Camelot is not what it seemed. The presidency of John F Kennedy is remembered oftentimes as the quintessential American tragedy. Young, attractive, aristocratic, healthy, tough in war but committed to peace. This is what we think of when we hear the name of the most pop culture-esque President this country ever saw before a man named Barak came along. But the smiling façade peeled back reveals the revered family history as polished gangsterism, the All-American picture of health as a chain smoker who was constantly demanding drugs for back pain, and a general disregard for the peace we enjoyed as he and his administration took office.
While it is easy to deride and blame Kennedy’s Vice President and successor Lyndon B Johnson as the man who escalated our involvement in Vietnam and doomed us to a decade of humiliating swamp sloshing quagmire, the man who took us first to the brink is one of the most revered doves in Democratic political history. Johnson may have pulled the proverbial trigger, but it was Kennedy who flipped the safety off and cocked back the hammer.
It is always easy for scholars to look back at history and deride the mistakes of those of the time; to say what should have been done in what situations and how that would have avoided xyz. To have the advantage of 2020 hindsight is an unfair one when judging the actions of our predecessors. But when a chorus of voices at the time, ranging from your closest personal advisors to your most important military and economic allies, are telling you you’re walking off a cliff, it becomes inexcusable to continue.
Such was the case with Kennedy and his relationship with the South Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem had been installed as the leader of South Vietnam following the Geneva Accords of 1954, and in many respects he was the best option to lead the newly partitioned South Vietnam, not a good option. George Herring’s book America’s Longest War described Diem as a fierce nationalist who was just as stringently an anti-Communist. He had exiled himself from his home country during French rule and had lived in New Jersey, so he was pro-American, a qualification that a bitter French diplomat considered to be his one redeeming quality in the eyes of the United States.
But Diem was also a rigid ruler who was out of touch with the peasantry, a solid 90% of South Vietnam’s population, and a Catholic, which raised tensions with the country’s Buddhist majority. From the outset, Diem and his family, who formed his closest circle of advisors, demonstrated a willingness to use legal and extralegal means to impose and then hold an authoritarian grip on the workings of the South Vietnamese government. In the initial “free” elections that put Diem into power, Diem won 605,000 of the votes when there were only 405,000 registered voters (Herring).
Such was the bedfellow that Kennedy inherited from Dwight D Eisenhower, who in turn had inherited from the French when they withdrew from the country, when he became President in 1960. By this time, Diem had already alienated large swaths of the population through misguided and elitist policies and programs such as Agroville, a derogatory name for Diem’s program that called for rural villagers to be uprooted and moved into large, communal hamlets that could be fortified and protected against insurgents and dissidents from the National Liberation Front and communist agents from the North.
Diem reasoned that by providing schooling and medical care as well as security in these hamlets, the villagers would appreciate the hospitality. But in reality, they harshly resented being forcefully removed from their native lands, where in many cases the remains of their ancestors were buried (a big deal in Buddhist culture), being given unfair compensation for those same lands (often being too little to pay for the fortified land they were being forced to buy), and forced to work on communal crops instead of personal ones.
Ignoring the fact that this program bore a stark resemblance to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist model of communal farming, the village structure was upended and trampled on by this forced relocation. This and other programs like it, along with Diem’s heavy handed treatment of any deemed dissidents or others who might be a danger to his power (jail, exile, execution, etc.) had convinced many people from the British, French, Vietnamese and American governments that Diem was not a person to increase American involvement with.
Kennedy felt differently. Extremely aware of any political criticism at home who characterized him as weak on the threat of Communism, Kennedy felt strongly that the United States needed to become more proactive in its containment policy towards Communism and the Soviet Union. He felt that the US had become too reactionary towards the threat under Truman and Eisenhower (pointing to Korea as a prime example), and he sought to break the trend in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy shared Eisenhower’s view of the region as dominos, and if one country fell to communism, the rest would soon follow. A communist uprising in Laos, which borders Vietnam on the western side, seemed to confirm his view. So South Vietnam became a priority of the Kennedy administration more than it had been to any of his predecessors. Diem’s government was buoyed and kept alive by billions of dollars of aid that began to flow in from the United States in both military and economic aid.
The disappearance of French foreign capital following that country’s withdrawal was replaced by the import-lease program, which allowed for a massive influx of dollars into the economy without causing out of control inflation by importing goods instead of dollars. While this seemed to improve the standard of living, it in fact made the consumer goods portion of the Vietnamese economy entirely dependent on US aid and didn’t affect at all the peasants outside of the city centers, the large majority of the population.
However, most of those aid dollars, even some meant for economic purposes, went into the building of the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Herring describes the wholesale funding of the army by the US, including the purchase of uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and equipment, the payment of salaries for officers and enlisted alike, and trips for the ARVN’s officers to train in the United States.
The efforts of Kennedy’s MAAG (Military Assistance and Advisory Group) team, would have and should have yielded a good result, a functioning and organized military that had the beginnings of good morale and discipline. But again, Diem intervened and placed his stamp of incompetence. Fearing a united military as a threat to his power, Diem broke up the military into blocs. Also, he appointed officers to positions of command based not on merit or skill but on their level of loyalty to him. The Civil Guard, a sort of militia type unit meant to police cities for insurgents, became a dumping ground for those without the skills to succeed in the regular army.
Also, and this was the MAAG’s mistake, the ARVN was training primarily in conventional warfare, instead of counterinsurgency. This would prove to be a dire mistake when the NLF began to sweep the countryside with revolution and guerilla warfare, a game the ARVN had no answer to.
To answer the question of whether or not war was unavoidable by the time Kennedy was assassinated, one must understand the prism the world was viewed through at that time. Communism vs. capitalism. Nothing else mattered. In the eyes of US policymakers, communism was a menace that would seek to control the world. As Herring called it, in a zero sums game, any gain by the Soviets was automatically a loss for the Americans.
It was then the same way it is today in terrorism vs. freedom. With that in mind, it is not hard to imagine war being inevitable the moment Vietnam was partitioned in 1954. Kennedy sought to be more aggressive towards communism, but at the same time was not effective in gaining what the US felt it needed from Diem in South Vietnam. Diem consistently bullied Kennedy into more aid, less strings attached, less supervision and more lenience to drive his country into the hands of the NLF and the communists.
Between Kennedy’s determination but inability to achieve his stated goals and Diem’s megalomania, Ho Chi Minh didn’t have to do very much. His enemies built the fire, Ho simply lit the match, and when agents from the North began arriving in the South, they found a receptive peasant population that hated Diem for his treatment of them and the Americans as just another group of white, imperialist occupiers. Had a different South Vietnamese President been in place, Kennedy could have quite possibly achieved his goals of a stable government and strong protective army. Had there been a stronger American President, Diem might have been either forced to meet the people’s needs or forced from power. But the two together made that impossible and war inevitable.
Herring, George C. America’s Longest War, Fourth Edition. 2002. McGraw Hill Higher Education.
Zac Johnson - My name is Zac Johnson. I'm a 22 year old senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, majoring in political science. I'll graduate in ...
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