Episode 3: Kennedy Doubles Down

Now we have a problem in making our power credible and Vietnam is the place. -President John F. Kennedy, 1961

After the Bay of Pigs defeat in Cuba and the erection of the Berlin Wall, President Kennedy needed a win. “Vietnam is the place,” he told a reporter, convinced the U.S. could restore its Cold War credibility by saving the remote Southeast Asia country from communism.

Kennedy supplied thousands of additional military advisers and equipment to South Vietnam to fight the Communist insurgency. He resisted sending ground troops, against his advisers’ persistent urging.

For a time, American assistance appeared to help stabilize South Vietnam—but in 1963 tensions between the Diem regime and its U.S. ally and resistance from the population escalated to a tragic and bloody climax.

Diem’s downfall

The South Vietnamese President’s  increasingly authoritarian regime ends in a violent coup

The flood of American resources appeared to buoy South Vietnam. But in January 1963 a few hundred “Viet Cong” guerrillas repelled the assault of 2,500 American-equipped South Vietnamese infantrymen in the Battle of Ap Bac. The American press portrayed it as evidence that the South Vietnamese military was incompetent and that President Diem was to blame.

That spring, newspaper images of monks burning themselves in protest against the Diem regime stunned observers around the world. The violence and unrest in Saigon raised blood pressures in Washington. Meanwhile, Diem ignored the Kennedy administration’s increasingly adamant calls for reform.

The Diem experiment came to a bloody end when he and his brother were assassinated on November 23 in the back of an armored personnel carrier.