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. 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. Restoration of colonial rule fanned the flames of nationalism still further in Vietnam, and significantly elevated the role of the Communist element within the national resistance to the point where it dominated what had previously been a politically broad-based independence movement. Nevertheless, the State Departments influence in Vietnam planning was on the rise, as it had been since early 1963. Katherine Young/Getty Images. . 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. No amount of administrative tinkering could mask the continuing and worsening problems of political instability in Saigon and Communist success in the field. by David White, Bloody Victory or Bloody Stupidity? Much of the history of 1968 we recall now is . 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. 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. His replacement was retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, formerly military representative to President Kennedy and then, since 1962, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the signal that the United States was becoming more invested in the military outcome of the conflict could not have been clearer. 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. Out of fear of a great power confrontation with the Soviet Union, the United States fought a limited war, with the South China Sea to the east and the open borders of Laos and Cambodia to the west. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . In fact, Johnson himself grew up poor from Texas. Inside the administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball also made the case for restraint. 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. 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. Position Paper on Southeast Asia, 2 December 1964, David Humphrey, Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment,, Quoted in Randall B. 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. Having secured Congressional authorization with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Johnson launched a bombing campaign in the North, and in March 1965, dispatched 3,500 marines to South Vietnam. 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 . With this speech, Johnson laid the political groundwork for a major commitment of U.S. troops. 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. LBJ was a nation-builder. 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 November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson was sworn in as the 36th. Looking at his former defense chief and national security adviser, he said, You know, I want you fellows to know everything that went wrong in Vietnam thats being criticized, it was my decision, not yours. 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. The failure of free men in the 1930s was not of the sword but of the soul. He emphasised four factors which justified not just a presence but an escalation of American military force. specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history and On the pretext that the airfields needed for US aircraft had to be defended, the number of ground troops increased swiftly. (3) congress wanted to reassert its right to authorize military action. 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. The U.S. general election that loomed in November altered the administrations representation in Vietnam as Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge resigned his post that June to pursue the Republican nomination for president. All signs were now pointing to a situation that was more dire than the one Kennedy had confronted.7, Or so it seemed. 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 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. 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. Why didnt Lyndon B. Johnson seek another term as president? He risked his own career for the good of the people in the United States. In an effort to achieve consensus about security requirements for those troops, key personnel undertook a review in Honolulu on 20 April. 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. Many believed that it was too bloody of a war, with no reward for the loses. B. (Juan Bosch), bang-bangs (the military), the baseball players (a reduction from an earlier reference to those fellows who play left field on the baseball team, or the leftist rebels), and other references, some thinly veiled and some veiled to the extent that they are now almost completely obscured. Those pressures were rooted in fears about domestic as well as international consequences. 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. Compounding the new administrations problems was the realization that earlier assumptions about progress in the war were ill-founded. 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. 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. 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. Lyndon Johnson. 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. I did that! Johnson had chosen to keep on Kennedys foreign policy team McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Charges of cronyism and corruption had dogged the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem for years, sparking public condemnation of his rule as well as successive efforts at toppling his regime. March 23, 2018. Lyndon Johnson. 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. Furthermore, Johnson was acutely aware that he was JFKs successor. 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. Like other major decisions he made during the escalatory process, it was not one Johnson came to without a great deal of anxiety. The CIA predicted that if Washington and its allies did not act, South Vietnam would fall within the year. 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. 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. $17.93 . He had been in exile in Puerto Rico since. By mid-March, therefore, Johnson began to consider additional proposals for expanding the American combat presence in South Vietnam. "Why We Are in Vietnam". Theres not a bit.25 Coming on the eve of Johnsons dispatch of the Marines to Vietnam, it was not a promising way to begin a war. 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. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation. 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. 1. In an effort to provide greater security for these installations, Johnson sanctioned the dispatch of two Marine battalions to Danang in early March. There is no media for this section. Its just the biggest damned mess that I sawWhat the hell is Vietnam worth to me?What is it worth to this country? 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. 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. This is a different kind of war. 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. The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. Lyndon Johnson. By December, with attacks increasing in the countryside, a look back at those earlier metrics revealed that State Department analyses were indeed on the mark.8, Yet Johnson did not need that retrospective appraisal to launch a more vigorous campaign against the Communists, for his first impulse as the new president was to shift the war into higher gear. Collection. The American commitment to South Vietnam was one of Kennedys legacies. 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. 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. From the above two quotations, there seems little doubt that Johnson genuinely believed there was a threat of world domination by Communism, a very mainstream Cold-War view among American politicians from the late 1940s to the 1980s. In a sense, Johnson was able to avoid the label he so greatly feared would be pinned to his name. 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. Detail from "The Conquest of Siberia" (1895) by Vasily Surikov. 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. . 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. LBJ then widened that circle of support by turning to Eisenhowers longtime aide General Andrew J. Goodpaster, who convened study groups on Vietnam. 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? Johnson saw no evidence that President Kennedy had intended to deescalate. Sometimes I take other people's judgments, and I get misled. As he would say to U.S. In late January 1964, General Nguyen Khanh overthrew the ruling junta, allegedly to prevent Diems successors from pursuing the neutralization of South Vietnam. 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. Even after winning the 1964 presidential election, Johnson still felt he had to tread carefully with public opinion. Meeting with his top civilian advisers on Vietnam, LBJ told them to forget about the social, economic, and political reforms that Kennedy had stressed. 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. I cant blame a damn human. Elected to the presidency in December 1962, Bosch had proved popular with the general population.