Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (review)

Focusing only on those "issues most related to the fundamental issues of war and peace" (p. x), Lawrence Freedman accurately captures in Kennedy's Wars the essence, as well as the details, of John F. Kennedy's greatest foreign policy challenges.

Experienced Kennedy hands might be tempted to discount the value of this book given that Freedman cites almost no unpublished material; however, the author has managed to produce an insightful and well-written work by making highly effective use of published primary sources, blended with material from hundreds of secondary sources.

Kennedy's policies as president are the focus of Freedman's work, but he emphasizes the key role played by others. In this context, the book begins with a useful dramatis personae, listing dozens of relevant individuals both renowned and obscure, from Dean Acheson to Valerian Zorin. Freedman's source citations are documented in endnotes, and a full bibliography is provided.

Over the course of the book, Freedman establishes patterns of behavior peculiar to Kennedy's handling of disparate foreign policy crises that shed light on Kennedy's core beliefs. Notwithstanding his Cold War rhetoric, Kennedy repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to negotiate. According to Freedman, Kennedy's critics claim that he eschewed a negotiated withdrawal from Vietnam because of his "fixation with the need to beat off the communist challenge come what may to the exclusion of all diplomacy." Freedman deems these accusations "barely credible" (p. 383).

Instead, Freedman suggests that Kennedy's activism was more rhetorical than real. As a senator, he could comfortably criticize President Eisenhower for failing to take military action in far-flung places. As president, Kennedy grew increasingly concerned about the risk that even relatively small-scale military conflicts could soon escalate into a nuclear confrontation. The military did nothing to assuage Kennedy's fears, repeatedly advocating armed intervention on the assumption that conflicts would not be limited.

Freedman demonstrates how Kennedy's strategic judgments evolved in other ways during his presidency. Having advocated flexible response on the floor of the Senate, and later on the campaign trail, Freedman explains that Kennedy quickly came to appreciate "that nuclear deterrence might be more persuasive in practice than in theory" (p. 111).

On the critical question of what Kennedy might have done in Vietnam, Freedman is properly cautious. Noting that decision making in 1964 and 1965 was based on complex calculations, Freedman lays out the many "what if" questions and concludes "it is dangerous to assert answers to these questions with confidence" (p. 404).

The unanswered questions surrounding John F. Kennedy's conduct of foreign policy cry out for still more evidence, as opposed to a reinterpretation of known sources. In the meantime, Lawrence Freedman has produced a thoughtful and scholarly work that will be of interest to general readers and serious scholars alike.