President Kennedy wanted to keep USA out of Vietnam

[Octafish]

48. ''I will never send draftees over there to fight.''

THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

by Michael Morrissey

The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the assassination.

1. JFK's policy

In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime, though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised withdrawal at that early date:

The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

'But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected,' Kennedy told Mansfield....

After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, 'In 1965 I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected' (O'Donnell, p. 16)."

Sometime after that Kennedy told O'Donnell again that

"...he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American military forces from Vietnam. He had decided that our military involvement in Vietnam's civil war would only grow steadily bigger and more costly without making a dent in the larger political problem of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia" (p. 13).

Just before he was killed he repeated this commitment:

"'They keep telling me to send combat units over there,' the President said to us one day in October [1963]. 'That means sending draftees, along with volunteer regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I'll never send draftees over there to fight'." (O'Donnell, p. 383).

Kennedy's public statements and actions were consistent with his private conversations, though more cautiously expressed in order to appease the military and right-wing forces that were clamoring for more, not less, involvement in Vietnam, and with whom he did not want to risk an open confrontation one year before the election. As early as May 22, 1963, he said at a press conference:

"...we are hopeful that the situation in South Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgement at the present time" (Harold W. Chase and Allen H. Lerman, eds., Kennedy and the Press: The News Conferences, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965, p. 447).

Then came the statement on October 2:

"President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too" (O'Donnell, p. 17).

This decision was not popular with the military, the Cabinet, the vice-president, or the CIA, who continued to support Diem, the dictator the US had installed in South Vietnam in 1955. Hence the circumspect wording of the statement on Oct. 2, which was nevertheless announced as a "statement of United States policy":

Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgement that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S.
military personnel assigned to South Viet-Nam can be withdrawn (Documents on American Foreign Relations 1963, Council on Foreign Relations, New York: Harper & Row, 1964, p. 296).

CONTINUED...

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