Few issues from the Vietnam War divided the American public more than the character and nature of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The US government claimed that communist North Vietnam controlled the NLF, and that it wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam by force. Antiwar scholars and activists, in sharp contrast, argued that the NLF was born in the tinder-dry rice paddies of South Vietnam in response to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive policies. The NLF was very skillful at portraying itself as local freedom fighters, organized simply to free South Vietnam from foreign domination and a corrupt Saigon government. This made it difficult for successive US presidential administrations to win support at home and abroad for their counterinsurgency programs. In reality, the NLF was both Southern and communist. The Lao Dong, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, was a nationwide, unified movement with revolutionaries placed in most villages and hamlets throughout Vietnam. The party leadership in Hanoi included several southerners, like Le Duan – the partys general secretary – who favored armed rebellion to liberate Vietnam south of the 17th parallel and to reunify the country under the socialist banner.

In October 1963, McNamara went to Vietnam with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor. On his return, the administration convened a series of NSC meetings that culminated in a press release that the United States would withdraw by 1965. The end point for the withdrawal plans and for the announcement were not victory in the traditional sense but instead something more ambiguous: “until the insurgency has been suppressed or that national security forces of the Government of South Viet-Nam are capable of suppressing it.” Over the last few months and especially in October, McNamara was concerned with what he found in Vietnam where existing programs were deficient or lagging. Withdrawal was not premised on success but instead on a predetermined training program that fit with McNamara’s priorities at the OSD. He insisted on a public announcement as a bureaucratic move aimed at neutralizing those who might interrupt the CPSVN. A separate announcement that 1,000 troops would be withdrawn by December 1963 was aimed at quieting SFRC criticism that the United States was bogged down in Vietnam.