Abstract
Efforts to put down insurgencies go back a long way in history, but references to ‘counterinsurgency’ are of recent vintage. According to one witness, President John Kennedy and his brother Robert coined the term in the early 1960s as they sought ways to cope with a deepening crisis in Southeast Asia. After World War II, Washington had supported the French effort to regain control of Indochina and then in 1954 had intervened to bolster the embryonic Republic of South Vietnam (RVN). While US leaders talked of ‘nation-building’, critics charged that they were acting as a new colonial power in the region, and by the time Kennedy took office in 1961, the National Liberation Front (NLF) was challenging the RVN, which it condemned as a proxy for US imperialism. The president and his team wished to distance themselves from the ‘dirty war’ France had waged and hoped that innovative tactics associated with counterinsurgency would defeat the rebels and establish the South Vietnamese government as a free-standing ally rather than a puppet of the United States.1
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