And if you take the time to examine what was really happening with Kennedy and the Vietnam war instead of cherry picking a few statements that were made, it's very obvious that although Kennedy wanted to pull US troops from combat in Vietnam that he rapidly came to the conclusion that doing so would cause South Vietnam to go over to the communists, he was ADAMANT about not letting that happen and instead increased the numbers of "advisers". That is why the claim by progressives that Kennedy would have ended the war if he hadn't been assassinated is baseless.
It is not 'baseless'. His own advisers and his Secretary of Defense said that he would have ended our involvement. It is totally ignorant to 'claim' that JFK would have escalated the war as LBJ did.
One of John F. Kennedy's most trusted and closest advisers was devout Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith. JFK and Galbraith were working together to end the Vietnam War, against the recommendations of his personal military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and his deputy National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow. Kennedy sent Galbraith on a personal mission to Vietnam to assess the situation there. Kennedy didn't trust his ambassador (Henry Cabot Lodge), the military or anyone else would tell him the truth. Galbraith even arranged a private luncheon for Kennedy and India's Prime Minister Nehru at the Newport estate of Jacqueline Kennedy's mother and stepfather. No one from the State Department--to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's great consternation--was invited, save Galbraith. At the Nehru-Kennedy luncheon, Galbraith and JFK began probing the Indian leader about ways to avoid American militarization of Vietnam, a subject on which (for complex reasons) the neutralist Nehru remained maddeningly ambiguous, emphasizing only that the United States must stay out.
Galbraith and Vietnam
By Richard Parker
Monday, March 14, 2005
In the fall of 1961, unknown to the American public, John F. Kennedy was weighing a crucial decision about Vietnam not unlike that which George W. Bush faced about Iraq in early 2002--whether to go to war. It was the height of the cold war, when Communism was the "terrorist threat," and Ho Chi Minh the era's Saddam Hussein to many in Washington. But the new President was a liberal Massachusetts Democrat (and a decorated war veteran), not a conservative Sunbelt Republican who claimed God's hand guided his foreign policy. JFK's tough-minded instincts about war were thus very different. Contrary to what many have come to believe about the Vietnam War's origins, new research shows that Kennedy wanted no war in Asia and had clear criteria for conditions under which he'd send Americans abroad to fight and die for their country--criteria quite relevant today.
But thanks also in part to recently declassified records, we now know that Kennedy's top aides--whatever his own views--were offering him counsel not all that different from what Bush was told forty years later. Early that November, his personal military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and his deputy National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, were on their way back from Saigon with a draft of the "Taylor report," their bold plan to "save" Vietnam, beginning with the commitment of at least 8,000 US troops--a down payment, they hoped, on thousands more to follow. But they knew JFK had no interest in their idea because six months earlier in a top-secret meeting, he had forcefully vetoed his aides' proposed dispatch of 60,000 troops to neighboring Laos--and they were worried about how to maneuver his assent.
Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake.
For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty. Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics.
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