Yes. No one said anything at the time. It was all Camelot, Camelot, Camelot, and JFK was perfect. Sure, he may have made a few little mistakes in the Bay of Pigs, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or, etc., etc., but he was still picture perfect!
I first learned about the assassination when I read the complete report on Tricky Dick’s Watergate scandal in the NY Times. There was a whole section of the paper, maybe 20 pages, that included every word. Buried in the middle was a short statement about how JFK sent the CIA to assassinate the Catholic President of South Vietnam, because the Buddhists were mad at him and a monk had committed suicide.
JFK was the first openly Catholic President, and he had a terrible time explaining that he wasn’t about to do whatever the Pope told him to. He leaned over backward to show that he wasn’t a Catholic. And he just HAD to murder his faithful ally in Vietnam because he didn’t want to be known as a CATHOLIC! Never mind that behind the scenes he was one of the worst Catholics ever, with at least two or three adulterous affairs every day.
So, he murdered our ally, who was brilliantly fighting the war with our minor help. With him gone, we either had to give up the whole area to the Communists, or we had to send in numberless troops to die in the jungles.
Every war JFK fought was just dreadful, and required the sacrifice of unprecedented numbers of drafted troops.
” who was brilliantly fighting the war with our minor help.”
ROTFLMAO!
The Kennedy-Johnson team knocked off a man they did not like and by doing so and agreeing to a coup, they insured that Ho Chi Min could easily sell, to Vietnamese north and south, the idea that every government in the south after that was just an American puppet. Nice going.
Not a good way to ‘prevent’ a war.
Re: “Never mind that behind the scenes he was one of the worst Catholics ever, with at least two or three adulterous affairs every day”.
I know reliable women still living in Texas who tell how LBJ bedded down women and hit on them at social events. So what was the difference with Diem?