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

Howard Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2003

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 assassination of Premier Diem--Howard Jones argues that Kennedy intended to withdraw the great bulk of American soldiers and pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Vietnam.
Drawing upon recently declassified hearings by the Church Committee on the U.S. role in assassinations, newly released tapes of Kennedy White House discussions, and interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and others from the president's inner circle, Jones shows that Kennedy firmly believed that the outcome of the war depended on the South Vietnamese. In the spring of 1962, he instructed Secretary of Defense McNamara to draft a withdrawal plan aimed at having all special military forces home by the end of 1965. The "Comprehensive Plan for South Vietnam" was ready for approval in early May 1963, but then the Buddhist revolt erupted and postponed the program. Convinced that the war was not winnable under Diem's leadership, President Kennedy made his most critical mistake--promoting a coup as a means for facilitating a U.S. withdrawal. In the cruelest of ironies, the coup resulted in Diem's death followed by a state of turmoil in Vietnam that further obstructed disengagement. Still, these events only confirmed Kennedy's view about South Vietnam's inability to win the war and therefore did not lessen his resolve to reduce the U.S. commitment. By the end of November, however, the president was dead and Lyndon Johnson began his campaign of escalation. Jones argues forcefully that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, his withdrawal plan would have spared the lives of 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese.
Written with vivid immediacy, supported with authoritative research, Death of a Generation answers one of the most profoundly important questions left hanging in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jones (Mutiny on the Amistad) delivers an informative narrative documenting in rather elaborate detail a popular theory of JFK and Vietnam advanced previously by such writers as Richard Mahoney and Richard Reeves: that had Kennedy lived, U.S. involvement in Vietnam would not have escalated as it did. There were 685 U.S. advisers in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was inaugurated president in early 1961. Less than three years later, in October 1963, the U.S. had 16,732 American troops in place. Despite this escalation, Kennedy was never wholly convinced of the wisdom of American involvement in Vietnam. Minutes of the September 6, 1963, National Security Council meeting, two weeks after Kennedy gave the go-ahead for the overthrow of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, show Robert Kennedy openly questioning whether Communist takeover of the South could be successfully resisted, regardless of whether Diem remained in place or not. The president himself is on record even earlier, in April 1962, as telling his aides to "seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement." Hawks such as Dean Rusk in Kennedy's cabinet (shortly inherited by LBJ) did not agree. Jones, like most scholars in recent memory, argues that the instability of Diem's government, followed by the assassinations of Diem and JFK, combined to create an environment where escalation of American involvement in Vietnam became inevitable, thus triggering what Jones terms "the death of a generation." Although not advancing an original thesis, Jones, a historian at the University of Alabama, goes deeper into the existing evidence supporting this thesis than have most other writers, and does so in a highly readable manner.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Argues quite convincingly that had the coup not been bungled and Johnson not propelled to leadership, Vietnam may have ended quite differently--almost certainly not in the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Solid history marked by memorable moments (including a glimpse of David Halberstam looting Saigon's presidential palace) and the highly effective use of hitherto classified documents."--Kirkus Reviews

"Jones presents a work of outstanding scholarship, on which he spent 15 years researching recently declassified State Department records and a comprehensive array of other primary and secondary documents, to arrive at a persuasively affirmative response....This scholarly appraisal ranks with Fredrik Logevall's Choosing War and David Kaiser's American Tragedy as one of the most important current investigations of the diplomacy of the early war."--Library Journal

"An informative narrative documenting in rather elaborate detail a popular theory of JFK and Vietnam...had Kennedy lived, U.S. involvement in Vietnam would not have escalated as it did. [Jones] goes deeper into the existing evidence supporting this thesis than have most other writers, and does so in a highly readable manner."--Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1St Edition edition (March 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195052862
• ISBN-13: 978-0195052862
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly Researched History but Questionable Conclusion, August 17, 2003

By 

Q. Publius (Annandale, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (Hardcover)

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 3, 1863, at the moment before Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, the high tide of the Confederacy before the devastating loss that day set the South on the road to ultimate defeat. Similarly, in the American heart, even for those who aren't Kennedy fans, there will always be a wish that the bullets in Dallas would have missed, that a young president who inspired hope in so many citizens would have somehow been able to avoid one of our great national tragedies by avoiding the massive bloodshed and societal chaos resulting from the Vietnam War. Like the thesis of this book, we'll never know if that could have happened, but such a wish is a natural longing of the human heart.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars True in '63....., November 25, 2006

By 

Mcgivern Owen L (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (Hardcover)

"Death of a Generation" reports on President John Kennedy's attempts to limit the United States' exposure in Vietnam. It is set in the early 1960's, prior to "South Vietnam" becoming the staple of nightly newscasts and before most of us could locate the place on a map. Burned by his experience at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, JFK was dubious of our Indochina involvement and leery of advice from his military and the CIA. He favored counter-insurgency/Special Forces action as opposed to main force combat. Central to the Vietnam problem was Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The two, most especially Nhu, were authoritarian, remote and resistant to any democratic reforms. The Catholic brothers became increasingly estranged from the Buddhist majority. DG revolves around JFK's increasingly frustrating dilemma of dealing with the recalcitrant Premier. Diem's resistance to those reforms only served to further the cause of North Vietnam and the efforts of the ever-present, increasingly aggressive Viet Cong to undermine the Saigon regime. 1963 was the key year. JFK had to survive the 1964 Presidential election without being accused by the Republicans as "soft on Communism". He wished to avoid the fate of President Truman, who was accused of "losing China". Once safely re-elected, his plan was to call US forces home by late 1965, after South Vietnam could "stand on its' own". As 1963 progressed, rumors of a military coup in Saigon intensified. Slowly and reluctantly, JFK relented and allowed the South Vietnamese military to overthrow Diem and Nhu and force them into exile unharmed. But the brothers were assassinated-virtually murdered. The coup solved nothing and arguably made the crisis in Saigon worse as the generals squabbled among themselves. The rest is history as President Johnson immediately pursued a military buildup that led to the "death of a generation". There are some dark warnings in DG from top Kennedy lieutenants Chester Bowles and Michael Forrestal about our Indochinese quagmire in the making. And there is a chilling warning from Lieutenant General Lionel McGarr, the onetime top commander in Vietnam: `Military measures could not provide permanent solutions to a massive problem that has political, economical, social, psychological AND military dimensions'. McGarr's warning to Army Chief of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer went unheeded. His position was correct in 1963 as it would be in 1975 as Saigon fell to the Communists. DG is exhaustively researched and documented, with 100 pages of notes. It certainly covers the topic! But DG far too long, self -indulgent and wordy. The same points are made over and over. DG cries out for a stern editor with a sharp blue pencil. 100 pages could easily have been truncated. Is such editing performed anywhere anymore? In all the heft, there are two issues that are not covered adequately: 1) What if only Nhu had been removed and Diem left in place? Such is pure speculation, but deserves mention. Vietnam, in 20/20hindsight could not have been worse off with Diem than it was with the squabbling generals. 2) Did JFK's staff serve him well? This reviewer feels they did not! Secretary of State Rusk seems virtually detached, and Maxwell Taylor, Joint Chiefs Chairman appears more loyal to the military establishment than to his Commander in Chief. And this reviewer has never understood what value Defense Secretary McNamara bought to the table. (Personal feelings do not belong in book reviews but RM was the man this observer's generation loved to hate). "Death of a Generation" is recommended to SERIOUS (!) history buffs, students of the Vietnam War and those who can wade through such a long rice paddy of writing. . Casual readers should look elsewhere; there are many other JFK and Vietnam works to choose from. 3 stars are a rather strict rating for such a serious and well researched work, but the sheer heft here begs for the reduction in rank.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb view of the Kennedy administration and Vietnam, August 20, 2003

By 

Scott Blake (Mountain View, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (Hardcover)

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.