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“Every time we have gotten near the culmination of our dreams, the war bells have rung,” Lyndon Johnson lamented in mid-July 1965. “If we have to fight, I’ll do that. But I don’t want . . . to be known as a War President.”1 LBJ’s words came at the time of his greatest triumph as president—the passage of landmark Great Society legislation—and as he faced with foreboding a decision to Americanize the war in Vietnam. Throughout the seven weeks in which he made the 1965 troop decision, the war and the Great Society were closely connected.2 And they remained so thereafter. As he feared, the war he took on so reluctantly undermined his dreams for continuing reform at home. And the way he went to war in July 1965—using a low-key approach he hoped would preserve his Great Society goals—all but assured a bloody stalemate in Vietnam.
The story of the troop decision has been told often and well. Yet most of this work was done before a remarkable—and indispensable—source became available. In the sizable hands of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the telephone became a formidable instrument of presidential power. It was used to extract information from advisers, legislators, and journalists, sell them on programs and policies, cajole and wheedle, and squelch potential opposition. Johnson relied heavily on it. Many of his conversations were taped, and these recordings offer invaluable insights into his moods, thoughts, policy predilections, and modus operandi. This short work draws on records of phone conversations, supplemented by other documents, to explore the crucial events of June and July 1965 leading up to his fateful decision to increase the American troop presence in Vietnam. The phone conversations do not yield any major surprises or challenge conventional wisdom. They do provide an intimate, richly textured portrait of the president’s mental disposition and train of thought during these momentous weeks. They show a chief executive tormented by anxiety, certain of what he must do but profoundly skeptical of success; a seasoned and skillful political operator struggling to build support for policies he himself was uneasy about; and a prickly and thin-skinned leader, obsessed by the press and his rival, New York senator Robert Kennedy, angry with rising criticism but unsure exactly how to counter it. Above all, they reveal a beleaguered chief executive determined to do what he viewed as necessary to protect America’s international prestige by upholding the nation’s imperiled position in Vietnam, but in a way that would minimize threats to his cherished Great Society programs.
BRANDED a warmonger and baby killer by antiwar extremists and an all too timid and yet much too intrusive commander in chief by Vietnam war hawks, LBJ has enjoyed surprisingly gentle treatment at the hands of scholars. Even writers who deplore the war have given him some benefit of the doubt for taking the nation into it. He inherited a long-standing commitment to and an intractable problem in Vietnam, it is argued. Like his predecessors, he was beholden to the unthinking and virulent anticommunism that gripped U.S. policymakers during the heyday of the Cold War and was trammeled by bloated estimates of the nation’s global interests and the fears that the “loss” of South Vietnam, as with the fall of China to the Communists in 1949, would have disastrous political consequences at home. In this context, many writers have insisted that LBJ had little choice but to escalate the war in 1964–65.3 Some are more critical of the secretive, deceitful way he handled the decision than of what he actually did.
In recent years, scholars have modified and directly challenged this view. Friendly observers insist that LBJ’s decisions for war were motivated not simply by Cold War exigencies but also by his determination to promote American democratic ideals in places like South Vietnam.4 Others, more critically, claim that Johnson in reality had considerable leeway in dealing with Vietnam. Had he opted for peace in the summer of 1965 and applied his exceptional political skills to its achievement, he could have gained broad support in Congress, in the country, and with major allies. Instead, in this view, he chose war, largely for reasons of domestic politics and personal credibility. In this regard, some writers compare him unfavorably with what they believe JFK would have done had he lived.5
Few would question that by June 1965, Johnson faced an imposing challenge in Vietnam. The Second Indochina War (to become known in the United States as the Vietnam War) had begun in the late 1950s when those Viet Minh who had remained in the South following the 1954 Geneva Conference launched an insurgency in response to South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s refusal to participate in the elections called for by Geneva and his efforts to forcibly extinguish all opposition to his rule. At first with misgivings, North Vietnam backed the Vietcong rebels by sending men and supplies. JFK responded to the surging revolt in 1961 by significantly expanding U.S. military aid to South Vietnam, increasing the number of military advisers, and secretly authorizing Americans to take part in combat. The overthrow and assassination of Diem in November 1963 by dissident South Vietnamese army officers, with U.S. blessings, complicated an already messy situation. In late 1963, Hanoi increased aid to the insurgents as part of a go-for-broke strategy to win a decisive victory that would presumably force a U.S. withdrawal. Shortly after the assassination of Kennedy on November 22, the Johnson administration declared that the “central objective” of U.S. policy must be to help South Vietnam defeat the “externally directed and supported communist conspiracy.”6
Both sides escalated the war in 1964–65. The overthrow of Diem brought political chaos rather than stability to South Vietnam, coup following coup in what one LBJ adviser called “government by turnstile.” Buddhists and Catholics fought in the streets of Saigon. Even as North Vietnam prepared regular units to enter the conflict, the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) proved incapable of handli...
