That is all very well, it could be argued in response, but surely the administration deserves at least some sympathy, for the simple reason that no one of consequence was at the time asking it to consider disengagement. But in fact they were. Influential commentators at home and abroad began in the autumn of 1963 to suggest that America’s commitment to South Vietnam ought to be fundamentally reevaluated, that a major war on behalf of the GVN might be neither necessary to western security nor winnable in any meaningful sense of the term.
