assassination, his administration had already
sent more than 16,000 men to South Vietnam.
The Geneva Agreements were dead, as the US
responded militarily to increasing Vietcong activ-
ity in the South.
More important than the numbers, which were
small compared with Johnson’s eventual decision
to fight an all-out war employing half a million
US combat troops, was the commitment the
US made to South Vietnam during the Kennedy
presidency and the decisions that were taken
about the basic strategy needed to prevent
South Vietnam from falling to the communists.
Kennedy had expressed doubts at times about the
intrinsic importance of Vietnam; on other occa-
sions he subscribed to the notion that its loss
would entail the loss of southern Asia.
Although Kennedy frequently showed a better
sense of proportion than some of his advisers
about the dangers of escalation following the
despatch of US troops, he never departed from
his policy of increasing the US commitment as
much as he judged necessary to defeat the
Vietcong. His reasoning was political and global:
political because after agreeing to the neutralising
of Laos and the Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster, he
could not afford to seem in retreat again; global
because he accepted what he interpreted as the
communist challenge to the free world, which
had now shifted to a struggle for the Third
World. He ignored the advice he received from
General de Gaulle in the summer of 1961 not to
get bogged down in an interminable war in Indo-
China as the French had been and he was unde-
terred by the refusal of his principal ally, Britain,
to join the US military effort, as it had once done
to halt communist aggression in Korea. Vietnam
became America’s fight, with relatively little help
from America’s Pacific allies, Thailand, South
Korea, Australia and the Philippines. It was the
kind of struggle, moreover, for which the
Eisenhower military doctrine of meeting any
communist aggression with massive nuclear retal-
iation against Moscow or Beijing was extraordi-
narily ill-suited, as Eisenhower had already
discovered in Laos.
The new military concept suitable for Third
World struggles with communism was worked
out mainly by Walt Rostow, a professor of eco-
nomics, General Taylor and McNamara. At the
heart of it was the notion of flexible response.
Insurgency and guerrilla tactics would be met by
counter-insurgency and specially trained units –
the Green Berets. The Vietcong would be sought
out and destroyed in their hideouts in the coun-
tryside and jungles. Combat troops would meet
the enemy troops in just sufficient strength to
defeat them. This would enable the US to resist
force by counter-force in situations and over con-
flicts that, in themselves, could not possibly be
regarded as important enough to risk the destruc-
tion of the US in a nuclear exchange with the
Soviet Union. Only in defence of Western Europe
and over the question of Berlin did the US
threaten to use nuclear missiles. But even this
determination was doubted by de Gaulle, who
developed France’s own nuclear missile capacity,
and by the British who, though they later decided
to rely on American missiles sold to Britain, also
maintained their own national deterrent.
In Vietnam, Kennedy’s acceptance of the doc-
trine of flexible response meant that the US
would be drawn into an ever increasing commit-
ment. This was foreseen by intelligence reports
reaching Washington which pointed out that
neither bombing the North nor increasing the
level of American combat troops in Vietnam
would dissuade the North from matching every
increase. The US would be setting out on a war
of attrition without any foreseeable end. Or,
rather, it would be ended first by the US, when
the American people and Congress came to say
no to any further resources, any further loss of
American lives.
Kennedy, himself, at one time asked what was
so important about Vietnam, and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, more of a hawk than a dove,
wondered how the Americans could win a war in
South Vietnam which the South Vietnamese
themselves were mishandling and even losing. For
Kennedy the struggle was not about Vietnam
alone but about American leadership, about the
perception of America’s determination to defend
the free world, whatever the cost. This was
America’s mission in the world. In his election
campaign, in his inaugural and subsequent
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