1. JFK's Policy
In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime, though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised withdrawal at that early date:
The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).
By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with Mansfield:
The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.
"But I can't do it until 1965 – after I'm reelected," Kennedy told Mansfield....
After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, "In 1965 I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected (O'Donnell, p. 16).
Sometime after that Kennedy told O'Donnell again that
...he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American military forces from Vietnam. He had decided that our military involvement in Vietnam's civil war would only grow steadily bigger and more costly without making a dent in the larger political problem of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia (p. 13).
Just before he was killed he repeated this commitment:
"They keep telling me to send combat units over there," the President said to us one day in October [1963]. That means sending draftees, along with volunteer regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I'll never send draftees over there to fight" (O'Donnell, p. 383).
Kennedy's public statements and actions were consistent with his private conversations, though more cautiously expressed in order to appease the military and right-wing forces that were clamoring for more, not less, involvement in Vietnam, and with whom he did not want to risk an open confrontation one year before the election. As early as May 22, 1963, he said at a press conference:
...we are hopeful that the situation in South Vietnam would permit some withdrawal in any case by the end of the year, but we can't possibly make that judgement at the present time (Harold W. Chase and Allen H. Lerman, eds., Kennedy and the Press: The News Conferences, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965, p. 447).
Then came the statement on October 2:
President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too" (O'Donnell, p. 17).
This decision was not popular with the military, the Cabinet, the vice-president, or the CIA, who continued to support Diem, the dictator the US had installed in South Vietnam in 1955. Hence the circumspect wording of the statement on Oct. 2, which was nevertheless announced as a "statement of United States policy":
Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgement that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Viet-Nam can be withdrawn (Documents on American Foreign Relations 1963, Council on Foreign Relations, New York: Harper & Row, 1964, p. 296).
NSAM 263, signed on Oct. 11, 1963, officially approved and implemented the same McNamara-Taylor recommendations that had prompted the press statement of Oct. 2. They recommended that:
A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.
In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort (Pentagon Papers, NY: Bantam, 1971, pp. 211-212).
The withdrawal policy was confirmed at a news conference on Oct. 31, where Kennedy said in response to a reporter's question if there was "any speedup in the withdrawal from Vietnam":
I think the first unit or first contingent would be 250 men who are not involved in what might be called front-line operations. It would be our hope to lessen the number of Americans there by 1000, as the training intensifies and is carried on in South Vietnam (Kennedy and the Press, p. 508).
By this time it had become apparent that Diem was not going to mend his brutal ways and provide any sort of government in South Vietnam that the US could reasonably support, if indeed any US-supported regime had any hope of popular support at that point. The only alternative to a total US military commitment was to replace Diem with someone capable of forming a viable coalition government, along the lines of the agreement for Laos that had been worked out with Krushchev's support in Vienna in June 1962. The point of deposing Diem, in other words, was to enable an American withdrawal, as O'Donnell and Powers confirm:
One day when he [Kennedy] was talking with Dave and me about pulling out of Vietnam, we asked him how he could manage a military withdrawal without losing American prestige in Southeast Asia.
"Easy," he said. "Put a government in there that will ask us to leave" (p. 18).
This decision, too, was not popular with the Cabinet or with Johnson. Secretary of State Rusk said at a meeting on Aug. 31, 1963, "that it would be far better for us to start on the firm basis of two things – that we will not pull out of Vietnam until the war is won, and that we will not run a coup." McNamara agreed, and so did Johnson, the latter adding that he "had never really seen a genuine alternative to Diem" and that "from both a practical and a political viewpoint, it would be a disaster to pull out...and that we should once again go about winning the war." (NYT, Pentagon Papers, p. 205).
Diem and his brother Nhu were both murdered during the coup on Nov. 1, 1963, but much as Kennedy's critics might like to imply that he ordered their executions, he had nothing to gain from such barbarity. O'Donnell and Powers say the killings "shocked and depressed him" and made him "only more sceptical of our military advice from Saigon and more determined to pull out of the Vietnam war" (p. 17). The US liaison with the anti-Diem generals, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a long-time CIA operative who had helped Edward Lansdale and the CIA bring Diem to power in 1954, later told the press, on President Nixon's suggestion, that Kennedy had known about the Diem assassination plot, but this was a pure fabrication (Jim Hougan, Spooks, NY: William Morrow, 1978, p. 138). It is more likely that Diem and Nhu were killed by the same forces that killed Kennedy himself three weeks later.
Two days before Kennedy was shot, there was a top-level policy conference on Vietnam in Honolulu, where the issue was not just withdrawal but accelerated withdrawal, along with substantial cuts in military aid. As Peter Scott notes in his important but much-ignored essay in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, the Honolulu conference agreed to speed up troop withdrawal by six months and reduce aid by $33 million ("Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers," Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, Vol. 5, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 224). The New York Times also reported that the conference had "reaffirmed the U.S. plan to bring home about 1,000 of its 16,500 troops from South Vietnam by January 1" (11/21/63, p. 8, quoted in Scott, p. 224).
Curiously, because of the Honolulu conference and a coincidental trip by other Cabinet members to Japan, the Secretaries of State (Rusk), Defense (McNamara), the Treasury (Dillon), Commerce (Hodges), Labor (Wirtz), Agriculture (Freeman), and the Interior (Udall), as well as the Director of the CIA (McCone), the ambassador to South Vietnam (Lodge), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor), and head of U.S. forces in Vietnam (Harkins) were all out of the country when Kennedy was killed. Only his brother Robert, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, who apparently returned to Washington from Honolulu on Nov. 21, the HEW Secretary (Celebrezze), and the Postmaster General (Gronouski) were in Washington on Nov. 22. Johnson, of course, was with the president in Dallas, but this too was curious, since normal security precautions would avoid having the president and vice-president away from Washington at the same time, and together.