lyndon b johnson why we are in vietnam

794-803. 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. 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. Sometimes I take other people's judgments, and I get misled. 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. (1) president lyndon b. johnson failed to send enough troops to south vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Katherine Young/Getty Images. American public opinion was willing to go along with whatever course of action the administration chose, Johnsons standing being so high at this point. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive. There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. By Kent Germany. 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. Copyright 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. As he lamented to Senator Russell, A man can fight . This was particularly true of his conversations with broadcast and print journalists, with whom he spoke on a regular basis. 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. We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else. His Great Society programs to tackle poverty and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act were socially progressive measures carried out during a period of economic expansion and increased prosperity. Johnson also dispatched another trusted aide, State Department official Thomas Mann, to Santo Domingo and, later, his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. Image Prior to finalizing any decision to commit those forces, however, Johnson sent Secretary of Defense McNamara to Saigon for discussions with Westmoreland and his aides. Instead his time in office is mostly associated with deepening American involvement in the war in Vietnam which ultimately proved futile. The Diem coup had unleashed a wave of instability below the seventeenth parallel that Communist forces were only too eager to exploit. Lyndon B. Johnson, Tet Offensive champagnecrow196. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . The spate of endless coups and governmental shake-ups vexed Johnson, who wondered how the South Vietnamese would ever mount the necessary resolve to stanch the Communists in the countryside when they were so absorbed with their internal bickering in Saigon. 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." Lyndon B. Johnson US President & First Lady Collectibles, Lyndon Johnson 1964 US Presidential Candidate Collectibles, Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-69 Term in Office US President & First Lady Collectibles, Photograph Collectible Vintage Pin Ups Pre-1970, Historic & Vintage Daguerreotype Photographic Images, WW2 German Photograph, In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. July 28 - President Johnson announces further deployment of U.S. military forces to Vietnam, raising U.S. presence there to 125,000 men and increasing the monthly draft call to 35,000. Out of that process came Johnsons decision to expand the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam to eighty-two thousand. Why didnt Lyndon B. Johnson seek another term as president? Johnsons consideration of the Westmoreland proposal, which promised a drastic expansion of the American commitment, led him to seek the counsel of outside advisers as well as a final review with senior officials of his options in Vietnam. In Santo Domingo, rebels sympathetic to the exiled liberal intellectual President Juan Bosch had launched an open, armed uprising against the military-backed junta. Beginning in 1965, student demonstrations grew larger and more frequent and helped to stimulate resistance to the draft. 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. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 160,500 academics and researchers from 4,573 institutions. Only that way, he argued, could he sell the compromise to powerful members of Congress. 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. 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? It pained him to hear protesters, especially studentswho he thought would venerate him for his progressive social agendachanting, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? To avoid the demonstrations, he eventually restricted his travels, becoming a virtual prisoner in the White House. American casualties gradually mounted, reaching nearly 500 a week by the end of 1967. In late January 1964, General Nguyen Khanh overthrew the ruling junta, allegedly to prevent Diems successors from pursuing the neutralization of South Vietnam. **** 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 forces were, however, largely used for search-and-destroy missions because the administration was receiving reports that the South was about to collapse, a concern that grew when it was realised that the air offensive was making little impact on the war in the South. Lyndon Johnson. specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history and Specifically, he had removed from office Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war whom the act was largely designed to protect. I did that! In April 1964 US intelligence reported that substantial numbers of regular North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He emphasised four factors which justified not just a presence but an escalation of American military force. 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. 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. Like sending troops in there to Santo Domingo. Expectations of prosperity arising from the promise of the Great Society failed to materialize, and discontent and alienation grew accordingly, fed in part by a surge in African American political radicalism and calls for Black power. (4) military leaders demanded limits on presidential . 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. The bombing, however, was failing to move Hanoi or the Vietcong in any significant way. 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. He references the song "We Shall Overcome", . The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that 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. LBJ was a nation-builder. 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. It meant in particular that America could never send ground troops into the North. 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. 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. But in February 1965 Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder, the aerial assault on North Vietnam. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation. 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. McNamara thus recommended, and Johnson endorsed, a more vigorous program of U.S. military and economic support for South Vietnam.10. 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. Start filling in the gaps now. Why did Lyndon B. Johnson get impeached? The troops arrived on 8 March, though Johnson endorsed the deployment prior to the first strikes themselves. Nevertheless, the State Departments influence in Vietnam planning was on the rise, as it had been since early 1963. Yet Johnson was a genuine social reformer who wished to raise Americans out of poverty, expand education, provide enhanced welfare and free medical care, tackle urban renewal, preserve and protect the environment and end racial discrimination the Great Society vision. 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. On 8 March 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines waded ashore on the beaches at Danang. In an effort to provide greater security for these installations, Johnson sanctioned the dispatch of two Marine battalions to Danang in early March. 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. There are no easy choices when you are chief executive of a nation which is both a democracy and the most powerful nation on earth. When Kennedy entered office, he too supported the unpopular regime, increasing substantially the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam. Political considerations that stretched back to the loss of China episode of the late 1940s and early 1950s led Johnson, as a Democratic, to fear a replay of that right-wing backlash should the Communists prevail in South Vietnam. 11 PopularOr Just Plain OddPresidential Pets, U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz. 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. You are very welcome to turn up on the night of the talks at our permanent venue, the Royal Scots Club in Abercromby Place in central Edinburgh. 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. For a narrative of these events, see David Kaiser. Civilian rule in Saigon came to an end in mid-June as the Young Turksmilitary officials including Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Kyrose to prominence at the head of a new ruling war cabinet. The Cold War was essentially fuelled by a conflict of ideology, and Johnsons ideology was strongly rooted in the past. President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded American air operations in August 1964, when he authorized retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam following a reported attack on U.S. warships in. They recommended that LBJ give Westmoreland what he needed, advice that General Eisenhower had also communicated to the White House back in June. In late 1963 the North Vietnamese greatly increased supplies of weapons and equipment to the Vietcong and infiltrated regular army units into the South. This raised the problem of balancing the demands, both political and financial, of his cherished domestic program and his deep ideological hostility to Communism. The bombing of North Vietnamese cities was not announced to the press, the soaring military costs were met by borrowing rather than tax increases, and most significantly no Congressional approval was sought for the dramatic increases in troop numbers. 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. He had been in exile in Puerto Rico since. 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. . Fifty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. 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. 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. 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. All signs were now pointing to a situation that was more dire than the one Kennedy had confronted.7, Or so it seemed. value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful While the Great Society policies dovetailed well with New Deal policies, Johnson misinterpreted Roosevelts foreign policy, reading back into the 1930s an interventionist course of action that Roosevelt only adopted in 1941. 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. In February 1965, after an attack by Viet Cong guerrillas on an U.S. military base in Pleiku, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of massive bombing raids on North Vietnam intended to cut supply lines to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters in the South; he also dispatched 3,500 Marines to protect the border city of Da Nang. 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). No interest on the part of the North Vietnamese was forthcoming. It was in this context that General Westmoreland asked Washington in early June for a drastically expanded U.S. military effort to stave off a Communist victory in South Vietnam. Department of State Bulletin, April 26, 1965. We are there because we have a promise to keep. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a coup in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt. The job, therefore, couldnt be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment. The Vietnam war was a very controversial war. 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. He frequently reached out to members of the business and journalistic communities, hoping to shape opinions as much as to receive them. Fifty thousand additional troops were sent in July, and by the end of the year the number of military personnel in the country had reached 180,000. Hoping to apply more pressure on the Communists, the administration began to implement a series of tactics it had adopted in principle within the first week of Johnsons presidency. The first phase began on 14 December with Operation Barrel Rollthe bombing of supply lines in Laos.13. In response, President Johnson ordered retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and asked Congress to sanction any further action he might take to deter Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. 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. 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. And like most politicians he routinely asserted that everything was done for principled non-self-regarding reasons: Why are we in South Vietnam? Many more would be required to regain the initiative and then to mount the win phase of the conflict. 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. 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. 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. By President Lyndon B. Johnson. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . Even after winning the 1964 presidential election, Johnson still felt he had to tread carefully with public opinion. "Why We Are in Vietnam". Although not a Communist himself, Bosch had raised the ire of the Dominican military through his accommodation with Communist factions and been forced out in a September 1963 coup. He considered the depth and extent of poverty in the country (nearly 20 percent of Americans at the time were poor) to be a national disgrace that merited a national response. He advanced the Kennedy legacy, obtaining far more than Kennedy would likely have gotten out of Congress, and then won a . US Information Agency Fifty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. South Vietnam would have fallen to the communists much sooner than it did, saving thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. The emergence of the William Bundy task force highlights a key dimension of the administrations policymaking process during this period. 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. Its just the biggest damned mess that I sawWhat the hell is Vietnam worth to me?What is it worth to this country? 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. Speakers have included eminent academics, published authors, documentary producers, historical novelists, postgraduate researchers and Open History Society members. I have nothing in the world I want except to do what I believe to be right. Worries about the credibility of the U.S. commitment to Americas friends around the world also led Johnson to support Saigon, even when some of those friends had questioned the wisdom of that commitment. 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. Convinced that Bosch was using and encouraging Communist allies, particularly those aided and abetted by the Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro, the reactionary military-backed junta sought to crack down on pro-Bosch groups, moves that only served to provoke the Dominican population to take their activism to the streets. 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. 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. North and South Vietnamese Communists declined to meet Johnson on his terms, one of numerous instances over the following three years in which the parties failed to find even a modicum of common ground.

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