End of RVN

1) not completely except to say we fought the VC with one hand tied behind our back.
2) probably, though JFK had a bad physical back, he had a spine when it came to dealing with communism/communists.

 

I doubt that JFK would have ended the war but his morality was mostly confused. He was raping a young girl at the time of the Bay of Pigs and reneged on his promise of support. He called Ike to meet him at Camp David and Ike told him that if you start something like that you have to follow through.

Furthermore, the Vietnam War was a proxy war with Russia. Dean Rusk and others had the domino theory that the fall of Vietnam would cascade and cause other states to fall. I know that during the 1964 campaign the hippies said that the war would have ended if LBJ had not become president. The rules of engagement that did not allow us to fight full force caused our defeat in my opinion.

An equal but forgotten question is did Truman's rules of engagement stop us from winning the Korean war. Victor Davis Hanson says that Ridgeway was smart to stop at the 38th parallel, where we are today because we found it tough going when we invaded the north and a quarter of a million Chinese crossed into North Korea. After WW II, we reduced our military to nothing and we were caught unprepared when North Korea invaded South Korea to prevent an election on reunification that the communist would have lost. So the question is would China and Russia started a major war if the US had militarily re-united the two Koreas during Truman's time. Ike negotiated the armistice and the issue festered until Trump said that North Korea would be obliterated if they did not get rid of their missiles and nuclear weapons--China seems to be backstabbing us but Russia seems quiet.