By Kevin Seabrooke
Author of the award-winning Act of War—detailing the 1968 capture of the spy ship USS Pueblo by North Korean gunboats—comes a new look at one of America’s most serious foreign policy blunders. Accessing government sources newly available through the 2016 amendment of the Freedom of Information Act, Cheevers argues that the passive stance of the Kennedy administration in the months leading to up to the assassination of South Vietnam’s president Diem in 1963 was the biggest factor in the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, rather than the conventional view that the Johnson administration escalated the war.
Kennedy’s Coup: How America Descended into Vietnam (Jack Cheevers, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 704 pp., Feb. 17, 2026 $35 HC)
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