The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam

Selverstone (Constructing the Monolith), head of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, offers an intriguing deep dive into a topic long debated among scholars of the Vietnam War: had President Kennedy not been assassinated, would he have followed through on his plans to withdraw U.S. troops, or drastically escalated the conflict, as his successor Lyndon Johnson did? Kennedy partisans believe he would have taken America out of the war; Johnson supporters contend that—faced with the military and political situation in South Vietnam in 1964 and 1965—Kennedy would have ratcheted up U.S. involvement. Though Selverstone acknowledges that the answer is “ultimately unknowable,” his thorough analysis of tape recordings from the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses and other historical evidence leads him to conclude that Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had halted withdrawal planning before Kennedy’s death, likely would have taken a similar approach to Johnson’s. Kennedy “never relinquished his interest in brushfire wars, nor did he dampen his rhetoric about their necessity,” Selverstone writes. “He continued to operate from a worldview that embraced the precepts of domino [theory] thinking... and the demonstration of resolve.” Scrupulous and revealing, this is a persuasive answer to one of the Vietnam War’s biggest what-ifs. (Nov.)