Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War

by Howard Jones

Book Overview

When John F. Kennedy was shot, millions were left to wonder how America, and the world, would have been different had he lived to fulfill the enormous promise of his presidency. For many historians and political observers, what Kennedy would and would not have done in Vietnam has been a source of enduring controversy.
Now, based on convincing new evidence--including a startling revelation about the Kennedy administration's involvement in the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195176057
• ISBN13: 9780195176056
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Superb view of the Kennedy administration and Vietnam

If there is a better work on the Kennedy administration and its involvement in the Vietnam war, I haven't read it. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how the United States got so deeply involved in Vietnam.

Thoroughly Researched History but Questionable Conclusion

The author has done his homework by thoroughly researching primary and secondary sources on President Kennedy's Vietnam policy from 1961 through 1963. Kennedy had always maintained, going back to his election as senator in 1956, that the Vietnam conflict could only be won or lost by the Vietnamese themselves, and that the U.S. could not fight the war for them. He continued with this view as President, even though many political and military advisers urged him to send in significant U.S. troops. While he did increase the number of advisers, who sometimes assisted the South Vietnamese in battle, he never favored deploying significant ground forces. Also, Kennedy had a plan to eventually withdraw what U.S. troops were in country as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) became more capable. Even in 1963 1,000 U.S. troops were withdrawn. The author's main position is that Kennedy would never have turned the war into an American war, with a huge deployment of U.S. forces, the way Lyndon Johnson did starting in 1965. Thus the death of a generation of young Americans (over 57,000), and many more times that number of Vietnamese, as well as the spiritual death of a generation of Americans who never again trusted their government and turned to self-destructive behavior in the drug culture, could have been avoided. This is an interesting thesis, but essentially unknowable. Hanoi significantly built up Viet Cong military capability in 1964 and 1965. The coup overthrowing Diem, which the Kennedy administration supported(though no Americans were involved in its execution) resulted in a series of ineffectual political leaders who were no better at political and economic reforms, or at leading the fight against the Viet Cong, than Diem was. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, had he been reelected in 1964, would he really have been able to totally withdraw from Vietnam and be tagged with another global loss to Communism, as the Democrats where in 1950 with the loss of China? The politics of 1965, both Republican and Democrat, strongly supported U.S. assistance to South Vietnam, even the deployment of significant U.S. ground troops. The author's basic position, then, that Kennedy would have avoided the death of a generation, is highly questionable.Nevertheless the book is well worth reading and is a must for anyone interested in Kennedy's Vietnam policy or the buildup to the Vietnam War. One interesting story relates how the intriguing Edward Lansdale told McNamara his statistical measures for judging progress in fighting the Viet Cong insurgency were all wet because he was measuring many factors which weren't getting to the heart of the issue. An intriguing what if of this period is: what if Lansdale had been more involved in forming U.S. policy on Vietnam? At the time he was assigned to Operation Mongoose, the program of covert action against Cuba.In the novel "Intruders in the Dust," Faulkner describes how in Southerners' hearts it will always be July

Ch. 4, Secret War 5, Subterfuge 6, Seduction 7, Decent Veil

This book has great chapter titles, and 80 pages of notes.There are a lot of questions in this book are about death. While President Kennedy was alive, it was not obvious that Vietnam was going to be part of the world in which so many Americans would die. The insignificance of the problem at the time Kennedy took office might be guessed from such assessments as, "Interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres showed them to be well trained and brought in, across the seventeenth parallel, or through Laos and Cambodia. The total Vietcong in central Vietnam had grown from a thousand at the end of 1959 to five times that number by mid-1961." (p. 102). President Kennedy had authorized an increase in American troops that jumped from hundreds to thousands as the years went by, but with little sign that, merely seven years after JFK took office, more than a thousand troops per week on each side might be losing their lives in Nam early in 1968.As a professor in history with a year off from teaching, Howard Jones had the opportunity to examine documentary sources and the Oral History Interviews at presidential libraries, and he even talked to a few of the remaining participants. Daniel Ellsberg is not a major character in this book, though Jones talked to him on March 27, 2002, concerning a meeting in which President Kennedy asked Lansdale about getting rid of The Nhus, "But if that didn't work out--or I changed my mind and decided to get rid of Diem--would you be able to go along with that?" Lansdale ended up in a limousine with Robert McNamara after the meeting, where McNamara told him, "When he asks you to do something, you don't tell him you won't do it." (p. 365). Actually, the source of this story is a book by A. J. Langguth, a New York Times correspondent in South Vietnam who claimed "Ellsberg's unpublished memoir, Langguth asserted, contained this account of Lansdale's clandestine meeting with the president." (p. 365). "Ellsberg likewise considers the story valid. But in an interview of McNamara conducted by Langguth years afterward, the former secretary alleged that he did not recall the meeting." (pp. 365-366). I checked the index of SECRETS by Daniel Ellsberg, finally published in October, 2002, and found no mention of President Kennedy on the pages of the only entry for "Lansdale, Edward G.: McNamara's meeting with," though it included a page on which "high Vietnamese officials who met with General Lansdale regarded him warily but with awe because of his reputation as a kingmaker. They assumed he was there to pick the next Diem." By the time Ellsberg was on the Lansdale team, LBJ was president, Diem and Nhu were dead, and the Vietnamese could only hope that another government like Diem's would be better than a bunch of generals.America clearly considered a coup against Diem at a time when it was trying to be as neutral as possible, because Diem could have asked American diplomats to leave Nam if he had any evidence that the Americans