Kennedy's Role In The Vietnam War

Introduction

In this essay, the author will examine the position of the Kennedy Administration with regard to ability to respond flexibly to communist expansion, especially to guerrilla warfare. We generally think of John F. Kennedy's policies mostly with regard to Vietnam. However, we must remind ourselves that the U.S. was at the time only at the beginning of its involvement in Vietnam. The real and imminent threat for the administration was in Cuba. While the Bay of Pigs incident turned out to be a disaster and the Cuban Missile Crisis left Fidel Castro firmly ensconced in power, the administration maintained its anti-Castro options by continuing undeclared guerrilla war against Castro. While the administration refused to go ahead

for arms and aid in rubles (Roskin & Berry & Larson, 2012, 201-202). The failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing convinced Castro that a second attack was virtually inevitable. Thus, he approved Khrushchev's plan to deploy missiles to the island in the summer of 1962. When the U.S. expressed alarm at the deployment in October of 1962, the Russians protested that they were just providing Cuba with a deterrence to more U.S. attacks (Wiersma & Larson, 1997,

In of May 1961, Kennedy deployed 400 Green Beret (U.S. Army Special forces) troops to South Vietnam's Central Highlands to train Montagnard tribesmen in their counterinsurgency tactics. J.F.K. additionally tripled the level of military and foreign aid to South Vietnam (Anderson, 1999). Kennedy believed it was critical to support the South Vietnamese regime, the previous Eisenhower administration had with a small U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), numbering some 740 soldiers who provided training and logistics assistance to the South Vietnamese Army. The administration of J.F.K. determined that the mission and size the U.S. advisory project must increase if the U.S.-backed government of in Saigon was to survive and win the war. While some of Kennedy's cabinet advisors proposed a negotiated settlement for Vietnam similar to one that recognized Laos as a neutral nation, this was not to be. The administration had just suffered diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment in Berlin and Cuba. So that they did not repeat this, the covert military option was used, but unsuccessfully. The war continued to escalate, requiring more U.S. advisors and military and foreign aid. Unfortunately for the U.S., the covert operations to assist the South against North Vietnam