welcome this morning to the miller center here at the university of virginia. we're delighted that mark and i were just saying it's just great to see everybody gathered together in our beautiful williamsburg style forum room.

we want to thank c-span for being with us today. and so if you enjoy this sort of like a holiday movie that you never tire seen over and over again, feel free to watch numerous times. we want to welcome everyone in person as well as those who are watching online live and those who will be watching our archive version as well as those who will watch on c-span. we are here today, of course, with my colleague, professor marc selverstone, to speak about his new book, which is titled the kennedy withdrawal. the subtitle is camelot and the american commitment to vietnam is published by harvard university, has just been published this fall, and it is available in the foir today for purchase and signing. they make a perfect holiday gift and you will even get an inscription and a signature from mark. mark is a historian here at the miller center, where he also chairs our presidential recordings program.

and i'm not only happy to call him a colleague, but a friend. and speaking of harvard, we are joined remotely today by our good friend, professor fred logevall. fred, welcome who holds the lawrence de belfry, chair of international affairs at harvard university, where he is also a professor of history. fred is the pulitzer prize winning for his book called embers of war? and its subtitle, the fall of an empire and the making of america's vietnam. i highly recommend it, as well as his most recent book, which is jfk coming of age in the american century, 1917 to 1956. and you might be saying, but didn't president kennedy have another seven years on this earth? and the answer is yes. and that is why we are being joined remotely by fred, who is assiduously working on volume two of his jfk biography, which will take the president's life

from 1957 until the assassination in 1963. so, fred has been so kind to generous lee. join us today from his native land of sweden. so he is in scandinavia as we speak. i just have a few housekeeping duties for you both in person and online. if you have questions for our experts today, mark and fred, and you are person. feel free to jot those down. i am catholic trained. so if you can make your handwriting, that would be very helpful. don't have those cards around the room. show you how to do polymer penmanship. but my mother would have been perfect at that, so please write those down and my colleague alfred reeves, who along with christina lopez guitar de chao and mike greco and the whole team here who make these happen. but if you wave your card at any time during our time here today, alfred will come pick those up and we'll leave about 20 minutes or so at the end for those.

if you are online, please use your q&a function. if you have a query for us and we'll get to as many as we can. and before i turn to mark a question i want to recognize today, those of you in the audience who be vietnam era veterans, could i see a show of hands if are. oh, well, thank you so much for being here today. thank you for your service. my older brother is also a vietnam era veteran. i know the problems that you faced, particularly when you came home from overseas and so were so grateful for your service to our country. and it so happens in real time. this is pearl harbor day. my father was a world war two veteran, was mustered in on december 2nd, 1941, five days before pearl harbor. and so we're grateful to all of those who served and all of our wartime settings as well as in peacetime. thank you again so far.

let us turn to a war. vietnam. there are so many books that on the vietnam war, on president kennedy. and of course, fred has a book on the subject. what prompted you to do another book on the subject and particularly studying the withdrawal plan? president kennedy around the vietnam war. and how is it different from other books that have come before? well, thanks for the question and thanks for creating the opportunity for me here and everybody else at the miller center not only to participate in this event, but really to help me write the book because without the miller center community, that really would have been impossible. and the book itself is a little unorthodox, as you note. there really aren't all that many books on kennedy and vietnam. there are a handful of one in 85. and then a few in subsequent decades, and some of them are

quite targeted. some are thin, some are very comprehensive. what i set out to do was not to write a composite sense of account of kennedy vietnam, but really to on something much narrower, which is this withdrawal plan that was undertake and during the kennedy years to extricate the united states from vietnam. it was a plan that was first tabled in the middle of 1962 and then was developed over the course of 1963 and then my initial thought was, this would be great. what a wonderful opportunity. and it grew out of our work here at the miller center because as a member of the presidential program back in 2005, i participated in the conference, along with fred and several of our colleagues on this question of what was kennedy's plan for vietnam in late 1963? what lyndon johnson think kennedy's plan for vietnam was.

and did johnson do about it once johnson became president on the 22nd of november? that. so my original thought was just to write on that small little slice. but then i came to realize that to tell the story of the withdrawal plan, i actually had to backtrack and tell story of kennedy in vietnam more, more comprehensively. so i spent a fair amount of time developing what i saw as kennedy's commit to vietnam. hence that that part of the title and then carrying carried the story past three into 64 into march of 1964, when the plan essentially falls apart under lbj. and then i tack on an epilog, which addresses the the story about that planning, the narrative about that planning at the time. late 1960s into the 1970s. but then very much so in the era

of 911. and the way that conversation about kennedy vietnam became rolled into a conversation and the united states and its use of force abroad. so it became a much larger project and i would say that again, it is not really a comprehensive history of vietnam, although it covers much of the same ground. and it has to. but it is a much more targeted exploration of. his planning to withdraw the united states. so in effect its, it's a study of kennedy's commitment to vietnam through the lens of his planning to withdraw from it. right. well, fred, can we turn to you? i know it's i've said i'm the moderator today. i've got my two experts here. and i'm going to turn to fred for a conversation and questions that you might have for mark as well. well, you never just a mere moderator, barbara, you're selling yourself much too short. i'm delighted to be with all of you. and of course, in particular to be here with mark.

i think mark and i might have first discussed this project on a while playing tennis together in charlottesville years ago. and congrats on the book. it's just a marvelous book. i think mark is being modest in a sense. yes, maybe in some ways it's not, quote unquote, comprehensive. but i want to tell the audience that is a it's an unsurpassed examination and probably will be for some time. kennedy's policies on vietnam writ large. and i think, as mark just pointed out, he had to he had to go back and really consider policy in its entirety for us to then be able to understand what is the thinking. in late 1963, when so much is happening? and then, of course, he himself is was assassinated soon after the coup and the assassination of the south vietnamese leader. no, didn't jim, but i think i think what's so critical and why the book is so important and

maybe i'll i'll i'll just make this point, barbara, and then turn it back to you is mark and i both know and i think you know, barbara, that audiences want to know about kennedy and his role in the in the buildup in vietnam. it is the the mother of all counterattack rituals. and i'm sure we'll get to it before the before our conversation is all over in terms of what might have done but understood ending as i think people do that his death occurs at a key moment in that buildup. we need to understand what the administration is doing. we need to understand what is the what is the nature of this withdrawal plan and nobody before mark had really looked at that plan using all the available evidence that we now have and that is, i think, what's key about the book is that it is authoritative. barbara, you just have a sense as you read this that here is an

author who has digested not just the primary sources. there's listen to all the tapes, but who also knows the existing inside and out. and at some it's a great achievement, a tour de force, i would say. and addition to that, mark is, just a not only a brilliant writer who understands his material and write so cogently, but narrative prose carries you along and is very compelling. so fred mentioned mark the sources and i see our director, bill antholis, in the back of the room here today. one of the things that that bill said when he became, our director six years ago was i want to make sure that the full time faculty at the miller center so that's my colleague here and mickey russell riley whom is the co-chair with me of oral history. dan and mark are in the presidents recordings program and our day jobs are doing our

programmatic work but we are also expected to do scholarship that's based on that programmatic work and sometimes beyond it. and so bill said, i want to make sure you all have sabbatical opportunities, chairs, for example, chaired professors in the university. i know typically henry abraham every six semester would get a leave. we're at about every 13th semester, but still grateful for that. and i know that mark would that opportunity to go for to the kennedy library and delve deeply into the archive there in addition to taking his day job of working in the in the tapes. so for people who may not be as familiar mark with the recordings program and the kennedy tapes, secret white house tapes that he tell us about that and then tell us about using those resource sources that the miller center produces, but also the archives that you were able to delve into at the kennedy presidential

library. well, i would i hesitate to go further after comment from you and from. i think i would just stop there. yes. nice of you to be with us today. thank you very much. but the tapes were critical to to my study and i think to the study of of kennedy and people who are studying john's and critical to the study of johnson and nixon as well. you can't write histories or otherwise of these figures without consulting them, because by and you are going to get the unvarnished unedited thoughts and there are caveats to that of these individuals in the oval office thinking through in real time not knowing how the story turns out. so to hear them policy arguing back forth with their advisors, attempting to go down certain paths that then get blocked, they need to shift gears and go down others. it's a fascinating exploration

of policymaking in real. and with respect to kennedy and vietnam, there are a host of tapes that can and can use and kent germany and i as a team our colleagues on on the recordings program transcribed and then considered and i and ken is now doing comparable that tried to work these into our understanding of what we know about and vietnam and particularly kennedy and and the withdrawal and i had mentioned at the outset this conference that that i had attended in 2005 with fred and others our job at that conference was to bring to bear key conversations from the kennedy tapes that relate it to the question of withdrawal. and there are a few tapes in particular that were really important, most notably those from. early october 1963 after chairman the joint chiefs

maxwell taylor and secretary defense robert mcnamara returned from the fact finding mission to vietnam. come to kennedy and and present to him a plan essentially to to try to rectify many of the problems that that were afoot in vietnam at the and to encourage the gm regime to to perform better, but also to activate this planning that had been in the works july of 1962, maybe even may of 1962. here they are in october of 1963. here's plan, mr. president, to get the united states out of vietnam. and you could hear kennedy, his advisors talk about that in real time, not only on the morning of second when it's just a handful of people, but then at a national security council session later that evening, where they they consider not only the merits, the planning itself, but how to go forward and make it public. and that's really a big deal. it's one thing to talk about

timelines in war, particularly in counterinsurgency. this it's another thing to talk about that in a public fashion. and that's what they proposed do, largely because the administration was at six and seven about where to go. if you recall, in late august 1963, there was movement toward, a coup in vietnam that collapsed. it didn't leave the united states, the south vietnamese, in any better position. in fact, there were mutual recruitment options and the us was faced with having to live with a regime that. gm knew the united states was willing to throw overboard and so what do you do about that? and so there was all kind of tension, their relationship and you can hear that play out in the tapes. so particularly these tapes from early october 1963, tapes that had become available in 1997 as a result of oliver stone's film jfk, which exorcized the

american public, including congress, that it decided empanel an assassination records board to ferret out all of the information. whatever we had relating to kennedy's murder. and there still materials that were waiting for related to that but one of those those document collections were tapes themselves and so some of the first kennedy tapes on vietnam concerned this period in. early october 1963, august 1963, related to the coup. and then even late october, 1963, related to the coup that really took place. but then later, after some of these more comprehensive studies of kennedy and vietnam were written, we started to get tapes from mid-september 1963. those are the where you can hear kennedy and mcnamara, taylor and mcgeorge bundy kennedy's national security advisor talking, dispatching to the

mcnamara taylor mission, what were they supposed to find? how are they supposed go about their business? what about this withdrawal plan that's been in the works? and you could hear taylor and mcnamara presenting it to jfk. we want to tell gm about the we think that this will be very helpful in holding his and holding him to account in making sure that they're leveraged a way that they know that we're not in vietnam and that if they really want to want to survive, they they better fight the war and more effectively. and it's in some of those tapes, you can hear kennedy start to consider the merits of this withdrawal plan. and he's really not terribly enthused by it he doesn't think it makes a whole lot of sense on the face of it that the united states has been threatening gm

for ten years with some version of that either withholding economic aid or maybe trying to get out. it's better if we just try to encourage them to fight the war better. and you to mcnamara and taylor are best positioned to help him do that. so it's one of our first inklings in a chronological sense of where kennedy was and then we hear him in october 1963 questioning maybe the merits of withdrawal again and questioning the end date for an american departure, which mcnamara and taylor propose as the end of 1965. you can hear kennedy say, well, 65 doesn't work out. we'll get a new. so we factor this into our analysis along with the other evidentiary evidentiary materials that we have textual sources from the defense department, from the state oral histories, other secondary

sources. and we try to come up with best guess of of what withdrawal planning meant to kennedy at the time and then as i try to explore later what it meant to lbj after that time. so how many of you or have seen the interim the interview that president kennedy did at hyannis in labor day weekend, 1963 with walter cronkite have seen that if you have it, go on youtube and watch it and i remember it was because cbs was changing their evening news program from 15 minutes to 30 minutes expanding it to it is to this day and i remember watching this on youtube, bob and mark, you mentioned the the discussions not only of whether to have a withdrawal plan or when to withdrawal and how to withdraw and what to do. the public's understanding of

and the famous line that i always recall from having seen this clip is kennedy saying, you know, it's there in the end. and the final analysis is he often said it's their war, it's the vietnamese war. you know, we can help them but we can't win it for. and then i hear in my mind in 1967 and 68, his brother robert saying the same thing, and he would, as president kennedy said in the final analysis, their war. we can help them. we can't win it for them. and he's saying that as he prepares to run and then runs in 68, also with tragic circumstances surrounding it. so was there also, as you say, a strategy determining how to explain this to the american. how to explain the commitment or how to explain the withdrawal, both. yeah. so so commitment is is a significant one that lasts the entirety of kennedy's

presidency. you hear him again and again saying things like he did on on september 2nd, we cannot desist in vietnam, this is an important struggle. it's it's important that the united states remain there. and i've used that word important twice as opposed to using the word vital, because kennedy never makes vietnam of vital importance the united states. it is not a vital national security interest. in contrast to what he about thailand actually, which is vital national security interest. and so you wonder about kennedy's rhetoric, which seems to be fairly consistent. on the one hand, it's their war. they have to win it. the people of vietnam. but we cannot desist and we cannot shrink from this struggle and that was something certainly important for kennedy in 1961 a

tough for jfk in foreign policy, in which he allegedly, after the bay of pigs after laos and the decision to pursue a neutral solution for laos after a tough, testy summit with in vienna after, the berlin wall going up in august after the tank crisis in october of 1961. i just can't take another hit essentially in 1961. and even after after the the khrushchev meeting, kennedy says james reston of the new york times, you know, now, now we have a problem of making our our power credible to khrushchev and vietnam is the place. so you hear him saying both things at the same time that it's their war, but we need to remain committed in helping them fight it. and that is a tension that they were never really to resolve.

and as as the withdrawal, how to explain the withdrawal. did launch a public relations campaign of a sort after october of 1962. and i would mention in that regard that that's the first that anybody hears about publicly, all this planning is done in secret. from may of 1962, when it's floated to general harkins, the head of the military assistance command in vietnam to july of 62, when mcnamara actually directs the formal planning begin to january of 63, when the first iteration of that plan is put forward to the spring of that year, when it goes through alterations, when mcnamara actually wants to accelerate planning for withdrawal. and it's not just to take troops out by the end of 65, it's to achieve the symbolic effect of of of showing the american public that our commitment is

limited. it is it does have boundaries. we're going to take a thousand out by the end of 1963. and so this withdrawal plan is actually kind of a hybrid of these two approaches, a plan take out a thousand troops by the end of 63, plan to take up most them by the end of 65. but all in secret. and the public know about that. nor does the yet to do. the south vietnamese about that. it's kept entirely secret from them, which is interesting, given fact that this is a limited partnership and. all this planning is being done ostensibly in their name, but it becomes public. in october of 1963 and initially it's panned by all of the major papers, by by pundits in the press. this sounds crazy, you followed a consistent policy, even though you say that this is your consistent policy. now, how can we live with jim and the religious repression

been going on and and all the problems we had with him and so so in the media people are very confused the public is very confused too and you this in commentary throughout the course of those months. kennedy references it a few times in late october and mid november 1963, particularly the thousand man withdrawal, talking, getting hundreds, maybe not thousands out. people wonder, well, is he now backing away from that pledge? but they seem to be still pretty committed to withdrawal, even though it didn't really play terribly well in the country writ large. and we may get into this at the end later on with with implications of of publicly articulating plans to withdrawal. but it doesn't really seem kennedy got any great public approval bounce that it doesn't

seem though the military situation really as a result of that and in fact there is evidence to suggest it along with the other pressures that the kennedy team was imposing on the south vietnamese. it created a sense of chaos or resulted in the sense chaos that ultimately resulted in the the removal of the zm himself so their public affairs program for the withdrawal did not go exactly as as as planned. fred can i. barbara oh, go ahead fred. well, i just think this is really interesting. i'm so glad you brought up the the interview. what's what's fascinating, me and i'm researching this for the second volume of the biography is that, you know, they were really prepared for this interview. that is to say the administration more or less knew what was coming from it with

respect to the question and that the president would be asked. and he was always kennedy was, always somebody who did his homework. he made seem effortless, often. but that was in part as is so often case because he had practiced. so it's fascinating to me as points out, that in what he says about vietnam in that interview with a very large television audience, in a sense wanting to have it both ways, as mark points out, he wants to suggest, is their war, not ours. they have to win it, and yet it would be a mistake for us to withdraw and. you know, i think in a sense and mark and i think you talked about this. i think there's a certain paradox. and kennedy's vietnam policy going back from when he visited vietnam as a congressman in 1951 right up i would to his death which is i think a conviction on his part that a military

solution is going to be a really difficult that defeating ho chi revolution by by of arms is going to be, to say the least, a tall order. and i think he's skeptical of this his own experience in world war two, which we can get into, i think helps, to explain this. but the paradox is, as mark shows in the book, that you still see an increase in the us involvement quite, quite significantly under kennedy. and someone has to, one has to on the one hand cut up or one has to couple that ambivalence which i think is deep with this determination to try to make thing work. the question i wanted ask mark, if i may quickly, is on the tapes you alluded the fact, mark, that like any other source, one has to use the tapes with caution. i would love to hear you have a thought on how you, since you're so involved with this in, the in

this crucial project, the presidential recordings project what you think of the tapes as a source. there's a if you have a quick thought on that and then maybe more to the point here, how important the tapes are for vietnam, for the cuban missile crisis. it seems to me i would i would argue that the tapes are really for our understanding of kennedy's deliberations and his decision on the missile crisis for johnson in vietnam. it's a huge loss that we can discuss with respect to nixon, obviously. but on this question of kennedy and vietnam, would you say the tapes are really significant or not? so i would they're really significant and there's one moment in particular that strikes me as as really compelling. and that is in may of 1963,

after mcnamara returned from one of these secretary of defense meetings there, the interagency process kind of ran the show in the united states state defense intelligence. but a lot of the operational details regarding, the the counterinsurgency assistance effort were handled out in honolulu at sing, pag and you would have the u.s. country team coming to to honolulu and you'd have members of the u.s. military and and diplomatic establishment them there. and one of those meetings takes place the ace takes place on the 6th of may, 1963. it's a pretty pivotal meeting because. that's where mcnamara really tasks the joint chiefs with getting this thousand man withdrawal in shape. and when mckinley era says the plan is to get up by 1965, it needs to be faster.

we need to ramp our efforts. we need to make sure it happens more quickly. the money that we're devoting to this is too high. we can actually cut funds and the whole the money is a very interesting story. so it's a it's a one day conference on may six, the following day, mcnamara flies back d.c. and he has a private meeting with kennedy. and this picture? no, that's actually so this is actually a picture of the cover of the book is a picture of the october meeting. max taylor has been cut out. and this is also not the usual that you see from that meeting. the usual one is kennedy sitting back and you see, taylor and mcnamara on the couch. and it's a great shot. and it was the one that was in the papers. but i was thrilled that they found this because the folks at harvard in many ways, for me, the story of the book, which is that this planning was and we can talk more about this was mcnamara's plan and not

kennedy's plan. but back to the may 6th meeting. it's a meeting just between those two. kennedy is playing for anybody else. he's not trying to appear particularly hawkish or dovish for anybody else. and i say that because there has been some discussion in the literature about kennedy and his commitment to withdrawal, whether he was fully committed, not review the decision again, it was really irrevocable. and what really got in the way with that was his murder. otherwise, we definitely would have been out by 65. and there are other people who say and that kennedy was playing a double game all along in the process. if there was a double game being played, somebody needed to carry that out. it would have to be bob, matt mcnamara, who is really running the show at secdef conferences, who essentially had been tasked

with with running the counter counterinsurgency from the united states, at least. and so if there was any deal there would have to be some kind of between kennedy and vietnam, particularly lee on the issue of do withdraw no matter what or do you withdraw only the context of military success? because that's a major question, right? are you going to pull out if are going poorly, as some folks would it, that kennedy would have pulled out regardless or that kennedy's withdrawal really would have been a conditions based withdrawal is the language that we got in the 2000 aughts and the 2000 teens we have lived through that history recently. you can hear kennedy mcnamara talking about not only the the state of counterinsurgency, but this idea to withdraw a thousand troops by the end of 1963. and kennedy asks the leading

question is is, you know, are you going to do this? if things are essentially going to hell in a handbasket? and mcnamara says, no, no, and kennedy follows up with another comment that you can certainly intuit to believe that kennedy thought that pulling out in the face of adverse military conditions was not a very good idea. so you know, where what does that tell us about where kennedy in vietnam at that point. but then also october 1963, when he is speaking with a whole bunch of people who were not necessarily as closest confidants, at least not on for sure, you know, how are we supposed to interpret kennedy remarks then? and i think the may seven remark when it's just two of them, is really important. i think it gives us a sense that kennedy's concern about in the face adverse military conditions is real and that when he voices that later he's being sincere.

i will go beyond and say that the tapes are because we do not have of conversation for all of these meetings that kennedy holds on vietnam. we just don't scholars in the room and ultimately online know that you know the foreign relations the united states or is that the state department puts out is invaluable because you will these memos cons and you can see what people said to one another at really important moments. the tapes provide many of those meetings correctives to that are said to who said them but the tapes also augment the historical record because they can fill in the blanks for meetings for which there were no mm cons and some of those meetings in the run up to the mcnamara taylor report are such that that the only record we have is the tapes or are the tapes. same with the morning meeting

for october 2nd, 1963. there is a memo for the nsc session later that night, probably statutorily there had to be. but. but none for the morning meeting. when kennedy first handed the plan to get out of vietnam and then discuss what to do with it, how to how to go about a public statement to explain the policy to the american public and to congress. and i would note that congress is a really important player here. and we've spoken about the executive branch for for much of of of our time here. but one of the reasons that kennedy that kennedy dispatches taylor and mcnamara to vietnam is so they can back and give a rosy report to congress about how things were going because people are up in arms about the kind insurgency kennedy is having an awful time winning the battle with congress to fund foreign aid package at close to

the levels that he wanted. and it's being gutted by 25% in vietnam. a big part of that. and you can hear mcnamara talking about the need to be able tell bill fulbright, chair of the senate foreign relations committee and others the things are going okay in vietnam that we have a grip on this. and while there might be some challenges at the moment militarily, things are progressing. so so this this trip that they take that's part of the withdrawal plan is really crucial and it is really only through the tapes that we have a record of first s-2 mission of what it is that taylor and mcnamara have proposed. can we zoom out to the 30,000 foot level we have with us today our colleague professor emeritus mal lefler who is renowned throughout the world for writing about the cold war and its history and has a book coming

this spring that we hope to do a forum on on the iraq war. but i'm thinking for for you and fred, to put this topic of vietnam into the larger context of the cold war. and people talk about the domino theory and who believed it? and was it correct or was it incorrect from taking it from pre-world war two era in europe and and asia to, the cold war era of southeast asia? the rest of the world. yeah. so the domino theory was was certainly relevant at the time. and, and i have talked about this and you know, there are questions to the extent that kennedy he truly believed in it and there, i think, is there's evidence on both sides to suggest that he was skeptical of. its mechanistic application that if one state is knocked over a state contiguous to that would knocked over as well. so the geographic dominoes would

fall. but there were also a psychological dominoes that might tumble and and those dominoes would if u.s. resolve if the credit of the american commitment to its allies, both in southeast asia as well as elsewhere was called into question. so. was kind of a touch stone of american will in the cold war at the time that could not be seen as failing to continue to prosecute that because of its impact more broadly, which is to say that the imperative i think what sustained the american commitment to vietnam and certainly through the 1960s it wasn't necessarily the reason that the united states decided to plant the flag earlier in the history that conflict. i think there were economic

considerations. and in the late 1940s, certainly with respect to making sure that the japanese had markets at a time when the united states looking to japan as an anti-communist bulwark in east asia, there were geopolitical concerns. well, with respect to france and helping america's european ally in in its war. but it's the credibility, imperative, really, i think, sustains the united in vietnam, and that affects so much of american thought about the value of the u.s.. position, america's posture in the world at that time. i mean, i think i think what's interesting about this is that it maybe ultimately more important in my view, is is credibility in a slightly different sense. so it's certainly the joplin pickel credibility of the united

states. but i like to speak of credibility cubed meaning that it's about also domestic political credibility for the president. so let's say kennedy or later johnson and later nixon. it's also about the personal credibility of, the presidents, but also their policy. they're their top advisors. so i think it's correct, as mark says, wholly correct. but that imperative becomes critically important. as he points out. but it seems to me it's not enough. we typically speak of credibility, geopolitical terms. it's about the national credibility. the united states, i think with respect to vietnam, that doesn't that moment suffice. and in fact, there's a kind of mystery here to some extent under kennedy. but even more under johnson, which is that i believe privately, privately, top policymakers weren't convinced that, in fact, that the outcome in vietnam of critical importance to american national

security. in other words, they doubted behind closed doors that credibility, imperative in geopolitical terms matters that mattered as much as they had to claim publicly. and i think becomes more pronounced under johnson. but there's even some of that, i think the closing months of the of the of the kennedy kennedy term we're getting close to our our q&a time. so again if you have questions here in person, write them down. and alfred reeves will collect them. alfred, it's i think we have several, if you will, forward. thank you, alfred. and again, if you're online, the q&a function and i have a question, if we can back up pre kennedy administration i started to read over the thanksgiving holiday david eisenhower was memoir called going to glory and it's about his grandfather dwight eisenhower's the white house and passing the torch to john kennedy in january of 61 and retiring his farm with mamie in gettysburg and he talks david

eisenhower talks a little bit about how kennedy changes the foreign policy defense policymaking apparat status of eisenhower and fred mentioned kennedy service in world war two. you can't get any more contrast of that passing of the torch on january 20th, 1960, on that cold day when the president the, new president delivered that amazing inaugural address. but here he was at, age 43, the youngest elected coming in to the white house and going out. our oldest president at that time, 70, although nowadays seems like a spring chicken compared to the r and our candidates these days but nevertheless you also have eisenhower who eventually of course became a star general in the army. and i didn't realize until i read this memoir that he wanted that to be reinstated so that that would continue to be his title. his five star status. he preferred over president as a

title. and i was thinking back to the tapes, mark, that in the converse ation that kennedy has that you can find on our website kennedy calling eisenhower during the cuban missile crisis. i think he calls in general all the way through. and of course, kennedy, who volunteered for service in world war two, as did his brother joe junior before war two, who lost his life as a navy aviator kennedy. kennedy almost lost his life in the solomon islands as a boat. and even young robert signed on for the navy as well. so how does kennedy recreate or refashion his foreign policy making defense policy making apparatus? and fred, that some of kennedy's thinking vietnam may have been shaped his own experience in world war two as a junior in the south pacific theater, it's less hierarchical as might imagine, given given eisenhower's as and

kennedy's as well. and that's particularly true with respect to the national security council itself, which had structured so that that policy proposals would move kind of the hill after a very rigorous process, going through lots of agencies being vetted. and then finally getting to the top and then a essentially consents his position would be delivered to eisenhower, kennedy found that to be to stiff, stultifying. it didn't allow for a lot of fluidity and flexibility or creativity and so kennedy dismantled eisenhower, nsc, and stripped it down, wanted a much more nimble approach to foreign policymaking, which is why you see him create task forces that draw on people from all over the place that are set up for

specific policy problems, a louse task force, and the berlin task and a vietnam task force. and then the southeast task force and the one hand you think that's a great way to kind of get the right people in the room and an cuba that's task force to get right people in the room to think about problems. but as kennedy discovered as a result of the bay of pigs crisis, it didn't always work well because you weren't assured of getting all the right people in the room, the right things at the same time, so it could be fully vetted by everybody. and so kennedy's kennedy's more fluid of approach, his at times, lack of detailed attention to that process, which kennedy's advisers expressed him after the bay of pigs. bundy says mr. president, essentially kind of tugging on his we've been trying to get your attention for a long time, and it's really tough because you're here, there and

everywhere else. and we just need a much more rigorous process. and so i think they came back to that after a while as well as kennedy imposing or creating other innovations for the foreign policy process room in the basement of the white house, ultimately a hotline to the soviets, better communication, but it's a it's a more fluid process which fitted kennedy's both from a paper perspective but probably also in a real time perspective in sitting around a table and entertaining opinion coming from everywhere, which kennedy was comfortable with. you can hear him on the tapes asking fabulous questions, interjecting himself when need be, but hearing each other's out, hearing each other's each other. yes, each other's opinions. and it just harder to see that

kind of a rambling process taking place during the eisenhower years. and fred, as i have already mentioned, now has the definitive of president kennedy. and if you're looking for the definitive biography of eisenhower, that is our history colleague, will hitchcock. several ago produced that. if fred anything to offer from your biographical of kennedy in that particular time in his life as a junior officer in the navy in world war two and how it may have impacted his views on policy in the military and particularly the war in vietnam. you yeah, i guess i would say a couple of things on that. first, i think he came out of the war kennedy did and this is very interesting in terms of the the difference between himself and father. i think jfk came out of the his service in the south pacific, convinced that the united states must play a leadership in world

affairs. his father remained an isolationist and would remain one long into the postwar period. but jack was different. so that's key. also, in terms of, i think ultimately understanding the vietnam commitment. the second and maybe to some extent paradoxical conclusion that i think jack kennedy reached from that service was that he was he came out of the war skeptical of military prognostications, of imminent success or that you know there was an easy military solution, this or that problem. i think what he saw in the south pacific made him dubious of what the brass, you know, was telling the junior officers. and i think. he came out quite skeptical that there were military solutions to problems that were, at their root, political and i think that's also key in terms of understand vietnam and why i think he remained, as i suggested, and i think this is consistent with mark's. i think he remained ambivalent

and. that's really important in terms of understanding his ultimate position. the last thing i'll just say very quickly with respect to eisenhower it's fascinating to me that that dwight eisenhower or after he leaves office. so say from from beginning of kennedy's administration, let's say through the escalation of the war under johnson, dwight eisenhower is really quite hawkish on vietnam. and in a sense, urging the administra nation to to make the commitment, the necessary commitment to preserve an independent noncommunist vietnam. it's not to get and it's not altogether consistent with his own reservations his own careful policy, more careful policy while he's president. well, i think. okay, mark, we'll move on to some superb questions because they really carrying along our discussion this one. and again, it may be from in house today or it may be online

as vice president was lyndon sufficiently aware or briefed on kennedy's plan so that he could have execute it on those plans? and ultimately, why did not? yeah, great question. so we know that johnson was aware of this planning. we know because johnson's aid howard berkes wrote a memo lbj to that effect that we have johnson knew about it. august 1962 and birth out the nature of the planning. it is not a hard and fast plan to get the u.s. out. it is a plan. it is part of planning so that we can understand and better the interplay, inputs and outputs we figure out how to distribute resources more effectively, that kind of thing. it's just to help us think through what the counterinsurgency, as opposed to hard and fast plan to get out. so we know that lbj of it then we don't know what lbj thinks of

it over the course of the next months perhaps. lbj's vice presidential which do exist out in which the johnson library is in the process of of of processing. perhaps those will help us understand and we are salivating at the prospect of getting getting a hold of those. there is an indication that lbj a the first of those two meetings on october second 1963 before leaving after 25 minutes for a lunchtime engagement, he did not speak and his name is not listed on. the mencken on that record. johnson's own daily diary says that he was there, which is intriguing. do i remember that? did he make a trip at he was vice president. he sure he made a really important trip may of 1961 after

the first set of really consequential decisions, the kennedy administration took to up its program, vietnam. and it was part of the process of trying to convince the south vietnamese that we are with you. and that was really the first goal of the presidential program, as it was described, to let the south vietnamese. know that that we will remain with you to stiff their spines to embolden them to enhance their morale. and you hear concerns about south vietnamese morale all through this parade. and that's really the main, as kennedy would say, to get to fight the war better on their own. and how do you do that? by increasingly vocal and visible display of american determination, whether that's through people like lbj going over or other high profile visitors, through economic aid,

through miller terry assistance, through assuring that vietnam plays an important place in america's. thinking about the cold war, and then ultimately through the blood and treasure of of of america's military commitment in the in the figure of troops, troops themselves, with the ultimate symbols of national and kennedy's ambivalence. and this is where i wanted it to bounce back on what fred said, because i think this is really important. it was essential that america, from the perspective of the people devising policy, proclaimed commitment as loudly as possible in order to embolden south vietnamese to show that they wouldn't quit and find themselves perhaps more willing to either the north vietnamese or the nlf. but the more that you did that, the more that you proclaimed loudly your commitment, the more that you boxed yourself in to having to that commitment.

and so what was at one point rhetorical. ultimately, when things go sour operational and that a dilemma that was deeply disconcert getting to kennedy in a tension that were never really able to resolve that of course remains with to america's military adventures abroad and how excruciating it was for for johnson for a host of reasons not the least of which is that both of his sons in law were in the military. and bill antholis and i did forum with former virginia senator chuck robb and his wife, linda bird johnson. robb couple of years ago online and you can that in the archive his memoir that that he did with the uva press as i recall think it was that it's it's one of the most amazing memoir of combat in vietnam that i have read and i'm sure there are many. and again some of you here in our audience today are online

served there. but he a lieutenant in, the in the marine corps had done rotc and university and just to to read about that and then the oral histories that we do here at the miller center of colin powell. we've done several oral histories up pace the marine corps general who was head of the joint chiefs of staff. these men came into the military and were young junior officers in vietnam and then went on to serve of course through the war on terror, the wars in afghanistan and iraq, which leads us to, i think will probably be our last question. our point today. this from our audience. how might your findings, mark, offer lessons for any of today's policy challenges? and i'll add the specifics of so called endless wars, which you have and done forms on here iraq, afghanistan, the issues that we face in ukraine now we have a whole war room here at,

the miller center devoted to the ukraine war with russia. and i'll even add in taiwan and china now. so let me close the circle on the first question, because i didn't address and i want to do that of remind me after this. okay. so johnson didn't think a whole lot of withdrawal planning he as he says to bob mcnamara the johnson tapes he thought it was a idea. he thought was a lousy idea, not necessarily to in the planning, but to make public. and he was far from alone among those around jfk who thought so as well. so johnson tries to screw himself up to to understand the logic. and he and mcnamara discuss and he kind of gets himself to understanding what mcnamara had to say. there's no reason to leave all military advisers there who are teaching the vietnamese how to

fly spotter planes when it's not necessary for them to be there. so let's get them out more people in more there. it's creating problems. him it's it's it's painting him kind of as a toady of the americans again, we come to look like the french and all that so johnson johnson is never thrilled about it but policy remains on the books and it is only events in south vietnam. take a turn. the worse in december of 1963. but then january february 1964, that you start to see not just comments in the press say that the states is dropping the plan to withdraw by 65, but then you start see comments from the policy curves themselves and even cite this one particular policymaker william bundy mcgeorge his brother, who was

more responsible for that than anybody in writing mcnamara taylor report looks to kashmir by march of 1964 and bob mcnamara will deliver a public address that effect later in the month. and then will direct cinc pac as as all other interested officials that all planning will now be to withdraw troops when needed but if we need more troops, they're going to go in. and so really the end of the withdrawal plan but the date is certainly dropped and the idea of getting them out when not needed. well, who wouldn't agree that? but opening the door to more troops publicly, that's a little bit different. they end up with more than a half million. their ultimate and if any of you have been to the vietnam in washington, i will never forget being in there with my parents who had two boys, my two older brothers who were of that age. and my dad looked at my mother

and said, we're so blessed that we don't have a name here on this wall. and then i would just turn to to the final the final question what lessons have we learned? so so there are lessons about kennedy as a power gone for wisdom in in international relations and particularly in these kinds of scenarios. what i try to highlight in the book is that the withdrawal planning really place in the service of of different objectives. it wasn't just about the united states, vietnam or the us getting out of vietnam, since it was in many ways mcnamara's plan, he was able to shape it in ways that were consonant with his own objectives at the pentagon and with other objectives of the government writ large and kennedy himself. we, i believe, was lukewarm at best on sure that those troops

would be out the end of 1965. and in many ways there were real hard and fast political rationales for the withdrawal plan in the first place. so when you hear discussions about withdrawal and particularly public about withdrawal tied a deadline, you got to think that there are political concerns involved. one of the great, you know, lessons about vietnam, it's hard to implement, of course is trying not to get politics, trying not to have politics get in the of strategy. and in a democracy that's awfully difficult very difficult but also it seems to be the case and there's there's growing research on this to suggest that publicly articulated withdrawal deadlines are not terribly effective at helping the. who espouse them in their in

their political stature at home public approval ratings. they don't really seem be terribly helpful militarily on the ground and and i think we should be skeptical about embracing them and to recognize as some of the reasons for which they're they're put in the first place. well, thank you so much. thank you, fred, for taking time off from your writing schedule there in sweden. we can't wait for the second volume of your jfk biography. we hope you'll schedule a little bit of time on your book tour for the miller center. always in person you are well invited, but if you need to do so, we'll understand. and mark you for your contributions to the miller center, to your contribution to scholarship and to history. and thank you all today for being here and those online and on our c-span programing, we are grateful and we wish you happy holidays and a happy new year. coming up.