[The Liberal Whisperer]

Two U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam under Eisenhower. Both from non-hostile causes. Saint Kennedy really escalated the war.

[Chances Are]

In 1962, Kennedy and Kruschev held a summit. This summit was held in the shadow of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and the U2 spy plane scandal featuring Gary Francis Powers. The Berlin Wall had recently gone up. too.

In light of all this, the bluff and bluster that was Nikita Kruschev pretty much bullied the young president at that summit. He came away embarrassed and mad, and felt he had to do something concrete to counter the image he'd just conveyed to the Russian Emperor (apparatchiks will gag at that, won't they?).

His advisors, chief among them Dean Rusk, Walt W. Rostow, and Robert McNamara, convinced him that Vietnam was the place to do it. It was far away, off the radar of most people, including the media, would cost little in the context of what was involved with the big picture, and would keep the military happy, relatively speaking.

However, JFK, along with the "Best and the Brightest", really had no idea what they were getting into. They had no concept of the "fighting force" that was passed off as the South Vietnamese army. They had little idea of the degree of venality and corruption that marked Vietnamese politics. And they'd overestimated themselves by an incredibly huge margin. I mean, these guys were the functional definition of arrogance and hubris.

Part of the problem was the "McNamara Strategy" the made military prosecution of the war all but impossible, rotating leadership in and out after a year (or less) because it was felt that no career military higher up should not be able to have Vietnam on his resume. (Of course, that same thought process did not apply to grunts.)

The real turning point in that war came when JFK authorized the assassination of Ngo dhin Diem in '63. This had all the hallmarks of a White House out of control, and I'm sure (but of course can't document) it influenced LBJ later, who saw that in this clime, "anything goes".

Had Kennedy survived the assassin's bullet, history doubtless would have viewed him quite differently, not at all the romantic way he is remembered today.

CA....