Editor’s note: Dr. Terry F. Buss is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration. He wrote this article exclusively for Tuoi Tre News.

>> An audio version of the story is available here

It’s been about 50 years since the American war began in the years 1961 to 1964, so it seems propitious to look back on the start of the war from the U.S. perspective that proved so costly to Vietnamese and Americans.

Both Vietnam and the U.S. are enjoying increasingly closer ties in trade, security, and culturally, overcoming the past differences and looking toward the future. 

In the past 20 years, the U.S government has released once-classified documents about the war’s beginnings, several high ranking U.S. officials involved in the war have published forthright books on their time in office, and researchers have begun to revise interpretations of the period.

Much of this material has not yet become widely known in America, and certainly not in Vietnam. 

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy became president in January 1961.  The Cold War was in full swing. Kennedy felt that the U.S. had tried to appease first Nazi Germany, then Soviet Russia during World War II with disastrous consequences.  Kennedy would reverse that: he wanted to take the fight to Cold War adversaries.  In his inaugural address to the nation, he pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Almost immediately, Kennedy faced several well-known crises that revealed U.S. weaknesses: building of the Berlin Wall, failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, Cuban-Russian missile crisis and neutrality issues with Lao. Importantly, Nikita Khrushchev, in an effort to needle Kennedy, announced that Russia intended to support local wars of national liberation. Kennedy chose Southeast Asia to make restore American power.

Kennedy sets the tone for his new foreign policy by appointing Robert McNamara secretary of defense. McNamara had no experience in either foreign or defense policy and no government experience. He was a Harvard University professor who became head of Ford Motor Company. McNamara appointed colleagues who also had no experience. What they all had in common was they were technocrats, from elite universities, very smart, and egotistical believing that they could manage the government better than others, “The Best and the Brightest.” Kennedy believed that McNamara had the management skills to guide his Cold War initiatives.

McNamara’s team tended to shut out experts, advisors and decision makers with whom they disagreed. The five top U.S. generals (the “Joint Chiefs”) were ignored, so military decisions in Southeast Asia were essentially handled by amateurs.

They were technocrats in the sense they believed by gathering and analyzing tons of performance data, solutions to problems would be clear. Systems analysis ruled. They lacked vision, insight and strategy.

McNamara and Kennedy held identical views about counterbalancing Cold War adversaries: “containment” and confrontation if needed. They believed that wars of liberation in South East Asia would create a “domino effect” in which one country after another would fall unless contained.

McNamara and Kennedy, and the administration, not only lacked foreign policy expertise, they also were totally ignorant about Vietnam—its politics, culture, history and place in the region with respect to China and Russia, but especially the determination of the Vietnamese people.

Kennedy began his Vietnam campaign in 1961 by sending 400 Green Beret “advisors” to assist the South Vietnamese government, following on efforts by presidents Eisenhower and Truman. The goal was to build a democratic government that could stand on its own, then in a short time, the U.S. would withdraw. While this was underway, McNamara was preparing contradictory plans for a “limited” war involving 200,000 U.S. troops initially. Ironically, Charles de Gaulle, after colonial power France was defeated by the Vietnamese warned Kennedy that this was a very bad idea.

Kennedy added 16,000 advisors in 1962. In a speech to Congress, he opined, “Few generations in all of history have been granted the role of being the defender of freedom in its maximum hour of danger. It is our great fortune….” McNamara visited South Vietnam proclaiming “every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war.”

In 1963, South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem was in turmoil with successful assassination plots, coup attempts, a dysfunctional army, victories by the National Liberation Front, and civil unrest—especially among Buddhists. Kennedy, having begun to rethink U.S. involvement, announced that 1,000 advisors would be withdrawn, and that he was considering a new strategy leading up to the 1964 presidential elections.

Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. No one knows whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam or not.

Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president, became president the day after the assassination. There would be no doubt where Johnson stood on the war. He took Kennedy’s policy “rethink” to mean a full scale expansion of the war.

McGeorge Bundy, senior foreign policy advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, put it well in his memoirs after the war when he said, “Kennedy did not want to be dumb, but Johnson did not want to be a coward.”

To be continued…