietnam almost as certainly, could not have survived.
Senator Kennedy, because of his Cold War politics and his first impression of Diem as a sincere Vietnamese nationalist, had been among the American supporters of Diem's government. That is why his decision to neutralize neighboring Laos came as a shock to Diem. He regarded Kennedy's new policy there as a threat to the survival of his own government. Kennedy tried to reassure him by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson in May 1961 to visit him along with other anti-Communist Asian allies who were dismayed by Kennedy's decision. Johnson criticized the President's policy too, but Kennedy drew the same line in South Vietnam that he had drawn in Laos and Cuba: he would not authorize the sending of combat troops.
In May 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended that combat troops be sent to Vietnam. For his part, Diem asked Kennedy for "selected elements of the American Armed Forces to establish training centers for the Vietnamese Armed Forces." The crucial issue was whether Americans would be sent to Vietnam in the form of organized combat units, capable of, if not intended for, conducting combat operations. Kennedy agreed to send military support to Diem, such as advisers and helicopters, but no matter what pressures were put upon him, he refused to send American units capable of independent combat against the guerrillas.
As the guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam increased almost threefold in September, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs all recommended to Kennedy in a memorandum that "we do commit the U.S. to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism and that we support this commitment by the necessary military actions," including Taylor's proposed "US force of the magnitude of an initial 8,000 men in a flood relief context" and expanding to "about 205,000 men." The President rejected this virtually unanimous recommendation of his advisers, which put him in a curious position: he single-handedly resisted the pressure from his whole administration.
John Kennedy had been to Vietnam in 1951; he had seen the French troops struggle fruitlessly. Robert Kennedy said that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the United States would be in the same spot as the French – whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination.
In his book, John M. Newman focuses on the "war before the war": the growing American involvement in Vietnam from mid-1961 to the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Diem in November 1963. Newman describes the bitter internal warfare waged by the Pentagon working with Lyndon Johnson, which cheated, lied, and plotted how to get American ground troops into Vietnam, and a skeptical President, who eventually compromised by sending thousands of military and civilian advisers.
On April 4, 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith, the ambassador to India, raised hell among Kennedy's advisers by proposing to the President that the United States negotiate with Hanoi a mutual withdrawal from the growing war in South Vietnam. If the United States instead increased its military support of Diem, Galbraith warned Kennedy, "there is consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did."
The Joint Chiefs were furious at Galbraith's proposal. They argued to McNamara that any drastic change in American policy would lead to the loss not only of South Vietnam but also of other Asian and non-Asian allies. The State Department was also opposed to a neutral solution.
To Kennedy, however, Galbraith's warning was a reminder of his friend Edmund Gullion's words, and he believed what the ambassador was proposing could be achieved. The President made an unsuccessful attempt to. He asked his new Assistant Secretary of State, Averell Harriman, to send Galbraith instructions to pursue an Indian diplomatic approach to the North Vietnamese about a mutual disengagement. Harriman resisted, saying they should wait a few days until they received an International Control Commission report on Vietnam. Kennedy agreed but insisted, according to a record of their conversation, that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith and that he would like to see such instructions. Harriman said he would send the instructions the following week. But he did not.
Averell Harriman sabotaged Kennedy's proposal for a mutual de-escalation. He "... struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line," as chronicled in Harriman's papers, and instead wired a message to Galbraith that "changed the mutual de-escalation approach into a threat of U.S. escalation of the war if the North Vietnamese refused to accept U.S. terms," thus completely distorting Kenned's intentions.
When Harriman's colleague Edward Rice tried to re-introduce Kennedy's mutual de-escalation proposal into the telegram, Harriman again intervened, first crossing out what Rice had written and then killing the telegram altogether. Because of the Assistant Secretary of State's obstruction, John Kenneth Galbraith was not informed about Kennedy's peaceful initiative.
In the Spring of 1962, when Kennedy had almost achieved a peaceful Laotian settlement, he instructed McNamara to make a plan for American withdrawal from Vietnam. The President had not yet reached the point of ordering the military to withdraw; he just needed a plan. Yet, his military chiefs were shocked. They perceived Kennedy's neutralization of Laos as surrender to the Communists. For the United States to withdraw from Vietnam was unthinkable.
John Kennedy tried to override the Pentagon's resistance by having his Secretary of State introduce the idea as a matter-of-fact to a small circle of high-level officials. McNamara served as Kennedy's "buffer" to top military men whose rising anger toward the President urged them toward insubordination. At some point, Kennedy had considered replacing Dean Rusk with McNamara as Secretary of State after the 1963 election, but as he confessed to Galbraith, "But then if I don't have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won't have a foreign policy."
However, on the issue of sending ground troops to Vietnam, McNamara was on the generals' side, and when it came to enforcing the President's will over the Pentagon's, McNamara was not always that competent. His order to the generals to draft a plan for withdrawal from Vietnam took more than a year to come back to the President in a form he could consider for approval. And after the President issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 on October 11 1963, this order was covered up because of his assassination.
JFK & VIETNAM is a disturbing but eye-opening book. It persuasively argues that John F. Kennedy indeed had realized an end had to be put to American intervention in Vietnam and that had Kennedy lived, the course of events would have been drastically different. John M. Newman has done a magnificent job with both the research and the writing of his work. I recommend it to proponents, as well as to opponents, of the version that it was President Kennedy who dragged the United States into the Vietnamese quagmire.
In 1951, when he was a young member of Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his younger brother Robert. At the time France was trying to regain its pre-World War II colony of Indochina. Although the French army's commander in Saigon insisted to the Kennedy brothers that his 250,000 troops couldn't possibly lose to some Viet Minh guerrillas, the young congressman knew better. He was convinced by Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate, who expressed skepticism in regard to Vietnam. At an evening meeting on top of a Saigon hotel, he told John Kennedy: "In twenty years there will be no more colonies. We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The homefront is lost. The same thing would happen to US."
Kennedy trusted Gullion, who had helped him earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy, and after becoming President, he would often cite his far-sighted comment to his hawkish military advisers, who were pushing hard for the ground troops Kennedy would never send to Vietnam.
On the eve of his inauguration, Kennedy had expressed his doubts about war in Southeast Asia. When he was given a briefing by President Eisenhower, the president-elect asked an unexpected question. It pertained to the rising conflict with Communist forces in Laos, Vietnam's western neighbor. Which option would Eisenhower prefer, Kennedy asked, a "coalition with the Communists to form a government in Laos or intervening [militarily] through SEATO [the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, to which the U.S. belonged]?" Ike was surprised by his successor's suggestion and said it would be "far better" to intervene militarily because any coalition with the Communists would end with Communist control. Even unilateral intervention by American troops was preferable to that. It would be "a last desperate effort to save Laos."
Kennedy listened carefully but skeptically and thought that what he was hearing was a recipe for disaster coming from a man who in a few hours would no longer be responsible for it. "There he sat," the new President told friends later, "telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years."
Three days after Kennedy became President, on November 11 1960, South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem was almost turned out of office by a military coup. The November 1960 attempt foreshadowed the November 1963 successful coup that would kill Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. In 1960, however, Diem survived and reasserted his control over South Vietnam. Claiming initially that he had reformed his ways, he continued his despotic rule, relying on American support to defeat both the democratic opposition and a Communist-led guerrilla movement.
The Pentagon Papers describe the unique American commitment to Vietnam that existed when John F. Kennedy became President: unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was "essentially the creation of the United States," as was the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. Without American support Diem almost certainly could not have maintained his hold on the South during 1955 and 1956. Without the threat of American intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Viet Minh armies. Without continued American aid, the Diem regime certainly, and an independent South Vietnam almost as certainly, could not have survived.
Senator Kennedy, because of his Cold War politics and his first impression of Diem as a sincere Vietnamese nationalist, had been among the American supporters of Diem's government. That is why his decision to neutralize neighboring Laos came as a shock to Diem. He regarded Kennedy's new policy there as a threat to the survival of his own government. Kennedy tried to reassure him by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson in May 1961 to visit him along with other anti-Communist Asian allies who were dismayed by Kennedy's decision. Johnson criticized the President's policy too, but Kennedy drew the same line in South Vietnam that he had drawn in Laos and Cuba: he would not authorize the sending of combat troops.
In May 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended that combat troops be sent to Vietnam. For his part, Diem asked Kennedy for "selected elements of the American Armed Forces to establish training centers for the Vietnamese Armed Forces." The crucial issue was whether Americans would be sent to Vietnam in the form of organized combat units, capable of, if not intended for, conducting combat operations. Kennedy agreed to send military support to Diem, such as advisers and helicopters, but no matter what pressures were put upon him, he refused to send American units capable of independent combat against the guerrillas.
As the guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam increased almost threefold in September, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs all recommended to Kennedy in a memorandum that "we do commit the U.S. to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism and that we support this commitment by the necessary military actions," including Taylor's proposed "US force of the magnitude of an initial 8,000 men in a flood relief context" and expanding to "about 205,000 men." The President rejected this virtually unanimous recommendation of his advisers, which put him in a curious position: he single-handedly resisted the pressure from his whole administration.
John Kennedy had been to Vietnam in 1951; he had seen the French troops struggle fruitlessly. Robert Kennedy said that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the United States would be in the same spot as the French – whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination.
In his book, John M. Newman focuses on the "war before the war": the growing American involvement in Vietnam from mid-1961 to the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Diem in November 1963. Newman describes the bitter internal warfare waged by the Pentagon working with Lyndon Johnson, which cheated, lied, and plotted how to get American ground troops into Vietnam, and a skeptical President, who eventually compromised by sending thousands of military and civilian advisers.
On April 4, 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith, the ambassador to India, raised hell among Kennedy's advisers by proposing to the President that the United States negotiate with Hanoi a mutual withdrawal from the growing war in South Vietnam. If the United States instead increased its military support of Diem, Galbraith warned Kennedy, "there is consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did."
The Joint Chiefs were furious at Galbraith's proposal. They argued to McNamara that any drastic change in American policy would lead to the loss not only of South Vietnam but also of other Asian and non-Asian allies. The State Department was also opposed to a neutral solution.
To Kennedy, however, Galbraith's warning was a reminder of his friend Edmund Gullion's words, and he believed what the ambassador was proposing could be achieved. The President made an unsuccessful attempt to. He asked his new Assistant Secretary of State, Averell Harriman, to send Galbraith instructions to pursue an Indian diplomatic approach to the North Vietnamese about a mutual disengagement. Harriman resisted, saying they should wait a few days until they received an International Control Commission report on Vietnam. Kennedy agreed but insisted, according to a record of their conversation, that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith and that he would like to see such instructions. Harriman said he would send the instructions the following week. But he did not.
Averell Harriman sabotaged Kennedy's proposal for a mutual de-escalation. He "... struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line," as chronicled in Harriman's papers, and instead wired a message to Galbraith that "changed the mutual de-escalation approach into a threat of U.S. escalation of the war if the North Vietnamese refused to accept U.S. terms," thus completely distorting Kenned's intentions.
When Harriman's colleague Edward Rice tried to re-introduce Kennedy's mutual de-escalation proposal into the telegram, Harriman again intervened, first crossing out what Rice had written and then killing the telegram altogether. Because of the Assistant Secretary of State's obstruction, John Kenneth Galbraith was not informed about Kennedy's peaceful initiative.
In the Spring of 1962, when Kennedy had almost achieved a peaceful Laotian settlement, he instructed McNamara to make a plan for American withdrawal from Vietnam. The President had not yet reached the point of ordering the military to withdraw; he just needed a plan. Yet, his military chiefs were shocked. They perceived Kennedy's neutralization of Laos as surrender to the Communists. For the United States to withdraw from Vietnam was unthinkable.
John Kennedy tried to override the Pentagon's resistance by having his Secretary of State introduce the idea as a matter-of-fact to a small circle of high-level officials. McNamara served as Kennedy's "buffer" to top military men whose rising anger toward the President urged them toward insubordination. At some point, Kennedy had considered replacing Dean Rusk with McNamara as Secretary of State after the 1963 election, but as he confessed to Galbraith, "But then if I don't have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won't have a foreign policy."
However, on the issue of sending ground troops to Vietnam, McNamara was on the generals' side, and when it came to enforcing the President's will over the Pentagon's, McNamara was not always that competent. His order to the generals to draft a plan for withdrawal from Vietnam took more than a year to come back to the President in a form he could consider for approval. And after the President issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 on October 11 1963, this order was covered up because of his assassination.
JFK & VIETNAM is a disturbing but eye-opening book. It persuasively argues that John F. Kennedy indeed had realized an end had to be put to American intervention in Vietnam and that had Kennedy lived, the course of events would have been drastically different. John M. Newman has done a magnificent job with both the research and the writing of his work. I recommend it to proponents, as well as to opponents, of the version that it was President Kennedy who dragged the United States into the Vietnamese quagmire.
September 26, 2014
This is the most lucid narrative I have read of the decisions made regarding Vietnam by Kennedy. It also is a story of deception - the lengths to which members of the military and Kennedy's own advisors went to deceive him and the nation as to how the "advisors" were doing in Vietnam. Neither General Harkins nor JCS Chief, General Maxwell Taylor come out of this account (scrupulously researched) looking good. I am convinced by Newman's argument that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam (indeed, was beginning to in November 1963) had he not run into a bullet. That he was assassinated and Johnson - a very different man - became president changed the course of history. It became our rather than their war. "The key to understanding how this [1964 Presidential] campaign problem differed for these two men is this: Kennedy had to disguise a withdrawal; Johnson had to disguise an intervention."
November 12, 2022
I can only see one review of this book on the app.
Why is that? Only friends can respond to that review, which I had no objections to, tho i did run out of gas on reading all of it..
That review was almost as long as the book.
I am 2/3 finished with this book. I got it at a Salvation Army Thrift Store in the north Houston area and I got more out of that 3 bucks than any other time I can remember in my adult life.
I basically disliked JFK my entire adult life but books like this one have brought me to see that his murder was a tragedy for this country. My impression and I think 90% of the country's impression was that Viet Nam would have turned out the same. Now, I do think if JFK would've been reelected he would've tried his best to pull us out of Nam. I do think if Goldwater had been his opponent in 1964 it would not have been a landslide.
The JFK murder was definitely NOT a lone nut deal.
Powerful forces that are still in place were part of it. Think of the billions of lost revenue and why that was unacceptable, and who would have been impacted. I used to believe Sirhan acted alone, he didn't have that many bullets in his gun. There is a reason Hank Sinatra's The Manchurian Candidate movie was banned back then. Google up Jolly West.
Why is that? Only friends can respond to that review, which I had no objections to, tho i did run out of gas on reading all of it..
That review was almost as long as the book.
I am 2/3 finished with this book. I got it at a Salvation Army Thrift Store in the north Houston area and I got more out of that 3 bucks than any other time I can remember in my adult life.
I basically disliked JFK my entire adult life but books like this one have brought me to see that his murder was a tragedy for this country. My impression and I think 90% of the country's impression was that Viet Nam would have turned out the same. Now, I do think if JFK would've been reelected he would've tried his best to pull us out of Nam. I do think if Goldwater had been his opponent in 1964 it would not have been a landslide.
The JFK murder was definitely NOT a lone nut deal.
Powerful forces that are still in place were part of it. Think of the billions of lost revenue and why that was unacceptable, and who would have been impacted. I used to believe Sirhan acted alone, he didn't have that many bullets in his gun. There is a reason Hank Sinatra's The Manchurian Candidate movie was banned back then. Google up Jolly West.
June 7, 2015
Although rapidly approaching twenty five years since John Newman's 'JFK and Vietnam' was first published, it remains one of the masterworks detailing the Kennedy administrations struggle with the problem of S.E. Asia.
In superb detail using historical documentary evidence, from the very first days of his presidency, this book provides insight into the deceptions and lies, from his own military intelligence sources and government personnel, including his Vice President, who entangled Kennedy into their agenda to commit U.S. combat forces into Laos and Vietnam.
Newman's chronological study, covering 1961 to the end of 1963, reveals a Commander-in-Chief steering the ship of state toward peace, while surrounded by the dogs of war.
To appreciate the deep politics of this presidency and perhaps the events in Dallas, 'JFK and Vietnam' is essential reading.
In superb detail using historical documentary evidence, from the very first days of his presidency, this book provides insight into the deceptions and lies, from his own military intelligence sources and government personnel, including his Vice President, who entangled Kennedy into their agenda to commit U.S. combat forces into Laos and Vietnam.
Newman's chronological study, covering 1961 to the end of 1963, reveals a Commander-in-Chief steering the ship of state toward peace, while surrounded by the dogs of war.
To appreciate the deep politics of this presidency and perhaps the events in Dallas, 'JFK and Vietnam' is essential reading.
December 14, 2017
One of the biggest questions surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy has nothing to do with the events in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. It has to do with a nation in Southeast Asia you have very likely heard of called Vietnam and exactly what JFK was doing and might have been preparing to do before bullets ended his life and presidency. In 1992, historian and former military officer John M. Newman offered up large pieces of the puzzle with his book JFK And Vietnam. Despite the subtitle on the cover about "Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power", there's not any speculation in the book regarding the assassination. Instead, it is more of a look into the decision-making process and how the course of the war over the three years or so Kennedy was President.
Newman worked through documents then declassified for the first time as he set out to answer the lingering questions regarding his title subjects. In doing so he covers the Kennedy administration from its earliest days to its last days, right up until the very early days of the Johnson presidency. Newman paints on a massive canvas as a result, one covering two continents and dozens of people with names both well known and obscure as it tracks events in Washington, Saigon, and in the jungles of Vietnam.
The picture Newman paints is not necessarily a pretty one either. Of particular interest to me was the look at intelligence gathering and how that information was relayed back to Washington. One of the things I'm often struck by in looking at the world of intelligence is how the information gathered can be misunderstood or hidden to suit an agenda. The book nicely demonstrates both showing how information gathered largely by-2 (military intelligence) as well as the CIA under Dulles and McCone, was largely obfuscated in an attempt to show a more positive picture of events than what was actually happening.
At least until 1963. By that point, as Newman makes an incredibly strong case for here, JFK was attempting to pull American forces out of Vietnam. Newman traces the routes of this plan back to 1962 and how the President, realizing the deception he was facing as well as calls form the military to commit a massive US intervention they had been pushing for since the earliest days of his presidency, effectively launched a fog of his own to hide the withdrawal plan until after the 1964 election. Newman also demonstrated how this plan, on the brink of bringing the first one thousand troops home despite attempts to dilute it by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was ultimately scrapped in the aftermath of his assassination and how events eventually led to Lyndon Johnson committing America to a land war that it could never hope to win.
While it may sound as though the book is entirely pro-JFK, that isn't quite the case. Newman is happy to bring rightful criticism against the President for his early inability to commit to a policy during much of 1961 as well as having allowed himself to be seen as helping instigate the coup that toppled and executed the corrupt South Vietnamese leader Diem, a move he did not support. What this warts and all portrait presents though is a more honest image of JFK than is often presented and how Vietnam gave him a series of hard-fought lessons, lessons that taught him what it took others in and out of government years to realize: that the war couldn't be won by a corrupt South Vietnam that was unwilling to fight even with American aid and support.
For a book that is now a quarter of a century old, Newman's book holds up well as more recent research backs up much of what it has to offer. Indeed, I discovered a revised edition was just published earlier in 2017 (I read the original 1992 edition that I found in a local library). Even having not read the updated edition, I heartily recommend it for those wanting a better understanding of what led to America's full involvement in Vietnam and looking for answers to how Kennedy might have avoided it. It's also a powerful and cautionary tale about politicians, the military, the world of intelligence gathering, and the need for those in power to know the truth when making decisions.
Newman worked through documents then declassified for the first time as he set out to answer the lingering questions regarding his title subjects. In doing so he covers the Kennedy administration from its earliest days to its last days, right up until the very early days of the Johnson presidency. Newman paints on a massive canvas as a result, one covering two continents and dozens of people with names both well known and obscure as it tracks events in Washington, Saigon, and in the jungles of Vietnam.
The picture Newman paints is not necessarily a pretty one either. Of particular interest to me was the look at intelligence gathering and how that information was relayed back to Washington. One of the things I'm often struck by in looking at the world of intelligence is how the information gathered can be misunderstood or hidden to suit an agenda. The book nicely demonstrates both showing how information gathered largely by-2 (military intelligence) as well as the CIA under Dulles and McCone, was largely obfuscated in an attempt to show a more positive picture of events than what was actually happening.
At least until 1963. By that point, as Newman makes an incredibly strong case for here, JFK was attempting to pull American forces out of Vietnam. Newman traces the routes of this plan back to 1962 and how the President, realizing the deception he was facing as well as calls form the military to commit a massive US intervention they had been pushing for since the earliest days of his presidency, effectively launched a fog of his own to hide the withdrawal plan until after the 1964 election. Newman also demonstrated how this plan, on the brink of bringing the first one thousand troops home despite attempts to dilute it by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was ultimately scrapped in the aftermath of his assassination and how events eventually led to Lyndon Johnson committing America to a land war that it could never hope to win.
While it may sound as though the book is entirely pro-JFK, that isn't quite the case. Newman is happy to bring rightful criticism against the President for his early inability to commit to a policy during much of 1961 as well as having allowed himself to be seen as helping instigate the coup that toppled and executed the corrupt South Vietnamese leader Diem, a move he did not support. What this warts and all portrait presents though is a more honest image of JFK than is often presented and how Vietnam gave him a series of hard-fought lessons, lessons that taught him what it took others in and out of government years to realize: that the war couldn't be won by a corrupt South Vietnam that was unwilling to fight even with American aid and support.
For a book that is now a quarter of a century old, Newman's book holds up well as more recent research backs up much of what it has to offer. Indeed, I discovered a revised edition was just published earlier in 2017 (I read the original 1992 edition that I found in a local library). Even having not read the updated edition, I heartily recommend it for those wanting a better understanding of what led to America's full involvement in Vietnam and looking for answers to how Kennedy might have avoided it. It's also a powerful and cautionary tale about politicians, the military, the world of intelligence gathering, and the need for those in power to know the truth when making decisions.
July 11, 2023
This was one HELLUVA book. I've had this on a shelf in my house for quite a few years. I should have read it long before now.
I've studied the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam for most of my adult life. I realized early on in my studies what a clusterfuck the entire situation was, but Newman's book really dug down deep into the beginnings of that situation like no other book I've read before.
Those truly at fault for this dark time in U.S. history were definitely NOT the U.S. servicemen and women who were out there in the jungles or being shot down out of the skies. It was ALL the fault of upper-level U.S. government administrators, politicians, advisors, and the highest ranking military personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The story behind JFK's handling of the communist threat in Southeast Asia was a horrendously misguided and poorly organized shitshow of assorted groups and self-serving fools, with myriad personal motivations and views, who criminally mishandled this issue. Kennedy himself was not completely innocent, either.
If you have an interest in this era of U.S. history, I strongly suggest that you find this book at your local library or somewhere and give it a read. You'll be amazed and horrified at how inept the U.S. handling of this really was. The truly scary part of this lesson in History is that similar things are going on in the U.S. right this very minute with regards to Russia, the Ukraine, the Middle East, China and Taiwan, etc.
Some things never change, it seems.
I've studied the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam for most of my adult life. I realized early on in my studies what a clusterfuck the entire situation was, but Newman's book really dug down deep into the beginnings of that situation like no other book I've read before.
Those truly at fault for this dark time in U.S. history were definitely NOT the U.S. servicemen and women who were out there in the jungles or being shot down out of the skies. It was ALL the fault of upper-level U.S. government administrators, politicians, advisors, and the highest ranking military personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The story behind JFK's handling of the communist threat in Southeast Asia was a horrendously misguided and poorly organized shitshow of assorted groups and self-serving fools, with myriad personal motivations and views, who criminally mishandled this issue. Kennedy himself was not completely innocent, either.
If you have an interest in this era of U.S. history, I strongly suggest that you find this book at your local library or somewhere and give it a read. You'll be amazed and horrified at how inept the U.S. handling of this really was. The truly scary part of this lesson in History is that similar things are going on in the U.S. right this very minute with regards to Russia, the Ukraine, the Middle East, China and Taiwan, etc.
Some things never change, it seems.
November 2, 2018
An excellent book that provides a detailed narrative of the inner workings of the Kennedy administration's discussions - and machinations - regarding Viet Nam. A reader may not agree with the author's conclusion (that JFK would never have agreed to send combat troops to Viet Nam) - but the details of the debates in Washington and in Viet Nam - and especially of the duplicity of advisors and generals - provides fascinating insights into the path that led to a disaster reminiscent of a Greek tragedy.
August 27, 2024
You need this two connect the dots
Read
December 26, 2025footnotes on footnotes
November 21, 2010
I put this book down somewhere, and likely will never return to it. The issue revolves around two presidential memoranda: on by JFK in Oct. hinting at a phased withdrawal to begin by Dec. 1963; one by LBJ on Nov. 25 opening the door to combat troops. Ellsberg says that RFK personally assured him that JFK was committed to withdrawal after the '64 election. And of course, we know how that all turned out, don't we...?
(( This is an outstanding book (currently reading) that details in a fascinatingly detailed and inductive manner the genesis of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and documents, exhaustively, JFK's ambivalent position -- starting from the intervention in Laos in 1961 --, his intention to withdraw after the 1964 election, the increasingly reactionary and vitriolic response of the military hierarchy, and the threads that led from all this to the assassination....
I had expected this book to be rather dense -- but had not expected it to be so compulsively readable, mature, detailed...
The author is a colonel in the U.S. military and a military historian. ))
(( This is an outstanding book (currently reading) that details in a fascinatingly detailed and inductive manner the genesis of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and documents, exhaustively, JFK's ambivalent position -- starting from the intervention in Laos in 1961 --, his intention to withdraw after the 1964 election, the increasingly reactionary and vitriolic response of the military hierarchy, and the threads that led from all this to the assassination....
I had expected this book to be rather dense -- but had not expected it to be so compulsively readable, mature, detailed...
The author is a colonel in the U.S. military and a military historian. ))
December 27, 2014
Do you want to believe? JFK was isolated and betrayed. We know that. This book goes into some speculation based on a presumed moral intent on JFK's part. It sees his change of heart after the Cuban missile crisis. A realization dawned on the holder of the highest office in a powerful nation. Clearly he had a majority of the CIA and DOD very pist off at him. Mix in some pist off Cubans/Texans/mobsters/banksters and bah da bing! New leader! Lots of end notes and reference sources. Not a smooth flow and lots of time jumps which can lead to confusion. It's not a easy story to tell in this much detail. If your REALLY want to know the story it's priceless other wise 2.9 stars.
October 22, 2014
Excellent book. Detailed and thought-provoking analysis of the reasons that the US ended up in the Vietnam War.
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