Point Being?
By Scott Johnson’s book report about the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit offers yet another recitation of the completely uncontroversial point that the 1961 Vienna meetings did not go well for Kennedy. Johnson concludes by noting that Kennedy, humiliated by his Soviet adversary, responded by escalating the US commitment to South Vietnam, where he presumed American power could be rendered “credible” again.
It’s nice, I suppose, to see wingnuts expressing so much retrospective anxiety about the Cold War and, in particular, about the American war in Vietnam. But Kennedy had wood for Southeast Asia long before the Vienna conference, and it takes a dramatic oversimplification to treat the Vienna summit as a truly decisive moment in the evolution of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Robert Dallek — who usually gets cited when people make the whole Vienna-caused-the-war argument — should really consider writing an op-ed that puts this particular misuse of An Unfinished Life to rest. Among a lot of other things, this thesis requires that everyone forget that Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was shaped by (a) his own advocacy (especially his involvement with Friends of Vietnam) during the 1950s; (b) his personal preference for covert operations and counter-insurgency (rather than the kinds of commitments that Johnson and Nixon would later make); and (c) the truckloads of shite fed to him by people like Walt Rostow, Mac Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, Paul Harkins, and Edward Lansdale among others.
Of course, had Time magazine’s 2004 Blog of the Year been around in 1961, it’s writers wouldn’t have been engaged in the sort of historical concern-trolling that’s on display in Johnson’s WS piece. Instead, they’d have spent most of the previous decade complaining about the failure of the United States to stand up on behalf of French imperialism (while insulting France for being unable to hold on to its Asian properties); congratulating the Eisenhower administration for creating a fake state in South Vietnam; ridiculing anyone who doubted that Ngo Dinh Diem was indeed the George Washington of his people; and berating the Kennedy administration for not actually committing combat forces to defend its non-communist friends in Southeast Asia. They’d have been insisting that the nation’s reputation was at stake in Vietnam, and they’d have been demanding an American surge — of the kind that only Johnson was willing to provide — that would give the South Vietnamese government the breathing room it needed to convert itself into a viable state.