Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 30 - June 23, 2025
Harriman acquitted himself better—he spelled out how the negotiations would start and what might follow—but he too raised as many questions as he answered, about how long the process might take, about who would ultimately rule Vietnam, and about the implications for America’s standing on the world stage and the Democratic Party’s standing at home.
Kennedy appears to have feared that a decision to negotiate on Vietnam would harm his credibility and provoke a domestic political attack similar to that which Harry Truman had endured after the “fall of China” a dozen years earlier.
This “doctrine of credibility” had by the fall of 1961 supplanted the domino theory in American thinking on Vietnam, or at least altered the way that theory was conceived.
It amounted to a kind of “psychological domino theory,” to use Jonathan Schell’s apt phrase.
In American public opinion, the Cold War Consensus that had undergirded American foreign policy since the mid 1940s remained intact in 1961, as could be readily seen on the editorial pages of elite newspapers.
He rejected the alternatives of negotiating a peace settlement or deploying combat forces and chose instead a down-the-middle approach of increasing aid and advisers.
even a relatively modest increase in the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam would make any future contraction of that commitment more difficult.
Three thousand American military personnel would now move about the South Vietnamese countryside, and some of them would be authorized to take part in combat.
The war appeared to most of them to be going much better. An early GVN collapse no longer threatened. And, indeed, the infusion of American aid and advisers in late 1961 and early 1962 yielded immediate (if temporary) results
More important, the 1962 American-Diem military offensive did nothing to stem the political revolution against the Saigon regime that was taking place in the countryside.
To some degree, at least, this picture of progress appears to have been deliberately fabricated by American military and diplomatic sources in Vietnam who faced tremendous pressure from McNamara’s Pentagon to report such improvements.
Averell Harriman, more hopeful about the prospects in the war than previously (and perhaps sensing that the issue had been decided in JFK's mind), now categorically opposed the solution he had urged back in November: to extend the Laos discussions to include Vietnam, with an eye toward gaining a neutralist settlement.
Roger Hilsman, one of Dean Rusk’s top deputies on Vietnam, attacked Galbraith’s interpretation of the war and urged that the war be prosecuted.
It was a curious thing about Rusk: as secretary of state he was the nation’s chief diplomat, and yet he had little faith in the power of diplomacy to settle international disputes, at least where communists were involved.
Rusk’s decision to have his department take a lower profile on the war had hugely important implications as U.S. involvement deepened, and it provides a large part of the explanation for one of the central features of American Vietnam policy in 1961-1965: the striking absence in the massive internal record of even rudimentary contingency planning for negotiations
True, in July 1962 he accepted a Burmese proposal to have Averell Harriman meet with his North Vietnamese counterparts at Geneva to discuss not only the Laos talks but also the situation in South Vietnam, which would seem to suggest that he might be willing to make a genuine attempt to reach an accommodation on the war. But there is no indication that JFK saw the meeting as significant. Harriman took an utterly intransigent line with DRV foreign minister Ung Van Khiem, demanding from Hanoi what would have amounted to a complete capitulation
in January he assured Mansfield that there would be a complete U.S. withdrawal, though not until after the 1964 election. But Kennedy said other things to other people.
His oft-quoted assertion to newspaperman Charles Bartlett in late April 1963 (that is, shortly after Ngo Dinh Nhu stepped up his anti-American campaign), which may be apocryphal but rings true, captures this point well: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” Bartlett quotes JFK as telling him. “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the people to reelect me.”87
If he had been looking for a face-saving and domestically defensible way out of Vietnam, the Diem regime presented it to him during the spring and summer of that year with Nhu’s anti-American pronouncements and with the attacks on the Buddhists.
But it bears noting that his decision to cut losses and negotiate on Laos caused far less ruckus on the homefront than many of his aides had feared and anticipated.
Hanoi’s vision of a settlement involved a coalition government in the South patterned on the Laos model, together with the withdrawal of the United States. The Soviets, the French, and most British officials also envisioned an agreement along these lines. Most of these observers understood that the Laotian model was an imperfect fit—that unlike Laos, South Vietnam did not have a readily identifiable centrist candidate for any coalition government who occupied the middle between two extremes (there was no Vietnamese Souvanna Phouma);
When next we consider the freedom-of-maneuver question in detail (in chapter 9, covering the final weeks of 1964), we will find a very different objective situation, both on the ground in Vietnam and in the domestic American and international arenas. At the start of 1965 continuing on the middle path would be impossible, which meant that the disengagement option demanded (or should have demanded) much closer attention.
In late August 1963, as the United States moved to oust the South Vietnamese leader it had backed for the past nine years, Charles de Gaulle chose to speak out in favor of a political solution leading to a Vietnam free of outside intervention. American officials, always opposed to an early settlement and possessing an agreement with London to work to prevent one, had seen no reason to feel particularly fearful of the prospect. The pressure in that direction had never been significant. Until now. The Kennedy administration, faced with determined opponents in both Hanoi and Saigon, now would
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Certainly in hindsight but probably also in the context of the time, the foreign-policy issue that loomed largest for the administration in those fateful months of late 1963 was Vietnam—or, at least, none could be said to have loomed larger.
His admirers, seeking to insulate JFK from the subsequent debacle in Southeast Asia, have asked us to judge him by his intentions rather than his accomplishments because, they have argued, his good intentions would have reached fruition had he not been cut down so suddenly in November 1963.
Evidence for the thesis is slim, to say the least, and to be plausible, the thesis must somehow overcome the two central themes of American policy making in the fall of 1963, to be examined in this chapter: first, a pronounced fear of a premature negotiated settlement; and second, a strong determination to remove Ngo Dinh Nhu from effective policymaking power, if necessary by removing President Diem himself.
Vietnam. “In response,” Hilsman advised, the United States “should point out publicly that Vietnam cannot be effectively neutralized unless the Communists are removed from control of North Vietnam.” Should the brothers make a “political move” directed to Hanoi, Hilsman suggested that Henry Cabot Lodge “give Diem a clear warning of the dangers of such a course and point out its continued pursuit will lead to a cessation of U.S. aid.”
policy. “I have good reason to believe,” he said, “that the Holy See would be willing to intervene with de Gaulle.”
British analysts believed that three courses were open to Washington: to make peace with Nhu, to replace the whole regime by way of a coup, or to clear out of Vietnam altogether. The analysts were divided among themselves on which of the first two options was more likely but saw little chance that Kennedy would consider negotiations.
In a memorandum to Kennedy on “suggested comments” for the interview, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy dealt at considerable length with the general’s statement and the ways in which the administration could gently but clearly distance itself from it.
It would be a mistake, Kennedy said, for the United States to withdraw from Vietnam.
He had introduced a dangerous new element—the prospect of North-South peace—at a time when U.S. officials were working feverishly to strengthen the war effort.
American planners would spend much time discussing the French leader’s actions and ideas, but only in terms of how best to counter them. The substance of his argument was not closely examined,
in September there were more signs that leaders in both North and South Vietnam were interested in pursuing the kind of accommodation envisioned by de Gaulle.
His leaking of the existence of the contacts to the rabidly anticommunist American journalist Joseph Alsop, who wrote a column on it in midmonth, suggests that he was trying to scare Washington,
Such a move would not be made out of any affection for the Hanoi regime—the Vietminh had reportedly tortured and killed their oldest brother.
But if, as some observers believed, they no longer were rational, then the “likelihood of Nhu’s endeavoring to seek an accommodation with Hanoi must be assessed considerably higher;
It is also obvious to me that we must not leave.
A compromise settlement between North and South would have forced an American withdrawal from Vietnam, a prospect most policymakers found too frightening to contemplate, much less to pursue. In late 1963, senior U.S. officials remained in nearly unanimous agreement that the American presence must be preserved.
Paul Kattenburg, a veteran State Department official who was chair of the Interdepartmental Working Group and who was considered a leading department expert on Vietnam, said his recent trip to Saigon had convinced him that Diem was hopeless and had made the people of South Vietnam unwilling allies of the Vietcong. The conclusion that both he and Lodge had reached, he told the group, was that the situation would continue to unravel and that the United States would be booted out of the country within six months to a year. Because Diem would not change and would not get rid of Nhu, there was only
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It was a key moment: the unthinkable proposition—to get out of Vietnam—had been made at a high- level meeting by a man widely respected for his deep knowledge of Vietnamese society.
Rusk, McNamara, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson immediately blasted Kattenburg’s claims.
It was a textbook example of how to silence a midlevel official, even one respected for his expertise on the issue in question.
During a press conference on 12 September, Kennedy announced that he was “for those things and those policies which help win the war there. That is why some 25,000 Americans have traveled 10,000 miles to participate in the struggle.
What helps to win the war, we support; what interferes with the war effort, we oppose.
Would a president privately scheming for disengagement from the war make such a categorical comment? Hardly.
it will lead to nasty come-backs when, as is likely, things go badly in the field over the next two months. The critics can then justly say ‘The war is now going worse—what are you going to do about it?’"
Averell Harriman, who had more access to Kennedy’s thinking than most in the administration, assured Lodge that “from the President on down everybody is determined to support you and the country team in winning the war against the Viet Cong. … There are no quitters here.”
if there was general agreement among U.S. policymakers that a negotiated American withdrawal should be excluded from consideration, there was no such unity of opinion on what should be done to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam.
The “pressures” group was opposed by one centered in the Defense Department and advocating “reconciliation.” Its members included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA director John McCone, and General Harkins.
