Stanley Karnow's excellent summary of what happened (note the mention of Diem's family, e.g., Nhu and his wife: the problem wasn't just Diem). As he points out, the coup and the deaths deepened US commitment and involvement as, among other things, Diem's successors made things worse and not, as hoped, better. Meanwhile Hanoi, watching this upheaval, stepped up its attacks. The political situation worsened; so did the military.
Karnow's summary is wrong on every major point about Diem and the anti-Diem coup except his observation that Diem's successors made things worse. Karnow did little else but repeat the anti-Diem attacks spread by the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, American so-called "anti-war" agitators, and JFK's liberal anti-Diem advisers.
Shorter: JFK handed LBJ an impossible situation.
Under the principle of command responsibility, yes, JFK handed LBJ a mess in South Vietnam. But, in terms of actual culpability, the bulk of the blame should be placed on Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, George Ball, Michael Forrestal, and Henry Cabot Lodge.
Whether JFK would have sent in the hundreds of thousands of troops, made it an American war, is an open question. My guess is no, he wouldn't have.
I tend to doubt that JFK would have sent 536,000 troops to South Vietnam, but Bobby Kennedy's oral history interview suggests that, at a minimum, JFK was prepared to start using heavy air power against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong if necessary.
But the question as to whether he had decided to simply withdraw, unconditionally, is a closed one: he had not. Those conspiracists who say he had are, as usual, simply making things up. To their credit, they're very good at making things up.
They're wrong, but they're not "making things up." They are relying on some of JFK's liberal advisers who belatedly claimed that JFK told them he was determined to completely withdraw from South Vietnam after the election, even if it enabled the Communists to conquer South Vietnam. Of course, they dismiss the accounts of JFK's advisers, such as Rusk and Rostow, who said they never heard JFK say any such thing. They also ignore the fact that the JFK White House tapes contain not a single word that suggests any such intention.
They are also relying on the "secret debrief" that McNamara recorded, only for himself, in September 1963, in which he claimed that JFK had privately told him that he had decided to get out of South Vietnam, even if it meant South Vietnam fell to the Communists.
A number of facts cast serious doubt on the veracity of McNamara’s “secret debrief.” For one thing, McNamara never told anyone about it, never mentioned it in any White House discussions on the Vietnam War, and said nothing about it in his memoir. Not one of McNamara’s adoring aides ever claimed that McNamara told them that JFK had confided to him that he was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Moreover, in the numerous JFK and LBJ White House tapes, McNamara never once mentioned JFK’s alleged decision to abandon South Vietnam.
I devote an entire chapter in
A Comforting Lie to debunking the unconditional-withdrawal myth.
