Kennedy found himself alone in his criticism of French action in Indochina when General Vo Nguyen Giap’s Viet Minh forces moved against the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The 15,000-man French garrison was then surrounded, and the United States began serious consideration of sending military aid, including the possibility of using nuclear weapons to support the French. During an impassioned speech before the Senate on April 6, 1954, Kennedy declared: To pour men, material and money into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile…no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere, an enemy of the people, which had the sympathy and the covert support of the people.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Despite Kennedy’s forceful remarks, a majority of the Congress sided with the existing American position. The 1954 Geneva accords ended the French–Indochina War, but the United States refused to back the agreement, calling for a new election in 1956 in which both the North and South would vote for their country’s future.

During the 1960 U.S. election campaign, neither Kennedy nor his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, paid much attention to Vietnam, concentrating instead on the ever-intensifying military and political situation in Cuba. By 1961, however, with Kennedy in the White House, Vietnam’s problems became his problems. This is the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it? Kennedy asked his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, shortly after assuming office. You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam.

In his thousand days in the White House, Kennedy learned more about Vietnam than he cared to. That remote Southeast Asian country quickly dominated his time as no other foreign problem, and eventually led the United States down a slippery slope of combat and lost lives that would not reach bottom until the mid-1970s.

Kennedy began to focus more on the situation in Vietnam after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in April 1961. Having suffered one humiliation in American foreign policy at the hands of Fidel Castro, Kennedy resolved not to let the same thing happen in Vietnam. He was a firm believer in the domino theory, which held that if one Western-supported country in a region fell, the others would crumble in its wake. Thus Kennedy in early 1961 made certain key decisions regarding further American involvement in Vietnam.

A National Intelligence Estimate report on South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem concluded that Diem’s internal policies were autocratic and that his domestic programs were hindering the war effort. As early as 1961, according to a report in the later-released U.S. Department of Defense study titled United States– Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967 (a k a the Pentagon Papers), the United States was questioning Diem’s long-term ability to remain in power unless he made certain far-reaching changes to improve the lives of his people. The American president hoped that Diem, who was a Catholic like himself, would make the necessary shifts in policies before events began spiraling out of control.

On May 11, 1961, the president ordered 400 U.S. Special Forces troops into Vietnam, along with an additional 100 military advisers to help train the South Vietnamese military. At the same time, Kennedy ordered the start of a clandestine war against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces inside South Vietnam, as well as covert missions into North Vietnam by well-trained South Vietnamese troops. These actions elicited a protest from the Hanoi government, which charged that the United States was using South Vietnamese territory to prepare for an invasion of North Vietnam. That October, Kennedy issued an order that sent American military personnel into ground action near the Laotian border.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to