By the start of 1961, then, the Second Indochina War was underway. A new American president, John F. Kennedy (JFK) took office at just this time, and Indochina was from the start an important foreign-policy issue for his administration. Initially, however, it was not Vietnam but Laos that loomed largest. Laos had been declared neutral by the Geneva conferees in 1954, and Washington had thereafter sent aid and advisery personnel to try to secure stable, pro-Western rule in the small, landlocked country. The Vietnamese countered by building up the Pathet Lao in the east. By the time of Kennedy’s inauguration, the US-sponsored government of Phoumi Nosavan faced imminent defeat at the hands of Pathet Lao guerrillas, heavily backed by the DRV. Outgoing president Eisenhower and several senior US officials urged JFK to intervene militarily, but he demurred, in part due to opposition from the British and French governments. Instead, Kennedy opted to back a Soviet-sponsored initiative to convene a new Geneva conference on Laos for the purpose of negotiating a settlement among the competing factions. In July 1962, a deal was signed. It did not bring lasting peace, but it did remove Laos from the list of Cold War hot spots.
For Kennedy, diplomacy seemed the only viable option on Laos. But he feared that by choosing this course he had opened himself up to charges of being "soft on communism" from his domestic opponents, many of whom were also attacking him for the failed effort to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. He determined to stand firm in Vietnam. The administration consequently stepped up aid dollars to the Diem regime, increased the air-dropping of raiding teams into North Vietnam, and launched crop destruction by herbicides to starve the Vietcong (as the insurgents in the South became known) and expose their hiding places. Kennedy also strengthened the US military presence in South Vietnam, to the point that by 1963 more than 16,000 military advisers were in the country, some authorized to take part in combat alongside the US-equipped Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).
Meanwhile, opposition to Diem’s repressive regime increased. Peasants objected to programs that removed them from their villages for their own safety, and Buddhist monks, protesting the Roman Catholic Diem’s religious persecution, poured gasoline over their robes and ignited themselves in the streets of Saigon. Intellectuals complained that Diem countenanced corruption in his government and concentrated power in the hands of family and friends, and blasted his policy of jailing critics to silence them. Eventually US officials, with Kennedy’s approval, encouraged dissident ARVN generals to remove Diem and his influential brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. On November i, 1963, the generals struck, ousting Diem and then murdering him and Nhu. Less than three weeks later Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas.
The timing and suddenness of Kennedy’s death ensured that Vietnam would be a particularly controversial aspect of his legacy. Just what would have happened in Southeast Asia had Kennedy returned from Texas alive can never be known, of course, but that has not stopped historians (including this one) from speculating. Consensus is usually elusive in such counterfactual exercises, and even more so in this case given the contradictory nature of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. He expanded US involvement and approved a coup against Diem, but despite the periodic urgings of top advisers he refused to commit US ground forces to the struggle. Over time he became increasingly skeptical about South Vietnam’s prospects and hinted that he would end the American commitment after winning reelection in 1964. Some authors have gone further and argued that he had commenced an American withdrawal from Vietnam even at the time of his death, but the evidence for this claim is thin. More likely, JFK arrived in Dallas still uncertain about how to solve his Vietnam problem, postponing - as veteran politicians often do - the truly difficult choices until later.
LyndonJohnson (LBJ), too, sought to put off the tough decisions for as long as possible. In the early months, he viewed all Vietnam options through the lens of the 1964 election. "Stay the course" seemed to be the wisest strategy in that regard, far less risky than either precipitous withdrawal or major escalation. Yet Johnson also wanted victory, or at least to avoid defeat, which in practice amounted to the same thing. As a result, throughout i964, the administration secretly planned for an expansion of the war to North Vietnam and never seriously considered negotiating a settlement. In early August, the president launched the first direct US military attacks on North Vietnam, after two American destroyers reported coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. He did so despite conflicting evidence as to what had occurred in the Gulf and why. Johnson also pushed through Congress the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave him the authority to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." In so doing, Congress essentially surrendered its war-making powers to the executive branch. The resolution, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later noted, served "to open the floodgates."391
Johnson, delighted with the broad authority the resolution gave him, also appreciated what the Gulf of Tonkin affair did for his political standing - his public approval ratings went up dramatically, and his show of force effectively removed Vietnam as a campaign issue for the Republican Party’s presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. On the ground in South Vietnam, however, the outlook remained grim in the final weeks of 1964, as the Vietcong continued to make gains. US officials responded by fine-tuning the secret plans for an escalation of American involvement.
In Hanoi, as well, plans were laid in 1964 for stepped-up military action. Already in December 1963, in the aftermath of the Diem coup, DRV leaders had decided to escalate the fighting in the South, in the hopes that further deterioration would either cause the Americans to give up the ghost and go home or leave them insufficient time to embark on a major escalation of their own.
Having made this decision, Hanoi officials were slow to carry it out, in part because their allies in Beijing and Moscow urged caution. Neither Communist giant was keen to see an Americanized war in Vietnam, one that could confront them with difficult choices and potentially bring them into direct contact with the US Seventh Fleet. Their own bilateral relationship deeply fractious, they also each sought to keep the other from gaining too much influence in Hanoi. Both advised the DRV to go slowly, and to avoid provoking Washington. The North Vietnamese professed to agree, even as they used the final weeks of 1964 to step up the infiltration of men and materiel into the South. Premier Pham Van Dong said during a meeting with Mao Zedong in October 1964: "If the United States dares to start a [larger] war, we will fight it, and we will win it. But it would be better if it did not come to that."392
World History
