On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy approved the chemical defoliation program in Vietnam. The program, said Kennedy, was to be considerably smaller than the Advanced Research Projects Agency had originally devised, and it should instead have a budget between $4 million and $6.5 million. With President Kennedy’s blessing, the genie was out of the bottle. By war’s end, roughly 19 million gallons of herbicide would be sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam. A 2012 congressional report determined that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed
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