you-””LBJ gets the blame for sending in combat troops the next year but as far as I can see the chaos set in motion by Diem’s death forced LBJ into choosing between a major American military role or a decision to abandon South Vietnam.””
ME-“No JFK, no Vietnam war,”
you-””I think that’s overstating it. The Communists had a vote in all of this. They ramped up their insurgency around the time Kennedy took office and he either had to increase our aid to Vietnam or let them get overrun.””
No, you are obsessed with defending JFK and the mythology, you seem to want to switch to whatever works, no JFK didn’t start the war when he sent in 16,000 troops, or that he had to start the war because he was forced into it for some reason.
Eisenhower stood by and watched as the French lost their Vietnam war, he evidently didn’t us to get into another war in Asia.
No JFK, then no Vietnam war for America, Nixon would not have sent in the 16,000 troops.
No JFK, then no Vietnam, the election of JFK destroyed America. As destructive and incompetent and corrupt as JFK was, the passing of his immigration policy after his death, made recovery for us, impossible.
“No, you are obsessed with defending JFK and the mythology,”
You are an idiot.
I doubt that you are capable of learning anything that runs counter to your goofball conviction that JFK was solely responsible for the Vietnam war but I’ll post this for others.
Here is President Eisenhower in 1954 speaking of the strategic importance of Indochina (that’s Vietnam) to the free world using what would become the famous falling dominoes analogy. Eisenhower’s domino theory was the basis for Kennedy and Johnson’s decisions to defend South Vietnam from conquest by the Communist North:
Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press: Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.
THE PRESIDENT. You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things.
First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.
Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.
Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.
Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on.
Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can’t afford greater losses.
But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.
Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.
It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go—that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.
So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10202