“JFK sent in 16,000 troops, “
Yeah I know, my dad and his Pentagon office partner were two of them. I had the opportunity to listen to them discuss Vietnam in the years before it made the front pages.
The majority of the 16,000 were not combat troops. The combat troops who were sent by Kennedy were there to train ARVN and they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be fighting. Special Forces were there to teach the ARVN how to fight counter insurgency warfare.
The American combat role started after LBJ got the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress in August 1964. The first deployment of regular ground combat troops began only after that. Gen Westmoreland began building up to a strength of 300,000 in the summer of 1965 with the first major battle occurring in Nov 1965 at Ia Drang Valley, the battle memorialized in “We Were Soldiers Once and Young”.
You are missing the point, America had kept it’s distance from Vietnam although we had a handful of men there under FDR, Truman, and two terms of Eisenhower, and the French defeat, and then suddenly BOOM, JFK sends in 16,000 troops and contributed to Diem being killed, he was starting his war, and he did.
No JFK, no Vietnam war, JFK was a boob, more like Jimmy Carter, except perhaps worse, even his war heroics was something that he should actually have faced courts martial on, instead, like everything with JFK, his failure and incompetence is flipped into the opposite.
You will have to scroll down for the Reagan letter to Nixon.
https://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/Courses/101_USH/101_manual_9.htm