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. Grant as secretary of war ad interim. Copyright 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. 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. Critics accused the Johnson administration of overreacting and lending too much credence to unsubstantiated claims of strong Communist influence amongst the rebel factions. Meanwhile, as Johnsons reform consensus gradually unraveled, life for the nations poor, particularly African Americans living in inner-city slums in the North, failed to show significant improvement. Within days of the attack, Johnson reportedly told State Department official George Ball that Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!11 The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the conclusion that the 4 August incident was fiction; whether it was imagined by flawed intelligence or fabricated for political ends has remained a vigorously contested issue.12. 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. by David White, Medical Mayhem in the US Civil War? 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. Original: Jun 30, 2016. 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. Over the course of the next several months, American assistance to South Vietnam would play out against a backdrop of personnel changes and political jockeying at home and in Saigon. In Santo Domingo, rebels sympathetic to the exiled liberal intellectual President Juan Bosch had launched an open, armed uprising against the military-backed junta. technological innovation designed for scholars and But leftist sympathizers continued to press for his return, and in the spring of 1965 the situation escalated to armed uprising. Limited war was a guiding principle restraining successive US presidents for fear of triggering Chinese or Russian intervention as had happened in Korea in 1950. Many believed that it was too bloody of a war, with no reward for the loses. newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social by David White, Bloody Victory or Bloody Stupidity? However, Americas traditional anti-colonial foreign policy stance was swiftly superseded by fears of Communist expansionism and the onset of the Cold War. Specifically, he had removed from office Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war whom the act was largely designed to protect. May 12 Lyndon B. Johnson visits South Vietnam Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon during his tour of Asian countries. In documenting those private uncertainties, the Dominican Crisis tapes share characteristics with the tapes of what became a much larger and more serious crisis where U.S. intervention was simultaneously and rapidly escalating: Vietnam. 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. Statement by the President Upon Ordering Troops Into the Dominican Republic, 28 April 1965. He came into office after the death of a popular young President and provided needed continuity and stability. 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. Many more would be required to regain the initiative and then to mount the win phase of the conflict. 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. All signs were now pointing to a situation that was more dire than the one Kennedy had confronted.7, Or so it seemed. There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . 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. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive. 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. 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. Arnold, Fortas reported directly to Johnson by telephone. When Republican supporters of Goldwater declared, In your heart, you know hes right, Democrats responded by saying, In your heart, you know he might. Goldwaters remark to a reporter that, if he could, he would drop a low-yield atomic bomb on Chinese supply lines in Vietnam did nothing to reassure voters. 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. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation. . See Conversation WH6505-29-7812, 7813, 7814, 7815. by David White, Chroniclers, Detectives or Judges Just What Are Historians? 450 Words2 Pages. 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. 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. 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. Eisenhower authorised massive aid programs which merely made the country more corrupt and dependent on subsidies, and sustained a large ineffectual army whose violent and ham-fisted activities contributed to a guerrilla insurrection waged by the southern Vietcong and supported by the Communist North. Liberal. . 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. 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. Comprised of figures from the business, scientific, academic, and diplomatic communities, as well as both Democrats and Republicans, these wise men came to Washington in July to meet with senior civilian and military officials, as well as with Johnson himself. 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. However, those same factors facilitated his disastrous escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and it is for this that he is largely remembered. 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. He had been vice president for 1,036 days when he succeeded to the presidency. 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. On November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson was sworn in as the 36th. 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. 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. 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. 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. The troops arrived on 8 March, though Johnson endorsed the deployment prior to the first strikes themselves. 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 South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. 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. Start filling in the gaps now. 1. Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. April 7, 1965 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. 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. 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. if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. Johnson was born in 1908 in Stonewall, Texas, as the oldest of five children. 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. this isa terrible thing that were getting ready to do. 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. students. On election day Johnson defeated Goldwater easily, receiving more than 61 percent of the popular vote, the largest percentage ever for a presidential election; the vote in the electoral college was 486 to 52. 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. "We have lost the South for a generation," was spoken by a man named Lyndon B. Johnson. 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. The first phase began on 14 December with Operation Barrel Rollthe bombing of supply lines in Laos.13. Katherine Young/Getty Images. 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. In the spring and summer of 1965 Johnson was laboring to get through Congress some of the most controversial of his Great Society programs: the Voting Rights Act, federal aid to education, and Medicare, among others. Nevertheless, it remained dissatisfied with progress in counterinsurgency, leading Secretary of Defense McNamara to undertake a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March 1964. 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. The onset of that American war in Vietnam, which was at its most violent between 1965 and 1973, is the subject of these annotated transcripts, made from the recordings President Lyndon B. Johnson taped in secret during his time in the White House. 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. 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. 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. Lyndon B. Johnson, also referred to as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States of America from 1963-1969. I cant blame a damn human. In a sense, Johnson was able to avoid the label he so greatly feared would be pinned to his name. Diems effort to construct strategic hamletsa program run by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhuended up alienating increasing numbers of South Vietnamese, arguably creating more recruits for the Communists instead of isolating them as the program had intended. As his popularity sank to new lows in 1967, Johnson was confronted by demonstrations almost everywhere he went. George Herring describes Johnson as a product of the hinterland, parochial, strongly nationalistic, deeply concerned about honor and reputation, suspicious of other peoples and nations and especially of international institutions.. "The. By President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was this pre-existing situation, where maintenance of the regime in South Vietnam had been elevated to symbolic political and ideological importance, which Johnson inherited upon Kennedys assassination in late 1963. Lyndon Johnson. The president responded by appointing a special panel to report on the crisis, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which concluded that the country was in danger of dividing into two societiesone white, one Black, separate and unequal., Examine President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legislation and handling of the Vietnam War, Analyze the effects of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed under the Lyndon Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. 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. 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. 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. 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. Their mission was to protect an air base the Americans were using for a series of bombing raids they had recently conducted on North Vietnam, which had been supplying the insurgents with ever larger amounts of military aid. 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. Detail from "The Conquest of Siberia" (1895) by Vasily Surikov. I have nothing in the world I want except to do what I believe to be right. 794-803. The presence of several policy options, however, did not translate into freewheeling discussions with the President over the relative merits of numerous strategies. Escalation was achieved through use of the Congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 which empowered the president to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.. 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. Lyndon Johnson's presidency began and ended with tragedy. 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). In an effort to provide greater security for these installations, Johnson sanctioned the dispatch of two Marine battalions to Danang in early March. "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. Instead his time in office is mostly associated with deepening American involvement in the war in Vietnam which ultimately proved futile. Why did Lyndon B. Johnson get impeached? David Coleman, former Associate Professor and former Chair, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Marc Selverstone, Associate Professor and Chair, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia, I guess weve got no choice, but it scares the death out of me. 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. 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. 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. Original Vietnam War Personal & Field Gear, Original WW II US Field Gear & Equipment, Original WW II British Hats & Helmets; Additional site navigation. Lyndon Johnson could have been remembered as one of the most outstanding of American presidents. 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 also dispatched another trusted aide, State Department official Thomas Mann, to Santo Domingo and, later, his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. They were unanimous and vehement in their advice to stay the course in Vietnam (although McNamara would very publicly do a mea culpa years later.). 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.