Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 7, 2016

The Krulak Mendenhall mission was an American fact-finding expedition sent by President Kennedy's administration to South Vietnam in 1963. It investigated the progress of the war by the South Vietnamese regime and their US military advisers against the Viet Cong insurgency. The mission was led by Victor Krulak (pictured), a major general in the Marine Corps, and Joseph Mendenhall, a senior Foreign Service officer experienced in Vietnamese affairs. The four-day whirlwind trip came in the wake of increasingly strained relations between the United States and South Vietnam. In their submissions Krulak presented an optimistic report on the progress of the war, but Mendenhall presented a bleak picture of military failure and public discontent. Krulak said that the Vietnamese soldiers' efforts in the field would not be affected by the public's unease with President Ngô Đình Diệm's policies. Mendenhall concluded that those policies increased the possibility of religious civil war and led the South Vietnamese to believe that their quality of life would improve under the Viet Cong. The contradictory reports prompted Kennedy to ask, "You two did visit the same country, didn't you?"