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The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam

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A major revision of our understanding of JFK’s commitment to Vietnam, revealing that his administration’s plan to withdraw was a political device, the effect of which was to manage public opinion while preserving US military assistance.

In October 1963, the White House publicly proposed the removal of US troops from Vietnam, earning President Kennedy an enduring reputation as a skeptic on the war. In fact, Kennedy was ambivalent about withdrawal and was largely detached from its planning. Drawing on secret presidential tapes, Marc J. Selverstone reveals that the withdrawal statement gave Kennedy political cover, allowing him to sustain support for US military assistance. Its details were the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose ownership of the plan distanced it from the president.

Selverstone’s use of the presidential tapes, alongside declassified documents, memoirs, and oral histories, lifts the veil on this legend of Camelot. Withdrawal planning was never just about Vietnam as it evolved over the course of fifteen months. For McNamara, it injected greater discipline into the US assistance program. For others, it was a form of leverage over South Vietnam. For the military, it was largely an unwelcome exercise. And for JFK, it allowed him to preserve the US commitment while ostensibly limiting it.

The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decisionmaking in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.

ISBN-13: 9780674048812

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Publication Date: 11-15-2022

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

Marc J. Selverstone heads the acclaimed Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where he edits the secret White House tapes of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He has written for the Washington Post, Atlantic, and U.S. News and World Report and appeared on C-Span radio. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and is Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Great "What If?" 1

1 Assumption January 1961-December 1961 19

2 Escalation January 1962-June 1962 52

3 Formulation July 1962-December 1962 77

4 Modification January 1963-April 1963 98

5 Acceleration May 1963-August 1963 118

6 Declaration September 1963-October 1963 146

7 Implementation October 1963-November 1963 175

8 Cancellation November 1963-March 1964 204

Epilogue The Shadow of Camelot 229

Notes 249

Acknowledgments 311

Index 315