Americans awakening to the Vietnam crisis puzzled over the conduct on both sides. Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy. Uncomfortable barriers of religion and race plagued Kennedy Administration officials most responsible for U.S. war policy in Vietnam, so that they “decided long ago,” wrote Max Frankel in the Times, “to discuss it as little as possible.” Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral,
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