Drinking Sour Wine

This chapter examines how the Kennedy-de Gaulle disagreement over Vietnam was exacerbated by fundamental disagreements over the nature of the Atlantic alliance and tolerance for neutral regimes outside the bloc system. Their dispute over Vietnam began at the spring 1961 summit as a clash of perception, but the Kennedy administration quickly retreated into clichéd views of de Gaulle to dismiss the French position rather than undertake the awkward, difficult task of questioning the assumptions that brought the United States to Vietnam. At the summit, Kennedy made a strong case that there were legitimate strategic concerns that focused his attention on South Vietnam and that a Western defeat there would do great damage to America’s global prestige. De Gaulle emphasized the region’s unsuitability for a military confrontation with the communists and its peripheral importance to the Cold War. What separated the two presidents at this point was de Gaulle’s preference for a low-risk diplomatic course of action that acknowledged the possibility—which he believed to be small—of strategic defeat, while Kennedy was willing to gamble on an idealistic, maximum effort campaign to forestall a communist victory.