“No JFK, no Vietnam war,”
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. My dad’s office partner was the Army’s small arms expert and by fall 1961 he was saying “they may not call it a war but they are sure using ammunition like it’s one”. The pace of war was picking up very quickly in Kennedy’s first year.
I do put a lot of blame on Kennedy for getting Diem killed and leaving a chaotic mess behind. Ho Chi Minh couldn’t believe his good luck. Diem’s assassination played a big role in Johnson’s decision to have the US military take charge of ground combat in the war.
“JFK was a boob, more like Jimmy Carter, “
I wouldn’t put them in the same category. Carter was naive, whereas Kennedy was reckless and that’s a dangerous enough quality in an American President.
So JFK didn’t get us into the war the military and Eisenhower didn’t want, Eisenhower himself would have had to start the Vietnam war if his time in office had stretched to 2 more years?
You seem devoted to JFK mythology, that’s for sure.