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As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy<\/a> probably was the worst American president of the previous century.<\/p>\n In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.<\/p>\n Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam. The assassination of Vietnam\u2019s President Diem on Kennedy\u2019s watch may have been one of the two biggest mistakes of the war there. (The other was the decision to wage a war of attrition on the unexamined assumption that Hanoi would buckle under the pain.) I don\u2019t buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out. Sure, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam \u2014 just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: We\u2019ll scale down our presence after victory is secure<\/a>. And much more than Johnson, Kennedy was influenced by General Maxwell Taylor, who I suspect had been looking for a “small war” mission for the Army for several years. Indochina looked like a peachy place for that \u2014 warmer than Korea, and farther from Russia.<\/p>\n (As a side note, there\u2019s another coup that JFK supported earlier in 1963: theBaathist one in Iraq<\/a> that chucked out a pro-Soviet general. Events in subsequent decades obviously are not Kennedy\u2019s fault, but it still is interesting to look at the documents. Here\u2019s a State Department sitrep<\/a> from, of all dates, Nov. 21, 1963: “Initial appraisal cabinet named November 20 is that it contains some moderate Baathis. Of twenty-one ministers, seven are holdovers from previous cabinet, thirteen are civilians, four are from moderate Shabib-Jawad faction of Baath (Defense \u2014 Tikriti; Communications \u2014 Abd al-Latif; Education \u2014 Jawari; Health \u2014 Mustafa) and a number of technician-type civil servants.” Did you notice the name of that defense minister? I think this might have been Saddam Hussein\u2019s uncle.)<\/p>\n Anyway, I think his track record kind of makes even old Herbert Hoover look good.<\/p>\n Read the Original Article at Foreign Policy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n