In addition to Cuba, Kennedy inherited the policy of containing communism in Southeast Asia. He shared his predecessors’ belief that the Soviet Union was behind wars of national liberation throughout the third world. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy believed that if Communists toppled one regime in Asia it would produce a “domino effect,” with one country after another falling to the Communists. Kennedy, a World War II veteran, also believed that aggressive nations that attacked weaker ones threatened world peace unless they were challenged.
Kennedy’s containment efforts ran into difficulty in Vietnam because the United States did not control the situation on the ground. After supporting Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam in 1955, the United States poured more than $1 billion into the country to implement land reform and create a stable government capable of withstanding Communist opposition from the Vietcong and North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s Communist forces in North Vietnam. However, Diem spent the money on building up military and personal security forces to suppress all political opposition. In 1961 Kennedy sent military advisers to help the South Vietnamese fight the Communists, but the situation deteriorated in 1963 when the Catholic Diem prohibited the country’s Buddhist majority from holding religious celebrations. In protest, Buddhist monks committed suicide by setting themselves on fire, a grisly display captured on television news programs in the United States. With political opposition mounting against Diem’s oppressive regime and the war going poorly, the Kennedy administration endorsed a military coup to replace the Diem government with one more capable of fighting Communists. On November 1, 1963, the coup leaders removed Diem from office, assassinated the deposed president and key members of his regime, and installed a military government.
Diem’s death, however, did little to improve the worsening war against the Communists. The Vietcong had more support in the rural countryside than did the South Vietnamese government because the rebels promised land reform and recruited local peasants disturbed by the corruption and ruthlessness of the Diem regime. The Kennedy administration committed itself to supporting Diem’s successor, but by late November 1963 Kennedy seemed ambivalent about what to do next. He was torn between sending more American troops and finding a way to negotiate a peace.
This ambivalence was reflected in Kennedy’s more general effort to balance his hard-line anti-Communist policies with new outreach efforts to inspire developing nations to follow a democratic path. The Peace Corps program sent thousands of volunteers to teach and advise developing nations, and Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress supplied economic aid to emerging democracies in Latin America. In June 1963, Kennedy announced his departure from his earlier militant Cold War stance in a commencement address at American University. Instead of describing a bipolar world of good and evil, Kennedy envisioned a “world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal.”
On November 22, 1963, three weeks after the assassination of Diem, Lee Harvey Oswald murdered Kennedy as he rode in an open motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The fatal shots from the assassin’s rifle brought the nation to a standstill and prompted an outpouring of public grief not seen since President Roosevelt died in office in 1945. In death, Kennedy achieved immense popularity, and many Americans viewed him as a martyr. Yet Kennedy had left many problems unresolved. His legislative agenda, including civil rights, remained unfulfilled, and at the time of his death there were 16,000 American military advisers in Vietnam.