Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
Virtual JFK
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- $48.99
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- $48.99
Publisher Description
The Virtual JFK DVD is now available! For more information on the film companion to the book, visit http://www.virtualjfk.com/
It Matters Who Is President—Then and Now
At the heart of this provocative book lies the fundamental question: Does it matter who is president on issues of war and peace? The Vietnam War was one of the most catastrophic and bloody in living memory, and its lessons take on resonance in light of America's current devastating involvement in Iraq. Tackling head-on the most controversial and debated "what if" in U.S. foreign policy, this unique work explores what President John F. Kennedy would have done in Vietnam if he had not been assassinated in 1963. Drawing on a wealth of recently declassified documents, frank oral testimony of White House officials from both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the analysis of top historians, this book presents compelling evidence that JFK was ready to end U.S. involvement well before the conflict escalated. With vivid immediacy, readers will feel they are in the president's war room as the debates raged that forever changed the course of American history—and continue to affect us profoundly today as the shadows of Vietnam stretch into Iraq.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The historical "what if" that won't go away, John F. Kennedy's unrealized Vietnam strategy gets a comprehensive workout in this volume by political science professor Welch and international relations professors Blight and Lang. Using first-hand documents, audio recordings and a conference-based research technique they call "critical oral history," the authors assimilate a "virtual" JFK to decide the course of the war. The 2005 Musgrove Conference brought together scholars and former White House officials for three days of discussion; the evidence quickly split into two camps. Skeptics conclude that, after the1963 assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem, JFK would done just what Lyndon did in 1965: send in tens of thousands more American troops. The opposing side points to Kennedy's 1963 plan to withdraw a thousand men, as well as the lessons of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to suggest he would have resisted the hawkish voices around him. The authors go ahead and determine a winner, the war-ending JFK who would have withdrawn the troops and taken the political beating that came with it. Though the book offers other new insights (PBS broadcaster and former LBJ advisor Bill Moyers, a possible Kennedy-McNamara "back-channel"), it plods through much heavily trafficked territory.
