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Event

The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam

Date & Time

Monday
Dec. 19, 2022
4:00pm – 5:30pm ET

Location

Zoom Webinar

Overview

In October 1963, the United States publicly proposed the removal of American troops from Vietnam, earning President John F. Kennedy an enduring reputation as a skeptic on the war. In fact, Kennedy was ambivalent about withdrawal and was largely detached from its planning. Its details were the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who turned a loosely defined presidential aspiration into a systemic program for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Its announcement in October 1963 ultimately served Kennedy’s political needs, allowing him to limit American involvement while preserving the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam.

Marc J. Selverstone is associate professor in Presidential Studies and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). He received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Ohio University.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.

Speaker

Marc J. Selverstone

Marc J. Selverstone

Chair, Presidential Recordings Program, The Miller Center and Associate Professor, University of Virginia

Panelist

Meredith Lair

Meredith Lair

Associate Professor in the Department of History & Art History, George Mason University

Hosted By

History and Public Policy Program

The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs.  Read more

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