yet seems disinclined to add to his knowledge as, for instance, by talking to foreign visitors.’
Torrents of ink have been expended on speculation about the course John F. Kennedy might have pursued in Vietnam, absent the Texas bullets. The CIA’s William Colby thought he would have recognised the need for a credible political strategy, as a precondition for any US troop commitment. White House aide Kenny O’Donnell later claimed to have heard the president say that the ideal outcome would be for a Saigon regime to ask the Americans to leave. The monarch of Camelot might have persisted in a limited commitment, without dispatching half a million troops. Robert McNamara asserted that Kennedy would have got out once the 1964 election was won. However, the defense secretary’s biographer notes that he expressed this belief only long afterwards.
The evidence seems overwhelming that the president’s thinking was dominated by the requirements of his forthcoming re-election campaign. In the previous spring he had told Senator Mike Mansfield that he favoured quitting Vietnam, but could not be seen to do so before polling day. On 22 November at Dallas Trade Mart, Kennedy was scheduled to say: ‘We in this country in this generation are the watchmen on the walls of freedom … Our assistance to … nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in South-East Asia today. But we do not weary of the task.’ J.K. Galbraith recalled: ‘I heard [Kennedy] say many times … “There are just so many concessions that one can make to the Communists in one year and survive politically.”’
Breathless modern admiration often obscures the fact that in mid-November 1963, Kennedy’s global standing was low. The London Times editorialised on the 12th, ten days before Dallas, about a ‘sense of paralysis’ pervading the US government, of ‘general disappointment’ about its performance, reflected in failures of policy across several continents. ‘For some reason, the American administration is becoming increasingly powerless to influence events at home or abroad.’ It seems implausible that Kennedy would have dared to act in a fashion that made him seem weak in advance of November 1964. Following re-election, he might have displayed the moral courage that Lyndon Johnson lacked, to cut America’s losses – but he probably would not.
Kennedy’s Vietnam policy suffered from the same fundamental flaw as that of every other president between 1945 and 1975: it was rooted in the demands of US domestic politics, rather than in a realistic assessment of the interests and wishes of the Vietnamese people. Kennedy was a sufficiently intelligent and sensitive man – consider his earlier scepticism about Indochina – to recognise the unlikelihood of American military success there. However, in the climate of the Cold War, which was then very cold, the political costs of staying in South Vietnam appeared to the Kennedy White House lower than those of being seen to quit, fail, lose, give best to the communists. Neither the president nor Robert McNamara grasped the depth of the potential downside of Vietnam for their own country.
By the end of 1963 the Saigon government had no physical presence in some parts of the Mekong delta, designated by the communists the ‘20/7 Zone’ – date of the 1954 Geneva Accords – and such ‘liberated areas’ expanded rapidly in the confusion following the death of Diem. Southern troop morale slumped, and even supposedly elite formations showed little appetite for engaging the enemy. The strategic hamlets programme collapsed. With astonishing suddenness, across large areas of the country the NLF found themselves in the driving seat. Americans enjoyed a black joke about an alleged conversation between Lodge and ‘Big’ Minh, in which the ambassador urged the general to promote reassurance among the Vietnamese just as Lyndon Johnson did with his televised address after Kennedy’s assassination. Minh said: ‘Fine. Give us TV.’
The fall of Diem prompted a crisis meeting of Hanoi’s central committee, which began on 22 November. Ho Chi Minh offered to moderate, but the hawks rebuffed this suggestion: there is an unconfirmed claim that he stormed out, in dismay or disgust. Such a gesture would have been uncharacteristic, though a month later he is alleged to have told the Soviet ambassador that he was retiring from politics. What is certain is that the meeting marked the end of Ho’s significant influence upon events – though not of his status as the personification of his country in the eyes of the world – and confirmed Le Duan as foremost power in Hanoi, with Le Duc Tho his most influential subordinate. Le Duan enjoyed an immense advantage over his foes both in his own country and in the US: he was the only important player whose objective was clear and unwavering – to create a unified, Stalinist Vietnam. It is worthy of notice that less than thirty years before the collapse of the Soviet empire, he displayed no glimmer of understanding of the epochal failure of its economic model.
Relations with Beijing – now more Stalinist than Stalin’s Soviet successors – had become much closer: on 2 August in Beijing, the Chinese had signed an agreement promising direct military support for North Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. Whether Mao would have honoured this is highly debatable, but in the autumn of 1963 the pact greatly strengthened the hand of Le Duan and his activist comrades in the politburo. China’s president Liu Shaoqi, visiting Hanoi, offered more active encouragement for the Southern liberation struggle than had any recent Beijing leader. Chinese weapons began to arrive in quantity, and to flow southwards, while 7,850 troops from the North made the epic trek to ‘Battlefield B’, as Hanoi designated the South. November’s Party central committee meeting ended with an unequivocal commitment to a new proactive, aggressive, explicitly military campaign.
Le Duan and his colleagues thought the new Saigon regime would quickly implode, and thus that the Americans were unlikely to dispatch ground troops in support of a lost cause. Anxiety to fill the power vacuum in the South caused them to decide upon an urgent escalation, expressed in Resolution 9, formulated in December 1963 and enshrined in two documents of which one was published on 20 January 1964, the other remaining secret: ‘Strive to Struggle, Rush Forward to Win New Victories in the South’. Meanwhile at home, the hardliners launched a new purge of ‘rightist deviationists’, some of them heroes of the Vietminh era: thousands of officials, journalists and intellectuals were dispatched for re-education.
Resolution 9 represented a historic commitment to wage an armed struggle to the bitter end. While Moscow and Beijing were troubled by its possible consequences, and for some months Soviet aid was near-zero and the Russians had no ambassador in Hanoi, both became reluctantly convinced that they must be seen to support the cause of revolution and liberation with ever more generous arms supplies. Hanoi roused its supporters: ‘The time has come for North Vietnam to increase its assistance to the South … The enemy … is using his armed forces to kill and plunder the people … The only way to smash them is through armed struggle, which hereafter becomes decisive.’ Though the Mekong delta witnessed the most immediate increase in guerrilla activity, the epicentre of the struggle would progressively shift towards the Central Highlands and the area north-west of Saigon. The communists’ ambitious new objective was to engage, maul and break the spirit of the South Vietnamese army.
Some historians believe that in 1962–63 important opportunities were missed to make a peace deal. This may be true, insofar as the North Vietnamese, and Le Duan himself, for a season considered negotiating an American exit, followed by neutralisation. It is wildly unlikely, however, that President Diem would have accepted a deal that involved sharing power with the NLF. Moreover, had a bargain been struck, this would have provided only the briefest pause before Vietnam became a unified communist state: neither Hanoi nor COSVN would have renounced violence in exchange for anything less.
Hindsight may suggest that such an outcome, such a surrender, would have been preferable to the decade of murderous strife that instead ensued. Most South Vietnamese, and especially the Buddhist leadership, would have chosen peace on any terms; it was their American sponsors who rejected such an outcome, arguing that to sentence the people of South Vietnam to share the dismal economic, social and political fate of their Northern brethren would represent a historic betrayal.
The communists and the United States rightfully share responsibility for the horrors that befell Vietnam after the death of John F. Kennedy, because both preferred to unleash increasingly indiscriminate violence, rather than yield to the will of their foes. American field artillery officer Doug Johnson said: ‘The first major turning-point in the war was the assassination of Diem. From that day, we had lost the moral high ground. Everyone knew that we were complicit.