John F. Kennedy: Unnoted Escalation

Kennedy is rarely brought up when considering U.S. action in Vietnam; Instead, Johnson and Nixon are the presidents that generally come to mind when considering the U.S.’s handling of Vietnam and the Vietnam War. This makes sense, considering everything there is to digest regarding Kennedy’s presidency, even when omitting the situation in Vietnam. The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kennedy’s fateful assassination all take up so much space in the U.S. historical canon that Kennedy’s role in the escalation of Vietnam is often forgotten.

Under the Kennedy administration, however, the U.S. began to invest heavily in the growingly troublesome situation in Vietnam. In his short three-year term, Kennedy had increased the number of American military advisors in South Vietnam from seven hundred to over sixteen thousand, way higher than allotted in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Kennedy also more than doubled the U.S.’s foreign aid package from $223 million to $471 million (Cohen 349). Critically, Kennedy also oversaw the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, representing a targeted and irreversible infringement in Vietnam from the U.S. Marc Selverstone writes that Kennedy and his team’s decision to overthrow Diem in November of 1963 represented, “an act that perpetuated, and arguably exacerbated, [Vietnam’s] political instability”, no doubt bringing the U.S. closer to the brink of war in Vietnam (Selverstone, Miller Center).

The U.S.’s situation in Vietnam was not a rapid avalanche of bad decisions affected by a couple of presidents; the situation should more accurately be viewed as a slow burn affected by the actions of all of the post-WWII presidents, Kennedy included. In Kennedy's presidency, the U.S. took fated steps towards war with Vietnam, knowingly or unknowingly casting the die and torching many pre-existing means to a peaceful resolution. Kennedy and his team certainly set the stage for the conflict in Vietnam, inheriting and passing along a difficult situation to his successors as President.