This book explores French president Charles de Gaulle’s frank, persistent, and discrete campaign to dissuade President Kennedy from expanding the American military/economic aid program in Vietnam from their first summit meeting between in May 1961 up until Kennedy green-lit a coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the late summer of 1963. There were many thorny issues that complicated the Franco-American relationship in the early 1960s—ranging from nuclear policy, British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), and conditions for negotiating with Moscow—but Vietnam ... More

This book explores French president Charles de Gaulle’s frank, persistent, and discrete campaign to dissuade President Kennedy from expanding the American military/economic aid program in Vietnam from their first summit meeting between in May 1961 up until Kennedy green-lit a coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the late summer of 1963. There were many thorny issues that complicated the Franco-American relationship in the early 1960s—ranging from nuclear policy, British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), and conditions for negotiating with Moscow—but Vietnam was the one case where de Gaulle was unquestionably right and Kennedy terribly wrong in hindsight. Kennedy’s decision to ignore de Gaulle on this matter was far costlier than any other, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, turned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese into refugees, and dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe. Despite de Gaulle’s efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit, the Kennedy administration responded to his peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. In the end, the Kennedy administration assumed that it was uniquely qualified to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World, while the discredited imperialists in the Élysée in Paris had lost their right to formulate Western policy in Southeast Asia by virtue of a long string of humiliating military defeats in their former colonies.