Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam

In "Kennedy's Wars," British historian Lawrence Freedman provides a detached, clear-eyed review of the foreign policy of the Kennedy Administration from 1961 to 1963. Freedman discusses in depth the Administration's responses to ongoing and somewhat overlapping crises in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Freedman provides vital context in terms both of the intermal dynamics of Kennedy's foreign policy and of the ongoing Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and its attendant shadow of potential nuclear war. Few modern readers, for example, remember the keen edge of the struggle over the status of Berlin in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Visible throughout is the education of a young John F. Kennedy as President, learning from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs operation to become progressively more skeptical of his own advisors and more pragmatic about what could realistically be accomplished in foreign affairs and made palatable to the American public. Kennedy's insistence on keeping options open over foreclosing them through quick decisions was both a strength and a weakness, in that flexibility was seemingly preserved, at the price of a sometimes chaotic foreign policy process. Freedman's research appears thorough and his presentation is consistently even-handed. His understanding of the dynamics and challenges of nuclear deterrence is worth savoring for its remarkable clarity. The concluding chapters on the long descent of America into involvement in Vietnam is especially poignant, as the reader knows the tragic outcome, but these chapters may also offer the most compelling lessons of the book. Freedman brings out how deliberations over Vietnam policy were warped by an inability to understand either Saigon or Hanoi from Washington, where Kennedy's foreign policy advisors fought over the correct characterization of a messy conflict. The lack of understanding of the conflict made it difficult for Kennedy and his advisors to recognize how few viable or palatable options they really had with respect to Vietnam. Freedman devotes some analysis to the proposition that Kennedy would have avoided the quagmire that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, plunged into headfirst in 1965. Freedman emphasizes that Kennedy was in no hurry to deepen the U.S. committment to South Vietnam and may have formed the working assumption in late 1963 that a withdrawal was likely after the 1964 Presidential Election. But Freedman also documents the vital counterpoint that Kennedy's assumption was based on a faulty understanding of progress in countering the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam; the assumption of a withdrawal was based on an expectation of reasonably favorable political conditions in which to do so. Freedman grants that Kennedy might have been more inclined to resist escalation of the war in 1965 than Lyndon Johnson. This book, written with the advantage of some 30 years perspective on events, is highly recommended to the student of U.S.

Sir Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, since 1982 and is an outstanding researcher and writer. This book is a very scholarly look at President Kennedy's performance in four hot spots of the Cold War: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. It's must reading for anyone who wants to understand Kennedy's approach to crisis management, also for those who think that Kennedy would have kept the Vietnam War from being an American war--that is, with Lyndon Johnson's later deployment of large numbers of American ground troops. Unlike the recent book Death of a Generation, by Howard Jones, which argues that Kennedy would never have turned Vietnam into an American war, Freedman's view is that we can't know what Kennedy would have done in 1965 when the government of Vietnam was on the brink of being defeated by a stepped-up Viet Cong insurgency. The situation in Vietnam during the years 1961 to 1963, covered by this book, was very different from that in 1965, when U.S. choices were very limited: basically either insert significant numbers of U.S. troops, or see South Vietnam fall to the communists, an unacceptable outcome for any American president at that time. The South Vietnames army was weak, and U.S. air power alone, used both in North and South Vietnam, could not alone have turned the tide (airpower never does, though today it has become an increasingly significant key to victory). Sir Lawrence has researched thousands of documents, summaries of administration meetings, and state department cables. His views are both documented and balanced. No one studying this period in U.S. and world history, and conflicts in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, can do without reading this first-rate book.

This book about John F. Kennedy's foreign policy focuses on the United States' confrontation with the Soviet Union over Berlin 1961, the nearly cataclysmic events in Cuba, and the deepening U.S. involvement in Indochina, which culminated in the overthrow and murder of the prime minister of South Vietnam just weeks before President Kennedy, himself, was assassinated. Is it appropriate to emphasize "wars" in a book about foreign policy? The answer, of course, is: Yes. Author Lawrence Freedman, one of Britain's leading authorities on the Cold War, does not expressly invoke Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but every reader knows that diplomacy and military power often are inextricably linked. On few occasions in American history has this been more true than during the "High" Cold War, the dangerous period between the first Berlin crisis in 1948 and the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. Freedman's fascinating, if occasionally frustrating book, examines the relationship between foreign and military policy at a time when U.S. and the Soviet Union confronted each other, directly or through surrogates, in venues throughout the world, several of which could have, by a single miscalculation, led to nuclear Armageddon. If John Kennedy genuinely deserves of the judgment of history as great, it is because of the remarkably cool judgment during the missile crisis. According to Freedman, Kennedy followed this advice in a book written by British military historian and strategist Basil Liddell Hart, which Kennedy reviewed shortly before his election: "Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face." The Soviet Union may have been foolish, if not reckless, to send nuclear missiles to Cuba, but, once they were there, the only way Nikita Khrushchev could remove them was through a political bargain which allowed his country to avoid international humiliation. If Kennedy had not allowed Khrushchev to save face, some sort of military confrontation, if not general nuclear war, would have been inevitable. Kennedy's decision not to take the advice of his more hawkish advisers was one of the great profiles in courage in the history of the American presidency. Kennedy defused the Berlin and Cuban crisis, but the war in Vietnam was well on its way to disaster when Kennedy died. Would anything have changed if he had lived? It is, to be sure, impossible to say. Shortly before he was assassinated, President Kennedy met with George Ball, a senior State Department official, to discuss Vietnam. When Ball spoke of the possibility of a war involving 300,000 American troops and lasting five years, Freedman reports that Kennedy reacted with "asperity," stating: "George, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys in town, but you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen." Freedman notes that Ball was uncertain whether the president was "making a prediction that events would not f