Was Kennedy Planning to Pull Out of Vietnam?

The following is a passage from an oral history interview done with Bobby in April, 1964 by the John F. Kennedy Library.

Third Oral History Interview with
ROBERT F. KENNEDY

April 30, 1964
New York, New York

By John Bartlow Martin
For the John F. Kennedy Library

[BEGIN TAPE V, REEL 1]

[snipping earlier portion of interview]

Martin:

All right. Now, Vietnam began in the first--on the 3rd of January started appearing rather prominently in the papers and, of course, still is, and was all through '63. Do you want to talk about it now? Do you want to wait till we come and pick up the coup later? In, on, in January, the Vietnamese killed three Americans and shot down five helicopters.

Kennedy:

Viet Cong, you mean.

Martin:

That's right. That's what I mean, I'm sorry, Viet Cong. A little later Mansfield said that we were, this thing was turning into an American war and wasn't justified by our national interest; we hadn't any business going in so deep, but we kept going in deeper. The president sent Maxwell Taylor and McNamara out there. And then, and Lodge, he appointed Lodge as the ambassador--and you remember the hassle between the CIA and Lodge. The president brought the CIA fellow back, and, in the end, there was the coup against the Diem brothers. Do you want to discuss the whole thing now? You must have been in on a good deal of this.

Kennedy:

Yes. Well, yeah, what do you want to start with?

Martin:

All right. At the beginning we seemed to have our lines crossed. I mean, the majority leader in the Senate, Mansfield, was saying this was not an American war, and he didn't think it was--that our--it should be--not, not--should not be an American war. He didn't think our heavy commitment there was justified. How'd you feel about it; how'd the president feel about it; and at what point did we get our lines straightened out?

Kennedy:

Well, I don't think that . . .

Martin:

Did I make myself clear?

Kennedy:

No, I don't think that fact, Senator Mansfield or somebody in the Senate takes a position, necessarily means .. .

Martin:

Well, he was majority leader.

Kennedy:

Yeah, but, you know, he's frequently taken that, those, that line or that position on some of these matters. I don't think that the fact he has an independent view from the executive branch of the government, particularly in Southeast Asia, indicates that the lines aren't straight. I, no, I just, I think every. . . . I, the president felt that the. . . . He had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

Martin:

What was the overwhelming reason?

Kennedy:

Just the loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.

Martin:

What if it did?

Kennedy:

Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world. Also, it would affect what happened in India, of course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East. Just, it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an effect on Indonesia, hundred million population. All of these countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the Communists, particularly as we had made such a fuss in the United States both under President Eisenhower and President Kennedy about the preservation of the integrity of Vietnam.

Martin:

There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

Kennedy:

No.

Martin:

But the same time, no disposition to go in all . . .

Kennedy:

No . . .

Martin:

. . . in an all out way as we went into Korea. We were trying to avoid a Korea, is that correct?

Kennedy:

Yes, because I, everybody including General MacArthur felt that land conflict between our troops, white troops and Asian, would only lead to, end in disaster. So it was. . . . We went in as advisers, but to try to get the Vietnamese to fight themselves, because we couldn't win the war for them. They had to win the war for themselves.

Martin:

It's generally true all over the world, whether it's in a shooting war or a different kind of a war. But the president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there . . .

Kennedy:

Yes.

Martin:

. . . and couldn't lose it.

Kennedy:

Yes.

Martin:

And if Vietnamese were about to lose it, would he propose to go in on land if he had to?

Kennedy:

Well, we'd face that when we came to it.

Martin:

Mm hm. Or go with air strikes, or--direct from carriers, I mean, something like that?

Kennedy:

But without. . . . It didn't have to be faced at that time. In the first place, we were winning the war in 1962 and 1963, up until May or so of 1963. The situation was getting progressively better. And then I . . .

Martin:

But then it got progre-- started going downhill, didn't it?

Kennedy:

Yes, and then we had all the problems with the Buddhists and the . . .

Martin:

Yeah.

Kennedy:

And, uh . . .

Martin:

Why did they go down, why did they get bad, Bob?

Kennedy:

Well, I just think he was just, Diem wouldn't make even the slightest concessions. He was difficult to reason with, well, with the. . . . And then it was built up tremendously in an adverse fashion here in the United States and that was played back in Vietnam, and . . . . And I think just the people themselves became concerned about it. And so, it began to, the situation began to deteriorate in the spring of 1962, uh, spring of 1963. I think David Halberstam, from the New York Times' articles, had a strong effect on molding public opinion: the fact that the situation was unsatisfactory. Our problem was that thinking of Halberstam sort of as the Ma-- what Matthews [unidentified] did in Cuba, that Batista [Fulgencio R. Batista] was not very satisfactory, but the important thing was to try to get somebody who could replace him and somebody who could keep, continue the war and keep the country united, and that was far more difficult. So that was what was of great concern to all of us during this period of time. Nobody liked Diem particularly, but how to get rid of him and get somebody that would continue the war, not split the country in two, and therefore lose not only the war but the country. That was the great problem.

However, the Oliver Stone version of the Kennedy assassination, as expressed in the movie JFK, holds that Kennedy had already decided to pull out of Vietnam, and was killed for that reason. That's just not so.