Status Report on Vietnam
Status Report on Vietnam
On January 2, 1963, South Vietnamese troops and their U. S. military advisers engaged Vietcong forces in what became known as the Battle of Ap Bac. Three U. S. soldiers died in the skirmish, which received extensive coverage in the American press. Several of those accounts were critical of the South Vietnamese performace, generating searching editorials on the status of the U. S. military advisory effort. Less than a week after the engagement in South Vietnam, President Kennedy invited legislative leaders to the White House to hear a briefing on the campaign from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. During the course of his report, McNamara would propose that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Earle G. Wheeler tour South Vietnam to conduct a more intensive study of the war.
President John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, 1961-1963.
Biographical sketch from American President.
Dean Rusk was secretary of state from 1961-1969.
Biographical sketch from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
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Robert S. McNamara was secretary of defense from 1961-1968.
Biographical sketch from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Everett Dirksen was a U.S. Senator from Illinois, and U.S. Senate Minority Leader from 1959-1969.
Biographical sketch from U.S. Congress.
Carl Vinson was a U.S. Representative from Georgia and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee from 1949-1965.
Biographical sketch from U.S. Congress.
JFK Daily Diary, January 8, 1963.
Meeting Tape 69.1 and 69.2, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Raw audio file available at the Miller Center's Scripps Library portal.
"Minutes of a Meeting of the Special Group for Counterinsurgency," January 17, 1963 | Source: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.
South Vietnam, Battle of Ap Bac, January 2, 1963. Source: ehistory @ OSU | United States Military Academy.Bibliographies
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).
Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York: 2003).
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, CA: 2005), 141-179.
John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: 1992).
Archives
U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian, Vietnam, January-August 1963.
Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.
Documents Relating to the Vietnam War, Mt. Holyoke College.
January 15, 1963, Meeting Tape 69.3, JFKL.
President Kennedy met with his senior military advisers immediately preceding their departure on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam.
February 2, 1963, Meeting Tape 71.2, citation, JFKL.
Following the Battle of Ap Bac in early January 1963, in which South Vietnamese troops and U.S. military advisers came under heavy attack, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Earle G. Wheeler led a fact-finding mission to assess the situation.
Status Report on Vietnam
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.