JFK inherited a few thousand "advisors" in Nam, under the control of the CIA.
From the first week of his presidency (literally) the JCS pressured him mercilessly to send in combat troops. JFK refused. He and RFK had spent a month in Nam in '55 and came away with the conclusion a colonially run "mandarin" (puppet) govt would never have popular support; the Vietnamese were fed up with hundreds of years of foreign occupation.
(Further, he knew that historically Ho Chi Minh had kicked the Japanese out after the Japanese had driven the French out in WWII. Despite Ho's plea in person to MacArthur that he wanted an American style democracy in Nam, the US supported having the French come back in after WWII. They got their asses handed to them by Ho's forces at Dien Bien Phu in '54.)
But for JFK, the tough thing was to pull out, knowing it would go communist, without being blamed for "losing Vietnam" as the right had done to Truman after China. So he went along with increasing the number of non-combat advisors to 17,500, remaining under CIA command.
Finally, he decided in the summer of '63 he would play jujitsu against the Pentagon and CIA. They were always insisting things were going great in Nam. So JFK sent McNamara (Sec Def) and Taylor (JCS Chmn) on a "fact finding" mission in September. They were to report back. JFK ordered their report to be written before they left on their trip. They were to report things were going so well, we could pull out all advisers by 1965. JFK accepted the recommendations on Oct 13, '63 (National Security Action Memorandum 263), ordering the first 1,000 to be withdrawn by the end of '63 and the balance by the end of '65.
LBJ had always supported sending combat troops in. He had sided with the Joint Chiefs at each of the meetings where it was discussed. The minutes of those meetings (and recordings) are now public. (Check the JFK Library online.) LBJ and the JCS wanted combat troops and they were violently opposed to JFK's withdrawal order.
Six weeks after that order, JFK was killed. Three days later, LBJ held a JCS meeting at the WH and afterward signed NSAM 273 reversing the withdrawal order.
It's all a matter of public record.
After LBJ took over, he ran for reelection mostly on pursuing JFK's domestic agenda. Then in '65, after defeating Goldwater, the Tonkin Gulf scam was executed. Essentially we sent a team of PT boats into the Tonkin Gulf harbor to harass the North Vietnamese navy. One of them pursued one of ours and fired at it. We then claimed we were attacked by the North, LBJ immediately went to Congress and got an enabling resolution, and a few months later, the first contingent of US Marines made a famous landing at Da Nang Beach.
After a couple of years, LBJ discovered the lesson JFK knew all along. It's the same lesson Shrub never learned, but his Daddy knew in '91. It's the same lesson Ike and MacArthur and DeGaulle all knew when they recommended to JFK against sending in combat troops.
The lesson is simple:
- People hate being conquered.
- Weapons are cheap.
- Guerrilla warfare can go on forever.
- Eventually the conquerer will want to go home.
So that's why LBJ is rightly held to account for our immersion into Vietnam and the loss of that war.
History will hold George Bush accountable for Iraq for many of the same reasons.