"Most likely"? So now you have a crystal ball huh? Look Ditto, despite your revisionist history lesson here the facts remain that----
"By 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower's 900 advisors.[151]"
and further
"The Strategic Hamlet Program had been initiated in 1961. This joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program attempted to resettle the rural population into fortified camps. The aim was to isolate the population from the insurgents, provide reeducation programs and health care, and strengthen the government's hold over the countryside. The Strategic Hamlets, however, were quickly infiltrated by the guerrillas. The peasants resented being uprooted from their ancestral villages. In part, this was because Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, a Diệm favorite who was instrumental in running the program, was in fact a communist agent who used his Catholicism to gain influential posts and damage South Vietnam from the inside."
Then we have-----
"U.S military advisors were embedded at every level of the South Vietnamese armed forces. They were, however, almost completely ignorant of the political nature of the insurgency. The insurgency was a political power struggle, in which military engagements were not the main goal.[158] The Kennedy administration sought to refocus U.S. efforts on pacification and "winning over the hearts and minds" of the population."
Vietnam War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wow, where have we heard that strategy recently? Oh yeah, from the Bush administration....Whenever the US gets involved in "Nation Building" we do it poorly, and usually with not nearly enough force to make it stick. Kennedy was weak in his pacifism, and Khrushchev knew it, and exploited it, especially in VN...
To look at what Kennedy would have, or wouldn't have done in concerns, I don't think that increasing troop levels would have been off the table with him, after all he tripled the numbers in his time. And remember his own words:
"pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."
The problem with liberals, and academics is that they often cherry pick what they want to believe about a President, and often re write the narrative to fit that, even if it just isn't so.
