I can agree, had he lived, the official policy of the United States on Vietnam may have changed under JFK, but he didn't change the plan before he died. The official US policy on the day he died was to withdraw 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and full withdrawal by the end of 1965. It was Johnson, not Kennedy who changed that policy. The moment Kennedy died, Vietnam became Johnson's. And everything that followed became Johnson's, NOT Kennedy's Vietnam.
Kennedy had explored negotiations with the Soviet Union to help end the conflict in Vietnam. He had begun secret negotiations to normalize relations with Cuba. I am very confident had Kennedy lived, Vietnam would have never metastasized into a full scale war and a national tragedy.
Kennedy and Johnson were two totally different men, with totally different values and viewpoints. Kennedy didn't trust the Joint Chiefs, McNamara said Johnson wrote a "blank check" to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that turned over Vietnam to their strategists.
The highlighted portion of your response pretty much shoots a massive hole in your "official policy" theory, Bfgrn!
Do you agree or disagree that the official policy of the US was to contest the spread of communism? If so...then you've got conflicting "policies"! OBVIOUSLY something has to give. Kennedy can't contest the spread of communism AND walk away from South Vietnam. He may have WANTED to get us out of Vietnam (God knows it was a mess under the Diem brothers!) but that in no way means that it's definite that he WOULD have allowed an ally of ours to be defeated by the communists.
It doesn't shoot any holes in my contention that JFK would have never escalated Vietnam into a full blown war.
What is becoming clear is you are so insecure you are unable to accept any facts. You are drowning and refuse to grab the ring. I have proven that the official US policy on the day Kennedy died was withdrawal. He was about to replace war hawk Dean Rusk as Secretary of State with McNamara, who already believed Vietnam would not end in victory.
The fact remains and will always remain that the official US policy on the day Kennedy died was to withdraw 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and full withdrawal by the end of 1965.
Kennedy would never make another decision in regards to Vietnam. The blame for what followed falls COMPLETELY on Lyndon Johnson.
And then you have admitted that policies change. So why don't you simply admit that you have no way of knowing whether or not Kennedy would have gone ahead and withdrawn all US troops by 1965? You're making a guess, based on what you'd like to THINK Kennedy would have done and you base that guess not on what Kennedy had done up to that point (which was to escalate the war substantially!) but on a "policy" that had been drawn up under the guidance of faulty information regarding South Vietnam's ability to defend itself without US troops.
And you STILL haven't explained how Kennedy's withdrawal "plan" would have fit in with his goal of stopping the spread of communism!
The fact is...Kennedy and McNamara were still committed to keeping South Vietnam from falling to the communists in 1963 despite McNamara's "Monday morning quarterbacking" years later.