David Dean Rusk was the United States Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the second-longest serving Secretary of State after Cordell Hull from the Franklin Roosevelt administration. He had been a high government official in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the head of a leading foundation. He is cited as one of the two officers responsible for dividing the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.
Robert Strange McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth United States Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense, having remained in office over seven years. He played a major role in promoting the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.
McGeorge "Mac" Bundy was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
The Report from Iron Mountain is a book published in 1967 by Dial Press which puts itself forth as the report of a government panel. The book includes the claim it was authored by a Special Study Group of fifteen men whose identities were to remain secret and that it was not intended to be made public. It details the analyses of a government panel which concludes that war, or a credible substitute for war, is necessary if governments are to maintain power. The book was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into fifteen languages. Controversy still swirls over whether the book was a satiric hoax about think-tank logic and writing style or the product of a secret government panel. The document is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, who reject the statement made in 1972 by satirist Leonard Lewin that the book was a spoof and that he was its author.
David Halberstam was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, while doing research for a book.
Maxwell Davenport Taylor was a senior United States Army officer and diplomat of the mid-20th century. He served with distinction in World War II, most notably as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed "The Screaming Eagles."
George Wildman Ball was an American diplomat and banker. He served in the management of the US State Department from 1961 to 1966 and is remembered most as the only major dissenter against the escalation of the Vietnam War. He refused to publicize his doubts, which were based on calculations that South Vietnam was doomed. He also helped determine American policy regarding trade expansion, Congo, the Multilateral Force, de Gaulle's France, Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and the Iranian Revolution.
Walt Whitman Rostow was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as National Security Advisor to President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.
John Paul Vann was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, later retired, who became well known for his role in the Vietnam War. Although separated from the military before the Vietnam War reached its peak, he returned to service as a civilian under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development and by the waning days of the war was the first American civilian to command troops in regular combat there. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was the only civilian in Vietnam to receive the Distinguished Service Cross. He died in a helicopter crash in 1972 at 47 years old.
John Alexander McCone was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.
Roger Hilsman Jr. was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author. He saw action in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, first with Merrill's Marauders, getting wounded in combat, and then as a guerilla leader for the Office of Strategic Services. He later became an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and briefly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department while he served as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1961 to 1963 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1963 to 1964.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter, about U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Paul Vann and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
Paul Donal Harkins was a career officer in the United States Army and attained the rank of general. He is most notable for having served during World War II as deputy chief of staff for operations in George S. Patton Jr.'s commands, and as the first Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander, a post he held from 1962 to 1964.
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.
The Taylor-Rostow Report was a report prepared in November 1961 on the situation in Vietnam in relation to Vietcong operations in South Vietnam. The report was written by General Maxwell Taylor, military representative to President John F. Kennedy, and Deputy National Security Advisor W.W. Rostow. Kennedy sent Taylor and Rostow to Vietnam in October 1961 to assess the deterioration of South Vietnam’s military position and the government's morale. The report called for improved training of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops, an infusion of American personnel into the South Vietnamese government and army, greater use of helicopters in counterinsurgency missions against North Vietnamese communists, consideration of bombing the North, and the commitment of 6,000-8,000 U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, albeit initially in a logistical role. The document was significant in that it seriously escalated the Kennedy Administration's commitment to Vietnam. It was also seen historically as having misdiagnosed the root of the Vietnam conflict as primarily a military rather than a political problem.
William Clyde Trueheart was a diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria from 1969–1971, and as the acting U.S. Ambassador and chargé d'affaires in South Vietnam from May–July 1963.
The United States foreign policy during the presidency of John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963 included John F. Kennedy's diplomatic and military initiatives in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, all conducted amid considerable Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Kennedy deployed a new generation of foreign policy experts, dubbed "the best and the brightest". In his inaugural address Kennedy encapsulated his Cold War stance: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate".
The quagmire theory explains the cause of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The quagmire theory suggests that American leaders had unintentionally and mistakenly led the country into the Vietnam War. The theory is categorized as an "orthodox" interpretation of the Vietnam War.
The Sigma war games were a series of classified high level war games played in the Pentagon during the 1960s to strategize the conduct of the burgeoning Vietnam War. The games were designed to replicate then-current conditions in Indochina, with an aim toward predicting future events in the region. In almost all runs, the outcome was either a communist win, or a stalemate that led to protests in the US.
The Children is a 1998 book by David Halberstam which chronicles the 1959–1962 Nashville Student Movement.
