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May 30 - June 23, 2025
“If we were to get out, de Gaulle would be the first to say, ‘See, I told you one cannot depend on the United States under a security treaty,’ “ Rusk declared time and again during the height of the war.
Should the administration opt for Option A and against the new military measures, the two men wrote, “the most likely result would be a Vietnamese- negotiated deal, under which an eventually unified Communist Vietnam would reassert its traditional hostility to Communist China and limit its own ambitions to Laos and Cambodia.”
This brings us to the biggest reason why Lyndon Johnson had considerable freedom to maneuver in the months following his election: the continuing inability or unwillingness of the South Vietnamese leaders to live up to their end of the bargain.
the generals knew it. They felt certain that continued and increased aid did not depend on their meeting this demand, that the Johnson administration felt too deeply committed to withdraw its support.
Khanh accused Taylor of interfering in South Vietnam’s internal affairs and publicly vowed independence from “foreign manipulation.”
It was an altogether bizarre state of affairs, with the de facto leader of South Vietnam, a man who early in the year Washington had hailed as a savior of his country, trading insults with Taylor and calling for antiAmerican demonstrations in Saigon.
Prominent outside observers saw the new developments as ample justification for an American extrication from the war.
Reston was correct. A large window of opportunity on Vietnam existed for Lyndon Johnson in the wake of his 1964 election triumph. It is undeniable that he wanted to avoid a major American war in the jungles of Southeast Asia; it should be equally clear that he could have avoided one, and that a broad range of important observers saw this at the time.
Nothing—not pessimistic intelligence reporting, not allied opposition, and not pervasive South Vietnamese war-weariness and burgeoning anti-Americanism—could dissuade these men from continuing their pursuit of a military solution.
in the aftermath of the American election Hanoi also sent subtle signals that it was open to peace talks.
A year later, in the late fall of 1965, U Thant’s efforts in 1964 became public knowledge. When the story broke, senior officials in the Johnson administration instantly knew they faced a sticky problem. The disclosures, they realized, made them appear to have been not merely skeptical of a diplomatic settlement in Vietnam in late 1964, but actively opposed to such a solution. Critics were bound to pose one question above all, they knew, a question for which they had no ready answer. People were certain to ask, George Ball said to a colleague, “Why didn’t you find out [what Hanoi had in
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But Johnson rejected a debate; indeed, he worked hard to avoid one. Why he did so is one of the great mysteries of the war.
Or maybe not. Maybe it is no mystery at all. Maybe Johnson failed to externalize the Vietnam problem because he was incapable of such a thing. “The role of public debate in securing popular assent to policies and, ultimately, national unity, was a concept he could not grasp,” his former aide George Reedy has written.
Johnson’s profound personal insecurity and his egomania led him not only to personalize the goals he aspired to but also to personalize all forms of dissent. Hence his vow not to be the president who lost Vietnam; hence his conviction that critics of the war were critics of him personally. In late 1964, Johnson’s dislike of conflict, his need to create consensus and to avoid confrontation, remained unshaken, as did his insistence that Americans must support a president in foreign policy and unite behind a policy of anticommunism.
(It is surely significant that Robert McNamara, the fourth member of the “Awesome Foursome” and the only one strongly opposed to using U.S. ground troops, was not in attendance.)
“We are facing war in South Vietnam,” Johnson wrote. “I have never felt that this war will be won from the air, and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be much more effective is a larger and stronger use of Rangers and Special Forces and Marines, or other appropriate military strength on the ground and on the scene.”
In that morning’s New York Times, the two men could read that Senate heavy- weight Richard Russell had come out publicly against any expansion of the war and in favor of a full-fledged réévaluation of the American commitment to South Vietnam.
“These officials no longer see much point in the argument that the United States would be negotiating from weakness: in their opinion, the weakness only increases with time.”
When Taylor arrived for work that morning he found waiting for him the president’s longer 30 December cable (it had arrived shortly before 2:00 A.M.), in which Johnson chided him for his handling of the Saigon political crisis and for his faith that bombing alone would do the job,
For Taylor it was a double blow—not only had Johnson plainly faulted his performance, but he had indicated his willingness to do what Taylor strenuously wished to avoid: send Americans to fight in the war.
Never before in the war had the Vietcong been deployed in such numbers.
In Saigon, American military officials were awed and perplexed. Said one: “The Vietcong fought magnificently as well as any infantry anywhere. But the big question for me is how its troops, a thousand or more of them, could wander around the countryside so close to Saigon without being discovered. That tells something about this war.”
the international isolation of the Johnson administration with respect to Vietnam would only increase in the key early months of 1965, as the South Vietnamese politico-military crisis deepened, as American opposition to an early negotiated settlement became steadily more apparent, and as Johnson’s window of opportunity on Vietnam began to close.
More than that, he set out to quash debate on the war, to manufacture consensus. To a considerable degree he succeeded,
the willingness of his three principal foreign-policy lieutenants, Bundy, Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who themselves possessed formidable talents for persuasion, to meet with critics and skeptics and warn them of the danger of disunity.
But the effort also required a permissive context. That is, it required that the targets of the campaign allow themselves to be stifled, allow the debate to be effectively ended before it started.7
any diligent reader of one of the nation’s major newspapers could see the disconnect between the optimistic prognostications of senior American officials—on 1 January Maxwell Taylor told newsmen that the Saigon political crisis would soon end—and the actual situation on the ground in Vietnam.
Barely had Johnson returned to Washington in early January than he began leaning on Senate skeptics to get on the team or at least keep their reservations quiet.
Mansfield, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on 3 January, said that neutralization for Southeast Asia by way of a great-power agreement might be the best solution and predicted there would be a “full-scale debate” on the war in the Senate.
An Associated Press poll of eighty-three Senators released on 6 January found no consensus whatsoever on what the Vietnam problem was or what the United States ought to do about it.
LB J told Stevenson to remind Morse that it had been he, Johnson, who had given him a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee on the day Morse switched to the Democratic Party.
The tactic worked. Rusk met with Fulbright on several occasions in January and got him to agree that now was not the time for the Senate to hold public hearings and engage in full discussion. For the second time in six months, Fulbright had done the administration’s bidding on Vietnam, despite his deep doubts about the American involvement.
Gore, from neighboring Tennessee, told journalists in midmonth that “we should never have been there in the first place, but that is water over the dam. The search must be not for scapegoats but for a face-saving disentanglement.” And Democrat George McGovern, in a Senate speech on 15 January, said that America was not winning in Vietnam, could not win a military victory, and therefore should seek to negotiate its way out.
Opposed to an immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam but also to an escalated war, Humphrey in January kept his cards close to the vest.
Humphrey nodded knowingly. “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” he replied, “but it'll never happen. Before it does, a neutralist government will come to power and ask us to leave. Don’t worry, Jim.”
the Pentagon’s John McNaughton asserted that Vietnam was being “lost” and that, with time, a government “not unfriendly to the DRV will probably emerge.”
Here the ambassador was putting his finger on one of the enduring truths of the war, a truth that neither he nor his senior colleagues in Washington ever fully understood, or, if they did, allowed themselves openly to acknowledge: namely, that a “strong” Saigon government meant a government with broad-based support, which meant a government neither created by nor sustained by the United States, which meant a government committed to ending twenty years of warfare.
In almost every meeting on the war in January, in virtually every cable that went out over his signature, he hammered away with the same message: get dependents out right away, before any reprisal strikes. It has been suggested that Johnson viewed the dependents issue as a stalling device, as a way to delay having to make a decision on escalation (i.e., no wider action without removal), but the better argument is that he had made up his mind and was merely laying the groundwork for the new military moves.
Dean Rusk misrepresented the administration’s position on negotiations, telling the legislators that the State Department was keenly looking for any sign that the communists would agree to a new Geneva-type agreement (he failed to note that the administration opposed a return to Geneva) and wrongly stating that the United States welcomed a fourteen-power conference on Laos. Robert McNamara followed, exaggerating the success of recent covert operations
The hawks, on the other hand, were well represented—Dirksen
In Washington the next day, McGeorge Bundy suggested one last way to try to deal with the Buddhists: send Henry Cabot Lodge to reason with them. (Just what he thought Lodge could accomplish is not clear,
Sure enough, in the early morning hours of 27 January, Saigon time, Khanh and the Armed Forces Council overthrew Tran Van Huong’s government in a bloodless coup. Taylor immediately cabled Washington (where it was still the evening of the twenty-sixth) that an alliance between Khanh and the Quang-led Buddhist Institute had caused the coup, and that most senior generals had supported the action. He noted that the institute’s leadership now appeared to be “in a position of dominant power and influence in the country,”
McNaughton, long pessimistic on prospects in the war, said Khanh’s maneuverings gave the United States justification to “dump” Vietnam. But what about the effect on other countries? he wondered. Yes, McNamara replied, an American withdrawal would only shift the struggle to Malaysia and Thailand, both of which could be expected to “go fast.”
Bundy had with him a memo that purported to represent both his and McNamara’s point of view, which would be the subject of the discussion with Johnson. It was, McNamara later said, an “explosive memorandum,” one that laid out in forceful prose what its author saw as the stark choice facing the United States: escalation or negotiation. “What we want to say to you,” Bundy began, “is that both of us are now pretty well convinced that our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat.”
the 27 January meeting mattered greatly because Johnson now moved to implement the policy he had agreed to in principle back in December. “We will move strongly,” he had now decided, “stable government or no stable government.” (Given the chaos in Saigon, this phrase really meant “government or no government.”) And he did not stop there. Understanding that the administration needed a pretext to “move strongly,” Johnson on this day also authorized the resumption of destroyer patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, the first since September 1964, in the hope of provoking a North Vietnamese attack.33
on the need for a stable regime prior to escalation, “we (in Washington] now wonder whether this requirement is either realistic or necessary.” (The meeting had decided it was neither.)
Recalled Bundy aide Chester Cooper, who’ accompanied the national security adviser on the trip: “The problem was that Johnson had already made up his mind. For all practical purposes he had dismissed the option of de-escalating and getting out, but he didn’t want to say that he had, so the rationale for this trip was this was going to be decisive.”
had Bundy traveled with a somewhat open mind, had he been instructed to provide Johnson with a truly fresh assessment of the war and its prospects, he might have been more affected by what he encountered. What he encountered was a South Vietnam teetering on the brink of social and political disintegration.
the South Vietnamese leader turned down invitations to meet with Bundy and other American officials at a reception scheduled for the following
(Khanh eventually did agree to meet with Bundy.) When news of the snubbing reached Washington, Lyndon Johnson exploded with rage; barely a week earlier he had called Khanh “our boy,” but now he said the administration should look to replace him, and he ordered aides to come up with a list of replacements.
