ABSTRACT
During the 1960s little attention was paid to 20th anniversaries. It is unlikely, for example, that anyone noticed the coincidence that almost exactly 20 years after Pearl Harbour US President John F. Kennedy, in a letter (dated 14 December 1961) to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, formally committed
America to a programme of ‘counterinsurgency’ in defence of South Vietnam which involved breaking the terms of the Geneva Armistice of 1954. Nor, almost two years later, did it remotely occur to anyone that it was precisely 20 years after the opening of the Cairo Conference of 22 November 1943 that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Two days later President Lyndon B. Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 confirming the American commitment to defend an independent South Vietnam.
