Specifically, he had removed from office Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war whom the act was largely designed to protect. 518. Passed nearly unanimously by Congress on 7 August and signed into law three days later, the Tonkin Gulf Resolutionor Southeast Asia Resolution, as it was officially knownwas a pivotal moment in the war and gave the Johnson administration a broad mandate to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. 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. By mid-March, therefore, Johnson began to consider additional proposals for expanding the American combat presence in 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. by David White, Medical Mayhem in the US Civil War? LBJ was a nation-builder. 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 . governance Press Conference, July 28, 1965. Of all the episodes of the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the episodes of 2 and 4 August 1964 have proved among the most controversial and contentious. The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson by the American writer Robert Caro.Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. 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. 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. Throughout his time in office, Johnson stressed that his policy on Vietnam was a continuation of his predecessors actions going back to 1954. When Kennedy entered office, he too supported the unpopular regime, increasing substantially the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam. The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that Raids by the local Communistsdubbed the Vietcong, or VC, by Diemhad picked up in frequency and intensity in the weeks following Diems ouster. This was in keeping with the Containment policy originating in the Truman Doctrine, causing keen pro-war advocates such as General William Westmoreland to lament that America always had to fight with one hand tied behind her back. Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. In an effort to provide greater security for these installations, Johnson sanctioned the dispatch of two Marine battalions to Danang in early March. 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. 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. With this speech, Johnson laid the political groundwork for a major commitment of U.S. troops. By Kent Germany. 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. . An Asia so threatened by Communist domination would certainly imperil the security of the United States itself. For fear of provoking an all-out war with the communist superpowers, the Johnson administration would forswear not only an invasion but also any attempts to sponsor an anti-communist insurgency in the North. 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. 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. With more than a thousand Americans seeking refuge in one of the citys largest luxury hotels and the situation on the street deteriorating to the point of an evacuation becoming necessary, Bennetts cable said that he and his colleagues were unanimously of opinion that time has come to land the marines. 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. 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. 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. Lyndon Johnson's presidency began and ended with tragedy. 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. Compounding the new administrations problems was the realization that earlier assumptions about progress in the war were ill-founded. The South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. These may be recent or from the distant the past, finished articles or drafts that the writer wants to try out. Communist China made it clear that it would not permit an invasion of North Vietnam. Johnson had a choice over his course of action and was not as constrained by circumstances as is sometimes suggested, the crucial period when this was most possible being late 1963 to early 1965. LBJ then widened that circle of support by turning to Eisenhowers longtime aide General Andrew J. Goodpaster, who convened study groups on Vietnam. 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. There is no media for this section. 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. And I dont want any of them to take credit for it.23. 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. By September, the Dominicans had agreed to a compromise. 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. 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. 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. At a post-retirement dinner in New York with McNamara, Bundy, and other former aides in attendance, LBJ accepted full responsibility. 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. And in July he agreed to the dispatch of two combat divisions to Vietnam. Position Paper on Southeast Asia, 2 December 1964, David Humphrey, Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment,, Quoted in Randall B. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South . Shortly after, he vented to adviser McGeorge Bundy in a now familiar monologue: I dont think its [South Vietnam] worth fighting for and I dont think that we can get out. Both Diem and Nhu were killed in the coup that brought a military junta to power in early November 1963, ending Americas reliance on its miracle man in Vietnam.4, Kennedys own assassination three weeks later laid the problems of Vietnam squarely on Johnsons desk. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . "Why We Are in 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 . 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. William Bundys role atop the Vietnam interagency machinery is indicative of that developmenta pattern that continued for the remainder of the Johnson presidency as Rusks star rose and McNamaras faded within Johnsons universe of favored advisers. However, Americas traditional anti-colonial foreign policy stance was swiftly superseded by fears of Communist expansionism and the onset of the Cold War. 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." 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. 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. 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. Liberal. In Santo Domingo, rebels sympathetic to the exiled liberal intellectual President Juan Bosch had launched an open, armed uprising against the military-backed junta. At the center of these events stands President Lyndon B. Johnson, who inherited the White House following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 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. Upon taking office, Johnson, also. 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. Joseph Siracusa stated that, America developed an increasingly rigid ideological view of the world anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-leftist that came to rival that of Communism. This appears to be as true of Johnson as it was of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Why did Lyndon B. Johnson get impeached? He had been vice president for 1,036 days when he succeeded to the presidency. 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.). 450 Words2 Pages. I think everybodys going to think, were landing the Marines, were off to battle., President Lyndon B. Johnson, 6 March 19651. In the late spring, developments closer to home offered striking parallels to the situation in Vietnam. 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. 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. Nevertheless, in an effort to provide greater incentive for Hanoi to come to the bargaining table, Johnson sanctioned a limited bombing halt, code-named MAYFLOWER, for roughly one week in the middle of May. It meant in particular that America could never send ground troops into the North. 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? President Lyndon B. Johnson, 6 March 1965 1 On 8 March 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines waded ashore on the beaches at Danang. 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. 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. In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson was opposed by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. 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. When Johnson assumed . 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. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation. Grant as secretary of war ad interim. Original: Jun 30, 2016. Nevertheless, it remained dissatisfied with progress in counterinsurgency, leading Secretary of Defense McNamara to undertake a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March 1964. 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. However, those same factors facilitated his disastrous escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and it is for this that he is largely remembered. . I did that! 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. by David White, Chroniclers, Detectives or Judges Just What Are Historians? 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. 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. But it was the attack by Diems minions on parading Buddhists four months later that ignited the nationwide protest that would roil the country for the remainder of the year and eventually topple the regime. History 2,000. "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. There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. 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. From 1967 onward, antiwar sentiment gradually spread among other segments of the population, including liberal Democrats, intellectuals, and civil rights leaders, and by 1968 many prominent political figures, some of them former supporters of the presidents Vietnam policies, were publicly calling for an early negotiated settlement of the war. Arnold, Fortas reported directly to Johnson by telephone. Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Johnson rejected a legislative strategy that would have entailed open-ended discussion, preferring to obtain the funds under the authority Congress granted him via the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964a move, he knew, that would further ratify that authority should he need to act even more boldly in the future. Department of State Bulletin, April 26, 1965. technological innovation designed for scholars and