“...sent 15,000 advisers and Special Forces he invented just for Vietnam...”
And this concept of Special Forces should have been used to train and assist the host government forces while on the strategic level conventional forces cut off and punished the aggressor nation. So eventually we had conventional forces in Vietnam playing a counter-insurgency game while the NVA were able to march down unopposed.
A well-engineered menacing and conventional (Maginot) Line along the 17th parallel all the way through Laos and into Thailand is what was needed. Not just a static defense but also a launch area for operations oriented toward the north when the NVA created mischief. The counter-insurgency part would have been successful.
Kennedy does not deserve the blame for putting half a million men in a counter-insurgency roles while the NVA invasion was allowed to continue unchecked. That was all LBJ and the “best and brightest” JFKers he retained.
“Kennedy does not deserve the blame for putting half a million men in a counter-insurgency roles while the NVA invasion was allowed to continue unchecked. That was all LBJ and the “best and brightest” JFKers he retained.”
Absolutely. Johnson was a horse’s azz on domestic and foreign policy.
And my point regarding Kennedy, is not that he was perfect, but he was a supply sider and hardly a shrinking violet on the world stage.....compare that to todays Democrats, who are full fledged Marxists.