In the last weeks of his life, President John F. Kennedy spent a lot of time worrying about the rising foreign-policy problem of Vietnam. Whether he would have avoided successor Lyndon B. Johnsonâ??s tragic escalation of US involvement in Southeast Asia remains one of the great â??what ifs?â? of 20th-century geopolitics.
Itâ??s possible he would have dispatched hundreds of thousands of US combat troops to the country, as did LBJ. Kennedy was a cold-war Democrat, meaning he was a committed anti-communist. His brother Robert Kennedy said in a 1964 oral history that JFK never thought about pulling out of Vietnam and was convinced the United States had to stand there against Soviet expansionism.
Some modern historians think otherwise. The Cuban missile crisis had taught Kennedy to be distrustful of the hawkish advice of national security officials. Meanwhile, from the Oval Office in 1963, Vietnam looked like an unstable country in a far-off, roiling corner of the world.
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