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. Lyndon B. Johnson, also referred to as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States of America from 1963-1969. But that endgame, when it did come during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, was deeply contingent on the course that Johnson set, particularly as it flowed out of key decisions he took as president both before and after his election to office. Jungle Warfare Tactics Manual Army History 1969 Vietnam. A series of meetings with civilian and military officials, including one in which LBJ heard a lone, dissenting view from Undersecretary of State George Ball, solidified Johnsons thinking about the necessity of escalating the conflict. 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. President Lyndon B. Johnson is shown during his nationwide television broadcast from the White House on March 31, 1968. 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. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . Sometimes I take other people's judgments, and I get misled. newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social Randall B Woods does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. (2) president richard nixon negotiated a peace treaty with north vietnam. On the pretext that the airfields needed for US aircraft had to be defended, the number of ground troops increased swiftly. 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. No interest on the part of the North Vietnamese was forthcoming. 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. Just days before the vote, the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa was attacked by Communist guerrillas, killing four Americans, wounding scores of others, and destroying more than twenty-five aircraft. I think everybodys going to think, were landing the Marines, were off to battle., President Lyndon B. Johnson, 6 March 19651. 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. Together, he explained, echoing the anthem of the civil rights movement, "we shall overcome.". Perhaps the most important of those informal advisers was Dwight D. Eisenhower. 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. 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. 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.). Liberal. Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term? 11 PopularOr Just Plain OddPresidential Pets, U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz. President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. 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.. 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. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/. 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 . 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. sciences. Original Vietnam War Personal & Field Gear, Original WW II US Field Gear & Equipment, Original WW II British Hats & Helmets; Additional site navigation. 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. He frequently reached out to members of the business and journalistic communities, hoping to shape opinions as much as to receive them. 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. Start filling in the gaps now. By September, the Dominicans had agreed to a compromise. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation US, Inc. Its legacy was 58,220 American soldiers dead, a huge drain on the nations finances, social polarisation and the tarnishing of the reputation of the United States. 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. It is clear that Johnson was reluctant to become involved in Vietnam. In an effort to achieve consensus about security requirements for those troops, key personnel undertook a review in Honolulu on 20 April. Davidson and later Mr. 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. Foundation and the Presidents Office of the University of Virginia, The Miller Centers Presidential Recordings Program is funded in part by the In late January 1964, General Nguyen Khanh overthrew the ruling junta, allegedly to prevent Diems successors from pursuing the neutralization of South Vietnam. 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. 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 . 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. With the return of a Democratic majority in 1955, Johnson, age 46, became the youngest majority leader in that body's history. 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. In thinking about Vietnam, the model LBJ had in mind was South Korea. 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. Press Conference, July 28, 1965. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a coup in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt. 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. 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. The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. 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. And like most politicians he routinely asserted that everything was done for principled non-self-regarding reasons: Why are we in South Vietnam? 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. 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. So why couldnt South Vietnam follow this model? His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey advised him against it. He emphasised four factors which justified not just a presence but an escalation of American military force. 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." 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. 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. His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. 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. The deterioration of the South Vietnamese position, therefore, led Johnson to consider even more decisive action. In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. 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 late 1963 the North Vietnamese greatly increased supplies of weapons and equipment to the Vietcong and infiltrated regular army units into the South. 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. But not wanting to get railroaded into large-scale military response by political pressure from hawks on the right in Congress, Johnson and McNamara privately and selectively conceded that classified sabotage operations in the region had probably provoked the North Vietnamese attack. The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson began on November 22, . 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. 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. 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. The CIA predicted that if Washington and its allies did not act, South Vietnam would fall within the year. Lyndon Johnson. 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. . The Cold War was essentially fuelled by a conflict of ideology, and Johnsons ideology was strongly rooted in the past. 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. In a sense, Johnson was able to avoid the label he so greatly feared would be pinned to his name. The Vietnam war was a very controversial war. 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. Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The bombing, however, was failing to move Hanoi or the Vietcong in any significant way. Johnson had chosen to keep on Kennedys foreign policy team McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. 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.. 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. 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. 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. By President Lyndon B. Johnson. At a post-retirement dinner in New York with McNamara, Bundy, and other former aides in attendance, LBJ accepted full responsibility. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . 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 emergence of the William Bundy task force highlights a key dimension of the administrations policymaking process during this period. 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. Johnson interpreted his victory as an extraordinary mandate to push forward with his Great Society reforms. Those few more divisions eventually reached 550,000 men by 1968. 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. 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. 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. 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.. But leftist sympathizers continued to press for his return, and in the spring of 1965 the situation escalated to armed uprising. When Kennedy entered office, he too supported the unpopular regime, increasing substantially the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam. Even after winning the 1964 presidential election, Johnson still felt he had to tread carefully with public opinion. 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. 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 first phase began on 14 December with Operation Barrel Rollthe bombing of supply lines in Laos.13. As he would say to U.S. The war was, however, impossible to win as Ball and Humphrey had predicted. McNamara thus recommended, and Johnson endorsed, a more vigorous program of U.S. military and economic support for South Vietnam.10. Lyndon Johnson. 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. The Diem coup had unleashed a wave of instability below the seventeenth parallel that Communist forces were only too eager to exploit. 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. The present Vietnam collection does not include all of the tapes related to the Dominican intervention, but transcripts of those tapes are planned as future additions to the collection. We are there because we have a promise to keep. . He began his career as a teacher. Katherine Young/Getty Images. 518. Many believed that it was too bloody of a war, with no reward for the loses. 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? However, Americas traditional anti-colonial foreign policy stance was swiftly superseded by fears of Communist expansionism and the onset of the Cold War. Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon The collection combines the originality, intellectual rigor, and scholarly Drawn from the months July 1964 to July1965, these transcripts cover arguably the most consequential developments of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, transforming what had been a U.S. military assistance and advisory mission into a full-scale American war.