Had JFK lived, would the Democrat establishment have been anti-Communist like him?

Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

We’ll never hear the end of questions about what a different world it would have been if President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had not been shot and killed one sunny day in Dallas in 1963.

The 50th anniversary, Nov. 22, has spawned countless articles and a number of books all raising, and often purporting to answer, the question.

President John F. Kennedy and South Korean President Park Chung-Hee in Washington.
President John F. Kennedy and South Korean President Park Chung-Hee in Washington.

Such speculation is relevant to Koreans. On May 16, 1961, almost four months after JFK’s inauguration, Park Chung-Hee tossed out the democratic government that had been in power since the ouster of Syngman Rhee in the student revolution of April 1960. Liberals assume JFK would have moved to stop Park from going to dictatorial extremes as he began 18 years and five months of strongman rule until his own assassination in October 1979. That instinct, though, might be wishful thinking.

As in all those other “what if” questions, we can’t be sure what JFK thought about Korea beyond the view that any South Korean leader should stand up to Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea. A black-and-white photograph taken at the White House six months after Park’s coup shows JFK smilingly welcoming him to lunch. JFK had more pressing matters to worry about than the democratic credentials of a South Korean leader.

JFK was far more concerned about Cuba and the Soviet Union than about Park’s rule. Just the month before Park’s coup, in April 1961, JFK had approved the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by a CIA-sponsored brigade of anti-Communist Cuban exiles. The attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime had been a ghastly failure.

JFK was more successful 18 months later, in October 1962, when he demanded that the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, withdraw missiles implanted on Cuban soil. In a 13-day crisis, Khrushchev complied after the U.S. promised to pull missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from Turkey and Italy and lift the blockade on Cuba.

The Cuban missile crisis is often cited as evidence of JFK’s strength and of the weakness of Khrushchev, forced out two years later by the hardliner Leonid Brezhnev. It’s as easy to say the missile crisis wasn’t that big a deal as it is to say JFK survived a test under near-fire that proved him a heroic figure. But would he have proven a mere mortal after all?

That tantalizing question is relevant for me since I covered Southeast Asia, mainly Vietnam, beginning nearly two years after JFK’s death. Would he, it’s often asked, have expanded the U.S. role as did Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been extremely frustrated as vice president until taking over after he was shot?

One thing we should never forget. Kennedy got us into that war. It was his decision to send in special forces, the green berets, as the Viet Cong, the southern wing of the Vietnamese communist forces, became ever more ferocious against the South Vietnamese army of President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Would JFK have sent in U.S. combat troops as Johnson did in 1965? Or would he have seen the struggle as hopeless and withdrawn U.S. support for Diem, who was assassinated three weeks before his death?

American liberals, to whom JFK — handsome, dynamic and a liberal Democrat like themselves — insist no way would he have turned the war into a quagmire from which there was no chance of victory.

He did, however, say that he believed in the “domino theory” enunciated by his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, the victorious World War II general who predicted that the rest of the former French Indochinese states, including Cambodia and Laos, would fall like “a row of dominoes” if Vietnam were to fall to the communists.

Eisenhower offered that view as communist forces were closing in on the French in Dienbienphu, a stronghold in northwestern Vietnam that the French had believed could withstand any attack from the raggedy peasant troops surrounding the base. Less than one month later, on May 7, 1954, the French surrendered; in July, negotiators in Geneva agreed on the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel into northern and southern zones.

The Geneva accords bore a certain resemblance to the agreement reached in Panmunjom one year earlier in which the Korean Peninsula was divided by a DMZ where the opposing forces stopped fighting. The accords even called for a demilitarized zone like the one in Korea.

While the 1953 armistice in Korea has endured, however, the Geneva accords broke down as the VC built up in the south with full support from the North, armed and equipped by China and the Soviet Union.

So “what if JFK had lived?” During his 1,000-day presidency, JFK did not face enormous crisis in Korea though Park did broach the idea of South Korean troops going to South Vietnam to fight alongside the Americans.

Columnist Donald Kirk was a reporter in New York when he heard about JFK’s assassination. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com.

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