President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara, 6/19/62
Photo Courtesy of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library
Criticism:
Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, was the earliest to
criticize United States policy, after he visited Vietnam in 1962. “To
summarize, our policies and activities are designed to meet an existing
set of internal problems in south Vietnam.
North Vietnam infiltrates some supplies and cadres into the south;
together with the Vietnamese we are trying to shut off this flow.
The Vietcong has had the offensive in guerrilla warfare in the
countryside; we are attempting to aid the Vietnamese military in putting
them on the defensive with the hope of eventually reducing them at least
to ineffectiveness. Finally,
the Vietnamese peasants have sustained the Vietcong guerrillas out of
fear, indifference or blandishment and we are helping the Vietnamese in an
effort to win the peasants away by offering them the security and other
benefits which may be provided in the strategic hamlets” (McMahon,
167).
He also went on to say that it is their country whose future is at
stake, not ours, and they should be fighting their own war (McMahon,
168).