Virtual Vietnam

Abstract

Those of us who teach the Vietnam War have learned to expect two questions from students on the opening day of class. First, of course, is the “could we have won” question, “we” being the United States and (sometimes) South Vietnam. The second question involves John F. Kennedy. If he had not been assassinated, students ask, would JFK have withdrawn America from Vietnam and averted the most disastrous foreign-policy venture in U.S. history? I answer the first question with a no, citing the vitality of Vietnamese nationalism and the lack of indigenous support for the U.S.-created southern regime, but I advise students that not everyone agrees with me, and I direct them to Vietnam War revisionists like Harry Summers and Mark Moyar for arguments that the war was winnable.1 The second question poses more of a challenge, not because it requires “counterfactual” speculation, which has always struck me as a legitimate exercise for historians, but because I have long thought that one can make a convincing case both for or against the proposition that Kennedy would have Americanized the war in the same fashion his successor did.