Here is an excerpt from the Rolling Stone interview of Daniel Ellsberg.
He is referring to a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in October 1967:

   [Rolling Stone, 12/6/73, pp. 42-43]

   ELLSBERG:
   I'd just started my study on the McNamara papers of the 1961
   decision-making, which was the volume that I drafted. So I asked [RFK] some
   questions about Jack Kennedy's refusal to send combat troops as requested
   by Taylor, Rostow, the joint chiefs and McNamara, virtually everybody
   involved, in 1961.
   
   I asked why Kennedy had sent advisers if he wouldn't send troops.
   
   Well, Bobby said, his brother had been absolutely determined not to send
   combat troops to Vietnam; he felt that if we started sending them, our
   force would substitute for that of the Vietnamese that we were hiring,
   and we would end up doing the whole job and get into the same position
   as the French.
   
   "Well," I said, "did he really expect to succeed with the advisers since
   everybody said he wouldn't?"
   
   He said, no, probably not, but there was some chance of success, and in
   any case the decision could be made later.
   
   So I said, "Was he prepared to see the country go Communist rather than
   send combat troops?" Because that was the crucial question.
   
   He said, very carefully: "I can't say exactly what he would have done in
   the actual situation, say of '64 or '65, that Johnson was faced with,
   where that was the alternative--either send troops or let it go Communist.
   But I can say what his intention was in '61 or '62, and it was that he was
   absolutely determined not to send troops."
   
   I asked him, "Do you think that politically, he could have let it go
   Communist? What did he plan to do?"
   
   He said, his brother would have arranged "a Laotian-type solution, some
   form of coalition government with people who would ask us to leave--
   which would hold together for some period of time and sort of paper over
   our withdrawal."
   
   And that had some plausibility, because Kennedy had presided over the
   Laotian solution in '61 and '62 at a time when virtually everybody
   believed it would quickly fall apart and lead to a Communist takeover,
   which in fact it did not do. But he was clearly willing to do it in
   Vietnam. This was very significant.
   
   WENNER:
   This isn't the conventional assessment of Kennedy's role.
   
   ELLSBERG:
   It's consistent with other stuff that's come out since then, such as what
   Kenny O'Donnell says. O'Donnell was Kennedy's close friend and chief of
   staff. He says that Kennedy decided in late '62, and more strongly in
   early '63, that our position was essentially hopeless in Vietnam and that
   we should get out, but that he could not afford to close our involvement
   there before the election of '64, precisely because, as he said, "When we
   get out, whenever it is, there will be a McCarthyite attack on me and I
   will be accused of selling out the country and losing Indochina to
   Communism. After we win the election I can take that, but I can't afford
   it before the election."
   
   Now, that is far from a flattering story, because, although it shows a
   realism about Vietnam, it also shows a willingness to keep bombing the
   Vietnamese for a couple more years in order to get through the election.
   
   I said to Bobby: "What made him so smart, how could he be so clear-sighted
   about the possibility of success?" And I remember that he really burst
   out at that point saying: "But we were there; we had seen it! We were
   there together in the early Fifties, and we saw the position the French
   were in and saw what they were trying to do to the Indochinese. And my
   brother was determined early on that we would never get into that
   position."
   
   Now, all of this was very plausible to me, because I had been getting a
   feeling from reading these documents that the only men who were capable
   of visualizing the trap that Vietnam might be for us were people who
   happened to have a direct acquaintance with the French experience. George
   Ball was one. He had been a consul in this country for the French during
   that period. The others, the great majority of officials, just could not
   conceive that we could be subject to the same problems as the French;
   they couldn't think of us as colonialists, or racists, for God's sake.
   They thought of us as so much more competent and powerful than the French
   that the problem looked entirely different. But people who had actually
   known the French experience could see otherwise, and Jack Kennedy was one
   of those.
   
   I've never really referred to that interview, although it was genuine
   historical data from a participant, because I wanted to avoid being one
   of those who went around saying that he could vouch for the certainty
   that Kennedy would carry out those intentions, if he were put in a crisis.
   But I think it is true to say that Kennedy was more likely to have closed
   out, cut the losses in '64, '65, than any of the other Presidents we've
   had.
   
[see VNAM54.TXT in library 9 for a speech outlining JFK's views in the 50s]