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Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
The Virtual JFK DVD is now available! For more information on the film companion to the book, visit
466 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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October 17, 2021
This book addresses one of the most controversial what-ifs in American foreign policy: What would President John F. Kennedy have done if he had not been assassinated? The young President's premature death came at an especially inopportune moment in the Vietnam saga — only three weeks after an American-sanctioned coup in Saigon overthrew and murdered South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, and about a year before President Lyndon B. Johnson embroiled his country into a large-scale war. On top of that, John Kennedy did not leave a clear statement about his intentions in regard to Southeast Asia, and overall his Vietnam policy was rather contradictory, at least as presented to the public. On one hand, he expanded the American commitment to South Vietnam by substantially increasing the number of advisers, and he approved a coup against Diem. He also periodically supported the domino theory in statements to the American people. On the other hand, pressure from virtually all of his top advisers notwithstanding, President John F. Kennedy refused to send American ground troops to the Vietnam conflict, and he became increasingly disillusioned with South Vietnam's chances and began looking for a way to end American involvement there.
In their study, James Blight, Janet Lang, and David Welch argue that had President John Kennedy, there would not have been a Vietnam war. They focus on the minutes of Kennedy's November 15, 1961 showdown with his top-ranking advisers over whether to Americanize the war in Vietnam as proof for their argument. That meeting was the turning point in the President's opinion about what to do with the American government's ally in Vietnam, President Diem, and his declining fortunes. At the end of a nightmarish year, full of crises, humiliation, and much uncertainty about the eventual outcome of any of his actions during 1961, Kennedy was deliberately put under as much pressure as his military and civilian advisers could muster to send American troops in large numbers to prevent the triumph of Communism in South Vietnam. Yet John Kennedy stood his ground. As the authors point out, his reasons for not sending combat troops are highly important for us because they can help us understand his approach to the most significant decision any leader can face: whether to take the country to war or to keep the country out of war.
The minutes of the November 15, 1961 meeting reveal that the President was almost fighting with his whole high-rank national security team: McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, General Lyman Lemnitzer, and others. The authors divide his objections to deepening American commitment to Vietnam into four main categories: allies, guerrillas, interests, and escalation. President John F. Kennedy insisted on taking into account the views of America's many allies and doubted American military power could prevail in a jungle guerrilla warfare against an immensely determined enemy. He believed his country had other interests, such as the confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe, that greatly outweighed any possible benefit of a victory in a prolonged, costly conflict in Southeast Asian jungles.
"It is remarkable, in retrospect, that the convictions of the advisers were so strongly held — so convinced were they that a U.S. takeover was inevitable that the majority of the advisers seem to have missed the significance of it: the president was not going to war in Vietnam," Blight, Lang, and Welch comment. It seemed to have been just as incomprehensible for them as John Kennedy's decision not to support the Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The exception was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who understood the President was indeed resolved to stay out of Vietnam and helped him search for a way to get out of the increasingly complicated situation there without a general war.
But President John F. Kennedy was responsible for dealing not only with advisers, but also with the public. As an elected politician, he was supposed to be a salesman. "The difficulty of making the sale to the public is increased as the politician finds it necessary to tell the public what it may not want to hear," explain the authors. The public phase of the President's turning point began with a speech Kennedy gave in Seattle roughly twenty-four hours after the November 15 showdown with his advisers. This November 16, 1961 speech demonstrates how John Kennedy strives to lead the American people to uphold his position on Vietnam in the face of the hostility of anti-Communist, Cold War ideologues. Its tone and content contrast sharply are with many of the public statements of President John F. Kennedy’s successors.
For him, 1961 was the presidential year from hell, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Laos crisis, and a potential nuclear crisis in Berlin leading the long list of foreign and domestic disasters. He could have played on the fears of Americans or encouraged them to halve the world into good and evil, free and Communist, wave the flag, and send their sons to Vietnam or Cuba – preferably to both, as General Lyman Lemnitzer had recommended during the previous day's meeting.
Instead, President John F. Kennedy asked the American people to open their eyes, take a good look at the new world of the early 1960s, and make their peace with it. He asked them to be realistic, to "face the fact that the United States is neither omniscient nor omnipotent—that we are only six percent of the world’s population — that we cannot impose our will on the other ninety-four percent of mankind — that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity — and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
Of course, John Kennedy made many, and varying, public pronouncements about foreign policy in general and the Vietnam conflict in particular. He said on one occasion that he believed in the domino theory, and on another that he was skeptical of it. However, as Blight, Lang, and Welch rightly argue, we can learn far more about the President's decision-making if we focus on what he did instead of on what he said. And what he did was resist the unanimous opposition of his top-ranking advisers to steer the United States away from the Vietnamese quagmire it would wade into later and begin building his public case for that decision.
President John F. Kennedy's advisers did not understand that not because, as it is often claimed, the President failed to properly explain his motives and plans to them, but because they viewed everything exclusively through the prism of Cold Warrior ideology. They could not imagine withdrawing from South Vietnam without making sure the South would not fall to Communism. President John F. Kennedy, on the other hand, not only imagined it, but by November 1961 realized it was probably inevitable, and McNamara and he began to plan future Vietnam policy accordingly.
By analyzing what could have happened, but did not, James Blight, Janet Lang, and David Welch, none of whom are professional historians, provide insightful observations that explain why things turned out the way they did. Their study method, called "critical oral history," involves interaction, in a conference setting, of former officials and scholars who have before them declassified documents and, in this case, tape recordings relevant to the issue discussed. VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED is a study with a unique approach and persuasive arguments, which make it compelling for Kennedy and Vietnam War buffs.
In their study, James Blight, Janet Lang, and David Welch argue that had President John Kennedy, there would not have been a Vietnam war. They focus on the minutes of Kennedy's November 15, 1961 showdown with his top-ranking advisers over whether to Americanize the war in Vietnam as proof for their argument. That meeting was the turning point in the President's opinion about what to do with the American government's ally in Vietnam, President Diem, and his declining fortunes. At the end of a nightmarish year, full of crises, humiliation, and much uncertainty about the eventual outcome of any of his actions during 1961, Kennedy was deliberately put under as much pressure as his military and civilian advisers could muster to send American troops in large numbers to prevent the triumph of Communism in South Vietnam. Yet John Kennedy stood his ground. As the authors point out, his reasons for not sending combat troops are highly important for us because they can help us understand his approach to the most significant decision any leader can face: whether to take the country to war or to keep the country out of war.
The minutes of the November 15, 1961 meeting reveal that the President was almost fighting with his whole high-rank national security team: McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, General Lyman Lemnitzer, and others. The authors divide his objections to deepening American commitment to Vietnam into four main categories: allies, guerrillas, interests, and escalation. President John F. Kennedy insisted on taking into account the views of America's many allies and doubted American military power could prevail in a jungle guerrilla warfare against an immensely determined enemy. He believed his country had other interests, such as the confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe, that greatly outweighed any possible benefit of a victory in a prolonged, costly conflict in Southeast Asian jungles.
"It is remarkable, in retrospect, that the convictions of the advisers were so strongly held — so convinced were they that a U.S. takeover was inevitable that the majority of the advisers seem to have missed the significance of it: the president was not going to war in Vietnam," Blight, Lang, and Welch comment. It seemed to have been just as incomprehensible for them as John Kennedy's decision not to support the Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The exception was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who understood the President was indeed resolved to stay out of Vietnam and helped him search for a way to get out of the increasingly complicated situation there without a general war.
But President John F. Kennedy was responsible for dealing not only with advisers, but also with the public. As an elected politician, he was supposed to be a salesman. "The difficulty of making the sale to the public is increased as the politician finds it necessary to tell the public what it may not want to hear," explain the authors. The public phase of the President's turning point began with a speech Kennedy gave in Seattle roughly twenty-four hours after the November 15 showdown with his advisers. This November 16, 1961 speech demonstrates how John Kennedy strives to lead the American people to uphold his position on Vietnam in the face of the hostility of anti-Communist, Cold War ideologues. Its tone and content contrast sharply are with many of the public statements of President John F. Kennedy’s successors.
For him, 1961 was the presidential year from hell, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Laos crisis, and a potential nuclear crisis in Berlin leading the long list of foreign and domestic disasters. He could have played on the fears of Americans or encouraged them to halve the world into good and evil, free and Communist, wave the flag, and send their sons to Vietnam or Cuba – preferably to both, as General Lyman Lemnitzer had recommended during the previous day's meeting.
Instead, President John F. Kennedy asked the American people to open their eyes, take a good look at the new world of the early 1960s, and make their peace with it. He asked them to be realistic, to "face the fact that the United States is neither omniscient nor omnipotent—that we are only six percent of the world’s population — that we cannot impose our will on the other ninety-four percent of mankind — that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity — and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
Of course, John Kennedy made many, and varying, public pronouncements about foreign policy in general and the Vietnam conflict in particular. He said on one occasion that he believed in the domino theory, and on another that he was skeptical of it. However, as Blight, Lang, and Welch rightly argue, we can learn far more about the President's decision-making if we focus on what he did instead of on what he said. And what he did was resist the unanimous opposition of his top-ranking advisers to steer the United States away from the Vietnamese quagmire it would wade into later and begin building his public case for that decision.
President John F. Kennedy's advisers did not understand that not because, as it is often claimed, the President failed to properly explain his motives and plans to them, but because they viewed everything exclusively through the prism of Cold Warrior ideology. They could not imagine withdrawing from South Vietnam without making sure the South would not fall to Communism. President John F. Kennedy, on the other hand, not only imagined it, but by November 1961 realized it was probably inevitable, and McNamara and he began to plan future Vietnam policy accordingly.
By analyzing what could have happened, but did not, James Blight, Janet Lang, and David Welch, none of whom are professional historians, provide insightful observations that explain why things turned out the way they did. Their study method, called "critical oral history," involves interaction, in a conference setting, of former officials and scholars who have before them declassified documents and, in this case, tape recordings relevant to the issue discussed. VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED is a study with a unique approach and persuasive arguments, which make it compelling for Kennedy and Vietnam War buffs.
August 13, 2018
"All war is stupid. The results of war are more complicated, more difficult to control, more damaging politically, and altogether more horrible than you or your advisers can imagine." is what this author imagines JFK would advise a modern president.
December 15, 2023
As the introduction to this book makes clear, so much Vietnam War historiography, both popular and academic, is about assigning blame for the losses, both political and personal. Was it Kennedy or Johnson, hawks or doves, a conscious choice or a historical inevitability? Particularly when this book was written in 2005, at the height of the Iraq War, the question of political responsibility for a war going badly was particularly acute.
Counterfactuals are somewhat absurd. History is a matter of interpreting evidence, but there is only one past. The methodological dispute between counterfactual and virtual history is somewhat arcane, but the method here has some validity. Blight and his co-authors assembled a panel of about 20 distinguished individuals: 3 Kennedy-Johnson officials (low level ones, the only one I'd heard of was Bill Moyers, and that's because he's been a newscaster for decades since being LBJ's press secretary), and evenly matched teams of 'skeptical' academics who believe Kennedy would have acted much as Johnson did, and 'radical' academics who thought he would have done differently, had he lived. Participants read a 1000 page briefing document of mostly primary sources, a selection of which are at the back, and then met for three days of spirited discussion at the Musgrove Conference Center in Georgia.
The book consists of a mix of summarizing commentary by the authors, direct quotes of participants, and primary sources, and is therefore most immediately useful as a model of how historians debate. The questions focused on three key moments in 1961, as Kennedy decides whether to commit to Laos, 1963 as Kennedy decides to remove Diem from power in a CIA-orchestreated coup, and then "long 1964", where Johnson starts Operation Rolling Thunder and eventually deploys the Marines to Da Nang.
The matter of Kennedy vs Johnson is a fascinating one, because the two men were of the same party, had comparable attitudes on muscularly interventionist anti-Communism, and practically the same foreign policy team. The differences, as the skeptics argue, were in psychology and foreign policy expertise. Having been burned by trusting hawkish advisors during the Bay of Pigs, and gained confidence during the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was more confident in foreign policy, and more skeptical of good military outcomes. Additionally, while the foreign policy team (Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc) was very similar, Kennedy was better at tolerating internal dissent and going against his advisors. Finally, assuming that South Vietnam was teetering on the brink of collapse in 1965, Kennedy would be in his second term and much less vulnerable to public pressure of the 'Who lost China?' variety.
The radicals lay out an argument that Kennedy has made a private decision to limit the American commitment to Vietnam to advisors only, and that he was prepared to let South Vietnam fall before sending in American troops. The skeptical counter is that while this private decision may be in character for Kennedy, there's no actual evidence of it, even in masses of private letters and audio tapes, that Kennedy did massively escalate the advisory commitment between his inauguration and assassination, and that decisions about 'withdrawal' may have been a token 1000 advisors, who were in fact withdrawn and replaced with a new set of 1000 advisors, out of roughly 17000 Americans in-country at the start of 1964.
There's no argument that Johnson made the war a psychological referendum on his own character and resolve, and that he and his administration agonized over the decision for months, while Johnson and Walt Rostow worked tireless to suppressing dissenting views. Ultimately, we'll never have an answer to this question, but the key lesson is that a short victorious war isn't.
Counterfactuals are somewhat absurd. History is a matter of interpreting evidence, but there is only one past. The methodological dispute between counterfactual and virtual history is somewhat arcane, but the method here has some validity. Blight and his co-authors assembled a panel of about 20 distinguished individuals: 3 Kennedy-Johnson officials (low level ones, the only one I'd heard of was Bill Moyers, and that's because he's been a newscaster for decades since being LBJ's press secretary), and evenly matched teams of 'skeptical' academics who believe Kennedy would have acted much as Johnson did, and 'radical' academics who thought he would have done differently, had he lived. Participants read a 1000 page briefing document of mostly primary sources, a selection of which are at the back, and then met for three days of spirited discussion at the Musgrove Conference Center in Georgia.
The book consists of a mix of summarizing commentary by the authors, direct quotes of participants, and primary sources, and is therefore most immediately useful as a model of how historians debate. The questions focused on three key moments in 1961, as Kennedy decides whether to commit to Laos, 1963 as Kennedy decides to remove Diem from power in a CIA-orchestreated coup, and then "long 1964", where Johnson starts Operation Rolling Thunder and eventually deploys the Marines to Da Nang.
The matter of Kennedy vs Johnson is a fascinating one, because the two men were of the same party, had comparable attitudes on muscularly interventionist anti-Communism, and practically the same foreign policy team. The differences, as the skeptics argue, were in psychology and foreign policy expertise. Having been burned by trusting hawkish advisors during the Bay of Pigs, and gained confidence during the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was more confident in foreign policy, and more skeptical of good military outcomes. Additionally, while the foreign policy team (Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc) was very similar, Kennedy was better at tolerating internal dissent and going against his advisors. Finally, assuming that South Vietnam was teetering on the brink of collapse in 1965, Kennedy would be in his second term and much less vulnerable to public pressure of the 'Who lost China?' variety.
The radicals lay out an argument that Kennedy has made a private decision to limit the American commitment to Vietnam to advisors only, and that he was prepared to let South Vietnam fall before sending in American troops. The skeptical counter is that while this private decision may be in character for Kennedy, there's no actual evidence of it, even in masses of private letters and audio tapes, that Kennedy did massively escalate the advisory commitment between his inauguration and assassination, and that decisions about 'withdrawal' may have been a token 1000 advisors, who were in fact withdrawn and replaced with a new set of 1000 advisors, out of roughly 17000 Americans in-country at the start of 1964.
There's no argument that Johnson made the war a psychological referendum on his own character and resolve, and that he and his administration agonized over the decision for months, while Johnson and Walt Rostow worked tireless to suppressing dissenting views. Ultimately, we'll never have an answer to this question, but the key lesson is that a short victorious war isn't.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews