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. Both the education bills and Medicare were civil rights measures in their own right, making federal funding to schools and hospitals dependent on desegregation. 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. I cant blame a damn human. In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. Instead his time in office is mostly associated with deepening American involvement in the war in Vietnam which ultimately proved futile. So did his long time mentor and friend, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. 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. However, owing to a dogmatic commitment to conventional thinking about the Cold War and Containment, and because opponents of escalation did not speak up till too late, Johnson proceeded with the Americanization of the conflict after recognising that the South Vietnamese could never win the war on their own. 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. 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. In explaining why such a large deployment was neededit was clearly far more than was needed for the protection of the Americans remaining in the nations capital after many had already been evacuatedJohnson now offered a markedly different justification that emphasized anti-Communism over humanitarianism, saying that the United States must intervene to stop the bloodshed and to see a freely elected, non-Communist government take power.20 Privately, Johnson argued more bluntly that the intervention was necessary to prevent another Cuba. In the days following his address, a number of influential members of the American press and U.S. Congress questioned the basis for concluding that there was real risk of the Dominican Republic coming under Communist control. 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. The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. Its just the biggest damned mess that I sawWhat the hell is Vietnam worth to me?What is it worth to this country? Again and again in following years, Johnson would point to the near-unanimous passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in trying to disarm increasingly vocal critics of his administrations conduct of the war. Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term? Arnold, Fortas reported directly to Johnson by telephone. I just cant be the architect of surrender.24. Johnson announced an "unconditional war on poverty" in his first State of the Union address, in January 1964. 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. Together, he explained, echoing the anthem of the civil rights movement, "we shall overcome.". Lyndon Johnson. He advanced the Kennedy legacy, obtaining far more than Kennedy would likely have gotten out of Congress, and then won a . 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.. In between lie incidents of increasingly greater magnitude, including the decision to deploy the Marines and the shift from defensive to offensive operations. 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. . 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. 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. 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. But leftist sympathizers continued to press for his return, and in the spring of 1965 the situation escalated to armed uprising. 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. But on 3 NovemberElection Dayhe created an interagency task force, chaired by William P. Bundy, brother of McGeorge Bundy and chief of the State Departments Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, to review Vietnam policy. "Lyndon Johnson was a revolutionary and what he let loose in this country was a true revolution." Johnson was "the man who fundamentally reshaped the role of government in the United States," says historian David Bennett of Syracuse University. 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. The North Vietnam Army and the underground Vietcong were free to move in and out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. SOURCE: Lyndon B. Johnson, "Peace Without Conquest." Address at Johns Hopkins University, April 6, 1905. Johnson also repeatedly referred to the legal basis for escalation, citing SEATO obligations, the Geneva Accords, the UN Charter, Eisenhowers commitment to South Vietnam in 1954 and Kennedys in 1961. In the 1960 campaign, Lyndon B. Johnson was elected Vice President as John F. Kennedy's running mate. 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. In 1970 he reflected: I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. 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. The Cold War was essentially fuelled by a conflict of ideology, and Johnsons ideology was strongly rooted in the past. 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. 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. 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. I think everybodys going to think, were landing the Marines, were off to battle., President Lyndon B. Johnson, 6 March 19651. Woods, Conflicted Hegemon: LBJ and the Dominican Republic,. Nevertheless, it remained dissatisfied with progress in counterinsurgency, leading Secretary of Defense McNamara to undertake a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March 1964. 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. by David White, Chroniclers, Detectives or Judges Just What Are Historians? 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. Johnson opted not to respond militarily just hours before Americans would go to the polls. His decision to step away from the presidency in March 1968 ensured that the endgame in Vietnam did not happen on his watch. Announcing that the four hundred Marines had already landed in Santo Domingo, he said that that the Dominican government was no longer able to guarantee the safety of Americans and other foreign nationals in the country and that he had therefore ordered in the Marines to protect American lives.19. He came into office after the death of a popular young President and provided needed continuity and stability. 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. 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. Elected to the presidency in December 1962, Bosch had proved popular with the general population. From late April through June 1965, President Johnson spent more time dealing with the Dominican Crisis than any other issue.17 On the afternoon of 28 April 1965, while meeting with his senior national security advisers on the problem of Vietnam, Johnson was handed an urgent cable from the U.S. ambassador in Santo Domingo, W. Tapley Bennett Jr., warning that the conflict between rebels and the military-backed junta was about to get violent, especially now that the military had split into two factions, one of which was starting to arm the populace. by David White, Medical Mayhem in the US Civil War? Vast numbers of African Americans still suffered from unemployment, run-down schools, and lack of adequate medical care, and many were malnourished or hungry. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation. 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. (3) congress wanted to reassert its right to authorize military action. Johnson had chosen to keep on Kennedys foreign policy team McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The first phase began on 14 December with Operation Barrel Rollthe bombing of supply lines in Laos.13. This is a different kind of war. The plan envisioned a series of measures, of gradually increasing military intensity, that American forces would apply to bolster morale in Saigon, attack the Vietcong in South Vietnam, and pressure Hanoi into ending its aid of the Communist insurgency. And there must be no such failure in the 1960s. Westmorelands request prompted Johnson to convene one of the more significant of these study groups that emerged during the war, and one that Johnson would return to at key points later in the conflict. 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. Johnson, a southerner himself, worked to persuade congressmen and senators from the former Confederacy to acquiesce in, if not actively support, passage of these measures. 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. Perhaps the most important of those informal advisers was Dwight D. Eisenhower. 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. 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). 518. Two days after his first order sending in the Marines, Johnson again went on television to announce a rapid escalation in the U.S. military intervention that, within three weeks, would have approximately thirty thousand U.S. troops in the island nation. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation US, Inc. If I left the woman I really loved the Great Society in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe. The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson began on November 22, . Statement by the President Upon Ordering Troops Into the Dominican Republic, 28 April 1965. 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. Gender Spheres and Circles of Power: How American Women Won the Vote by David White, Gruppe 47 and the Post-WWII German Literary World, Products Which Changed the World Sugar and Oil, Hamish Henderson and the Spanish Connection by Mario Relich, Is Donald Trump a Jacksonian? 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. And I dont want any of them to take credit for it.23. Katherine Young/Getty Images. Critics accused the Johnson administration of overreacting and lending too much credence to unsubstantiated claims of strong Communist influence amongst the rebel factions. His extraordinarily slim margin of victory87 votes out of 988,000 votes castearned him the nickname "Landslide Lyndon." He remained in the Senate for 12 years, becoming Democratic whip in 1951 and minority leader in 1953. 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. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/. Lyndon Johnson. rights reserved. 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. "Johnson was a man with great political skills, and it was through him that the nation made its most significant attempt to expand the American welfare state.". Balls arguments about the many challenges the United States faced in Vietnam were far outweighed by the many pressures Johnson believed were weighing on him to make that commitment. I don't always know whats right. strives to apply the lessons of history to the nations most pressing contemporary As he would say to U.S. 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. In the late spring, developments closer to home offered striking parallels to the situation in Vietnam. 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. 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 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. He risked his own career for the good of the people in the United States. But there aint no daylight in Vietnam. 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 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. Start filling in the gaps now. Many believed that it was too bloody of a war, with no reward for the loses. 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. 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. Communist China made it clear that it would not permit an invasion of North Vietnam. Distinguished Professor, John A. Cooper Professor of History, University of Arkansas. Nor would this be all; Westmoreland regarded these forces as necessary merely to blunt the Communists current monsoon offensive. 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. (1) president lyndon b. johnson failed to send enough troops to south vietnam. . But segregationists and red-baiters might well have blocked the civil rights achievements of the Great Society, prompting racial conflict at home that would have made Detroit seem like a picnic. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. He had been in exile in Puerto Rico since. 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. 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. 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.
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