This talk is part of the online conference The National-Security State and the Kennedy Administration.
The Vietnam War has been portrayed as either a war that the United States military was not allowed to win or a bad mistake carried out by people who simply had a misunderstanding of the world or too much confidence in American power. At first, the Kennedy administration was portrayed this way in books such as The Best And The Brightest, but then researchers and writers such as John Newman and Peter Dale Scott found that Kennedy planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam. By looking at the course of American policy after World War II up to the first few months of the Kennedy administration we can get a different perspective on it – that makes clear how and why Vietnam became a central focus of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military-industrial complex in the first place and what was driving the American war state in the early 1960s.
