Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

it. In late September, he dispatched a team headed by Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, his most trusted military adviser, to make an on-the-spot assessment.

The trip proved an eye-opener for McNamara. He had been among those favoring a pro-Diem policy in the weeks prior, but the mission changed him.

McNamara concluded that Hilsman and Lodge were correct: the prospects for success would be much greater without the Ngos in power. At the same time, he found no solid evidence that a coup would be successful, or that a successor regime would be better.

No doubt their coolness toward a change in government grew out of their conclusion that a replacement regime stood only a fifty-fifty chance of being an improvement over Diem.

The McNamara-Taylor report was a remarkable document, both for its importance in subsequent American policy decisions and for what William P. Bundy, an assistant secretary of defense, who was a member of the delegation, later called its “ internal inconsistency.” Though the military section of the report was optimistic, predicting victory once the political situation righted itself, the political section maintained, in Bundy’s words, that “such a righting was unlikely, and that on the contrary there was a serious prospect that an unreformed Diem would bring on chaos or an unpredictable change of regime.”34 Nor was the report accurate in its rendering of the military situation.

Here we come to another important new development in the late summer of 1963: the much greater attention paid to the war by both domestic and international audiences than at any time before, and the growing misgivings among many of these observers.

A State Department survey of U.S. public opinion in mid September found “widespread concern about U.S. Vietnam policy and considerable confusion” among Americans.

The real importance of South Vietnam, so far as we can discover, is psychological. If Diem falls, the world may be somewhat more convinced that Communism is the wave of the future.”

So long as America props up Diem, Ho will share the militance of Peking. But once Ho’s country is united under his rule, he could become another Tito.

the editorial’s larger assertions about the U.S. commitment and whether it ought to be continued were not widely shared in the print media in the late summer of 1963—such comments would not become commonplace until about a year later, in the autumn of 1964.

the New York Times, far and away the most influential press organ in the country, began to encourage a greater American effort in the direction of negotiations.

Research by Robert David Johnson makes clear that several centrist and left-of-center Senate Democrats in this period cast considerable doubt on the long-term prospects in the war effort—Albert Gore of Tennessee, Wayne Morse of Oregon, and George McGovern of South Dakota, for example, advocated using the Buddhist crisis as an excuse to get the United States out of what they saw as a hopeless mess.

a partial withdrawal, so the theory went, would suggest to lawmakers that the current course was the correct one and that the administration did not plan for Americans to take over the main burden of the fighting.

In a scene that would be repeated several times in The Long 1964, a prominent Senate Democrat had allowed himself to be used, to be co-opted by an administration intent on pursuing the war.

Gordon Etherington-Smith, Her Majesty’s ambassador in Saigon, a man more sympathetic to American aims in Vietnam than many of his compatriots, told the Foreign Office in mid September that the French proposal merited consideration.

Roger Laloulette, the French ambassador in Saigon, had been recalled to Paris for consultations in mid September following a spate of press reports detailing his support for a North-South agreement and alleging that he was leaning on other western diplomats to back Nhu against the Americans. Without him on the scene—he would in fact never return to Saigon—France’s capacity for direct influence on the GVN had been diminished.

Kennedy said bluntly that de Gaulle’s August statement had been unhelpful, particularly with regard to its timing.

Should this occur, the likelihood of achieving ultimate U.S. objectives in South Vietnam will have virtually disappeared.”

“Recent developments,” it warned, “convey the unmistakable impression that the Diem/Nhu combine are prepared to dig in for a protracted war of attrition with the United States, resisting pressures for reform.”

From Saigon, Ambassador Lodge warned that “we should consider a request [from the GVN] to withdraw as a growing possibility” and that the United States therefore had no choice but to back a coup.

But what if the coup failed? Just as they had done in the last week of August, Kennedy and his lieutenants in October spent much time debating the implications of a takeover attempt that did not succeed. They were convinced that a faded coup would be disastrous for America’s image abroad and would almost certainly bring about the very thing that a coup was intended to prevent: an ejection of the United States from South Vietnam by the Diem regime.

It was a fear bluntly articulated by Robert Kennedy at a toplevel meeting on 29 October. “If the coup fails,” he warned those around him, “Diem throws us out.”56

absurd morality laws were enforced,

this political and religious repression and reluctance to implement reforms contributed significantly to the American dissatisfaction, an important additional factor was the possibility that Diem and Nhu might be abandoning the war effort altogether in favor of a negotiated settlement.

Not for the last time, Washington would engineer the removal of a Saigon leader it perceived to be insufficiently committed to the war effort, a reality that makes a mockery of official claims, both then and in the years to follow, that the United States sought only to preserve freedom in South Vietnam, sought only to allow southerners to enjoy the blessings of self-determination.

one of the supreme ironies of American Vietnam policy in the Kennedy years that the same fear of negotiations resurfaced almost immediately after the new government,...

building a rapport with those groups alienated by the Ngos—students, urban professionals, members of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects, and, most important, the Buddhists.

The Paris government was certain that Washington was behind the Diem overthrow and that the new regime in Saigon was, as Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville put it in a cabinet meeting, no real government at all.

In the Senate, Mike Mansfield was increasingly inclined to agree with Paris that a neutralist settlement was the only real solution to the conflict. Walter Lippmann believed likewise, more strongly than ever.

With hindsight it can be said, with only slight exaggeration, that the week of 3-10 November was the week when the New York Times changed its editorial stance on Vietnam.

Later claims that the Times was slow in opposing the war in Vietnam, and therefore should be considered an accomplice to the Americanization of 1964-1965, are mistaken.

When the Times editorial followed two days after that, Joseph Mendenhall of the Far East desk told Roger Hilsman that he thought a meeting should be set up with the newspaper to try to “set them straight” on the situation in Vietnam and on U.S. policy there.

He told Kleiman that the president had made very clear that “the United States was prepared to withdraw its presence from South Vietnam as soon as Hanoi ceased its interference in the South or as soon as the South was able to handle the problem on its own.”

“We cannot,” the message concluded, “envisage any points that would be negotiable.”71 Those words serve as a succinct summary of the Kennedy administration’s approach to negotiations throughout its three years in office.

A number of individuals inside and outside the administration—among them Charles de Gaulle, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mike Mansfield, Walter Lippmann, George Ball, Chester Bowles, and John Kenneth Galbraith—had since 1961 warned Kennedy against deepening America’s involvement in Vietnam and had urged him to seek negotiated withdrawal. Instead, the president chose to steadily increase the U.S. commitment. By the time of his death, more than sixteen thousand American military advisers were in Vietnam.

His remarks set for delivery on 22 November at the Dallas Trade Mart, a destination he never reached, included the words: “We in this country in this generation are the watchmen on the walls of freedom. … Our assistance to … nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task.”72

the one-thousand-man withdrawal plan, it must be understood as being primarily a device to put pressure on Diem, as appearing at a time of general military optimism (or at least nonpessimism) in the war, as being wholly conditional upon battlefield success, and as designed to neutralize growing domestic American concerns and counter the appearance that Washington was taking over the war effort.

the one-thousand-man withdrawal signaled no lessening of the American commitment to South Vietnam.

NSAM 263 hardly represented the far-reaching policy initiative that the incipient-withdrawal proponents suggest. It was but one part of a larger “selective pressures” policy designed to push the Diem regime into greater effectiveness in both governing and prosecuting the war against the Vietcong.

As for NSAM 273, issued on 26 November 1963, four days after JFK's death, it did not institute any kind of reversal of the one-thousand-man reduction. The withdrawal, it read, would “remain as stated” in NSAM 263, and the thousand men in fact were removed at the end of the year.

“I talked with John Kennedy on hundreds of occasions about Southeast Asia,” Rusk noted in his memoirs, “and not once did he suggest or even hint at withdrawal.”

Midlevel officials Walt W. Rostow and William P. Bundy voiced similar sentiments after Oliver Stone’s JFK appeared.

a 1964 oral history interview, the younger Kennedy confirmed that the administration had not seriously considered a withdrawal.

Dean Rusk is surely correct in arguing that Kennedy’s Vietnam policy must be judged on what “he said and did while president, not on what he may have said at tea table conversations or walks around the Rose Garden.” Judged in that light, the evidence points not in the direction of an American withdrawal at the time of Kennedy’s death but to a continued commitment to the war.

he surely knew that a coup with American finger- prints all over it would make any U.S. withdrawal more difficult,

No less important, but largely ignored in the existing literature, is the second theme: the Kennedy administration’s complete rejection of exploring the possibilities for a political solution to the conflict.

The outrage in American public opinion at the GVN's policies in the fall of 1963 represented the golden opportunity—even more so than earlier in the summer—for the Kennedy team to throw up its hands and say that it had no option but to withdraw all U.S. assistance. Instead, Nhuzs actions only made Washington more determined to overthrow him and his brother.

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.

“We'd cross that bridge when we came to it,” was his brother Robert’s description of the administration’s thinking about the prospect of a complete deterioration in South Vietnam. It is an expression that effectively summarizes Kennedy’s entire approach to the war.

When John F. Kennedy arrived in Dallas that fateful day in November, the most important Vietnam decisions still lay in the future.