Reread Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" earlier this year, and it's still the definitive story of how, as you sum it up, we ended up supporting the wrong side. It was a terrible blunder to weigh in on the side of colonialism instead of supporting national liberation movements. Even if they did sometimes have funny economic ideas, the kind of thing that's attractive in an agrarian society and leads to reform, not of much interest in "advanced" industrialized societies.

I think once again we see the heavy hand of "capitalist interests" at work, a generally unconscious conspiracy of aligned interests and unquestioned worldviews among those who hold power. Kennedy saw Vietnam and the Communist North through the eyes of a wealthy capitalist; not outright hostile, even intellectually sympathetic, but blinkered by visceral class self-interest.