Without Dallas: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War.

• Position: Alternate history - Viewpoint essay

Title: Without Dallas: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War

Author: Mark White

Text:

What if the most famous murder in history had not taken place on November 22, 1963? With a life and a presidency ended prematurely by an assassin's bullets, there has been an understandable impulse on the part of historians to consider what would have happened to Kennedy had he lived beyond Dallas. Equally understandable, historians have commented on this issue so as to bolster their interpretation of Kennedy's presidency.

Kennedy's 'Camelot' supporters, including Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen, have suggested that he would have achieved great things. Schlesinger wrote: "He had so little time: it was as if Jackson died before the nullification controversy and the Bank war, as if Lincoln had died six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Roosevelt at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Marshall Plan." Robert Dallek, the most influential Kennedy scholar in recent years, has also considered what would have happened in a second term for JFK, concluding that he would have played a commendable role in reducing Cold War tensions.

Kennedy's detractors take a different view. "The dark side of the president's personal and official activities," claimed historian Thomas Reeves, "might have ruined Kennedy's second term and brought the nation another kind of grief and mourning than that which tragically did ensue." (i)

Of all the issues that would have determined Kennedy's legacy and reputation had he not been killed, the most important is Vietnam. Lyndon Baines Johnson, twenty months after becoming president, took the United States into a full-scale land war in Vietnam that became a disaster. Would Kennedy have made the same decision?

The 1964 Presidential Election

The first issue to be resolved is the likely duration of a Kennedy presidency had he not been assassinated, as this has clear implications for his legacy in Vietnam. Had he been defeated in the 1964 election, JFK would have served as president until January 1965, before the saga of US involvement in Vietnam could have played out to the extent that it did under Johnson's leadership. If Kennedy had won a second term, he would have remained in the White House until January 1969, as did Lyndon Johnson.

It is worth noting that since his days as a Harvard student Kennedy had developed a deep interest in international affairs. After his father Joseph P. Kennedy was appointed as Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador in London, JFK spent a lot of time in Britain in the late 1930s, at a critical juncture in diplomatic history as the fragile interwar peace was about to break down. Hewrote his undergraduate thesis on the British appeasement of Nazi Germany, which in the summer of 1940 was published as his first book, Why England Slept. In that book, he developed some of the core ideas that would shape his later approach to foreign policy: military preparation for democracies was essential, and democratic leaders needed to be resilient in dealing with aggressive dictatorships. After his election to Congress in 1946, Kennedy retained a strong interest in foreign affairs, more so that in domestic policy. (ii)

After his election as president in 1960, Kennedy was compelled to deal with some of the greatest challenges of the Cold War era. He endured a tense and acrimonious summit meeting in Vienna in June 1961 with his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev. It was at that summit that Khrushchev demanded the United States leave West Berlin within six months, thereby generating a major crisis over the German city. Kennedy responded robustly. The transcripts of the Vienna summit indicate that JFK was far more candid and effective with Khrushchev than had previously been assumed in making clear to him that Soviet demands over Berlin were unacceptable. Thereafter Kennedy announced a military buildup to convey the idea to Khrushchev that he would not back down over Berlin.

Although sanctioning the building of the Berlin Wall, Khrushchev abandoned his efforts to drive the United States out of West Berlin in 1961. That constituted a major achievement on Kennedy's part. To be sure, Kennedy had endured the humiliation of the failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in April 1961. But that occurred early in his presidency, and the negative impression created by this fiasco was corrected by what was generally regarded as his stellar performance during the Cuban missile crisis eighteen months later. Moreover, Kennedy would have been able to present himself in his 1964 re-election campaign not only as a president with the steel to stand up to the Russians, but also as a peacemaker as he had secured the historic Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. These foreign policy successes increased the likelihood that Kennedy would have won the 1964 election, and would therefore have shaped US policy in Vietnam until January 1969.

Did Kennedy have concrete plans for Vietnam?

The question of whether Kennedy would have gone to war in Vietnam had he not died in Dallas divides into two. Firstly, did Kennedy have concrete plans for US policy in Vietnam? And secondly, if not, what would he have most likely done in Vietnam? As for long-term plans, he rarely harbored them. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked on this, saying that although Kennedy was an impressively quick operator he did not always have a clear sense of the big picture. State Department official U. Alexis Johnson, too, noticed that JFK was "not a man to whom you could present a plan extending six, eight, ten months down the road and expect anything in the way of a reaction from him." This short-termism could be a troubling weakness, authorizing the Bay of Pigs invasion and other anti-Castro measures without considering how Khrushchev might respond (missiles in Cuba), and ordering a large military build-up without anticipating that the Russians would retaliate with a huge build-up of their own (which is precisely what they did later in the sixties). In the case of Vietnam, there is no evidence that Kennedy had decided whether to fight a full-scale land war there; and that outlook was consistent with his tendency to focus on the short-term. (iii)

Grafted on to this issue of Kennedy's proclivity to avoid dwelling on the long term is the growth he displayed as a leader during his time in the White House. That he became a more sophisticated and progressive thinker on relations with Russia and civil rights begs the question of whether a part of that growth was a greater ability to consider long-term developments. How he reflected in 1963 on the future of Soviet-American relations as well as race relations in the US suggests he did improve as a leader in this regard. Still, on Vietnam his long-term thinking remained unclear. (iv)

Kennedy's open mind on the future direction of American policy in Vietnam was revealed by his statements to the press in the fall of 1963, only a few months before his demise. In a September 2 interview with veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite, Kennedy said that, "In the final analysis, it is their [the South Vietnamese] war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it." This indicated that Kennedy was unlikely to bolster the South Vietnamese army with US ground troops given that it was their war. Yet in the same interview he said, "I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw" from Vietnam as it was "a very important struggle." This suggested that Kennedy was ready to stay the course in Vietnam in order to prevail, and presumably this strong commitment would have included US troop deployments if required. It could have been the case that Kennedy was thinking in terms of public relations: he wanted to assure the American people that somehow he would not tolerate a defeat in Vietnam and that he would keep America out of a protracted war there. On the other hand, his contradictory statements may have reflected the ambiguity...