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. The job, therefore, couldnt be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment. 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. (4) military leaders demanded limits on presidential . 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. By Kent Germany. South Vietnam would have fallen to the communists much sooner than it did, saving thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. Never during the ten-year-long Second Indochinese war did a government emerge in Saigon worthy of the support of the people of South Vietnam. This coincided with the assassination of Diem (with American collusion) and subsequent chaos in the South Vietnamese government, administration and army. 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. by David White, The Japanese Occupation of China 1937-45: The Divided Opposition and its Consequences by David White, What was the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and how successful was propaganda in realising the vision of a racially exclusive society? "The. 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. Together, he explained, echoing the anthem of the civil rights movement, "we shall overcome.". 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. 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. 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 risked his own career for the good of the people in the United States. It pained him to hear protesters, especially studentswho he thought would venerate him for his progressive social agendachanting, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? To avoid the demonstrations, he eventually restricted his travels, becoming a virtual prisoner in the White House. 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. 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. The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson began on November 22, . 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. Original Vietnam War Personal & Field Gear, Original WW II US Field Gear & Equipment, Original WW II British Hats & Helmets; Additional site navigation. 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. Lyndon Johnson could have been remembered as one of the most outstanding of American presidents. 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. strives to apply the lessons of history to the nations most pressing contemporary We are there because we have a promise to keep. 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. His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. A genuine Communist threat had effectively been created by US policy, based on the speculative domino theory, and this was amplified when the French were defeated and pulled out of south-east Asia. Statement by the President Upon Ordering Troops Into the Dominican Republic, 28 April 1965. rights reserved. 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. 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. 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. Elected to the presidency in December 1962, Bosch had proved popular with the general population. This was particularly true of his conversations with broadcast and print journalists, with whom he spoke on a regular basis. And there must be no such failure in the 1960s. students. In the late spring, developments closer to home offered striking parallels to the situation in Vietnam. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. And like most politicians he routinely asserted that everything was done for principled non-self-regarding reasons: Why are we in South Vietnam? Image 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. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation. The undesirability of renewed colonialism was seen as a lesser evil, so first Truman and then Eisenhower switched support from the indigenous independence forces to their more powerful ally, France. With this speech, Johnson laid the political groundwork for a major commitment of U.S. troops. These included a more aggressive propaganda offensive as well as sabotage directed against North Vietnam.9, But those enhanced measures were unable to force a change in Hanoi or to stabilize the political scene in Saigon. newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social 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. Critics accused the Johnson administration of overreacting and lending too much credence to unsubstantiated claims of strong Communist influence amongst the rebel factions. The South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon by David White, Bloody Victory or Bloody Stupidity? Johnson took the approach that dictatorships should not be appeased, declaring in July 1965: If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection. 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. 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. Lyndon Johnson could have been remembered as one of the most outstanding of American presidents. Statement by the President on the Situation in the Dominican Republic, 30 April 1965, Alan McPherson, Misled by Himself: What the Johnson Tapes Reveal about the Dominican Intervention of 1965,. During the intense debated that occurred within the foreign policy establishment in the spring and summer of 1965, Johnson himself was frequently the leading dove. 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. 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. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a coup in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt. 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. 11 PopularOr Just Plain OddPresidential Pets, U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz. There you will be made to feel welcome by one of our committee members. 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. Securing these fundsroughly $700 millionraised the question of whether to seek a congressional authorization merely for additional monies or risk a broader debate about the policy course the administration had now set for Vietnam. 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.
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