Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 Even in 1963 1,000 U.S. troops were withdrawn.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.

"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.

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.

While Howard Jones has marshalled a good deal of very interesting data on the USA's involvement with Vietnam and states clearly that" America's role as freedom's guardian warranted its intervention in South Vietnam." and in another place notes that the Kennedy adminstration promoted the general's coup against Diem; professor Jones fails to properly afix the blame for this extraordinally matter of the Ambassador to a nation plotting the toppling of the President and his assassination prior to even presenting his credentials . The fact that Lodge was ordered by JFK to stop the coup by JFK and that Lodge refused to do so , the fact that Lodge held longstanding hostility towards JFK due to home politics is made light of . The whole matter of how Lodge engineered the disposal of the CIA Chief of Station is also not put in proper context nor how he used and exploited Lou Conien for his personal agenda . And finally Jones does not delve into Diem's last phone call to Lodge , where from other sources it is quite ecident that it was Lodge who in turn called the Coup Generals to tell them where Diem & Nhu were so they could be murdered . The book is sub-titled How the assassinations of Diem and JFK prolonged the Vietnam war. A btter line would have been how the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem lost the Vietnam war.

The author somehow misses the intense war going between the C.I.A. and the State Dept. over Vietnam policy, just prior to the assassination of JFK.

In a matter of minutes any interested party can access via the internet a slew of reporting detailing this power struggle, with some predicting dire consequences.

Mr. Jones, although utilizing some of these same sources as he sees fit, ignores this evidence for some strange reason and methinks it to be by design.

When mainstream historians want to "get real" with history, seek out the truth, the whole truth and nuthin' but the truth and let nature take it course, they will not only be doing themselves a favor (with regards to their long-term integrity) but will also be doing their country a Big Favor, too.

This book has great chapter titles, and 80 pages of notes.

There are a lot of questions in this book are about death. While President Kennedy was alive, it was not obvious that Vietnam was going to be part of the world in which so many Americans would die. The insignificance of the problem at the time Kennedy took office might be guessed from such assessments as, "Interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres showed them to be well trained and brought in, across the seventeenth parallel, or through Laos and Cambodia. The total Vietcong in central Vietnam had grown from a thousand at the end of 1959 to five times that number by mid-1961." (p. 102). President Kennedy had authorized an increase in American troops that jumped from hundreds to thousands as the years went by, but with little sign that, merely seven years after JFK took office, more than a thousand troops per week on each side might be losing their lives in Nam early in 1968.

As a professor in history with a year off from teaching, Howard Jones had the opportunity to examine documentary sources and the Oral History Interviews at presidential libraries, and he even talked to a few of the remaining participants. Daniel Ellsberg is not a major character in this book, though Jones talked to him on March 27, 2002, concerning a meeting in which President Kennedy asked Lansdale about getting rid of The Nhus, "But if that didn't work out--or I changed my mind and decided to get rid of Diem--would you be able to go along with that?" Lansdale ended up in a limousine with Robert McNamara after the meeting, where McNamara told him, "When he asks you to do something, you don't tell him you won't do it." (p. 365). Actually, the source of this story is a book by A. J. Langguth, a New York Times correspondent in South Vietnam who claimed "Ellsberg's unpublished memoir, Langguth asserted, contained this account of Lansdale's clandestine meeting with the president." (p. 365). "Ellsberg likewise considers the story valid. But in an interview of McNamara conducted by Langguth years afterward, the former secretary alleged that he did not recall the meeting." (pp. 365-366). I checked the index of SECRETS by Daniel Ellsberg, finally published in October, 2002, and found no mention of President Kennedy on the pages of the only entry for "Lansdale, Edward G.: McNamara's meeting with," though it included a page on which "high Vietnamese officials who met with General Lansdale regarded him warily but with awe because of his reputation as a kingmaker. They assumed he was there to pick the next Diem." By the time Ellsberg was on the Lansdale team, LBJ was president, Diem and Nhu were dead, and the Vietnamese could only hope that another government like Diem's would be better than a bunch of generals.

America clearly considered a coup against Diem at a time when it was trying to be as neutral as possible, because Diem could have asked American diplomats to leave Nam if he had any evidence that the Americans were actively engaging in plots against a government that it was supposed to be supporting. The index is good at sorting out who was involved, though it isn't until page 280 that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a brigadier general in the Army Reserves who spent 1962 writing policy papers on Vietnam, was given the opportunity to become the American ambassador to Saigon. In the photo section, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's trip to Saigon on May 12, 1961, established that Frederick Nolting was ambassador then. President Kennedy is shown talking with Henry Cabot Lodge on August 15, 1963, just a few weeks before JFK's CBS television broadcast with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963. As usual, "Lodge's appointment, the Kennedy administration insisted, ensured bipartisan support for its Vietnam policy. These statements were true, but they did not reflect reality. The White House believed that Nolting had become too close to Diem," (p. 281). The note supporting this information adds, "Nolting learned of his removal over radio while on vacation." (p. 501).

While this is a history of policy that led to the Vietnam war, there is little sense that any possibility, other than a result which might be considered a victory for American policy, was ever considered. The only use that the Vietnamese had for the Americans was for creating the illusion that somehow America could win a war there. By September 18, 1963, Lodge was trying to get Nhu to leave the country, and reporting back to Washington, "one feels sorry for him. He is wound up as tight as a wire. He appears to be a lost soul, a haunted man who is caught in a vicious circle. The Furies are after him." (p. 371).

This is history on an emotional level. I have no doubt that Jack Ruby pulled the trigger of the pistol that shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach, resulting in Oswald's death, and it might have been because of a cancer that would take the life of Jack Ruby before the end of the 1960s, when we had learned enough from Lenny Bruce to let just about anybody swear, if they felt like it. For President Kennedy to remain on good relations with the C.I.A., after news started coming in on how bad the situation in Nam really was, is like expecting Americans to believe that Ruby and Oswald were friends, or even knew each other. Oswald and Ruby do not appear in this book. For that side of the story, see OSWALD TALKED by La Fontaine. This book has no news on who took part in the JFK assassination, which is officially still more of a mystery than anything that happened in Nam.