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Kennedy, LBJ & Vietnam:

The Struggle to maintain Economic Hegemony

"Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies. " -John F. Kennedy, speech, New York Times, October 13, 1960

In this section of the paper I will conduct a historical analysis of Kennedy's and LBJ's foreign policy. I argue that these policies mutually reinforced each other. Johnson's domestic policies were a continuation of Kennedy's and although there is some speculation as to how their foreign policies may have differed in the case of Vietnam in light of the evidence presented this will be proved to the contrary to the overarching aims of the function of the Kennedy presidency. Furthermore I will describe how the fourth pillar of American foreign policy, the implementation and maintenance of the liberal capitalist world order provided the impetus for escalation of the Vietnamese conflict that more or less severely strained the US's economic relations with Europe since they started out footing the cost for that War.

Kennedy is elected to office with the promise that he will be tough on communism. He appoints Allen Dulles as head of the CIA and Dean Rusk as secretary of State. Robert McNamara is appointed head of the DOD. In all of this Kennedy raises taxes because deterrence due to MAD had rendered their conventional use obsolete. Containment and commitment to intervention by conventional troops supplemented by a limited policy of nuclear deterrence were to implement under Kennedy's program of a "Flexible Response." This policy maintained that military power had to be harnessed for diplomatic means. The Eisenhower administration had developed MAD and this had put American policymakers at in impasse with the Soviets. The Soviets knew that the Americans were not going to sacrifice New York for the third world. Flexible Response was to entail the use of conventional and strategic nuclear weapons developing a system of gradation over the previous all out nuclear warfare scenario that provided few options.

However, in the third world there was an economic crisis. Prices for raw materials had drooped. Technology had made the prices for these goods cheaper. However, the price for American manufactured goods had remained the same. This had to do in part due to the US dollar's fixed rate, at 33 dollars and ounce, to gold. Furthermore, the thirdworld had doubled its population at this time. The US foreign assistance program at this time was more or less swallowed up by corrupt regional elites who owed their power on the promise that they would maintain the geopolitical and economic status quo of the West. Furthermore, investments in third world countries only went to cash crops geared to export such as (coffee and cotton) and not staple foods. The result was violent swings in the economy due to demand fluctuations, and speculative price manipulation leading to nationalist revolt.

Kennedy's response to the Latin American problem was the Alliance for Progress. This economic recovery was analagous to the Marshall plan with its emphasis in capital investment. However, Latin America lacked the administrative capabilities to implement those programs into production. Admittedly, colonialism had left Latin America in a retarded state of economic development. The only percieved way to bring about administrative stability was to establish a system of military Junta's in which the US core belief was stability in the western hemisphere as orginally spelled out by the Monroe Doctrine. Stephen Rabe suggests that the essential failure of the Alliance for progress lay in the fact that Kennedy, .."Underestimated the daunting nature of Latin America's socioeconomic problems...through its recognition policy, internal security initiaves, and military and economic programs the Administration demonstrably bolstered regimes and groups that were undemocratic, conservative and frequently repressive." (America in the World, 353)

During this time Kennedy decided to launch the Bay of Pigs uprising to overthrow Castro, a policy agenda left over from the Eisenhower administration. Allen Dulles the Brother of John Foster Dulles is the chief supporter of the operation. The 1500 pro-american Cuban forces recruited for this were supposed to have air cover but at the last minute Kennedy got cold feet and withdrew support, supposedly because he thought Krushchev would invade Berlin. The result was a major fiasco and prompted Castro to completely align himself with the Russians and the Chinese. Lafeber maintains that the purpose of this operation was grounded in the belief of the CIA's ability to install puppet regimes that would maintain the American hegemonic status quo: "The agency believed that a small invasion would trigger an uprising against Castro, just as the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 had triggered the overthrow of that government."(American Age, 589)

Kennedy like Eisenhower failed to understand that nationalism had many forms and although some were marxist in application, it was the only ideology that provided a discourse on land redistrubition and economic reform. In order for the Alliance for Progress to have been successful would have required a an overthrow of the old conquistador elite. In all the CIA would make dozens of unsuccesful attempts to kill Castro.

***

A number of Historians have advanced key reasons as to the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Arthur Schlesinger maintains that Kennedy supported the ill fated venture due to the administrative shambles in the CIA and the NSC and the lack of credible information in those agencies created in Joshua Sandman's description by his attempt to establish an agency more modeled after his program of flexible response. However, these do not account for the effect of ideology in the Cold War hampering reasoned and reflective decisionmaking. Historian Thomas Patterson notes the effect of this ideology on the Bay of Pigs: "An even more fundamental reason for the doomed operation was Kennedy's anti Castro fixation, which blinded him, to the moral and legal--as well as the logistical and military--questions involved in violently overthrowing a sovereign government." (America in the World, 337) The Bay of pigs would set the conditions in place for the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile crisis. If there were dominos the administration would seem to be creating the system that set such events into motion.

In Vietnam Kennedy continued the practice under Eisenhower of sending military advisors. He also relied on the notion of Indo China being vital to the Japanese economy, a theme inherited from the previous administrations. Furthermore the North Vietnamese nationalist movement was supplying guerilla incursions against Diem's South Vietnamese pro -western government, via the Ho Chi Minh trail that cut through the regions of Laos and Cambodia. The administration advanced the notion that the country Laos due to its placement near the Ho Chi Minh trail was essentially the gateway to Indo China. Laos was neutral during the conflict and yet in a geopolitical sense Kennedy certaintly provided the mechanism for LBJ's escalation. Inherently, Vietnam was locked in a fault line between the Soviet-Chinese power bloc and the Japanese-Western economic system.

Meanwhile in South Vietnam Diem's regime is plagued with mounting protest and corruption. A similar program of economic development as had been undertaken in Latin America, albeit land reform had ceased to be effective by 1960. The reason for the ineffectiveness of the Third World Asian Land reform movements stemmed from cold war economic antagonisms at the global supply side mode in so much as that regional elite funded nationalism stemmed more from the militarization of their economy while as hemispheric umpire the US allotted its foreign aid subsidies for appropriating military and pro-US business Asian elites.

Kennedy's administrative policies had to be viewed from the prisim of the Cold War itself. For Kennedy a Catholic, land redistrubition was essentially something only aethist communists did. Even If the moral implications had been fully considered or individually ascertained by Kennedy, no doubt his intelligence agency heads, Dulles and Co., would have prevented any attempt by Kennedy to craft catholic ideals in the face of his own catholic positivist presidency.

***

Between the periods of 1962-63 a total of 13,000 troops were sent to Vietnam. The administration advanced the rationale for sending them was that Vietnam would become a puppet of Maoist China. Arthur Schlesinger suggests: "Kennedy's legacy in Vietnam was dual contradictory and that he left on the public record the impression of a major national stake in the defense of South Vietnam."(America in the World, 350)

The US administration failed to acknowledge that Vietnam had historically resisted Sino Mongolian territorial encroachments throughout its history as a state. Rather it invested its hopes on the President of South Vietnam, Diem & the GVN. Diem was educated in the United States and upon returning to South Vietnam he proclaimed Catholicism as the official state religion of Vietnam, and began a government policy of exclusion aimed at native Buddhist traditions. Soon protests by Buddhist monks ensue and in the midst of one of the local protests a monk self immolated himself to protest the corruption of Diem's government. The effect of such an image when it was aired on American television was what first framed American popular conceptions toward protesting the war in Vietnam. Soon afterwards on November 1st, 1963 Diem was assasinated and two generals both sur-named Nguyen came into power. Later in that same month Kennedy himself would be assasinated.

In all of this the missile gap with the soviets was found to be nonexistent in the sense that America at this time had larger stockpiles of nuclear weapons than the Soviets. Kruschev's response to this was to move towards the blockade of Berlin. Kennedy responds by increasing the Defense budget by 3 billon dollars and "tripled draft quotas" (Lafeber, 596) On August 6th the Soviet Premiere commences the building of the Berlin wall to stem the tide of East German refugees. Kennedy did little other than decry the state of a divided city.

***

It was here where Kennedy developed his program of flexible response. This entailed the end of all out nuclear confrontation in the method espoused by deterrence and rather reliance on gradual missile proliferation supplemented by conventional force build up. This also entailed an increase in covert operations as well. Flexible response also provided for the Rearmament of Western Germany and the construction of a figurative trip wire euphemistically referred to as check point Charlie, a force of US - 30,000 soldiers between the two fortresses of communism and capitalism. In sum Kennedy's policy of flexible response kept the soviets out of the reconstruction of the western European economy. However, in Asia such flexible response when met by the soviets resulted in blind support for weapons proliferation throughout the third world and foreign intervention by Proxy characterized an enduring theme of all cold war interventions to come. In Asia the US relied on conventional troop deployments and the Soviets relied on conventional arms supply and military advisory roles.

Khrushchev's response to this was to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba, some 90 miles from American shores. At this time there were 20,000 soviet military advisors in Cuba entailing a complicated spy network. To Kennedy this was a direct affront to American national security and in terms of foreign policy tenants the first direct challenge to America's Monroe Doctrine. Khrushchev's ideological response to this is to note that the US had the Soviets surrounded by military bases, i.e., NATO and nuclear Trident missiles in Turkey and to such an extent he viewed his escalation was on even footing with American expansion. Castro had cabled Moscow fearing a US invasion of Cuba. Castro knowing that 60 years of American interventions in Cuba, stemmed from the US's exercise of the Platt Amendment at the behest of the sugar companies and mafia casino syndicates and subsequently Castro after being alerted to Operation Mongoose, provided Russia with the means for a Russian military sphere in Latin America. A US spy plane spots the Russian nuclear arsenal in Cuba and Kennedy responds by placing an economic embargo on Cuba and raised SAC's defcom status to level five. Kennedy faced with Soviet Atomic diplomacy scrambled for a diplomatic solution. He arrives at a no-invasion pledge to Cuba and the deactiviation of US nuclear Trident missiles in Turkey. The Soviet Premiere acquiesces and the Cuban Missile crisis officially ends 0ctober 29th 1962. Some theorists have advanced the notion that the longterm effects of the Cuban missile crisis were to play a part in the Assasination of Kennedy in Dallas on November 22nd 1963. A new President Lyndon Baines Johnson would take over where Kennedy idealism had failed.

It is difficult to know for certain what effect Kennedy's programs would have had on Vietnam or in the Third World in total entirety. What is known though is that the Kennedy Doctrine emphazised the importance of the domino theory in the Third World in traditional notions of geopolitical intrests being firmly locked and geared towards geoeconomic interests. Historian, William S. Borden maintains that Kennedy's committment to the Third World, "..was to launch an aggressive but ultimately futile defense of American hegemony." (Hogan, America in the World, 356) The Vietnam War was doomed to happen with or without Kennedy's approval. Just six months after Kennedy died the Gulf of Tonkin incident occured. Kennedy's assertion to withdraw US troops prior to his assasination would not have meant that the Vietnam war could have been stopped. Rather this apparent inconsistency of Kennedy reflected his idealisim and his motivation by ideology, which may have resulted in the power elite's decision to have Kennedy assasinated by patsy. To add a twist to the historical record, the soothsayer, Dean Rusk noted that, Kennedy never said,..."or hint to me that he was planning to withdraw from Vietnam."(America in the World, 350)

In later years, Kennedy's secretary of Defense, Robert Mcnamara described the inherent political quandry involved in America's intervention in Vietnam.

Robert McNamara on the Lessons of Vietnam

"You lost ... 3,200,000 people," McNamara told Giap. "We lost 58,000." He said the conference would help "ensure that our nations and other nations learn how to avoid such conflicts in the future." He elaborated to reporters afterward: "The major questions are: Could we have avoided a tragedy -- a tragedy for them and a tragedy for us -- or could we have minimized it?"

The story has not yet been told.

But why now? Why after all these years of silence am I convinced I should speak? There are many reasons: the main one is that I have grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders.

But I also know that the war caused terrible damage to America. I want to look at Vietnam in hindsight, not in any way to obscure my own and other' errors of judgment and their egregious costs but to show the full range of pressures and the lack of knowledge that existed at the time. I want to put Vietnam in context. We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of America. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.

-McNAMara-

By again deploying the administrations of cold war containment under Truman coupled with Eisenhower's policies of massive deterrence, Kennedy had inherited a military industrial complex that would soon require the internationalization of the US economy, i.e., construction of a new economic order and the de linking of the US dollar from the Gold standard. For sake of historical continuity this paper will resume discussion of the US gold standard after the Administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

----

LBJ & Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson viewed the status of Vietnam as paralleling that of Korea. He had been confounded by Truman's refusal to go after the Chinese. Johnson as a result of many years in Congress and in the Senate had developed a reputation as a consensus maker. In 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident Johnson was able to declare a police action to protect American ships from alleged N. Vietnamese unwarranted acts of provocation. Initially, 400 million dollars was earmarked to fund the US's counter insurgency operation and the first substantial number of American troops, 450,000 of them, begin to arrive in Vietnam to aid the GVN regime. Most historians have ceased speculation as to whether their was an actual military attack on the USS Maddox. The fact is that there was no real attack on the Maddox.

Johnson was trapped between trying to implement his 'Great Society' programs at home and geopolitical interests and power politicking in Vietnam. Johnson viewed the war in Vietnam as a way to appease his own coalitional corporate power base and to use the tide of patriotism to forge a consensus in the domestic arena for his social policies. In terms of military objectives in Vietnam, LBJ wanted to contain the spread of Chinese Communisim, and that with gradual escalation of the war Vietnam could be won absent international approval. He relied on the notion that a slow escalation of the war could keep the public from becoming interested in Vietnam. Gradual escalation would also keep the Soviets and the Chinese from declaring war on the US.

LBJ made a major miscalculation by choosing to escalate Vietnamese intervention. He poured tax dollars into a war that could not be won. Vietnam had always resisted china's hegemonic sphere so in terms of geopolitical doctrine the US created its own briar patch given that, "..no real possibility existed to change the political allegiance of the rural population to one of geniune support of the GVN." ( Paterson, Merrill, "Major Problems In American Foreign Relations," V II, p- 576)

Also, China at this time was politically unstable, and undergoing a cultural revolution designed to enshrine Mao as emperor of the Communist state. By 1967 the media images of the war in Vietnam began to have a polarizing effect on American public opinion. In 1968 at the Lunar Year of Tet the Viet Cong launched a major offensive to which although they were defeated served to remind and demonstrate to policymakers and the American public that little real, political, economic or strategic value had been gained as a result of 4 years of counter insurgency. LBJ in the face of mounting pressure decides not to seek reelection.

According to Eric Bergerud, Vietnam was an unwinnable war. "The Value of the history history of the war in a small place like Hau Nghia provience lies in pointing out the that the military and political situation facing the United States and the government of South Vietnam in the larger area was intractable, [strategic hamlet pacification, versus search and destroy ] given the realities existing in those nations and in the world. The United States did not fail in Vietnam because of tactical errors that were open to remedy. The errors made were on a much higher level. The American military seriously underestimated the difficulties involved in dealing with enemy forces. And the civilian leadership particularly under Johnson, underestimated the strength and tenacity of the enemy and overestimated the willingness of its own people and soldiers to continue the struggle indefinitely...They chose the wrong battlefield." (Eric M. Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Provience, pp.323-335, 1991, Westview Press, Bouldar, Colorado.) Also please see HW Brands's book, "The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power."

The Johnson Doctrine was used to preserve the status quo of the economic core, i.e., America's relationship to the third world as a subsumed peripheral client state. At this time it was perceived that the Soviets were cashing in on America's overall international economic woes and so Johnson was forced to assume that all peripherary states especially Latin America could fall if regional raw market economic supply centers were to fall under soviet hegemonic influence. Thus, Johnson relied on military interventions where he viewed political instability as a hindrance to economic investment such as active support for the Junta that controlled the government of Brazil during his term.

Russel D. Buhite in his essay, "From Kennedy to Nixon," notes that Kennedy was interested in primarily in preventing communist intervention in the third world-Latin America. Johnson shared the same worldview except that he had an ideological fetish for containing Soviet Power in Asia. "Johnson..Shared the world view of almost every policy maker of his generation seems abundantly clear: that appeasement did not pay; that America's primary military interest lay in containing the expansionist aspirations of the Soviet Union and the PRC, and in successfully competing for influence in the developing world."(American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 132) Thus, he argues that Johnson's commitment to the third world had little to do with the economic and political development of these individual countries more so than maintaining the economic status quo under the guise of American strategic necessity. Essentially the US's economic bias was to view all forms of Third World social revolution as attempts by indigenous natives to nationalize private industry or any other such revolutions inclined towards soviet Marxist ideology as precipitating a soviet backdoor two step.

Johnson also relied on Robert McNamara, the head of the DOD, and Johnson's chief backer of military escalation in Vietnam. In the political crisis of 1963 prior to the assasination of the assasination of the S. Vietnamese President, Diem, McNamara as well as General Maxwell Taylor relying on the ideological wit of the domino theory, managed to persude President Kennedy to link the political crisis in Vietnam to the security interests of the United States. It was Kennedy who sent the intial 16,000 troops to vietnam. Johnson's role in all of this was that in seeing the apparatus in place for intervention he saw how vietnam could function as a double containment objective, i.e., contain china and contain the allies of the Soviet's and Vietnamese as well. China had demonstrated its expansionistic tendencies by its seizure of Tibet in 1959. This seizure of land increased its landmass by over one-third of its original size. Furthermore, the land seizure in Tibet was decried by official UN resolution. China had also manifested its desire for eventual reunification of Taiwan to the mainland. Historical appeasement could not be tolerated in Johnson's view. When Johnson retired from public office in 1968, he spent the rest of his life growing out his hair to better relate with a 60's generation that had scorned him.

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