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In Episode One, Bill Musgrave, a US Army veteran told us how much he used to hate the Vietnamese he fought against. He opens Episode Two with a chilling description of what it felt like to be in a listening post in Con Thien. He conveys the fear he felt when he was out there so close to the enemy that he could hear them whispering to one another. He admits he is still afraid of the dark and that the way his kids found out he was in a war was when they had to give up their night-lights, but daddy still had one. It is a gripping way to open this episode.

As Miles Davis's "So What" plays, we hear JFK at his inauguration and we are taken back to 1961. Jack Todd, another interview subject, tells us that he still believes in the concept of an heroic America. He felt back then that it was right to be in Vietnam because Kennedy said it was the right thing to do. JFK was a god to him. Another clip of Kennedy at his inauguration ends with him saying that "to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the tiger, ended up inside.”

JFK surrounded himself with advisers who held his strong anti-communist beliefs, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Deputy NSA Walt Rostow, special military adviser Maxwell Taylor, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara had been president of the Ford Motor Company and was a pioneer in system analysis. All of these men, like Kennedy himself, had served in World War II.

Unbeknownst to the Americans, Ho Chi Minh was sharing power with Le Duan who was more impatient to reunify Vietnam than HCM was. Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese Army veteran, recounts that his parents saw the Americans as invaders no different than the French and he picked up their views. In the most telling interview so far, Leslie Gelb, who worked at the Pentagon, says, "None of us knew anything about Vietnam. Vietnam in those days was a piece on a chessboard, a strategic chessboard, not a place with a culture and a history that we would have an impossible time changing."

Kennedy, despite the talent he had gathered around him, did not have a good first few months into his presidency. The Bay of Pigs fiasco ended like, well, a fiasco. He felt bullied by Nikita Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna. He couldn't keep the Soviets from building the Berlin Wall. He refused to intervene in a communist insurrection in Laos. He was accused of being immature, indecisive, and inadequate to facing the communist threat. Kennedy felt he could only make so many concessions and survive politically in his first year.

South Vietnam posed another problem. Reports were that the Viet Cong controlled half of the Mekong Delta, a densely populated area. He sent Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to investigate. They came back urging him to commit US troops. Kennedy declined, saying it would be like taking a first drink. He instead turned to the concept of limited war. He looked to the Special Forces and counterinsurgency tactics with the recently developed Green Berets.

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