Dispatching the Wheeler Mission
Dispatching the Wheeler Mission
President Kennedy met with his senior military advisers immediately preceding their departure on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam. The Wheeler Mission, named for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, had been proposed by the Joint Chiefs the previous week following the Battle of Ap Bac, the first major confrontation between South Vietnamese and Vietcong forces. The ensuing Wheeler Report would be the third such review that Kennedy would receive in the span of a month. In late December, Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-MT) had toured Indochina and provided Kennedy with a pessimistic account of progress in the war. The State Department's Roger Hilsman and White House aide Michael Forrestal had also visited South Vietnam and had criticized the military's preference for engaging the Vietcong with conventional tactics.
President John F. Kennedy was the thirty-fifth President of the United States, 1961-1963.
Biographical sketch from American President.
General Curtis LeMay was Air Force Chief of Staff from 1961-1965.
Curtis LeMay obituary from the New York Times.
Admiral George Anderson was the Chief of Naval Operations from 1961-1963.
George Anderson obituary from the New York Times.
General Earle Wheeler was Army Chief of Staff from 1962-1964. He was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1964-1970.
Biographical sketch from the Arlington Cemetery Website.
Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962-1964.
Biographical sketch from the Arlington Cemetery Website.
JFK Daily Diary, January 15, 1963.
Meeting Tape 69.3, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Raw audio file available at the Miller Center's White House Tapes website.
"Report by an Investigative Team Headed by the Chief of Staff, United States Army (Wheeler), to the Joint Chiefs of Staff," January 1963 | Source: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.
Battle of Ap Bac, January 2, 1963. Source: ehistory @ OSU | United States Military Academy.
Bibliography
Bibliography - Vietnam Conflict, Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Bibliography of the Vietnam War, Prof. Edward E. Moise, Clemson University.
Vietnam War Bibliography, Richard Jensen, University of Illinois-Chicago.
Scholarship
David M. Toczek, The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam: They Did Everything but Learn from it (Westport, CT. 2001).
Fredrik Logevall, "Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been," in Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisisted, ed. Mark J. White (New York, 1998), 19-62.
Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 141-179.
John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: 1992).
Archives
John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.
U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian, January-August 1963.
Documents Relating to the Vietnam War, Mt. Holyoke College.
January 8, 1963, Meeting Tapes 69.1 and 69.2, WhiteHouseTapes.org.
President Kennedy invited legislative leaders to the White House to hear a briefing on the campaign from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara would propose that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Earle G. Wheeler tour South Vietnam to conduct a more intensive study of the war.
February 2, 1963, Conversation 71.2, WhiteHouseTapes.org
General Earle G. Wheeler briefed the President on the state of the press and the U.S. advisory mission in Vietnam. He gave President Kennedy a series of recommendations for improving South Vietnam's military in its war against the National Liberation Front, or Vietcong.
Dispatching the Wheeler Mission
See Stephanie van Hover, Marc J. Selverstone, and Patrice Preston-Grimes, "Window Into the White House," Social Education, vol. 72, no. 3 (April 2008), 130-135.
Teaching with the Tapes
Chester Pach, "The United States in the 1960s," Ohio Univesity.
Jeff Woods, "White House Tapes," Arkansas Tech University.