It is 10 September, 1963. President John F. Kennedy is in the Oval Office receiving oral briefings from Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, and Foreign Service Officer Joseph Mendenhall. Both men were dispatched to South Vietnam on 6 September, 1963 as part of yet another fact finding mission into the counter-Communist efforts of the Ngo Dinh Diem government. Relations between Saigon and Washington have become increasingly strained since the Diem government launched a wave of repression against the Buddhists in South Vietnam, who make up the majority of the country’s religious population. Scenes of Buddhist monks setting themselves aflame to protest persecution have done little to help the Kennedy administration sell its counterinsurgency plans to the American people. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Diem government is more concerned with stifling dissent than it is in fighting the Viet Cong, which has led to the United States exploring the idea of regime change in Saigon. Several South Vietnamese generals have been approached by the CIA about toppling President Diem and replacing his government with one that is more willing to engage and destroy the Viet Cong.
Kennedy listens calmly as Major General Krulak delivers his optimistic report on the war effort. Krulak speaks glowingly of the strategic hamlet program, which is Saigon’s effort to locate peasants out of Viet Cong areas and into villages that are surrounded by fortifications, making them impervious to attack. He also speaks enthusiastically about the overall effort of South Vietnam’s armed forces against the Viet Cong.
When Krulak finishes, Mr. Mendenhall begins speaking. He tells of the utter disgust the people in South Vietnam have both with Diem’s government and the war effort. He also states that the repression against the Buddhists, particularly the raids on their pagodas in August that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, have many in Vietnam speaking of a religious civil war. Mendenhall concludes his report by saying that many South Vietnamese are beginning to wonder if their lives would be better under the Viet Cong.
When Mendenhall finishes his report, President Kennedy leans back in his chair and asks, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?”
Over the next several days a bitter debate on American policy in Vietnam will erupt between advisors at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council. Kennedy, who is becoming increasingly frustrated with the mess in South Vietnam, is still uneasy about the cable sent in August to Henry Cabot Lodge, US Ambassador to South Vietnam, that instructed him to assist the CIA in finding generals who could stage a coup to oust President Diem from office. The idea of publicly backing a head of state while simultaneously plotting his removal doesn’t sit well with Kennedy. The conflicting reports he’s just heard from General Krulak and Mr. Mendenhall make him wonder if any American effort in South Vietnam will bring about a genuine anti-Communist insurgency in that country. In the wake of these conflicting reports, President Kennedy decides to send Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Saigon at the end of the month for the highest level US fact finding mission of his presidency.
What if Kennedy, instead of sending McNamara and Taylor to Saigon had gone himself on his own fact finding mission?
It is often said that US presidents live and work in a bubble, shielded and protected by aides and cabinet secretaries who are more concerned with protecting their turf and advancing their agendas than they are in giving the president honest, unvarnished facts. Kennedy had visited Vietnam in 1951 when it was still a French colony, and he was a Congressman preparing to challenge Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1952 election. Ten years later when he was President Kennedy, he would often lament to aides that if American advisors kept increasing their combat role in Vietnam, it would become a “white man’s war, one in which the Vietnamese saw themselves as mere spectators, just like they did when the French were defeated by the Viet Minh in 1954.” Kennedy was a keen student of history and extremely inquisitive, so a visit by him to Saigon in 1963 could have drastically altered the course of both US and Vietnamese history. No matter how many advisors a president sends around the country or around the globe, nothing compares to a president actually being on the ground at the site of inquiry, seeing for himself (there will never be a woman president of the United States) what the hell is going on.
The McNamara Taylor mission to Saigon began on 23 September and concluded on 30 September. On the 27 hour flight home the staffs of both men wrote up their findings, which called for a reduction of 1,000 American troops, shifting more of the burden of fighting to Saigon, increases in the construction of the strategic hamlets, and hope that these efforts would result in “significant progress” by 1965.
By January of 1965 President Kennedy was dead. President Lyndon Johnson, who had been elected by the largest popular margin vote in US history in November of 1964, was becoming increasingly disgusted with the progress of the war in Vietnam. A Viet Cong attack on a US camp at Pleiku on 7 February, 1965 prompted Johnson to begin sustained bombing of North Vietnam. When that didn’t turn the war’s progress around, he ordered American combat troops into action later that year. Johnson became the first sitting US president to visit Vietnam in 1967. By the time of his visit, there were 500,000 American troops in country, and the US had dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it had on Germany during World War II. Maybe a presidential visit in September of 1963 would have provided a different outcome.