Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War Hardcover – March 6, 2003

Regarding JFK's planned withdrawal from Vietnam: It really does not come down to sentimentality or what one wishes to believe. Enough of the historical record has been revealed to demonstrate that JFK had made the decision to withdraw from Vietnam. The Taylor-McNamara Report (really written by Krulak and Prouty, overseen by RFK) laid the groundwork for NSM 263 which began the withdrawal which was to be completed in 1965, thus preventing another Red Scare from damaging JFK's re-election chances. The first guy to tell this story in great detail was Jon Newman. His work was disappeared for a while, but it has stood the test of time as additional works like this one attest. Noam Chomsky has always befuddled parts of the US left by disparaging this conclusion but it is telling that when Newman offered to publicly debate Chomsky on the subject, Chomsky refused.

One can argue (though I never would) that we can't know that JFK wouldn't have changed his mind and gotten into the Vietnam War just like LBJ did. However, we can say that JFK had begun a withdrawal from Vietnam and that LBJ reversed this policy (with NSM 273) days after taking office.

Very good over-all but it could spend a little more time on the Harriman group which went after Diem with a vengeance. Diem was a good man and the DoS proved not worthy of him as an ally (and they also proved their ability to fabricate coups - such as what we have just witnessed in Ukraine - albeit those of Kennedy's era were a lot cleverer than the nit-wits Hillary Clinton has stuffed the DoS with [I mean - plotting a coup over unsecured phone lines? Who does that other than over-confident morons?]) Bill Colby told me (1996 just before his death) that he thought the betrayal and murders of Diem and Nhu were pretty much errors that could not be recovered from as nothing really went right in the war against the Communists after that (i.e., with revolving-door coups, no political legitimacy in the GVN, all the good people of Diem's bureaucracy swept-away with nincompoops installed in their place, and, of course the over-night shut-down of the Strategic Hamlets program - the one counterinsurgency concept and program the Communists hated the most). To be clear, Jones' work does not attempt to white-wash this terminal mistake yet he does not give it the in-depth analysis it truly deserves. On the other hand, those historians who have suffered under the weight of standard Orthodox-school bilge for the last near half-century (beginning with Halberstam's 'Quagmire') must be grateful for those authors who show any sort of minor sympathy for Diem.

"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.

Good book, highly recommend it.

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.