Vietnam War: Kennedy

During the spring and summer of 1963, Americans were seeing images on television and in the newspapers of Buddhists protesting the harsh treatment they were receiving under the Diem government of South Vietnam.

Journal article addressing JFK's war decisions.

Determined to stop the spread of Communism in the early 1960s, President Kennedy increased US presence in Vietnam.

Track the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War under Pres. John F. Kennedy's administration.

During the early 1960s, the U.S. military presence in Vietnam escalated as corruption and internal divisions threatened the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Article from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on the beginnings of the Vietnam War.

The events in Southeast Asia that eventually led to America's war in Vietnam.

Marc Selverstone is Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center. He joined the Miller Center in November 2000 after receiving his Ph.D. in U.S. Foreign Relations from Ohio University. His interests include U.S. foreign relations post-1945, the culture of the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. He is author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Harvard University Press, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2010. He is presently at work on The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. This Forum is part of the Miller Center’s 50th Anniversary retrospective on the Kennedy Presidency.

President Kennedy fought the Cold War on multiple fronts. Although we may associate the Vietnam War with the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the seeds of war were planted under JFK. Dive into the world of palace intrigue, grand strategy, domino theory, and an unofficial coup in South Vietnam.

President Kennedy records a personal memo about the death of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, only to be interrupted by his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. The light tone he strikes with his son stands in stark contrast to his words about the overthrow of Diem and his brother, which clearly upset him.