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May 30 - June 23, 2025
Charles de Gaulle was almost certain that major war was in the offing. On 18 March he told members of the French cabinet that the effort to prevent major fighting in Vietnam had failed. The war, the general declared, “will last a long, long, long time.” The following month, he offered a more precise estimate: unless Washington stopped the war immediately, he told his ministers, the fighting would go on for ten years and would completely dishonor the United States.
Like much of the rest of the world they had mistakenly assumed that Lyndon Johnson would never allow himself to be sucked into the Vietnamese morass, and it annoyed them that he would jeopardize continued improvement in Soviet-American relations for the sake of an incompetent and unrepresentative Saigon regime.
On 17 March Premier Zhou Enlai told Lucien Paye that the Americans were the personification of evil and that the United States had acted in bad faith on Indochina ever since 1954.
Having determined that Washington had now fully committed itself to a military solution, Hanoi vowed to give as good as it
John McNaughton noted that the Saigon government controlled only minimal parts of the northern part of South Vietnam and that U.S. officials on the scene saw a 50 percent chance of a coup within three weeks.
“Yank, go fight your war somewhere else,” became a slogan frequently heard in Saigon and elsewhere.
William Bundy detailed his disillusionment on several occasions in June. It is clear that the prospect of a deal behind America’s back between the Saigon government and the NLF was heavy on his mind. In a heartfelt letter to American envoys in East Asia dated 14 June, Bundy said that the war was going very badly; the prospects were poor, the options few. The dispatch of large numbers of American ground forces looked likely, but such a move might well cause the Vietnamese to slacken in their own effort.
The most likely form of collapse would be a quiet deal with the NLF or Hanoi that would call for a coalition government and, “in fairly short order, a request for our withdrawal,” Bundy noted, adding that such an outcome might be preferable to a U.S.-Hanoi deal or a conference that would end up “selling out South Viet-Nam.”
On 15 March, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to plead for passage of the Voting Rights Act. A member of the audience, enthralled by what he heard, later called it “Johnson’s finest hour,” a “great moral statement against discrimination.” According to McGeorge Bundy and George Ball, however, that day LBJ's mind was.elsewhere; Bundy and Ball conversed on the phone in the afternoon and concurred that the president was fixated on Vietnam.
Johnson told the Chiefs that he wanted a weekly report totaling the Vietcong dead.
When Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson gingerly advocated a pause in the bombing and spoke to the desirability of negotiations in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on 2 April, Johnson exploded in anger. He berated Pearson in a meeting at Camp David the next day, at one point, according to an eye witness, even grabbing the prime minister by the lapels.
Still angry two days later, Johnson ordered embarrassed aides to cancel the planned visits of India’s Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan’s Mohammad Ayub Khan, whom Johnson knew also sought reduced tensions in Southeast Asia. Shastri and Ayub were outraged by the snub, and the United States squandered an opportunity to facilitate better relations between the two leaders, whose countries went to war later in 1965.
He likened his challenge to the one the British and Winston Churchill had faced in 1939-1940 and said he would not give up the fight.
Johnson said he wanted a few British soldiers to get killed in Vietnam alongside Americans so that their pictures could appear in the U.S. press to demonstrate to the public that America’s principal ally was contributing
When the first contingent of American marines waded ashore near Da- nang in South Vietnam in the early part of March 1965, it signaled the end of the most important period of policy deliberation in the history of American involvement in Vietnam.
Neither senior officials nor anyone else could know in the late winter of 1965 how large the American commitment would eventually become, or how long the war would go on, or how much blood would be shed before it was over.
powerful elements on record by February 1965 as opposing a major American escalation—the group included the bulk of the Senate Democratic leadership and many other lawmakers in the party; the vice president-elect; prominent commentators such as Lippmann, Drew Pearson, Arthur Krock, and Hans J. Morgenthau; and newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
Famed Vietnam correspondents David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, both of whom would later turn against the war, in late 1964 remained supportive of a strong U.S. commitment.
if there were “war hawks” in Congress at the end of 1964, they were a timid bunch indeed.
Most critics of American policy also rejected the standard administration assertion that the outcome in Vietnam would have a direct bearing on developments elsewhere in the region, that a Saigon defeat would start the dominoes falling.
The core component of the credibility imperative was an assumption that a failure to stand firm in the war would cause allies around the world to question, and perhaps lose faith in, America’s commitment to their defense, and would embolden adversaries to act aggressively. It was a kind of “psychological domino theory,” as Jonathan Schell has put it, and there was but one thing wrong with it: it did not reflect the realities of the international system of late 1964-early 1965.6
a few appear to have been half-converted, such as the New York Times’s James Reston, who would suggest in one column that wider U.S. military involvement would be folly and in the next that there might be no alternative.
Even in their estimations of the regional and global implications of a defeat in Vietnam, many senior policymakers did not differ all that much from most of the dissenters—especially if the defeat occurred because of the perceived ineptitude or apathy of the South Vietnamese themselves.
If the war was not overdetermined, it was not “underdetermined” either.
the United States would pursue a military solution in Vietnam, through escalation if necessary. As early as the previous spring the top officials had reached that conclusion, and they had never deviated from it. The question is why.
I attach more explanatory power to the short-term and personal factors in that decision than to longterm and impersonal ones.
It could be tempting, therefore, to draw a straight line between the Truman Doctrine and the landing of the marines at Danang. The temptation should be resisted.
Leaders in the later antiwar movement would say it was the “establishment,” the “ruling elite,” that got the United States into war, but this, too, explains little—the New York Times was a pillar of that establishment, as were Lippmann and Mansfield and others of like mind.
On 11 February 1965 the U.S. stock market took its biggest plunge since the day of the Kennedy assassination. The reason: investor concerns, after the Pleiku attack and American retaliatory air strikes, that the United States was sliding into a major land war in Asia.
But it will not do merely to list X number of causes. It is the task of the historian to reduce a given list of causes to order by establishing a causal hierarchy, and to relate the items in this hierarchy to one another.
For the leading causes of the 1965 escalation we must look to the short term, and especially to the year 1964 and to the interaction in that period of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his most senior advisers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk.
No doubt this assumption made them sleep better at night. But it had little to do with why they acted.
Geostrategic considerations were not the driving force in American Vietnam policy in The Long 1964, either before the election or after; partisan political considerations were; individual careerist considerations were.
So why did they favor Americanization? Less out of concern for America’s credibility, I believe, than out of fears for their own personal credibility. For more than three years, McNamara and Bundy had counseled the need to stand firm in the war (a relatively easy thing to do in, say, 1962, when the commitment was small and the Cold War situation considerably more tense), and to go against that now would be to expose themselves to potential humiliation and to threaten their careers.
Rusk, for his part, reinforced Johnson’s conventional, inflexible approach to foreign-policy problems and shared his penchant for simplistic analogizing between Munich in 1938 and Saigon in 1965.
What, then, drove Johnson’s approach to the Vietnam issue? Chiefly its potential to do harm to his domestic political objectives and to his personal historical reputation.
Understanding this duality in Johnson’s thinking about the war, in which partisan calculations competed for supremacy with concerns for his personal reputation, is essential to understanding the outcome of the policy process in Washington in the fifteen months that followed his taking office as president.
McGeorge Bundy spoke well to this point years later: “I think if [Johnson] had decided that the right thing to do was to cut our losses, he was quite sufficiently inventive to do that in a way that would not have destroyed the Great Society. It’s not a dependent variable. It’s an independent variable.”
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this conflation of the national interest and his own personal interest in Johnson’s approach to Vietnam.
skin. In private LBJ would sometimes say that he could not withdraw from Vietnam because it would lead to his impeachment, but he was too smart a politician to really believe such a thing. What he really feared was the personal humiliation that he believed would come with failure in Vietnam.
“If you let a bully come into your front yard one day,” he liked to say, in reference to the lesson of Munich, “the next day he will be up on your porch and the day after that he will rape your wife in your own bed.”
This personal insecurity in Johnson, so much a feature of the recollections of those who knew him and worked with him, might have been less important in Vietnam policy if not for the way it reinforced his equally well documented intolerance of dissent.
Recall the point made later by McGeorge Bundy, certainly no contrarian voice: “You can’t organize against Lyndon Johnson without getting bombed before breakfast, because in his view that’s the final and ultimate conspiracy.”
Johnson, no one else, ensured that the critical derisions on Vietnam were made by a small and insular group of individuals who by the latter part of 1964 had been involved in policy making for several years in most cases, who had overseen the steady expansion in the U.S. commitment to the war, and who had a large personal stake in seeing that commitment succeed.
IF OSWALD HAD MISSED
Counterfactual questions of this kind often make professional historians nervous, but they should not. Thinking about unrealized possibilities is an indispensable part of the historian’s craft—we can judge the forces that prevailed only by comparing them with those that were defeated.
All historians, whenever they make causal judgments, are engaging in speculation, are envisioning alternative developments, even when these alternatives are not stated explicitly.
The following base assumptions seem reasonable: that a surviving Kennedy would have kept his advisory team (which became Johnson’s) more or less intact, at least through the 1964 election; that he likely would have faced Goldwater in that election, as Johnson did, and would have beaten him; that, like Johnson, he would have wanted to keep Vietnam on the back burner until voting day; that the situation in South Vietnam would have deteriorated at more or less the same rate as under his successor; and that, therefore, crunch time for him likely would have come at about the same time as for
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A good argument can be made that he likely would have done more or less what Johnson did and Americanized the war, but a better one is that he probably would not have done so, that he would instead have chosen some form of disengagement.
Whereas Kennedy would have faced the critical Vietnam decisions in his second (and final) term, when the domestic political implications of those decisions would be at least somewhat less pressing, Johnson faced them in what amounted to his first term—for
