JFK signed off on the military coup.
He did not want Diem killed. He wanted Diem and his wife taken out of country without being harmed. What went wrong is that JFK gave Averell Harriman the job of carrying out the coup, who despised Diem and his wife. It's an open secret that Harriman gave the order to kill them. Duong Van Minh, the Vietnamese general who led the coup, also despised Diem and his wife (Minh is an interesting historical character unto himself, but I won't sperg about him here). After JFK found out how the coup went down, he went into a deep depression.
There's even a personal recording that JFK made about this.
He wanted to do Vietnamization before Nixon made it offishul policy 7-8 years later. He wanted to leave in appearance but not reality
He tried a sort of Vietnamization, but it was a weird, wonky, and unsuccessful form of counterinsurgency. The idea that JFK and Camelot had was to send in a few highly-trained commandos and specialists, build a bunch of nice things for rural people, teach them how to maintain those nice things, train them how to fight, and then leave. This was to work against communist ideology that capitalists only cared about money by showing them what the US and free markets could offer. Basically, "we can do the communist thing of building communities but better." This also reduced the footprint of the American military and the idea was to create self-defense militias against the communists. Most of these rural peasants didn't care about the Cold War and did not like the communists bullying them (which they did).
What happened is a bunch of clinics, schools, wells, and roads got built and then abandoned because rural people don't have the means to maintain that shit when they've lived as rural farming peasants their entire lives. Also, the communists
were in the country and
there were more of them, so many of these militias got slaughtered without consistent American support. JFK did not want a large US military presence in Vietnam because he thought it would invite more trouble - e.g. the Soviets or the Chinese would then use American intervention as a justification for their own intervention. Eisenhower's doctrine for his entire administration was to point nukes at everyone, but that doesn't work when communists start global insurgencies. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu proved that - a bunch of shoeless rice farmers dragged artillery pieces up a mountain, set them up, and destroyed the French. You can't nuke that. A jet cannot enforce a "no communist assembly" edict. A tank cannot tell whether people in a basement are planning a terrorist action or having a party.
In opposition to JFK was the Department of Defense which wanted him to stop fucking around, send in the troops, crush the insurgency, and call it a day. Nixon's "Vietnamization" was in response to the lackluster US military operations of the LBJ administration which weren't enough to crush the insurgency. LBJ thought he could have his cake and eat it, too. In fact, modern counterinsurgency strategies acknowledge this and that's why Bush's surge was so successful: they quit fucking around, sent a fuckton of soldiers over, and focused on maximum coverage plus public security. Instead of focusing on difficult offensive operations or "winning hearts and minds," Coalition forces denied enemy operational capability by having troops everywhere and made the Iraqis feel better about the occupation by keeping their communities safe. The surge worked, but was politically damaging (higher Coalition casualties) and Obama decided to start using more drones.
TL;DR: it was more complicated than that.
This is the real thing, because the CIA convinced him that the Bay of Pigs would go just fine without the Chair Force flying sorties to support the landings. He was thinking of canceling the whole thing and the CIA said nah go ahead it'll be fine, and instead it nearly broke his presidency and him personally. He was still unpopular and did not expect to be re-elected because of the Bay of Pigs when he was assassinated, blamed the glowniggers, and hated them for it
JFK was pissed about Bay of Pigs because he was told the anti-Castro forces would not need air support. He thought it was a complete boondoggle and was destined to fail. The main point of contention was that JFK did not want to provide American air support because that would start a war between the US and Cuba at the very beginning of his administration. The pro-Bay of Pigs people assumed JFK would cave and support the invasion fully once it happened, but JFK told them to fuck off and the invasion failed. That cost the CIA a ton of assets - they lost a
lot of people in the Bay of Pigs operation. This resulted in a confrontational relationship between the White House and CIA for all of JFK's presidency, although JFK continued to use CIA assets to support operations in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Air America kept American counterinsurgents supplied and reinforced for all of JFK's presidency and for decades after.
Unfortunately, that sounds very libertarian. If you cede territory then it gets taken by niggers and trannies.
Conservatives have been naive for far too long and you end up with obama and busing in migrants with kamala and the absolute lunacy of gender and race everywhere.
Don’t give an inch. It has to be actively fought. Which requires organizing.
The price is eternal vigilance. Not all are cut out for it but the best of us, the real heroes, are.
You miss my point entirely. Normal, well-adjusted conservatives naturally gravitate towards defending, supporting, and maintaining their community and country. For them, it is a necessary action. They understand the importance of service, duty, and discipline. If you are a True & Honest person with a job, a family, and a love of your countrry, you
will have a civic life. The problem with "organizing" is that it's usually proposed by someone with an agenda. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen "conservatives" try to "organize" and it devolves into a grift. We even have threads on this website about these kinds of people.
