in short if you er ta er taking er kennedy's decision over vietnam, if he decided to do nothing, this would have been very damaging to him politically because of the declared er policy of the global containment of communism and the expectations of his domestic public that the united states would take action to defend the free world wherever the free world was challenged without much questioning about what the free world actually was, i mean the fact that er er south vietnam was run by a rather squalid dictatorship was neither here nor there  erm so erm you have to er evaluate when you're contemplating er actions of this kind what failure would mean in domestic political terms.