> 3. Who cares? Kennedy sponsored the beginning of the war in the 1950s,
> when
> he was a war-mongering Senator. As President, he escalated the war by a
> factor of more than ten, both in terms of troop levels and rules of
> engagement. He never clearly and decisively ordered a single troop to
> withdraw, and he never had the spine to say anything decent in public.
> His
> overall Vietnam record is of huge war crimes. Maybe it would have worked
> out slightly better than Johnson's or Nixon's, but they all belonged in a
> deep, dark jail cell for their actions. Galbraith is fine, and his dad's
> awesome, but why waste time trying to rehabilitate scumbags who did such
> unconscionable things?
Someone else on this list said, "I remain agnostic," and that'd probably be the wisest position for me, too. The thought that Kennedy would have avoided the awful spectacle of Vietnam is appealing for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, it gives its believers a new source of moral outrage, i.e., the Good Thing that Didn't Happen. For another, it meshes with the mythology of Kennedy. And it gives Kennedy assassination theorists something resembling a tangible reason-- or, what Chief Wiggum calls a "mo-tive."
But a harder look at Kennedy, and simple common sense, doesn't support this being a certainty. The guy was a hawk in lots of ways, and he was somewhat cavalier about incursions into the Third World. Lyndon Johnson had a much stronger record of domestic progressive accomplishment during his term in office, and he certainly didn't pull the U.S. out of Vietnam.
I hate to cite Hitchens here, but in a review of a recent book about Johnson (or Vietnam), he offered the following thought-experiment. Imagine if Johnson had died while in office, and Hubert Humphrey drove us into the lightless tunnel. It's not too hard to imagine Johnson's loyalists saying that Johnson had wanted to remove troops, but his noble opposition was cut short by fate. And considering how many "contingency plans" are drawn up for the President's review, wouldn't reseachers be citing the "what happens if we pull out" plans as evidence of Johnson's peaceful tendencies? Imagine as the now-famous White House Tapes were opened up, and we got to hear Johnson's conversations with the likes of Russell Long, where he wailed about the futility of the war and his own misgivings. Wouldn't that create a wave of argument stating that _Lyndon Johnson_ would have avoided the quagmire?
The point here is that the very same kind of evidence is offered to prove that Kennedy would not have escalated our involvement in Vietnam.
Maybe Kennedy would have had the self-awareness to remove U.S. troops... or thought of some action or tactic that created even _greater_ horrors. Or maybe he would've died of Addison's Disease. We just do _not_ know. And as someone else on this list said, who cares? It's just academic speculation; it won't change history, and it doesn't seem to be able to change our current history, either.