What Would JFK Have Done in Vietnam?

n 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. Johnson’s tragic escalation of US involvement in Southeast Asia remains one of the great “what ifs?” of 20th-century geopolitics.

It’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.