Tackling head-on the most controversial and debated "what if" in U.S. foreign policy, this provocative work explores what President John F. Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he not been assassinated in 1963. Drawing on a wealth of recently declassified documents, frank oral testimony of White House officials from both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the analysis of top historians, this book presents compelling evidence that JFK was ready to end U.S. involvement well before the conflict escalated. With vivid immediacy, readers will feel they are in the president's war room as the debates raged that forever changed the course of American history—and continue to affect us profoundly as the shadows of Vietnam stretch into Iraq.