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The Kennedy Withdrawal
Episode 2430 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a visit by Andy Pham, a good friend of this podcast. He has invited three prominent college professors to join him in a discussion of an important new book about the genesis of the American participation in the Vietnam War. The book deals with little know facts surrounding President Kennedy’s decisions about the conflict.
The book to be discussed in this episode of titled: The Kennedy Withdrawal. It was written by Dr. Marc J. Selverstone. The book provides a major revision of our understanding of JFK’s commitment to Vietnam, revealing that his administration’s plan to withdraw was a political device, the effect of which was to manage public opinion while preserving US military assistance.
Dr. Marc Selverstone is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a BA degree in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Another of the Professors is Meredith H. Lair. Prof. Lair’s work examines warfare and its relationship to American society and culture, with particular emphasis on how knowledge and memories of the past are constructed and disseminated over time. She is the author of Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War, which examines the non-combat experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam.
The other interlocutor is Dr. Sean McLaughlin of Murray State University. He is the special collections and exhibits director at Murray State University. He is the author of JFK and de Gaulle: How America and France Failed in Vietnam, 1961-1963 (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
Listen to episode 2430 and get the full interview with three notable college professors who examine the book The Kennedy Withdrawal.
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