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May 30 - June 23, 2025
Nor could he comprehend the way in which diplomacy seemed to be above politics, immune to the haggling he had perfected with American politicians, businesspeople, and labor leaders.
Little wonder that he entered the White House with his eyes on matters at home—his main goal, he told aides only hours after being sworn in, was to enable all Americans to share in America’s bounty.
In the late autumn of 1963, he understood well the scope of America’s commitment in Vietnam and the potential trouble the war could pose for him.
When U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reported on the situation in Saigon on 24 November, Johnson said he felt like a catfish that had just “grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.”
a memorandum a few days later to Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the new president noted that the more he looked at it, “the more it is clear to me that South V...
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Like many of his generation he was marked by the failure of the allies to stop Hitler at Munich, and he often declared that he would not reward “aggression” in Vietnam with “appeasement.”
As he later said to biographer Doris Kearns, in a dubious interpretation of the past: “I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared to what might happen if we lost Vietnam.”
It was Johnson more than his lieutenants, however, who set the tone for Vietnam policy in the early days after the assassination.
“Don’t go to bed at night until you have asked yourself, ‘Have I done everything I could to further the American effort to assist South Vietnam?"‘
It may be, as some have suggested, that Johnson had an excellent opportunity to withdraw from Vietnam immediately upon entering the White House, but it is virtually impossible to imagine him actually taking such a step.
“Foreigners,” Johnson quipped early in the administration, only half-jokingly, “are not like the folks I am used to.”
This insecurity, well documented in the reflections of those who knew him well, helps explain two closely related tendencies in Johnson’s approach to Vietnam that were evident early and would prove highly important to policy making as time went on. One was his aversion to meeting with foreign diplomats or consulting with allied governments.
Second, Johnson’s lack of confidence in foreign policy helped fuel his well-documented dislike of dissension on Vietnam policy, even among his closest advisers.
The new president had barely settled into the Oval Office before the CIA, the JCS, and the embassy in Saigon began issuing reports of virtually unchecked momentum by the Vietcong in almost all parts of South Vietnam.
Vietcong incidents had skyrocketed since the Diem coup, going as high as 1,000 in one week, as compared to the 1962 average of 363 per week, and the first-half-of-1963 average of 266 per week.
the government refused to go along with a new Pentagon plan to improve the military situation by bombing the North. At a meeting with American officials, Minh argued that such bombing would be a mistake for the most fundamental reasons: it would hurt innocent people, it would alienate popular opinion in the South, and it would likely have no real effect on Vietcong troops fighting in the South.
Whether key government leaders such as Minh were prepared to consider a neutralist settlement to the conflict in this period is unclear.
In late November, the CIA reported that contacts between the Saigon regime and the NLF were taking place.
U.S. officials understood perfectly well that in this kind of fluid situation, in which anything was possible, pressure for negotiations from outside Vietnam could have enormous influence. And indeed, as 1963 drew to a close, such pressure was gaining momentum.
The White House was particularly concerned about the growing concerns expressed by three key Democratic members of the Senate, Johnson’s mentor Richard Russell, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. All three had grown increasingly dismayed with the direction of U.S. policy in recent months, and all three had the capacity to strongly influence thinking on Capitol Hill.
On 7 December Russell told Johnson, “We should get out [of Vietnam], but I don’t know any way to get out.” On another occasion in December Russell reportedly advised LBJ to “spend whatever it takes to bring to power a government that would ask us to go home.”
Mansfield described the situation as increasingly similar to the Korean War of a decade earlier, and he reminded Johnson that Eisenhower did not pursue that war to victory but went to Korea “to make peace, in reality, a truce.”
The way to achieve such a peace, Mansfield argued, was, first and foremost, to encourage the new Saigon government to shift its primary emphasis from the militáry to the political side (he was apparently unaware that the new regime was planning to do just that).
Bohlen was convinced that de Gaulle, whom he described as “highly egocentric with touches indeed of megalomania,” actually wanted strained relations with the United States. The general, Bohlen argued, viewed the nation as the only real international unit. He therefore disliked any form of integration or other association that watered down the sovereignty of the country; consequently, it was natural that he would stress the independence of France on all matters.
Couve and de Gaulle insisted that U.S. policy was destined to fail and that only negotiations presented a viable solution to the conflict.
Mansfield, backed by Russell, again urged Johnson to solidt French help in securing a settlement even if the possibility of getting it offered “only a faint glimmer of hope.” And the New York Times, read not only by leaders in Washington but also by those in Saigon and Hanoi, invoked de Gaulle in editorializing that “a negotiated settlement and ‘neutralization’ of Vietnam are not to be ruled out.”
The administration did rule them out, and nothing demonstrated that more starkly than its reaction to events in another place where de Gaulle’s influence was deemed to be great: Cambodia.
“The more I think about the proposed conference on Cambodia,” he said, “the more disastrous I think it would be. … It is inconceivable to me that a conference like this could do other than foment and encourage the neutralism
State Department cable instructed him to “categorically, and in [a] manner most likely to convince them, say to the generals that the U.S. government in no way favors neutral solution for South Vietnam.” The cable noted that “powerful voices” such as Lippmann and the New York Times had been pressing for such a solution, but emphasized that the U.S. government, “from the top down,” was committed to a “win-the-war policy.”
On 16 December, six days after U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler, on State Department instructions, had inquired if the Kremlin could be “induced” to cooperate in avoiding a Cambodia conference that could cause “serious problems” for the United States and South Vietnam, Soviet officials told Washington that the USSR had derided to accept Sihanouk’s proposal and was awaiting word from London.
His words had the desired effect. Britain chose not to press for a conference, despite the prevailing opinion among senior officials in London that such a meeting should be convened. Not for the first time, and not for the last, Britain gave top priority to its desire for good relations with Washington.
The State Department responded immediately. It instructed the ambassador to “make a special effort to reassure Dinh and others who may also be concerned. Nothing is further from USG [the U.S. government’s] mind than [a] ‘neutral solution for Vietnam.’ We intend to win.”
Even more important, however, was the need to counter the growing clamor for a conference-table settlement for Vietnam and the need to convince the Minh regime that such a solution must be resisted.
the NSC's Michael Forrestal succinctly summarized the rationale for the trip, reporting that he had just cleared a cable to Lodge “telling him that we are against neutralism and want to win the war, and that is why McNamara is coming out.”
Here it is necessary to distinguish between, on the one hand, neutralism as a conscious political line that would seek to steer a middle path between both East and West, and, on the other, a less political and less coherent attitude springing from weariness of war and lengthy suffering at the hands of both sides. By all accounts it was the latter of these variations that mushroomed in the South near the end of 1963 and caused such trepidation in Washington.
What he heard confirmed the administration’s worst fears. The enemy controlled ever greater sections of the countryside. Strategic hamlets were overrun or in ruins.
The news proved for McNamara what he had been fearing for several weeks: that the optimistic appraisals provided to him by Harkins earlier in the fall had been wrong, and that the Kennedy team’s one-thousand-man withdrawal plan had been based on false reports.
John McCone, who accompanied McNamara on the trip, began his report of the visit with the stark observation, “There is no organized government in South Vietnam at this time.”
Johnson needed no convincing. He fully shared his aides’ determination to find a winning formula in Saigon.
More portentously, given that the letter was also released to the press, LBJ gave Minh a “pledge” that the United States “will continue to furnish you and your people with the fullest measure of support in this bitter fight.”
The pretext for their onslaught was a second memorandum from Mansfield to the president that favored such a solution. After reiterating many of the points of his earlier effort, the majority leader suggested that there should be less talk of American responsibility in Vietnam and more talk of the Vietnamese themselves and that there should be a great deal of thought given to the possibilities of a negotiated solution. “We are close,” he warned Johnson, “to the point of no return in Vietnam.”
The ferocity with which the trio of top officials countered Mansfield’s claims is stark evidence of their concerns about his influence on Capitol Hill and about the growth in pronegotiation sentiment in general, both at home and abroad.
Bundy warned Johnson on 6 January that moving in the direction of withdrawal by way of neutralization would mean: a) A rapid collapse of anti-communist forces in South Vietnam, and a unification of the whole country on Communist terms. b) Neutrality in Thailand, and increased influence for Hanoi and Peking. c) Collapse of the anti-Communist position in Laos. d) Heavy pressure on Malaya and Malaysia [sic]. e) A shift toward neutrality in Japan and the Philippines. f) Blows to U.S. prestige in South Korea and Taiwan which would require compensating increases in American commitment there— or else
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He warned ominously that if the United States followed Mansfield’s advice and moved toward neutralization, that move would be seen as a “betrayal” by “all anti-communist Vietnamese,” and “there are enough of them to lose us an election.”
Bundy, referring to himself as an “ex-historian,” noted that Harry Truman had suffered politically from the fall of China because most Americans came to believe that he could and should have done more than he did to prevent it. “That is exactly what would happen now
Therefore, McNamara concluded apocalyptically, “the stakes in preserving an anticommunist South Vietnam are so high that, in our judgment, we must go on bending every effort to win.”
Theodore Sorensen, one of Kennedy’s top aides, advised Johnson to reject Mansfield’s analysis. He warned that neutralization would lead to a communist takeover of Vietnam, a weakening of American prestige and security in Asia, and domestic political trouble for Democrats.
Three decades later Robert McNamara would express regret at the “limited and shallow” nature of these arguments against neutralization or withdrawal at the start of 1964 and would acknowledge that they demonstrated graphically the unalterable American opposition to any kind of early negotiated settlement in Vietnam.
But the analyses also revealed something else: the continuing American fear that the momentum for such a settlement might become too great to stop.
In meetings with Lodge in early January, Minh made clear that he was troubled by the U.S. commitment envisaged in Washington.
