The urgencies of Berlin, Cuba, and Vietnam in the 1960s ramified patterns established earlier by Truman and Eisenhower, testing the extremes of Cold War conventions. Despite its vast power, leaders in the United States were susceptible to charges of weakness and indecision; at a Warsaw Pact meeting in August 1961, Khrushchev blustered that the United States “is a barely governed state. . .Kennedy himself hardly influences the direction and development of policies in the American State. . .he is a rather unknown quantity in politics. So I feel empathy with him in his situation, because he is too much of a lightweight for both the Republicans as well as for the Democrats” (qtd. Engel 240-241). In the most extraordinary conflict of the Cold War, Khrushchev and Kennedy’s rhetorical and tactical sparring over Berlin and the Bay of Pigs led them to the precipice of nuclear war, and then back again. It is impossible to know whether Kennedy would have drawn the lessons of the Cuban Missile crisis in a way that would have prevented what historian Jeremi Suri calls the “historical traps” of Vietnam following his assassination; the groundwork for it predated his own brief presidency. As Suri has argued, a series of “rigid and dogmatic tactics undermined the pragmatic and idealistic purposes of American activity” in Southeast Asia from the postwar through quagmire periods (Suri Liberty’s 205).
The historical record of the 1960s suggests that American policymakers, inheriting a transformed United States, didn’t strike the right balance between pragmatism and idealism, and the results were disastrous (though not world-ending, as threatened in October 1962). People in Southeast Asia suffered grievously for those mistakes, and the reverberations are still being felt there. Many Americans also suffered grievously for those mistakes, namely those on the front lines in Vietnam and the people who loved them. The tragedy of Vietnam amplified a general atmosphere of dissent within the United States that had started with the Civil Rights Movement, while around the world citizens demanded a voice.
The historical record of the 1960s suggests that American policymakers, inheriting a transformed United States, didn’t strike the right balance between pragmatism and idealism, and the results were disastrous (though not world-ending, as threatened in October 1962). People in Southeast Asia suffered grievously for those mistakes, and the reverberations are still being felt there. Many Americans also suffered grievously for those mistakes, namely those on the front lines in Vietnam and the people who loved them. The tragedy of Vietnam amplified a general atmosphere of dissent within the United States that had started with the Civil Rights Movement, while around the world citizens demanded a voice.