The invasion of Cuba never materialized. Instead, Cuba was sanctioned with drastic trade embargos designed to cause the regime’s internal collapse. The economic sanctions did little but galvanize the Castro dictatorship into an attitude of self-defense and tighten its links with the Kremlin. This policy would survive until the end of the Cold War, and remains unchanged today; an unlikely anachronism due to the intense lobbying of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the second most powerful lobby in the United States after AIPAC, founded in 1981 by a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, Jorge Mas Canosa.

In lieu of invasion, Johnson offered to the generals the Vietnam War. This was another betrayal of the late President. Kennedy had resisted the urging of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send troops to Vietnam, resolving only to maintain a force of 15 000 men, who were officially deemed “military advisors”. General Douglas MacArthur, who knew Asia, had convinced Kennedy: “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined”. Kennedy often quoted MacArthur in response to the advice of the Joint Chiefs: “Well, now, you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced”. General Taylor remembers: “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against [sending ground troops], except one man and that was the President. The President just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do […]. It was really the President’s personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn’t go in”. In late 1963, Kennedy decided to evacuate all U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. Knowing that this decision would be exploited by his enemies in the campaign of 1964, he decided to keep it quiet until his second term. “The first thing I do when I’m re-elected”, he confided to Tip O’Neill, “I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam. […] that is my number one priority — get out of Southeast Asia”. From the 11th of November, he paved the way for the withdrawal by directive NSAM-263, which included removing “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of the 1963”, and “by the end of 1965 […] the bulk of U.S. personnel”. Just before leaving the Oval Office for Texas, November 21, and after reading a report on the latest casualties, he repeated his resolution to the Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff: “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life”.

Meanwhile in Vietnam, the attitude of the CIA reflected the same deliberate sabotage of presidential politics as in Cuba, taking parallel methods. Evidenced by the bombing of Saigon on May 8th 1963, which left eight dead and fifteen wounded among the Buddhist monks protesting against their oppression by the Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem. The CIA soon accused Diem, claiming that,  “the weight of evidence indicating that government cannon-fire caused the death”. Diem, for his part, officially accused the Viet Cong. But his brother Ngo Dinh Can confided to an investigator at a Catholic newspaper Hoa Binh that he was “convinced the explosions had to be the work of an American agent who wanted to make trouble for Diem”: it indeed appeared that the explosion was due to American-made plastics. In 1970, the same newspaper obtained the confession of a certain Captain Scott of the CIA, who detailed the operation. Why this criminal action? In 1963, the CIA decided, with the help of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime Republican enemy of Kennedy, to destabilize the government of Diem and support a military coup. It was in direct opposition to the explicit orders of Kennedy, who relied on the stability of the country and wanted to give Diem a chance, the leader to whom he had personally assured his support. The Saigon attack contributed significantly to delegitimize Diem in the eyes of the mainly Buddhist population, and paved the way for what was to follow: October 30th, 1963, with approval of the CIA, four generals took power, arresting Diem, his brother and sister-in-law, and after promising them safe exile, turned around and shot them dead in a truck. The insubordination of the CIA had reached its tipping point, with the assassination of Diem as a fateful prelude to the assassination of Kennedy himself. Senator George Smathers remembers Kennedy’s reaction when hearing about Diem’s overthrow and death: “I’ve got to do something about those bastards… they should be stripped of their exorbitant power”. He was talking, of course, about the CIA.

October 2nd, 1963, Richard Starnes, Washington Daily News correspondent in Saigon, exposed the insubordination of the CIA, who were working against the President’s efforts to stabilize the country. “The story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in South Vietnamis a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power. […] they represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone”. Arthur Krock quoted Starnes’ investigation the next day in his daily column in the New York Times, addressing “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam”. He wrote that according to an unnamed “high United States source […], The CIA’s growth was ‘likened to a malignancy’ which the ‘very high official was not sure even the White House could control any longer’”. “If the United States ever experiences a ‘Seven Days in May’, it will come from the CIA”. Krock was a friend to Kennedy, and it is likely that the “very high official” is none other than Kennedy himself, who wanted to warn the American people of the imposing threat to both his life and the democratic fabric of his country. Seven Days in May is a political thriller published in 1962, which details a military coup for control of the White House. Kennedy’s opinion on this novel was known to his friends. Having read it in the summer of 1962, he declared it a credible scenario. “It’s possible. It could happen in this country”, he said, “if, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a ‘Bay of Pigs’” and one or two other similar crises. “The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment”. Nearing the end of 1963, after having refused the generals more than three times, Kennedy felt the reality of the threat more than ever, and most likely used his contacts in the media to send a message, one that a posteriori sounds like a posthumous accusation of the CIA.

After Kennedy’s death, the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam would be reversed. On November 24th, just after being installed in the Oval Office, Johnson summoned Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge saying: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went”. On November 26th, the day after Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson buried the NSAM-263 directive and replaced it with another, NSAM-273, which requires the military to develop a plan “for the United States to begin carrying the war north”, including “different levels of possible increased activity”, and “military operations up to a line up to 50 kilometers inside Laos” ─ which violated the 1962 Geneva Accords of 1962 establishing the neutrality of Laos. Its draft, identified by code OPLAN-34A, is dated the 21st of November, and states: “The President has reviewed the discussions of South Vietnam which occurred in Honolulu, and has discussed the matter further with Ambassador Lodge”. The statement is untrue, since the “President”, which is still Kennedy at that time, could not have been materially informed of the discussions taking place at the Conference of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ended in Honolulu on November 21st. The draft therefore reveals a bureaucratic trick: if the date of OPLAN-34A is authentic, it gives credence to the premeditated nature of Johnson’s NSAM-273, and furthermore implicates the Joint Chiefs in a certain foreknowledge the President’s immanent death. All ambiguities cleverly formed in the NSAM-273 directive would be lifted by a memorandum signed on January 22nd1964 by General Maxwell Taylor, “National Security Action Memorandum n° 273 makes clear the resolve of the President to ensure victory over the externally directed and supported communist insurgency in South Vietnam[…] To do this, we must prepare for whatever level of activity may be required”. It is no longer a question of stopping the war, but rather to win at any cost. Robert McNamara, continuing as Secretary of Defense, conceded to Johnson's agenda, recommending the mobilization of 50,000 soldiers and a program of “graduated overt military pressure” against North Vietnam, a policy which Johnson rubberstamped in March 1964 by memorandum NSAM-288.

The only thing still missing was a suitable pretext: it will be in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964, when a torpedo was allegedly launched by the North Vietnamese against the American destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy, later recognized as a “phantom attack”. Though in fact a radar error dressed up in political rhetoric, the event allowed Johnson to pass through Congress on August 7th, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which gave him full powers to send up to 500,000 soldiers into North Vietnam. With that, Johnson plunged the Vietnamese people into a decade of untold suffering, taking the lives of more than a million civilians. From 1965 to 1968, as part of Operation Rolling Thunder, more than 643,000 tons of bombs were dropped ─ three times more than during the entire Second World War ─ on a mostly rural country, and about 500,000 American soldiers were sent to Vietnam, where 50,000 perished.