Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [38]
Those less enamored with the martyred president might be tempted to quote the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s great novel of the 1920s, The Sun Also Rises. The woman with whom Hemingway’s protagonist Jake Barnes is in love suggests that, were it not for World War I, they might have lived happily ever after. “Yes,” Jake replies. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
In fact, Kennedy saw South Vietnam as the crucial test case of flexible response, an opportunity to demonstrate that counterinsurgency and nation-building techniques could defeat communist-inspired “wars of national liberation”—that when it came to projecting power, the United States had at hand tools other than those offered by the CIA and SAC.48 With this in mind, the president
increased the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam from nine hundred to nearly seventeen thousand “advisers.”
eased restrictions on U.S. military personnel, authorizing those advisers to engage in combat operations or in combat support operations like Operation Ranch Hand, in which U.S. Air Force aircraft dumped large quantities of defoliants such as Agent Orange on the Vietnamese countryside.49
more than doubled the level of material support provided to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), including heavy equipment such as armored combat vehicles and field artillery along with more than three hundred military aircraft.50
did nothing in his public representations to refute claims made by others in his administration—Taylor and McNamara in the forefront—that South Vietnam represented a vital U.S. national security interest.51
permitted members of his inner circle to conspire with ARVN generals intent on toppling President Ngo Dinh Diem, installed by the United States as president of South Vietnam in 1955.52
In 1961 Vice President Lyndon Johnson had hailed Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Asia.” Two years later, however, the South Vietnamese autocrat had become, in Washington’s eyes, an intolerable impediment to U.S. efforts to defeat the communist insurgency, widely assumed to be directed by North Vietnam.
The coup, launched on November 1, 1963, with direct involvement of both the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the CIA, succeeded. The generals overthrew Diem and murdered him, choosing a U.S.-manufactured armored personnel carrier as the execution site. Washington had counted on Diem’s removal to reenergize the war against the Viet Cong (VC). The generals who made the coup were expected to be more cooperative. In fact, operational success produced political catastrophe. In Saigon, the coup threw open the floodgates of instability and dysfunction. Three weeks later, with events in Vietnam careening out of control, Kennedy himself was dead.
Here was yet another debacle on a par with the Bay of Pigs, this time entirely of the administration’s own making. American complicity in the coup again showed how little those around Kennedy had learned from the events that had occurred on their watch. Assumptions that decisions made in Washington were sure to shape and determine the course of events far afield remained firmly in place. Having concluded that Diem was obstructing their purposes in Vietnam, they acted with astonishingly little consideration for the downside risks.
Kennedy’s assassination freed the president from being called to account for all that ensued. In fact, as U.S. involvement evolved into a national nightmare, it became all the more necessary to hold the martyred president sinless. Doing so sustained the comforting belief that, were it not for an assassin’s bullet, the United States might have avoided a decade of trauma involving war, division, demoralization, domestic upheaval, and defeat. Had fate only allowed Kennedy to live, the high ideals and visionary aspirations that he was said to have represented might have achieved fulfillment.
In the popular imagination, none of the subsequent revelations about Kennedy