One of the core reasons the US resorted to force in Vietnam and its neighboring countries, was because Washington’s imperial designs for south-east Asia had scant support from local populations. The client regime established by President Dwight Eisenhower in the southern half of Vietnam, from 1954, had no legitimacy whatsoever in the Vietnamese countryside where four-fifths of the populace resided.
Even in the wealthier urban areas, public backing was slim for the Diem autocracy in South Vietnam, a country founded officially in October 1955. US army planners estimated in the early 1950s that the Vietnamese revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, enjoyed broad support throughout Vietnam, an assessment that would remain consistent well into the 1960s; years after the US military invasion of South Vietnam, which had been authorized by John F. Kennedy in late 1961.
An important study completed in 1969 by the US army officer, Jeffrey Race, who was himself present on the ground in South Vietnam, confirmed the Saigon regime’s dismal popularity. Race revealed further how Diem’s forces and that of his successors “terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement – for example by liquidations of former Vietminh, by artillery and ground attacks on ‘communist villages’ and by roundups of ‘communist sympathizers’.”
South Vietnamese officials knew quite plainly that “communist cadres are close to the people, while ours are not”, but they never grasped why. The reason was that the US-backed regime failed to address the needs of the rural masses, while the revolutionary forces, as Race outlined, “offered concrete and practical solutions to the daily problems of substantial segments of the rural population” of South Vietnam. The Diem outfit, elitist and propped up by US military aid, had only one recourse to control the public: violence.
The Eisenhower administration was aware of Diem’s thin popularity. Yet, Eisenhower was also a distinguished general, with considerable front-line experience as a commander during World War II. He would not sanction an invasion of Vietnam. US troop numbers in South Vietnam peaked at a modest 900 under Eisenhower, and they remained in “strictly advisory” roles.
Read more: Op-ed: US involvement in Vietnam and the domino theory
US military interventionism during Eisenhower’s presidency
The sum total of US military interventionism during Eisenhower’s eight year presidency – when American power was greatly clear of any country and close to its peak – consisted of a three month invasion of tiny Lebanon from July 1958, to help thwart the spread of Arab nationalism in the Middle East. Eisenhower said openly that for America to lose control of this region “by inaction would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the strategic position and resources of the Middle East”.
It is true that Eisenhower, from the summer of 1959, was planning a military intervention in Cuba to destroy the Castro government, thereby restoring the Caribbean island to US auspices. As Eisenhower was aware, four previous US invasions of Cuba had been launched during the early 20th century, to rescue weak American-friendly governments in Havana. Eisenhower would not get around to ordering what he foresaw would be another brief and successful intervention in Cuba, like the US victory against leftist forces in Lebanon. The invasion plans for Cuba were forwarded to Kennedy instead.
Expansion of US military during JFK’s presidency
As soon as JFK assumed the presidency, contrary to what is often claimed, he ordered a vast expansion of US military capacities; which by 1961 were already much larger and more formidable than its nearest competitor, the USSR. Seeing the disparity, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev proposed to JFK wide-scale mutual reductions in offensive weaponry, which would have reduced the threat of ultimate destruction. Khrushchev’s offer was rejected by Kennedy.
Read more: President Kennedy’s handling of conflict in Vietnam
The US political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, observed that the Kennedy administration thereafter “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen… even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces, to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States”.
The US arms budget at the end of Eisenhower’s tenure in 1960 amounted to $45 billion. Under Kennedy, by 1962 military expenditure had increased to $52 billion. JFK’s sparking of an arms race was a central cause culminating in the Cuban missile crisis, of October 1962. Khrushchev’s reaction to Kennedy’s military build-up was to give the Americans “a little of their own medicine”, as the Soviet president said; that is, by stationing nuclear missiles outside of the Soviet Union’s borders for the first time – to be dispatched to Moscow’s ally Cuba.
CIA’s augmentation under Kennedy
Various assertions have been circulated about JFK’s policies through the decades: that with his assassination, an earlier age of innocence ended, that he was in the process of withdrawing from Vietnam, ending the Cold War and the arms race, that he wanted to dismantle the CIA and the military-industrial complex. A closer examination may prove otherwise.
The CIA, simply reflecting Kennedy administration planning, was increasing its activities across Vietnam into 1962 and 1963, including covert operations in communist North Vietnam. CIA schemes during the Kennedy years were also growing in Laos, Cuba, Chile and even Africa. In June 1963, Kennedy requested the CIA to again ramp up operations against Fidel Castro, in a renewed effort to overthrow him. The assaults aimed at Cuba were terminated by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, just five months into his term in April 1964; with President Johnson saying that the Kennedy administration “had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean”.
CIA historians have pointed out that it was in fact Johnson who regarded the CIA “with contempt”, not Kennedy, and that LBJ reduced the CIA’s role in policy decisions.
In late 1961, JFK fired the CIA’s strongest critic (veteran politician Chester Bowles) and during his presidency the CIA director became “a principal participant in the administration, on a par with the Secretary of State or Defense”, while the CIA had a “significant voice in policy making” under Kennedy, particularly through 1963. The Kennedy brothers’ enthusiasm for CIA counterinsurgency and covert operations was clear. This can be attested to by highlighting such programs as Operation Mongoose, authorized by JFK on 30 November 1961 – and which was a major campaign of CIA-run terror and subversion against Cuba.
The CIA can only have been grateful to JFK for augmenting their power, and allegations that they were involved in his assassination are baseless. The CIA had much more cause to be disgruntled with Johnson and especially his successor, Richard Nixon, who had cold disregard for what he termed the “Ivy League liberals” who he felt were running the CIA.
In 1962 and 1963, President Kennedy was utilizing the CIA to undermine leftist movements in Chile, pertaining to the upcoming 1964 elections there, through efforts to prevent a figure like Salvador Allende from prevailing. Kennedy-engineered CIA interference in Chile had a crucial role in preventing an Allende victory in 1964 (Allende would not win the presidency until 1970). Even more significant, was the JFK government’s involvement in laying the groundwork for the takeover of Brazil by a military autocracy. The coup in Brazil was simply pushed along by Johnson, and successfully implemented in the spring of 1964.
National Liberation Front
Regarding Vietnam, an insurmountable problem for the Americans to the very end was, according to the US military historian Eric Bergerud, the “extremely formidable political apparatus” of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) – along with their “extremely popular” policies which “earned for the Viet Minh the loyalty and gratitude of hundreds of thousands of poor peasants”. Much of the peasantry for many years had supported the Viet Minh (later dubbed the Viet Cong, in Western discourse).
The anthropologist-adviser Gerald Hickey, who first touched down on Vietnamese soil in 1956, observed how Vietnam’s masses had “learned from early childhood to view reality through the prism of Viet Cong ideas, beliefs and prejudices”. After Washington assumed full control of the war in early 1965, the Viet Cong’s legitimacy grew further. They could then plausibly state that they were defending their country against a foreign power.
The first public protest in America against the Vietnam war did not occur until October 1965, in the heart of American liberalism, Boston, Massachusetts. This was eight or nine months after President Johnson had ordered the huge military escalation, at which point North Vietnam was also being bombed regularly by US warplanes.
The US invasion of South Vietnam was a reality by January 1962, as American soldiers participated directly in bombing raids of villages. This was confirmed publicly by Washington officials in March 1962. A quarter of a century later the analyst and author Noam Chomsky wrote, “For the past 25 years I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to a US invasion of South Vietnam, or US aggression in Indochina – without success. Instead I find a US defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that was unwise, the doves maintain”.
JFK’s public and private remarks leading up to his death call for everyone to “focus on winning the war”, and that withdrawal without victory would not remotely be considered. JFK reiterated on 12 September 1963, slightly more than two months before his killing, “What helps to win the war, we support; what interferes with the war effort, we oppose”.
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By the time of Kennedy’s death, there were almost 17,000 US troops present in South Vietnam, up from 11,300 the year before; and the number was set to be increased again into the fourth year of JFK’s presidency in 1964. Nothing perceptible changed in US government strategy following Johnson’s assumption to the White House, on 22 November 1963. The key advisers whom JFK drew counsel from imparted the same views on the new president. Among them were Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
These three powerful figures would remain in their posts for years into the Johnson presidency, McNamara until February 1968, Bundy until February 1966 and Rusk until January 1969. This is a clear indication by itself of the smooth continuity process, as the mantle passed from Kennedy to Johnson. McNamara, Bundy and Rusk advised Johnson to reject the milder recommendations espoused by outsiders, and “to keep to Kennedy’s more militant policies”. In January 1964, McNamara warned Johnson that any move to “neutralize” South Vietnam, that is to withdraw without victory, “would inevitably mean a new government in Saigon that would in short order become Communist-dominated”.
Read more: More troops in Afghanistan: A recap of the Vietnam war?
Shane Quinn has contributed on a regular basis to Global Research for almost two years and has had articles published with American news outlets People’s World and MintPress News, Morning Star in Britain, and Venezuela’s Orinoco Tribune. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Global Village Space’s editorial policy.