Kennedy and Vietnam: The great what-if

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Kennedy and Vietnam: The great what-if

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John F. Kennedy is often portrayed as a dove because plans for U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam began while he was president. A new book by Miller Center Professor Marc Selverstone, drawing on once-secret presidential recordings, makes the case that the withdrawal plan was a canny political device, designed to manage public opinion while preserving U.S. military assistance.

Selverstone, author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam, joins Harvard University’s Fredrik Logevall, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history, in a conversation moderated by Barbara Perry, Miller Center director of Presidential Studies. What would have happened if Kennedy had lived? Was Kennedy's Vietnam strategy adopted decades later in the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

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The Miller Center