I had no idea that there were tapes of Kennedy discussing Vietnam.

[NNadir]

John F. Kennedy was my least favorite, with the possible exception of the overtly racist Woodrow Wilson, Democratic President of the 20th century.

To my mind he doesn't measure up to FDR, of course, but not even to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter (in that order).

Much of the public, and many historians, I'm sure would not agree with me, but it's just my opinion.

Looking over the line up on CSPAN history this coming weekend, I came across a lecture by Professor Marc Selverstone in which he will discuss the Kennedy Tapes on Vietnam.

Again, I didn't know that such tapes existed.

Apparently Professor Selverstone appeared on CSPAN back in 2013 discussing these tapes, and I checked it out. (Some of the tapes are played, including many of the players who stayed on for the Johnson Administration.)

The 2013 discussion, an interview, is here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?315600-1/kennedy-vietnam-tapes

I am not among those who think that Kennedy would have really found a way to "get out of Vietnam" but he was discussing it, but I'm not sure he would have actually done it as events unfolded. He was assassinated only a few weeks after Diem was, but there is, in one excerpt, made to a Dictaphone when he was alone, when he muses on his own culpability and that of his administration in Diem's assassination.

[CountAllVotes]

1. My late husband was in the Army in 1959

They were trying to convince him to re-enlist in order to participate in a "secret mission in Indochina".

He didn't go for that one bit and got out of the Army as soon as he could!

Nightmare scenario was a coming and he knew it!

[NNadir]

2. It's stated in the talk that when Kennedy took office there were 700 "advisors" in Vietnam.

When he died there were 16,000.

The talk indicates though that at the end of the Eisenhower administration, and in the early part of the Kennedy administration, there was more concern about Laos than Vietnam.

Your husband sounds like he was a smart guy nonetheless. I don't think too many people were aware of the situation in 1959.

[CountAllVotes]

3. My husband enlisted

He was an immigrant from Ireland and held a Green Card.

He figured if he did not enlist, he'd have to go sooner rather than later; i.e. get drafted.

He had two other brothers nearby and they both enlisted as well.

They all became U.S. citizens after they got out but my late husband did not.

He was a gunner in the Army and he was so not impressed.

He did not trust them one bit.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

4. It is very satisfying to hear someone else hold this belief about Kennedy.

I am so tired of the mythology that sprung up around him. And his wife. She and Pierre Salinger concocted the illusion of "Camelot," and then sold it to the understandably grieving public, but it was still a charade. Then she contacted William Manchester to write the definitive post-JFK book, which she later tried to stop the publication of by very unseemly methods, even drafting RFK to intercede on her behalf and join her in that effort. Fortunately for posterity, their efforts fell short.

We will probably get castigated for our views, but I am glad that I am not alone in my views.

Nostalgia, like hind-sight, is 20-20, too.

[NNadir]

6. Probably the most overrated President in history.

Having managed to not blow up the world after stumbling recklessly into the situation that made the risk of this happening very real is rather like announcing that a drunk driver who causes a wreck is a hero for pulling victims from the burning other car out before they're seriously burned.

His performance at the Vienna summit after the Bay of Pigs marked him to the far more incisive Khrushchev as a puerile lightweight out of his league, which in fact he was.

He was, as his father reported to his friends during his campaign for the Presidency, no liberal and was, in fact, a dedicated, if sloppy, cold warrior, the only Democratic Senator to not vote to censure Joseph McCarthy. (RFK was Roy Cohn's assistant during the McCarthy hearings.)

Even as a Cold Warrior, he was ineffective, which is not to say being a cold warrior was a good thing. The result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, unadvertised at the time and ignored by the media, was that the United States was required to remove its missiles from Turkey, making the US less of a threat to the USSR than it was before the crisis.

I have taken flak for my views of Kennedy here and elsewhere, but I stand by them.

The world would have been a better place if Lyndon Johnson won the 1960 Democratic Nomination and had been elected President.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

7. Flak would be a kind way of putting the responses I've received.

"But he was so charming, so charismatic !" Both overrated. "He had such vigor and vitality." Also false, as he was getting injections several times a day to fight his Addison's debilitation, as well as other medications. The American people had a right to know he was suffering from an incurable disease. The medications alone could have (and probably did) affect his thinking.

He was brash, emotionally-immature (Bill Clinton was no match for Kennedy in the extra-marital infidelity arena.), and not nearly as "brilliant" as people were led to believe. He was, as my father said, "thinly read." He knew book titles and had read synopses of major works, but when quizzed in depth about such tomes, he fell far short of actually comprehending the depth of complex policy issues.

I have been called unspeakable (and unprintable) things for my opinion, but like you, I hold firm about the facts of this man. Had he lived, I shudder to think how much deeper this country would have been sucked into the vortex of war and death in pointless and unwinnable conflicts.

[John1956PA]

5. I recall seeing a filmed interview. n/t