Free American History Revised by Jr. Seymour Morris Page A

or another. Dramatic events like Pearl Harbor or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are obvious “tipping points.”
    But sometimes tipping points are not so obvious. In two cases when America embarked on a drawn-out war fraught with unintended consequences—Vietnam and Iraq—the decision to go to war was made in a flash, on the spur of the moment when America was under attack.
The Single Bullet That Eventually Led Us into Vietnam
    Vietnam was getting to be a problem. In early 1963, JFK told Senator Mike Mansfield,“If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected.” (Similar statements were made to Senator Wayne Morse and to presidential aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Michael Forrestal.) At a September 12 press conference he claimed his policy was “simple” and listed three objectives: win the war, contain the Communists, and bring the Americans home. But after getting battlefield reports from Vietnam that things were going much worse than anticipated, he shifted his thinking dramatically. At a November 12 press conference, he dropped the “winning the war” entirely and made “bringing the boys home” number one: “Now, that is our object, to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate.” Accordingly he signed an executive order, National Security Agency Memorandum (NSAM) 263, to withdraw one thousand of the sixteen thousand American combat “advisors” in Vietnam and for
all
Americans to be out of Vietnam by January 1, 1965 (i.e., in thirteen months). He had a November 24, 1963, appointment with his ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, to finalize the details of this withdrawal scheduled for December 3.
    The plan never got carried out. To be sure, the thousand advisors made it home on December 3, but that was only because of bureaucratic inertia in executing changes in presidential decrees. The rest—and the 500,000 men later to serve—were not so lucky.
    What happened? Two days before his meeting with Lodge, President Kennedy was assassinated. The incoming president, a man with no foreign affairs experience, announced within hours of moving into the Oval Office, “I am not going to lose Vietnam, I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” He summarily rejected Ambassador Lodge in favor of other advisors who warned that “hard decisions would have to be made if Vietnam was to be saved,” and issued NSAM 273, canceling JFK’s NSAM 263.
    Normally, when a new man assumes the presidency because of assassination, you would expect continuity. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson professed as much when he assured reporters, “Let us continue.” Only the reality was quite different: within a quick forty-eight hours of taking office, in the midst of all the turmoil over the assassination, he made the single most important presidential decision of the 1960s: massive involvement in Asia.
    In his memoirs,
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara provides a photograph with an interesting center: “Nov. 24, 1963: The First Meeting. Among LBJ’s first actions as president—while he was still in his vice-presidential quarters in the Old Executive Office Building and before he had moved into the OvalOffice—was meeting with Dean Rusk, George Ball, Ambassador Lodge, and me to discuss Vietnam. His instructions were clear: Win!”
    For a new president with no electoral mandate of his own, such aggressiveness was quite baffling. But not really a surprise. In late 1963, Kennedy and Johnson had their eyes on the upcoming presidential election. They had opposing views on what to do about Vietnam afterward. Whereas Kennedy had told his advisers he couldn’t pull out until after he was reelected, Lyndon Johnson was now telling the Joint