Robert Dallek Quotes
Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.'s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.
Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Little, Brown and Company, 2003.
The occasion was the visit to Washington of French Minister M. Jean Letourneau. The French were fighting the communists in Vietnam and the U. S., not yet in the fight, promised material and political aid, but no military participation. It was almost a decade later that America sent its first military personnel to Vietnam. The West was persuaded that the French could handle the situation. When they were defeated, America and Britain assumed that it was the notorious military incompetence of the French that accounted for the situation rather than the competence and commitment of the Vietnamese Communists and their support of the majority of the people.
After the French were driven out, Vietnam was supposed to have a national election to choose a government but the people of Vietnam were deeply split between those supporting the Communists and Ho Chi Min (who had led the campaign to oust the French from their colony) on one side and Vietnamese who were more Westernized and favored a democracy. Vietnam was mostly Buddhist but most of the Western oriented leadership of the Democracy advocates were Christians. They wanted to delay the election to give them a chance to organize to catch up with the communists at political organization. Ho Chi Min and the Communists already do facto controlled the North of Vietnam and decided to use force against the Western oriented forces whose military was much smaller than the Communists who had ejected the French. The United States provided financial aid and supplied weapons and Central Intelligence Agency assistance to the South Vietnam forces who were afraid of being overrun by the Communists headquartered in the North. Taylor’s mission was to go to Vietnam, assess the situation and make recommendations to President Kennedy.
Had he signed such a treaty in 1968, he would have been pilloried by the Conservatives of both parties for selling out the interests and principles of the United States and shackling the military before they could win the war. The military was lying about their successes and there were very few. Further, our ally whose government we were protecting from armed revolution was totally corrupt and did not support freedom and democratic values much more than the North Vietnamese Communists did. The Vietnamese in the South had little to fight for unless they were proofing from the corrupt government. There was no possibility that American could have won the war under those conditions. When the Nixon Administration signed the treaty, some of the ultra conservatives objected, but Nixon was a Republican anti-Communist and red baiter and this blunted the opposition of the bulk of the conservatives who were seeing a more realistic view of the war. The liberals who hated Nixon, however, supported him on this matter which was then their most important issue.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.
