The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year. Reston in particular would see these events as a study in irony, believing that by October 1962, after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had made good his need to show Khrushchev his fiber, but by that time it was too late as far as Southeast Asia was concerned; there were already more than 15,000 Americans in South Vietnam. For the Cold War was still quite real in 1961, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the men who had come to power in Washington were very much a part of it. They had been fashioned out of it, and now in their first year they were getting regular reminders that it had not yet crested, and their own very eagerness to be tested would in fact accelerate it.