$17.93 . 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. I don't always know whats right. This was particularly true of his conversations with broadcast and print journalists, with whom he spoke on a regular basis. Both the education bills and Medicare were civil rights measures in their own right, making federal funding to schools and hospitals dependent on desegregation. Collection. And as they do on so many other topics, the tapes reveal the uncertainty, flawed information, and doubts to which Johnson himself was frequently prone. . Such expressions of doubt and uncertainty contrasted starkly with the confidence administration officials tried to impart on their public statements. 1. The Vietnam war was a very controversial war. With more than a thousand Americans seeking refuge in one of the citys largest luxury hotels and the situation on the street deteriorating to the point of an evacuation becoming necessary, Bennetts cable said that he and his colleagues were unanimously of opinion that time has come to land the marines. How Did Lyndon B Johnson Contribute To The Civil Rights Movement. Get the detailed answer: Why did America get involved in the Vietnam conflict? . Johnson took the approach that dictatorships should not be appeased, declaring in July 1965: If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection. by David White, Medical Mayhem in the US Civil War? Fifty years ago, when the 89th Congress convened in January 1965 following Johnson's landslide election victory against Sen. Barry Goldwater, LBJ was at the height of his political power. This coincided with the assassination of Diem (with American collusion) and subsequent chaos in the South Vietnamese government, administration and army. My father was 17 years old when LBJ gave this speech, less than 18 months later my dad drops out of high school and enlists in the US Army and goes to war with the 101st Airborne Division to. 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. He was an overbearing man who tolerated no dissent, and though he appears to have been poorly advised, he chose who to listen to, was secretive in his decision-making, and was overly concerned with how the USA and he himself appeared to others. 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. Johnson himself confessed his own doubts and uncertainties about the wisdom of sending U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic to his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, at the peak of the deployment. He advanced the Kennedy legacy, obtaining far more than Kennedy would likely have gotten out of Congress, and then won a . Only an increased American presence on the ground, Westmoreland believed, in which U.S. forces engaged the Communists directly, could avert certain military and political defeat. The first phase began on 14 December with Operation Barrel Rollthe bombing of supply lines in Laos.13. Fortas and Mann supported different paths to restoring stable government to the Dominican Republic, forcing Johnson to choose between divided opinion from his advisers. In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. His decision to step away from the presidency in March 1968 ensured that the endgame in Vietnam did not happen on his watch. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . He even goes on to say that, had the U.S. not intervened, Communism would dominate Southeast Asia and bring the world closer to a Third World War. By Andrew Glass. His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. 450 Words2 Pages. No amount of administrative tinkering could mask the continuing and worsening problems of political instability in Saigon and Communist success in the field. April 7, 1965 The third speech was given during a press conference in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, regarding the rationale for keeping America in the conflict in Vietnam. However, those same factors facilitated his disastrous escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and it is for this that he is largely remembered. The CIA predicted that if Washington and its allies did not act, South Vietnam would fall within the year. Kennedy was essentially continuing the anti-Communist containment policy of his predecessors, but he was also impelled by a sense that he had been repeatedly bested by the more experienced Khrushchev and needed to make a stand somewhere. Unhappy with U.S. complicity in the Saigon coup yet unwilling to deviate from Kennedys approach to the conflict, Johnson vowed not to lose the war. Of all the episodes of the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the episodes of 2 and 4 August 1964 have proved among the most controversial and contentious. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation. Critics accused the Johnson administration of overreacting and lending too much credence to unsubstantiated claims of strong Communist influence amongst the rebel factions. Lyndon Johnson could have been remembered as one of the most outstanding of American presidents. Broad planning for the war often took place on an interagency basis and frequently at levels removed from those of the administrations most senior officials. US Information Agency Fifty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. 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. 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. Lyndon Johnson could have been remembered as one of the most outstanding of American presidents. Within days of the Pleiku/Holloway attacks, as well as the subsequent assault on Qui Nhon (in which twenty-three Americans were killed and twenty-one were wounded), LBJ signed off on a program of sustained bombing of North Vietnam that, except for a handful of pauses, would last for the remainder of his presidency. Raids by the local Communistsdubbed the Vietcong, or VC, by Diemhad picked up in frequency and intensity in the weeks following Diems ouster. 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? 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. The job, therefore, couldnt be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment. The deterioration of the South Vietnamese position, therefore, led Johnson to consider even more decisive action. 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. 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. Bombing had neither compelled Hanoi to halt its support of the Vietcong nor was it disrupting the flow of supplies to the insurgents; likewise, it had neither bolstered morale in the South nor stiffened Saigons willingness to fight. When Johnson assumed . 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. All In early August 1964, after North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin near the coast of North Vietnam without provocation, Johnson ordered retaliatory bombing raids on North Vietnamese naval installations and, in a televised address to the nation, proclaimed, We still seek no wider war. Two days later, at Johnsons request, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. In effect, the measure granted Johnson the constitutional authority to conduct a war in Vietnam without a formal declaration from Congress. Department of State Bulletin, April 26, 1965. Johnson interpreted his victory as an extraordinary mandate to push forward with his Great Society reforms. Lyndon B. Johnson, Why We Are in Vietnam, 1965 By the summer of 1964 the Johnson Administration had already made secret plans to escalate the American military presence in . . . So did his long time mentor and friend, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Johnson opted not to respond militarily just hours before Americans would go to the polls. He began his career as a teacher. A half-century has passed since President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned Americans by announcing, in a televised address on March 31, 1968, that he was drastically reducing the bombing of North Vietnam . Lyndon B. Johnson's tenure as the 36th president of the United States began on November 22, 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy and ended on January 20, 1969. 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. He had been in exile in Puerto Rico since. 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. 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. Those few more divisions eventually reached 550,000 men by 1968. 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. As the bombers flew, the commitment expanded, and criticism of those policies mounted, Johnson sought to convince the American public, international opinion, and even the North Vietnamese that the United States had more to offer than guns and bombs. In fact, Johnson himself grew up poor from Texas. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge within two days of becoming president, I will not lose in Vietnam. That personal stake in the outcome of the war remained a theme throughout his presidency, perhaps best embodied by his remark to Senator Eugene McCarthy in February 1966: I know we oughtnt to be there, but I cant get out, Johnson maintained. 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. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation US, Inc. But leftist sympathizers continued to press for his return, and in the spring of 1965 the situation escalated to armed uprising. 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. newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social In late January 1964, General Nguyen Khanh overthrew the ruling junta, allegedly to prevent Diems successors from pursuing the neutralization of South Vietnam. Nevertheless, it remained dissatisfied with progress in counterinsurgency, leading Secretary of Defense McNamara to undertake a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March 1964. Johnson was reluctant to intervene in South East Asia but once strategic and politic exigencies seemd to demand it, he began to develop a not unreasonable vision for the future of South Vietnam, one that helped him stay the course. Johnsons actions, both domestically and internationally, arose from his early political experiences as a New Deal Democrat. He was following the political interpretation and policy direction known as Containment which had first been suggested by George Kennan and adopted by Harry Truman in 1947. 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. students. Following weeks of intensive discussion, Johnson endorsed the third optionOption C in the administrations parlanceallowing the task force to flesh out its implementation. It is clear that Johnson was reluctant to become involved in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson. I did that! Shortly after, he vented to adviser McGeorge Bundy in a now familiar monologue: I dont think its [South Vietnam] worth fighting for and I dont think that we can get out. 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. Johnson had a choice over his course of action and was not as constrained by circumstances as is sometimes suggested, the crucial period when this was most possible being late 1963 to early 1965. The primary charge against Johnson was that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress in March 1867 over Johnson's veto. However, during Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, he strongly believed that there was a need to help South Vietnam become independent. Home. 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. By 1 April, he had agreed to augment the 8 March deployment with two more Marine battalions; he also changed their role from that of static base security to active defense, and soon allowed preparatory work to go forward on plans for stationing many more troops in Vietnam. 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. His dispatch of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to South Vietnam in February 1965 sought to gauge the need for an expanded program of bombing that the interdepartmental review had envisioned back in November and December. He references the song "We Shall Overcome", . The circumstances of Johnsons ascendance to the Oval Office left him little choice but to implement several unrealized Kennedy initiatives, particularly in the fields of economic policy and civil rights. sciences. Why didnt Lyndon B. Johnson seek another term as president? In fact, it was those advisers who would play an increasingly important role in planning for Vietnam, relegating the interagency approachwhich never went awayto a level of secondary importance within the policymaking process. 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. As real-time information flowed in to the Pentagon from the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy, the story became more and more confused, and as frustratingly incomplete and often contradictory reports flowed into Washington, several high-ranking military and civilian officials became suspicious of the 4 August incident, questioning whether the attack was real or imagined. In Santo Domingo, rebels sympathetic to the exiled liberal intellectual President Juan Bosch had launched an open, armed uprising against the military-backed junta. Bundys presence in Vietnam at the time of the Communist raids on Camp Holloway and Pleiku in early Februarywhich resulted in the death of nine Americansprovided additional justification for the more engaged policy the administration had been preparing. Liberal. At the center of these events stands President Lyndon B. Johnson, who inherited the White House following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 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). Even after winning the 1964 presidential election, Johnson still felt he had to tread carefully with public opinion. When Kennedy entered office, he too supported the unpopular regime, increasing substantially the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam. 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. The American commitment to South Vietnam was one of Kennedys legacies. by Dr David White, Alasdair Gray on the Declaration of Arbroath: A Personal View, The Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway and Sunday Travel by Dr John McGregor, Monitoring Morale: The History of Home Intelligence 1939-1944 by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang, How Churchills Mind Worked by Paul Addison, Red Herrings & Codswallop: Fishing History Pre-Brexit by Pouca McFeilimidh, Stalin, the Red Tsar? Citation History 2,000. Much of the history of 1968 we recall now is . Lyndon B. Johnson was the 36th president of the United States and was sworn into office following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Johnson abhorred the Kennedy practice of debating such questions in open session, preferring a consensus engineered prior to his meetings with top aides.14 Two of those senior officials, Secretary of Defense McNamara and Secretary of State Rusk, would prove increasingly important to Johnson over the course of the war, with McNamara playing the lead role in the escalatory phase of the conflict. For the White House, which of the two to back was not immediately clear; both had their supporters within the administration and in the U.S. Congress. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam We want nothing for ourselves. 518. While Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had committed significant American resources to counter the Communist-led Viet Minh in its struggle against France following the Second World War, it was Kennedy who had deepened and expanded that commitment, increasing the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam from just under seven hundred in 1961 to over sixteen thousand by the fall of 1963. 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. 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.. This raised the problem of balancing the demands, both political and financial, of his cherished domestic program and his deep ideological hostility to Communism. He coupled that vision with rhetoric designed to highlight the administrations willingness to discuss, if not negotiate, aspects of the conflict in Southeast Asia. By Kent Germany. By September, the Dominicans had agreed to a compromise. (2) president richard nixon negotiated a peace treaty with north vietnam. While senior military and civilian officials differed on what they regarded as the benefits of this programcode-named Operation Rolling Thunderall of them hoped that the bombing, which began on 2 March 1965, would have a salutary effect on the North Vietnamese leadership, leading Hanoi to end its support of the insurgency in South Vietnam. 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. I cant blame a damn human. For a narrative of these events, see David Kaiser. I need you more than he did, LBJ said to his national security team.6, That need was now more pressing because the counterinsurgency was deteriorating. In between lie incidents of increasingly greater magnitude, including the decision to deploy the Marines and the shift from defensive to offensive operations. One faction, which included Fortas, McGeorge Bundy, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, favored the more leftist Guzmn, while Mann and Secretary of State Dean Rusk favored Imbert. 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. The Open History Society is open to everybody and meets on the last Friday of the month between September and May to hear talks from historians and those interested in and knowledgeable about history. Nevertheless, in an effort to provide greater incentive for Hanoi to come to the bargaining table, Johnson sanctioned a limited bombing halt, code-named MAYFLOWER, for roughly one week in the middle of May. Foundation and the Presidents Office of the University of Virginia, The Miller Centers Presidential Recordings Program is funded in part by the President Lyndon B. Johnson announces that he has ordered an increase in U.S. military forces in Vietnam, from the present 75,000 to 125,000.Johnson also said that he would order additional increases if necessary. In an effort to achieve consensus about security requirements for those troops, key personnel undertook a review in Honolulu on 20 April. American public opinion was willing to go along with whatever course of action the administration chose, Johnsons standing being so high at this point. The troops arrived on 8 March, though Johnson endorsed the deployment prior to the first strikes themselves. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a coup in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt. 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. 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. 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. Further indication of that resolve came the same month with the replacement of General Paul D. Harkins as head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) with Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, who had been Harkinss deputy since January 1964 and was ten years Harkinss junior. Homework Help 3,800,000. Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term? Those officials included many of the same figures who had acquiesced in Diems removal, as the desire for continuity led him to retain Kennedys presumed objectives as well as his senior civilian and military advisers.5 Uncertainty about his own foreign policy credentials also contributed to Johnsons reliance on figures such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, all of whom had been with Kennedy since the outset of that administration. In late 1963 the North Vietnamese greatly increased supplies of weapons and equipment to the Vietcong and infiltrated regular army units into the South. The shuffling and reshuffling of military personnel also contributed to Diems troubles, further undermining the counterinsurgency; indeed, by reserving some of the Souths best troops for his own personal protection instead of sending them out to defeat the Communists, Diem contributed to the very incidenthis forcible removal from powerhe was trying to forestall.3 A poor showing against the Vietcong at the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 sparked the most probing questions to date about those personnel shifts and about the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). On 8 March 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines waded ashore on the beaches at Danang. 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. Lyndon Johnson's presidency began and ended with tragedy. From the array of figures angling for power, two leading candidates for forming a provisional government emerged: General Antonio Imbert Barreras was put forward by an influential wing of the military, while the more liberal Silvestre Antonio Guzmn Fernndez was championed by those more sympathetic to Bosch. The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that These exchanges reveal Johnsons acute sensitivity to press criticism of his Vietnam policy as he tried to reassure the electorate of his commitment to help the South Vietnamese defend themselves without conjuring up images of the United States assuming the brunt of that defense. This section is for pieces, both published and unpublished, which Open History Society members have written. Woods, Conflicted Hegemon: LBJ and the Dominican Republic,. Securing these fundsroughly $700 millionraised the question of whether to seek a congressional authorization merely for additional monies or risk a broader debate about the policy course the administration had now set for Vietnam. Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Here was a nation born under the direst of circumstances. From the incidents in the Tonkin Gulf in August 1964 to the deployment of forty-four combat troop battalions in July 1965, these months span congressional authorization for military action as well as the Americanization of the conflict. Notably, Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and one of the officials most enamored of deposing Diem, had lost his job in the State Department within the first five months of the Johnson administration. What if Johnson had heeded Humphreys advice and his own doubts? The credibility concerns of Johnson and his advisers were not limited to how the USA would be viewed if it did withdraw it would not have been seriously damaged since only Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan and South Korea backed continued American involvement it was equally the threat to their own and the Democratic partys standing. Humphrey's advice that the United States should pull back on the Vietnam War nettled Johnson . By spring of 1965, Johnson was holding impromptu lunch meetings with only a handful of senior officials on Tuesdays where they hashed out strategy. Lyndon B. Johnson, "The President's News Conference: Why Are We in Vietnam?" July 28, 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1965, Book II, pp. This was in keeping with the Containment policy originating in the Truman Doctrine, causing keen pro-war advocates such as General William Westmoreland to lament that America always had to fight with one hand tied behind her back. They recommended that LBJ give Westmoreland what he needed, advice that General Eisenhower had also communicated to the White House back in June.