by David White, Bloody Victory or Bloody Stupidity? President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Johnson was reflecting the conventional wisdom of most historians and political thinkers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s who saw Appeasement in the 1930s as a mistake, but when he tried to apply this lesson to the Cold War, it served him poorly. In particular, Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency overall was a good thing for the American People. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation. Despite his campaign pledges not to widen American military involvement in Vietnam, Johnson soon increased the number of U.S. troops in that country and expanded their mission. At a post-retirement dinner in New York with McNamara, Bundy, and other former aides in attendance, LBJ accepted full responsibility. value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful Although there were contradictory reports about the engagement in the gulfabout which side did what, if anything, and whenJohnson never discussed them with the public. Moreover, the enormous financial cost of the war, reaching $25 billion in 1967, diverted money from Johnsons cherished Great Society programs and began to fuel inflation. In the 1960 campaign, Lyndon B. Johnson was elected Vice President as John F. Kennedy's running mate. Lyndon B. Johnson is one of the most consequential US presidents, responsible for passing some of the most significant pieces of legislation in modern history, including the Civil Rights Act of . However, pressurised by his closest cabinet advisers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk, along with the Head of Military Command in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, he agreed to a large-scale aerial bombing campaign against the North Operation Rolling Thunder. Each year the society also invites one of its own members to give a talk, usually at the AGM , and transcripts of these are among the works appearing here. Johnsons election as president in his own right allowed the administration to move forward in crafting a more vigorous policy toward the Communist challenge in South Vietnam. This was particularly true of his conversations with broadcast and print journalists, with whom he spoke on a regular basis. I just cant be the architect of surrender.24. But the procedural issues of these months, as important as they were and would become, were constantly being overwhelmed by the more pressing concerns of progress in the counterinsurgency. Johnson ultimately decided to support Guzmn, but only with strict assurances that his provisional government would not include any Communists and that no accommodation would be reached with the 14th of July Movement. Nevertheless, the State Departments influence in Vietnam planning was on the rise, as it had been since early 1963. With vehemence that ultimately provided fodder for the administrations harshest critics, and betraying none of these doubts and uncertainties, administration officials insisted in public that the attacks were unprovoked. In the late spring, developments closer to home offered striking parallels to the situation in Vietnam. Ibid, pp.12746. Though his . After a devastating war with the North (1950-1953) and one of the lowest living standards in the world in 1950, South Korea had by 1963 emerged from military rule and in 1965 was already beginning to see real economic gains. In time, LBJ would make his key decisions in the presence and on the advice of very few advisers, a practice that Johnson hoped would protect him from the leaks he so greatly feared would undermine his carefully crafted strategy. Such expressions of doubt and uncertainty contrasted starkly with the confidence administration officials tried to impart on their public statements. So why couldnt South Vietnam follow this model? Two days later, on the night of 4 August, the Maddox and another destroyer that had joined it, the USS C. Turner Joy, reported a new round of attacks by North Vietnamese military forces. American lives are in danger.18 With the concurrence of his national security advisers, Johnson immediately ordered four hundred U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic, a deployment he announced in a brief, televised statement from the White House theater at 8:40 p.m. that evening. Johnson sought Eisenhowers counsel not only for the value of the generals military advice but for the bipartisan cover the Republican former president could offer. What was being undertaken was essentially a war of attrition, with the hope that eventually they could kill more cadres than the enemy could replace (the body-count measure of success). The cost requirements of concurrent military campaigns in both the Dominican Republic and Vietnam were now such that the administration approached Congress for a supplemental appropriation. McNamaras arrival and report back to Johnson on 21 July began the final week of preparations that would lead to Johnsons announcement of the expanded American commitment. Like sending troops in there to Santo Domingo. 11 PopularOr Just Plain OddPresidential Pets, U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . students. The decision to introduce American combat troops to the Vietnam War in March of 1965 was the result of several months of gradual escalation by President Lyndon B. Johnson. His ability to broker agreement in Congress through his powerful personality and his single-mindedness allowed him to implement more than 90% of his Great Society legislative proposals, a truly remarkable and positive achievement. Those 3,500 soldiers were the first combat troops the United States had dispatched to South Vietnam to support the Saigon government in its effort to defeat an increasingly lethal Communist insurgency. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueller conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history. The number increased steadily over the next two years, peaking at about 550,000 in 1968. Washington was generally pleased with the turn of events and sought to bolster the Khanh regime. Citation Perhaps the most significant contribution the tapes make to our understanding of the Dominican Crisis is to show with much greater clarity the role the President himself played and the extent to which it consumed his time in the late spring of 1965.22 Fearful of another Cuba, Johnson was personally and heavily involved in managing the crisis. Lyndon Johnson. Using its own defense measures and aided by aircraft from the nearby aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, the Maddox resisted the attack and the North Vietnamese boats retreated. As secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara was an architect of the war and implicated in the lies that were the bedrock of U.S. policy. A series of meetings with civilian and military officials, including one in which LBJ heard a lone, dissenting view from Undersecretary of State George Ball, solidified Johnsons thinking about the necessity of escalating the conflict. Joseph Siracusa stated that, America developed an increasingly rigid ideological view of the world anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-leftist that came to rival that of Communism. This appears to be as true of Johnson as it was of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The working group settled on three potential policy strands: persisting with the current approach, escalating the war and striking at North Vietnam, or pursuing a strategy of graduated response. Vast numbers of African Americans still suffered from unemployment, run-down schools, and lack of adequate medical care, and many were malnourished or hungry. In a sense, Johnson was able to avoid the label he so greatly feared would be pinned to his name. But leftist sympathizers continued to press for his return, and in the spring of 1965 the situation escalated to armed uprising. LBJ then widened that circle of support by turning to Eisenhowers longtime aide General Andrew J. Goodpaster, who convened study groups on Vietnam. With the return of a Democratic majority in 1955, Johnson, age 46, became the youngest majority leader in that body's history. Never during the ten-year-long Second Indochinese war did a government emerge in Saigon worthy of the support of the people of South Vietnam. Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon In the 1930s we made our fate not by what we did but what we Americans failed to do not by action but by inaction. (2) president richard nixon negotiated a peace treaty with north vietnam. In an effort to provide greater security for these installations, Johnson sanctioned the dispatch of two Marine battalions to Danang in early March. In coming weeks and months, questions and doubts about the necessity of the military intervention grew. On 7 April, before an audience at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, LBJ outlined a program of economic aid for both South and North Vietnam, characterized by efforts to fund a $1 billion project to harness the productive power of the Mekong River. For a narrative of these events, see David Kaiser. While the attacks on Pleiku and Qui Nhon led the administration to escalate its air war against the North, they also highlighted the vulnerability of the bases that American planes would be using for the bombing campaign. Although State Department officials had maintained in October 1963 that that statistical evidence pointed not to success but to mounting troubles against the Vietcong, Pentagon officialsboth civilian and militaryhad rejected those arguments. by David White, The Japanese Occupation of China 1937-45: The Divided Opposition and its Consequences by David White, What was the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and how successful was propaganda in realising the vision of a racially exclusive society? The troops arrived on 8 March, though Johnson endorsed the deployment prior to the first strikes themselves. He came into office after the death of a popular young President and provided needed continuity and stability. All During the campaign Johnson portrayed himself as level-headed and reliable and suggested that Goldwater was a reckless extremist who might lead the country into a nuclear war. But LBJ was equally committed to winning the fight against the Communist insurgency in Vietnama fight that Kennedy had joined during his thousand days in office. Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term? Johnson opted not to respond militarily just hours before Americans would go to the polls. The subject matter may be anything from the Falklands War to medieval women, from Hugh MacDiarmid to Eamon De Valera, from Nazi feature films to Sicilian cultural history, from Bannockburn to Verdun. His decision to step away from the presidency in March 1968 ensured that the endgame in Vietnam did not happen on his watch. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina. To view these, click on the link titled Members' Articles. It was a political strategy that worked, and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed with minimal dissent, a striking political victory for Johnson even as the 1964 presidential campaign got under way with a vengeance. Some citizens of South Viet-Nam at times, with understandable grievances, have joined in the attack on their own government. To preserve the secrecy of the mission and to protect against possible eavesdroppers on the telephone line, they adopted a kind of organic, impromptu code that sometimes served to confuse the speakers themselves.21 The Johnson-Fortas conversations from this period are replete with references to J. He frequently reached out to members of the business and journalistic communities, hoping to shape opinions as much as to receive them. As the transcripts included in this volume of taped conversations indicate, those decisions were often agonizing ones, conditioned by the perception that Vietnam was a war that he could neither abandon nor likely win. Vietnam might not have become a zone of conflict for the United States had she adhered to Franklin Roosevelts wartime opposition to the return of French colonialists and his support for independence for Indochina once the Japanese had been defeated. And once the troops started arriving, their numbers kept growing, hawkish military commanders repeatedly insisting that victory was just around the corner if only they could deploy a few more divisions. The South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. As each new American escalation met with fresh enemy response and as no end to the combat appeared in sight, the presidents public support declined steeply. Johnson interpreted his victory as an extraordinary mandate to push forward with his Great Society reforms. Both Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that brought a military junta to power in early November 1963, ending Americas reliance on its miracle man in Vietnam.4, Kennedys own assassination three weeks later laid the problems of Vietnam squarely on Johnsons desk. Together, he explained, echoing the anthem of the civil rights movement, "we shall overcome.". His report to LBJ was not a happy one, as signs pointed to a deterioration in South Vietnamese morale and an acceleration of Communist success. The present Vietnam collection does not include all of the tapes related to the Dominican intervention, but transcripts of those tapes are planned as future additions to the collection. Beginning in the mid-1960s, violence erupted in several cities, as the country suffered through long, hot summers of riots or the threat of riotsin the Watts district of Los Angeles (1965), in Cleveland, Ohio (1966), in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan (1967), in Washington, D.C. (1968), and elsewhere. But the man that misled me was Lyndon Johnson, nobody else. On 2 August, the USS Maddox, engaged in a signals intelligence collection mission for the National Security Agency (known as a Desoto patrol) off the coast of North Vietnam, reported that it was under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Johnson believed he could not ask the region to accept both the demise of Jim Crow and the loss of South Vietnam to the communists. . "We have lost the South for a generation," was spoken by a man named Lyndon B. Johnson. U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War: the Gulf of Tonkin and Escalation, 1964 In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. The Cold War was essentially fuelled by a conflict of ideology, and Johnsons ideology was strongly rooted in the past. Those pressures were rooted in fears about domestic as well as international consequences. The flag of Vietnamese nationalism had been captured by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers in the north: it would not be easily wrested from them. Lyndon Johnson. It was focussed on the 1930s appeasement of Hitler and the Containment Doctrine of Truman, and these greatly contributed to his decision to escalate the war. The North Vietnamese were gambling that the South would collapse and the Americans would have nothing to support, leaving them no option but to withdraw. The war was, however, impossible to win as Ball and Humphrey had predicted. **** David White, Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition, The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville 1705, The War of the Rebellion US Civil War Documents. These were: that America keeps her word; that the future of all south-east Asia was the issue; that our purpose is peace; and that the war was a struggle for freedom. The collection combines the originality, intellectual rigor, and scholarly Write an article and join a growing community of more than 160,500 academics and researchers from 4,573 institutions. Part 2 of 3. Thus ideological inflexibility and political self-interest snuffed out any alternative to escalation; and Johnsons pride and his domineering, machismo character led him to see any weakening of the American position in Vietnam as a personal humiliation. Having already decided to shift prosecution of the war into higher gear, the Johnson administration recognized that direct military action would require congressional approval, especially in an election year. Operating under the code name Mr. In conversation with Dick Russell, he said, I dont think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of lot less.. Press Conference, July 28, 1965. The North Vietnam Army and the underground Vietcong were free to move in and out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Instead his time in office is mostly associated with deepening American involvement in the war in Vietnam which ultimately proved futile. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor., It was for these reasons that Johnson carried out the military escalation quietly and almost clandestinely. The job, therefore, couldnt be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment. Johnson believed that if he permitted South Vietnam to fall through a conventional North Vietnamese invasion, the whole containment edifice so carefully constructed since World War II to stop the spread of communism (and the influence of the Soviet Union) would crumble. Despite Democrat control of Congress, he felt hampered by conservative elements within his own party: Those damned conservatives, they dont want to help the poor and the Negroes but theyre afraid to be against it Theyll say we have this job to do, beating the Communists. Those Tuesday Lunches would involve a changing array of attendees over the course of the next two years and, by 1967, would become an integral though unofficial part of the policymaking machinery.15. During the intense debated that occurred within the foreign policy establishment in the spring and summer of 1965, Johnson himself was frequently the leading dove. There is no media for this section. "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President." President Lyndon Johnson telling the nation on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Johnson rejected a legislative strategy that would have entailed open-ended discussion, preferring to obtain the funds under the authority Congress granted him via the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964a move, he knew, that would further ratify that authority should he need to act even more boldly in the future. specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history and He coupled that vision with rhetoric designed to highlight the administrations willingness to discuss, if not negotiate, aspects of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Instead of a nation with a unique history, South Vietnam was a political compromise, the creation of the Great Powers (the US, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United Kingdom) at the 1954 Geneva Conference. These included a more aggressive propaganda offensive as well as sabotage directed against North Vietnam.9, But those enhanced measures were unable to force a change in Hanoi or to stabilize the political scene in Saigon. As he expressed to longtime confidant Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia), LBJ understood the symbolism of sending the Marines and their likely impact on the combat role the United States was coming to play, both in reality and in the minds of the American public.16. But in February 1965 Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder, the aerial assault on North Vietnam. Johnson accepted the offer of his friend and confidant Abe Fortas to undertake a secret mission to Puerto Rico to negotiate with Bosch, someone Fortas had come to know through mutual contacts. Kennedys largesse would also extend to the broader provision of foreign aid, as his administration increased the amount of combined military and economic assistance from $223 million in FY1961 to $471 million by FY1963.2, Those outlays, however, contributed neither to greater success in the counterinsurgency nor to the stabilization of South Vietnamese politics. US Information Agency Fifty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. The size of those forces would be considerable: a total of 44 free world battalions, 34 of which would be American, totaling roughly 184,000 troopsa sizeable increase from the 70,000 then authorized for deployment to the South. Victory in the military conflict became the new administrations top priority. Particularly critical was J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who, in the wake of the crisis, took the Johnson administration to task for a lack of candor with the American public. Rotunda was created for the publication of original digital scholarship along with Johnson's strategic objective in South Vietnam, as articulated at Johns Hopkins, was the same one set forth previously by Kennedy in National Security Action Memorandum 52. Best Known For: Lyndon B. Johnson was elected vice president of the United States in 1960 and became the 36th president in 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The subsequent division of Vietnam into two zones, plus American prevention of national elections in 1956, and the coming to power in the South of the corrupt and ineffective Ngo Dinh Diem sucked America deeper into the region.