Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

In the weeks following the Pleiku incident, while the administration continued to try to manufacture consensus on the war, among audiences both at home and abroad, and continued to hide the direction of its policy, the advocates of diplomacy launched their most intensive effort to head off a full-scale war. These weeks in the late winter of 1965 represent the climax to our story, for it was then that the Johnson administration moved to implement the policy decisions that had been taking shape since early 1964 but only now had been formally adopted; and it was then that the hopes for an early diplomatic solution all but ended. What more than a few observers perceived at the time and what is crystal clear today is that by the early spring of 1965 the last chance to prevent another full-scale war in Indochina had passed.