I watched Ken Burns' Vietnam, and this was a documentary over 20 hours long, and they used a large team of people to do the research for that documentary, and went into depth what different presidents thought, and what they did, and every president involved with Vietnam thought exactly the same thing, and are in fact recorded in conversations with different people, some in their cabinet, and others with different political leaders.
This is the consensus, among ALL the presidents, with the exception of Eisenhower, who wasn't in power long enough to see how badly this was going to go, but from the very beginning even he saw problems with taking Vietnam over from France.
We don't like it, it's an unwinnable war, but if Vietnam falls to Communism, other Southeastern Asian countries are going to fall, and we will appear weak.
There, that was the thought of EVERY president, as recorded saying exactly that, over different conversations, or as reported by those around them, and JFK was no different. In fact he said we should pull out, but he felt he would lose the 1964 election by doing so. He also repeated the same thing about other countries falling to communism if Vietnam did.
So, my feeling of this documentary is, it wasn't researched well enough, and there was a bias when going in to make it, and that bias never changed, which means they were looking for certain data, and not anything else. You listen to good documentary makers, and you often hear that they started to make a documentary on one thing, and as they were going along, they knew the documentary had to become something different. I don't know the details of the research that was done for this, but I have a lot of faith in Ken Burns, who's done MANY great, well researched, and very thorough documentaries, so I trust the information in that one more than this. Trying to say he was GOING to pull out of Vietnam isn't backed up by ACTUAL moves on his part, while in fact the opposite is true, in that he sent in more troops than was already there. It's not the same as what Johnson did, but Johnson's situation was different, as the situation in Vietnam changed over time. Without a FULL understanding of all the events that surrounded Vietnam, it's too easy to walk away from a doc. like this in full belief of what the authors wanted you to think, so I would highly suggest watching the 20+ hour documentary on Vietnam by Ken Burns. It's the most complete documentary on the topic, and will give you all kinds of insight to the tragedy that was Vietnam. But, information comes at you fast and hard, so that 20+ hour documentary will quickly overwhelm your brain if you aren't ready to pay close attention. I had to go back and watch quite a few parts.
