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Well after Vietnam was chopped in half the U.S. threw its

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support behind South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem well this wasn't the greatest [Diem standing next to Vietnam on a map of the world]

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move because well honestly he just wasn't that cool of a guy. Diem must have

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studied every dirty trick in the mean dictator playbook, because well he nailed

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them all. He was stubborn ruthless and perhaps justifiably you know very

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paranoid. He persecuted his political enemies expelling imprisoning or [People behind bars looking unhappy]

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executing those who opposed his regime. He probably even tried to get sunshine and

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rainbows banned. Wait a sec, as leaders of the free world weren't we supposed to

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stop this kind of behavior? Well you bet, and the irony of this wasn't lost on the [American flag holding a stop sign next to Diem]

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newly elected president John F Kennedy well JFK had major issues with the U.S.

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basically supporting a mean dictator.. Well the US had helped to create Diem,

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Kennedy and his colleagues admitted that may have been a mistake, in the same

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way that raising a lion in your apartment maybe a mistake. For one by

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violating the Geneva Accords and allowing Diem to cancel national elections

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the US had become accountable for the growing unpopularity of the regime. This

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also helped to feed the rising tide of resistance in South Vietnam. At first [Anti Diem protest signs pop up in South Vietnam]

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JFK and his closest advisers underestimated the will of the North

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Vietnamese and knew diddly-squat about the growing anti Diem insurgency in the

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south. So Kennedy figured that maintaining an independent South Vietnam

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would require political maneuvering and the aid of military advisers, but

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hopefully no boots on the ground because if there was one thing JFK hated more

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than anything it was muddy tracks on his clean floor. Okay, so maybe that's not [Man in boots leaves muddy footprints behind]

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entirely true, JFK and his pals were less concerned with boot prints and more

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worried about Castro shenanigans in Cuba. Well there communist leader Fidel

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Castro cooperated with the Soviet Union in establishing Russian missile bases on

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the island.The tense showdown that followed ended in negotiations that

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favored the United States, so it seemed that the lesson to be learned from Cuba

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was that the U.S. only needed to resist communist aggression and perhaps Soviet [American flags hits USSR flag away from Cuba]

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aggression in Vietnam. If Kennedy could succeed against the North Vietnamese the

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way he had against the communist alliance in Cuba, well then disaster

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would be averted. What could possibly go wrong? [Question mark pulsating]

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Ya know besides everything... Vietnam was not Cuba and the Soviet Union had nothing to do

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with the growing unrest in South Vietnam by May 1963 amidst a series of

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tumultuous demonstrations in Saigon, it had become clear to Kennedy's

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administration that Ngo Dinh Diem had to go. Sorry Ngo but you're kinda a jerk. On 2 November

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1963 the South Vietnamese military with the encouragement of the US government [Diem is led away with a black plastic bag over his head]

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executed Diem and seized control of the government, and no nobody in Washington

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had said shoot Diem as a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff remarked you

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don't do an assassination that way. The way people are assassinated is by taking

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away the power that had been created to keep them there. Well three

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weeks later in Dallas, Texas president Kennedy died from an assassin's bullet. [JFK smiling in the back of a car]

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At which point the Joint Chiefs of Staff member probably said something like

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"Um, I take back what I said." [Staff member with ten gallon hat]

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