In this essay, I hope to investigate the question as to whether the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem or that of American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy played a larger role within the context of overt American engagement in Vietnam. As the head of the Republic of South Vietnam, Diem’s widely unpopular and deeply unrepresentative regime faced a determined guerrilla insurgency that sought to reunify a war-torn and under-developed nation with immense raw materials. While wars of national liberation were not always averse to our interests, Americans were fearful of Soviet and Chinese influence in a unified Vietnamese regime under the authority of Ho Chi Minh and his political associates. The Viet Minh, which had been forced to turn toward the material aid administered by the Soviet Union through the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform) after having appealed for American support, became an integral strategic consideration for United States foreign policy makers. While Vietnam itself had limited strategic value, the American foreign policy apparatus had given credence to regionalistic understandings of international relations that visualized communist-backed uprisings as a potential ‘domino’ that would have widespread effects on East Asian economic stability, with particularly dangerous repercussions to the reformation of post-World War II Japan.
As I hope to suggest, the ideological assumptions of the people tasked with creating American foreign policy necessitated an active stance in stifling the influence of indigenous political movements that resembled, in rhetoric and in deed, the strict conformity in political opinion that was necessitated in the authoritarian social order of the Soviets and their satellites. As such, it is my understanding that while policy coordination is said to stem from the White House and in turn through his Secretary of the State Department, the rigid assumptions and bi-partisan understanding of the danger of Communism in East Asia did not substantially differ even when the Chief Executive himself, the President, changed. Therefore, it is my opinion that American policy in Vietnam did not change in strategic assumptions as much as it was unconstrained from a position of theoretical or limited opposition to communism into a position of taking direct military action in defense of perceived American national interests. This change began immediately after the death of President Kennedy, an event which itself occurred only twenty days after the death of Ngo Dinh Diem. On November 26, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson adopted National Security Action Memorandum 273 which stated that “Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity…”[1] Thus, the eventual overt American military action in Vietnam was a creation of Johnson’s administration, which would have never been in power had President Kennedy either lost the election of 1960 or had he chosen a different Vice President. Clearly stated, the death of John F. Kennedy played a larger role in the change of American policy than the localized development of the death of Ngo Dinh Diem.
Vietnam had been a colonial subject of the French until the oppressive forces’ ignominious defeat at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954.[2] In the place of this Western and anti-Communist influence, American policymakers were anxious to fill any perceived vacuum of authority with reliable indigenous actors. Despite the guarantee of the Geneva Conference that free and fair elections would be held imminently to re-unite Vietnam, a seemingly well-established Catholic strong-man emerged as a potential ally for the immediate stabilization of the newly partitioned Southern Vietnamese republic. Much more than the French administration, the South Vietnamese people wanted a non-communist Vietnam and stressed the independent part while the Americans stressed the value of anti-communism, which led to southern revolt.[3] “Almost alone among prominent Vietnamese politicians, [Ngo Dinh Diem] possessed the combination of traits that Washington hoped to foster in the new state.”[4] Catholic, anti-colonial, and anti-communist, Diem became the protagonist of a policy the United States supported to provide military training for a force known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). With orders to stifle any communist invasion and to solidify Diem’s claim to power, American military advisors under President Kennedy directed anti-Communist southern forces and often fought alongside them. As Diem’s forces gained the necessary training and experience, they were increasingly deployed in missions that sought to sabotage and destroy the parallel infrastructure of a collectivized guerrilla force known to the Americans as the Viet Cong and to the Vietnamese as the National Liberation Front. As rebellious dissidents and professed communists, the Viet Cong sought to bring about the re-unification and eventual independence of the Vietnamese state under the direction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In part due to the heavy-handedness of the Diem regime, their efforts to recruit the South Vietnamese peasantry were quite successful and unfortunately led the Americans to double down on their support for the repressive regime.
“Diem’s religion put him in a small minority in heavily Buddhist Vietnam but held strong appeal in the United States,”[5] a characteristic he shared with President Kennedy. In contrast to all of Kennedy’s predecessors in the post-War period, a sort of skittishness regarding overt military action plagued the Democratic administration. Within the broader context of American foreign policy, Kennedy sought to recreate a strategic outlook that rejected the brinksmanship of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ while also readily combatting the international influence of communism. Perhaps, Curtis Lemay’s pondering of the Atomic question in Vietnam was an act of illusory grandeur, but the idea that a national liberation should be opposed with military force rather than redirected by economic and cultural forces highlights the ham-handedness that policymakers ought to have avoided. Such thinking was common place in Eisenhower’s administration, in the set of policies that went by the aforementioned ‘New Look’. In January of 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said that local forces must be reinforced by massive retaliatory policy (I.e. nuclear war).[6] In fact, under the foreign policy that preceded Kennedy, Lemay’s United States Air Force took lead amongst Armed forces by 1957.
Due in part to Kennedy’s decision to discredit Eisenhower’s policies during the election of 1960 against Eisenhower’s Vice President Richard Nixon, and also due to the prevailing notion that Kennedy’s Democratic predecessor, President Harry S. Truman had failed to stymie communist expansion in China, East Asia became a strategic focus for Kennedy’s foreign policy ventures within the broader Cold War conflict that required action. Although events in Cuba and Berlin did not directly affect the ‘facts on the ground’ in Vietnam, they necessitated firm action on the part of American policymakers.
Whereas Truman sought to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, the Kennedy administration sought to implement a similar modernization policy through the Strategic Hamlet Program. In contrast with Eisenhower’s willingness to rely upon the threat of nuclear weapons under what was termed the ‘New Look,’ a process of state building was adopted in Vietnam to ensure that further communistic recruitment would be stifled through the fortification of Vietnamese settlements, even though such action necessitated the forced movement of the peasantry from their ancestral homes. Despite its idealistic motivations, the policy led directly to diminished support for further American involvement in Vietnam amongst the masses and contributed significantly toward the centralized spread of Viet Cong activities in South Vietnam.
Although Ngo Dinh Diem had the support of sufficient military resources to suppress the Vietnamese people from participating in organizations antithetical to his regime, at least within his capital city of Saigon, successful opposition movements were mounted amongst the discontented peasantry outside of the city and in those Strategic Hamlets. As to the extent of the support administered by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in combatting Diem’s regime, it is important to recognize that the existing political division of this nation was a newly created and imposed partition upon the Vietnamese people. As such, the extent of the internalization of this division within the Vietnamese mind was limited. Instead, the Vietnamese people viewed partition as another in a litany of foreign actions meant to suppress the independent economic development of the Vietnamese state.
As Diem’s regime faltered in its efforts to present an alternative form of economic development under the umbrella of American assistance, the military officers that had to maintain his control decided that the increasingly callous behavior of the inner core of his regime, particularly the actions of his wife Madame Nhu (Trân Lê Xuân) and brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, necessitated regime change. Intriguingly, the astute “group of disaffected South Vietnamese generals secretly contacted U.S. representatives to test Washington’s interest in overthrowing Diem.”[7] With the support of United States Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., this development was carried out by the Vietnamese military under the close watch of the Kennedy administration. Within the broader discussion of which leader’s death resulted in a greater change of policy, it is my understanding that the forcible dismissal of Ngo Dinh Diem was in furtherance of the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy. While Diem’s presence may have limited the Kennedy administration from increasing its overt military engagement in Vietnam, it is with the removal of John Fitzgerald Kennedy that such actions began to substantially increase.
In order to prove this claim, I have decided to draw upon as evidence a visit to Vietnam made by “Deputy National Security Adviser Rostow and Kennedy’s top military aide, General Maxwell Taylor.”[8] While Kennedy’s advisors advocated for increasing the shipment of helicopters and to actually send troops, Kennedy said no. Considering the question is whether or not the influence of Kennedy’s death was more important than Diem’s death, it is evident that the question of Kennedy’s death was how much his advisors and political adversaries wanted him to go to war in Vietnam. Active ground troops constitute a major change in policy from Kennedy’s rejection months before, and this change was implemented during the first days of the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Evidently, the question must become why Johnson wanted to go to war with Vietnam. In my view, the psychoanalytical reading of Johnson suggests that he wanted to use the war as a way to steal the power to declare war through the War Powers Act as a way to solidify the necessary executive authority that he deemed reparations for putting him through the emotional suffering of his Vice Presidency under Kennedy. While such discussions may be held elsewhere, the focus here is whether or not Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of Americans and perhaps over a million Vietnamese to suffer needlessly and die for a war he had no chance of winning.
[1] See NSAM 273, Point 7: https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsam-lbj/nsam-273.htm
[2] Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War (Very Short Introductions) (p. 47). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[3] Grippaldi, Richard. America in Vietnam: Week Six Lecture. Rutgers University
[4] Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War (Very Short Introductions) (p. 56). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[5] Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War (Very Short Introductions) (p. 56). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[6] Grippaldi, Richard. America in Vietnam: Week Six Lecture. Rutgers University
[7] Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War (Very Short Introductions) (p. 79). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[8] Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War (Very Short Introductions) (p. 72). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
American Political Theorist 