Kennedy's involvement in Vietnam

[Music] Hello there, history rockers and welcome to another Cold War Special. How are you? How's your bank holiday weekend going? I hope you're having good times and you're working hard of course, which I'm sure you all are. I just want to say, actually, I accidentally tripdiver the reviews for History Podcast, the History Rocks Podcast on Apple last night. I don't have an Apple phone, I'm an Android girl through and through. But I had a look at it and I had no idea that people were reviewing it and we are a solid five star performance. And that is just, it's so touching to me, I just want to say a big thank you to all of those who are still listening. Not just here, but around the world as well, it's incredible. I also want to make a bit of a plea that's teachers out there and students out there, if you're listening, can you spread the word? Let's try to spread the word even further than we are right now. I know there's a lot of people that have never heard of the History Rocks Podcast that would really, really benefit from it. So if you are a member of a Facebook group or some kind of consortium or you've got some friends on Instagram or something like that, it would give me great pleasure. If you can spread the word, let's help lots and lots of students on the build up to the summer exams. So I'm going to start today with a little joke, as you know, the day is still pretty crummy, but I came across this one, so I'm going to be certainly this one yesterday. So I just want to share it with you. A schoolboy is in the Soviet Union, is writing his weekly essay that he has to do. And the opening sentence to this essay is this, he says, "My cat just had seven kittens. They are all communists, full stop." So he gets, good marks for that, that little essay. Second week, the following week, he goes back to his little essay. And he writes this, he says, "My cat, seven kittens are all capitalists." And the teacher reminds him that the previous week, he'd said that all the kittens were communists. And the little boy says, "Well, yes, but now they've opened their eyes." "But bum." "Yes, they've opened their eyes." "Open their eyes." "Yes, okay." "Let's not labour that one." "Okay, so where are we up to?" "We are still, I think, in Asia." "Previous episode, we were looking at why the Americans got involved in the first place. And we spoke about Truman and Eisenhower in particular, and the French pulling out of Indochina, they lost at DMVM, that sort of thing. So we're going to power through a bit more on Vietnam. Look at Kennedy a little bit today, I think. And obviously they'll move on to Nixon later. So if you remember, the reasons why Kennedy became involved in Vietnam, we mentioned that he subscribed to containment and picked up on Eisenhower's domino theory. He agreed with that. Growing his election campaign, don't they all, you know, you might be thinking this is all very familiar, Mel. He was banging the drum about being tough on communism. Lots of Cold War rhetoric. The other thing to note about Kennedy is that he is very young, he's very inexperienced, consequently then. He is influenced a lot by advisors around him, a bit like Eisenhower was actually. In particular, Robert McNamara, who becomes the Secretary of Defense and Dean Rusk, who becomes the Secretary of State, both of those positions in the government are really, really significant. And they were known to be hawks. So find what we mean by that. We've got hawks and doves. Doves are the ones that are looking for sort of diplomatic settlements to things, negotiations, et cetera. Hawks will often resort to some kind of military strategy to deal with the problem. He also mentioned that Kennedy was a Catholic and that his family friend was, well, Joseph McCarthy of all people, and be careful with overemphasizing that too much. I mean, I think he might play it role a little, you know, certainly Kennedy will dislike the state atheism within communist countries, but I wouldn't overreg it too much like, oh, he was best pals with DM because that's just not the case. That would be really exaggerating it. Now, before he got involved in Vietnam, there was a couple of events in particular that indicated that Kennedy had failed in his foreign policy. The big issue was at the Bay of Peaks, which is in Cuba, the new Cuban leader there, Fidel Castro, had actually taken over a number of American companies. Nationalized them, actually. And basically, the Americans were very upset about this. They'd tried to get rid of Fidel Castro by using a number of Cuban exiles and the CIA, Descent Winter Intelligence Agency, to stage an overthrow. The only thing that came to my mind was that Kennedy backed down on sending American air support in and the American Marines in to support the invasion, plus the Cubans were tipped off. And so they just sort of captured all of these ex-cuban exiles when they went in, arrested them, and it was an absolute embarrassment to Kennedy, it failed on it terribly. It allowed us as well. He was worried about a Soviet back communist victory there. He sent in military advises to the Lewatian leader. And basically, they tried to neutralise the country so that you don't get a communist government. Eventually, they agreed to a coalition, which I guess is not a lose for Kennedy, but nor is it, and now, right, win is not prevented communists from having any level of control in Laos. So quick events, one after the other, that seem to demonstrate that despite his rhetoric during the election campaign, is he really that tough on communists? On communism. You need, basically, a win. He needs to do something, achieve something that would demonstrate that he is going to take a firm line against communism. So what were his aims and methods? Well, Kennedy was opposed to the Geneva agreement, okay, for elections in Vietnam. Even as a senator, he was against that. He knew that Ho Chi Minh would win in that area, so he didn't want any elections to take place in Vietnam with tall, okay? Wanted to prevent that from happening. He was always seems to be against the idea of sending in ground troops. He did increase the number of military advisers to about 16,000. Under the direction of something known as the MACV, yeah, they supervise in the military assistance command, Vietnam. So yes, multiple occasions you'll notice when you're reading about the Kennedy in Vietnam. He has the opportunity to send in ground troops, but he's against it. He always resists the advice from Robert McNamara and Russ Gommat. What else does he do? Well, he sends in lots of equipment, helicopters, in particular, to help the movement of the ARVN troops. So those are the troops from South Vietnam. And reconnaissance missions and things like that, fire support. He starts introducing defalience, and you've probably heard all of the scandal about age and orange in particular and how it led to all sorts of birth defects and poison rivers and things like that within Vietnam. But the reason they were using these defalience was say that it would strip some of the foliage from the trees so that they can take clear photographs of bases, communist bases and things like that, or see where troops are moving through the jungle, because it is jungle, remember, in Vietnam. He also sent up a special sort of counterinsurgency force. They were known as a green berets. They were meant to be mobile and flexible so it could sort of move around the country and respond to things as and when they happened and cooperate with the ARVN. And in addition, from sort of '62, he encourages DM, the leader of the South, to create these strategic Hamlets. The idea being that they're gonna try and isolate the ordinary peasants from the communist, from the Vietnam Kong, very unpopular actually with the local population this, because what it entailed was peasants be moved from homes where they might have lived for generations where their religious sites and burial areas and things like that were, forcibly moved, often made to build their own strategic Hamlets. And the reforms that the Americans told DM to carry out on the strategic Hamlets, so things like basic healthcare, basic education, things like that never happened. He built way too many of these strategic Hamlets so there wasn't enough people to defend them. And it really sort of lost the hearts and minds of the local population. He found that often the peasants were collaborating with the communist forces. Probably increased actually as the consequences of strategic Hamlets, they weren't a particularly effective method in isolating them at all. So yes, in part the idea was probably potty, but I think DM's execution of it didn't help either. And he kind of did put a lot of pressure on DM to carry out reforms generally, particularly in relation to religious freedoms and things like that as well, none of which he does. DM then becomes an increasing problem for Kennedy and his administration. And they heard that there was a plan by a number of military personnel in Vietnam to have him assassinated. And he is assassinated on the 2nd of November in 1963 with the encouragement of that ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, who believed actually that DM was a significant obstacle to the American victory and the South Vietnamese victory. And basically though, he sort of covertly supported it, although the Americans publicly denied any American involvement at all. So the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, turned out to be very weak, very cowardly. We've got episodes of where they've run away from battle at back in 1963. The general cow, I think that's how you pronounce it, was unwilling to carry on fighting and DM ignored the American advice on troop redeployment. DM we know we just said refuse to implement any reforms. We've got a number of Buddhist protests going on within Vietnam, including some of them actually set in fire to themselves. The 73-year-old Buddhist monk, Thich Guanduc, set himself a light, which was particularly alarming to the Americans. And Madame knew who was a wife of DM, basically said some pretty awful things about it, plus promoted really unpopular bits of legislation, such as the banning of boxing matches in Vietnam. DM was also blamed then by the Americans for the failure of the strategic hamlet program. So because DM is proving to be a real obstacle to what the Americans are trying to achieve there, this is why Ambassador Henry Cabot large believed that DM should go, and that they should secretly support the attempt to assassinate him. But when he's gone, actually, I think the assassination of DM, it leads to much more instability in the region because we have quite a number of governments rise and fall after him, and he really does end up with a much greater involvement, I think, from the Americans in Vietnam afterwards, because, well, they probably weaken the South Vietnamese government even further, and they need to get involved much more. - Right, okay, so that gives you a bit of an overview of Kennedy. So let's leave it there for today, we'll carry on, having a look later on, of course, at Nixon's involvement and Johnson's involvement in Vietnam. According to the spec, we should take our look at Cuba next, given that we're on the issue of Kennedy. So we might hop on to that later. We've mentioned a little bit about Castro a moment ago. So we'll do that next. And I'm gonna sign off for today. Teachers out there, remember, there's lots of lovely training events coming up in June and July of this month. Next month, I should say. So if you would like to get involved, get on the History Rock website and book yourself in. Also, there is going to be, if you live in the North, it sounds very game of friends, that doesn't it. If you live in the North, we are organizing an A-level history teach meet. The first of its kind, actually. So if you are around and you want to come and see us at the end of June, June 26 is the date we have booked right, can you drop me an email on hellohistorerox.co.uk and I will send you all of the details. Okay, so have a great afternoon and I'll speak to you soon. Bye now.