White House Announces Troop Withdrawals

October 2, 1963

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor and President Kennedy, January 25, 1963.

Overview

The Kennedy administration announces a plan to withdraw 1,000 of the roughly 16,300 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This plan begins to take shape in spring 1962, but finally becomes actionable in October 1963 after Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell D. Taylor conduct a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. They recommend acceleration of phased withdrawal to demonstrate to Congress and the public that there is a plan for reducing involvement in Southeast Asia. While historians disagree on why Kennedy took this step, and Taylor and McNamara largely misjudge the situation in South Vietnam, the report forms the basis of U.S. policy moving forward.1

¹George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, (4th edition; New York: McGraw Hill, 2002), 122–123; Marc J. Selverstone, “It’s a Date: Kennedy and the Timetable for a Vietnam Troop Withdrawal,” Diplomatic History 34, No. 3 (June 2010), 485–495; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa, and Edward J. Drea, The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961–1965, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Volume V (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 289–290; Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 300–302.