Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 30 - June 23, 2025
“It is not easy for any country to repair its mistakes, especially those in which it has invested lives, money, and moral judgments. But the original mistake [of intervening] in Southeast Asia must be repaired. The way to do this is to go to a conference.
Lyndon Johnson needed no convincing. To Lippmann he had claimed that the military outlook in Vietnam was brightening, but inside he knew better.
More than he had let on to Lippmann, he shared the journalist’s pessimistic diagnosis of the Vietnam situation, shared his and other skeptics’ fears that the United States might be slipping into another major war on the Asian mainland, one that might well be unwinnable.
Even as he said those things, however, Johnson could not bring himself to give serious thought to disengagement.
The advocacy of top presidential aides mattered here. Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk all advised sticking it out in Vietnam, through escalation if necessary. Had the three of them marched into the Oval Office one spring day and declared that disengagement via a conference was the only sensible option, no doubt Johnson would have listened. Perhaps he would have followed their advice. But perhaps not. The role of the three advisers in the decision making was not quite as important as is often suggested.
Johnson was as committed to the defense of South Vietnam as anyone in his administration—not as optimistic as some, not as convinced that the outcome was crucial to America’s national security, but just as committed. Talk of disengagement he equated with softness, with being weak.
More than that, it would lead to a loss of the Democratic Party’s prestige at home, and his own personal prestige.
The pressure tactics worked. Ottawa and London, though dismayed by U.S. intransigence, agreed to forestall a conference. The French proposal was dead.
Even the “selective use” of nuclear weapons was considered, though only briefly.
William Bundy admitted as much during meetings with senior British officials in London on 28-29 May: military action against North Vietnam would in all likelihood be initiated, he told his hosts, but not before important groundwork had been laid in the U.S. Congress.
Most in Congress “are cautious or noncommittal,” Frederick Dutton, the head of the State Department’s office of congressional relations, reported in a memo to McGeorge Bundy on 2 June. “Even most of those supporting the Administration’s course are often wary about it.”
they were under no illusion that the mass'of Americans wanted, or would necessarily support, a significantly enlarged U.S. military presence in Vietnam.
so, for the second time in less than three months the United States decided to delay a policy initiative that all top officials agreed would in all likelihood eventually have to be implemented: taking the war to North Vietnam. Both times the decision to delay was based not on assessments of the military situation on the ground but on concerns that critical constituencies around the world would not support such action, and that some would respond by increasing the pressure for a negotiated settlement.
The gigantic scope of the program revealed just how isolated the administration perceived itself to be in the late spring of 1964—the president and his top aides feared they could not count on the American people or the vast majority of America’s allies to support the war effort. They even worried about the level of commitment among the South Vietnamese.
The importance of the information program can thus scarcely be exaggerated. It was the centerpiece of the administration’s Vietnam policy that summer. (Remarkably, it has received almost no attention from students of the war.) Its outcome would determine when and how to launch the wider military action that top officials now saw as nearly inevitable to prevent a collapse in South Vietnam (recall that the conferees in Honolulu in early June opted to delay such action in large part because of concern about how these crucial audiences would react).
Rusk said that the United States saw no reason to fight a war in that part of the world and that it sought no bases and no military position in the region.
Should North Vietnam agree to leave its neighbors alone, it could be assured that Washington would consider facilitating trade between the DRV and the West.
The Canadian should be perfectly clear, Lodge told the president: “The Americans are determined to win the struggle in South Viet Nam and will do whatever is necessary to win it.”
Martin was unmoved. He repeated Canadian objections to direct intervention and repeated his view that a conference, perhaps including the whole of Indochina, was the best bet.
At a State Department meeting on 30 May, W. Averell Harriman argued that too little work had been done on what might be offered to Hanoi in exchange for ceasing aggression in South Vietnam.
Pham Van Dong said nothing (and Seaborn failed to probe him on the issue), but it is telling that he voiced firm support for a new Geneva conference on Laos—surely he knew that de Gaulle and others felt confident that such a meeting would almost certainly be expanded to include all of Indochina.
By emphasizing his government’s patience and its determination not to provoke the United States, Pham Van Dong appears to have been trying, as Wallace J. Thies has put it, to “sketch out a solution allowing the U.S. a face-saving exit from the war.” Bringing about such an exit remained a key goal among Hanoi strategists: they were well aware of the immense military capabilities of the United States and wanted to do nothing that might encourage Washington to drastically escalate its role in the war. Thus, although Pham Van Dong showed little concern about, or even interest in, Seaborn’s
...more
Thus even before Lodge announced his intention to leave Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy sent Johnson a list of potential replacements, including Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, and himself. (The interest of these men in taking on the assignment is graphic proof of how important Vietnam had become in official Washington by mid 1964.)
As the months passed and the war effort deteriorated, he would even abandon, reluctantly, his opposition to the commitment of major American ground forces. By July 1965, he had renounced his membership in the Never Again Club.
Willard Matthias, an analyst with the CIA's Board of National Estimates, argued in a June 1964 internal memo (a draft of which he had completed earlier in the year) that the United States faced exceedingly poor prospects in Vietnam and should therefore consider seeking “some kind of negotiated settlement” to the conflict. “The guerrilla war in South Vietnam is in its fifth year and no end appears in sight,” Matthias wrote. The Vietcong, under the direction of the Hanoi government but dependent largely on their own resources, were pressing their attack more vigorously than ever, and with
...more
a 12 June Times lead editorial warning against U.S. pursuit of a military solution.
“The empires which Western power could not hold, that power cannot now pacify,” Church declared, and yet the United States appeared to believe that it could. The senator did not counsel an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, but he advocated a greater role for the United Nations in bringing peace to Indochina. He attacked the notion that an escalated war was the answer.
In a memo to Johnson outlining his views on the war, Humphrey said that the South Vietnamese should get American guidance but little else. Only they themselves could win their war, and to be able to do so they needed a stable political base. Without such a base, Humphrey warned, “no additional military involvement can be successful.
In addition, except for Morse and Gruening, these Democrats were acutely uncomfortable about challenging a Democratic president’s foreign policy, even when they disagreed with it.
In late June, a thirteen-member group of House Republicans, led by Representative Gerald Ford, called for a stronger U.S. stand in Vietnam, labeled the Kennedy-Johnson policies in Southeast Asia a failure, and threatened to make the war an issue in the upcoming campaign. The group charged that the administration was following a “Why Win?” policy in Vietnam, suggested that the time had come for a congressional resolution on the war, and called for an absolute commitment “to insure a victory for freedom.” A centerpiece in that commitment should be American command of all military operations in
...more
Whereas Seaborn saw no evidence of war-weariness or apathy in the North, no one could dispute that both were endemic in the South.
Khanh government representatives were secretly meeting with elements of the Vietcong.
Here was a foretaste of the George Ball who would become the most prominent in-house critic of escalation in the coming year: skeptical, searching , incisive, and prescient.
Johnson nevertheless chose Ball to meet the French president is not entirely clear, though it was a familiar Johnson stratagem to send dissenters to argue on his behalf.
De Gaulle said that he sympathized with Johnson’s dilemma but that the American president needed to know something about Vietnam: it was a hopeless place to fight. Vietnam is “rotten country,” he said, a phrase Ball would never forget. France would never again become involved there, nor would it ever support any American escalation.
Three weeks after Ball returned home, de Gaulle, at a Paris dinner given in honor of the visiting Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, assailed the “cruel divisions” of Southeast Asia, which he said were exacerbated by “unending foreign intervention.”
Few Japanese had a taste for communism or wanted a North Vietnamese victory in the conflict, but many on all parts of the political spectrum were haunted by memories of Japan’s own misadventure in China a quarter century earlier; they predicted that, much as Japanese forces had bogged down then, Americans would bog down now if they chose to fight.
When U.S. ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer pressed Tokyo officials for a more substantial involvement, they steadfastly refused. Before long, Reischauer later recalled, Vietnam would “cast a dark shadow over all Japanese-American relations.”
They were the dominoes that Washington insisted would fall if the free-world bastion in South Vietnam collapsed. But the governments there saw the struggle differently.
Fear of neutralism: it is everywhere in the administration cables, memoranda, and meeting notes that summer—sometimes spoken, sometimes implicit, always there.
The entry of U Thant into the fray was thus another blow to American efforts to build support for its policy and to discourage talk of a return to Geneva. Dean Rusk was especially put off.
An enticing proposal that might have had a good chance of resolving the Vietnam conflict before the eruption of major war—that is how one might describe the push in July 1964 for a reconvened Geneva conference. In this way the summer of 1964 was like the summer of 1963, a time of missed opportunity for a political solution to the conflict. But also as in 1963, it was a solution that never really had a chance of being realized, despite the momentum behind it in much of the international community.
Other observers, too, saw events at the end of July moving to a climax of one kind or another.
a massive election victory that made him president in his own right (and thereby removed the chief restraint on expanded American action in Vietnam).
To escalate or get out: that was indeed the central, inescapable question, as it had been for the previous twelve months. The difference now was that it had to be fully confronted, because the war was, as Grose perceived, at a turning point.
The president and his top men never doubted which way they would go: they would escalate.
especially welcome news given the Deep South’s defection from Democratic ranks to the independent candidacy of George Wallace, governor of Alabama.
Understanding what happened in the gulf and why requires understanding this urgent administration need to reaffirm its commitment to the struggle and find a way to jump-start the flagging effort in South Vietnam. It also requires understanding that, contrary to the administration’s claims, the incident had in fact been provoked, consciously or not, by the United States. And it requires understanding that American officials engaged in deliberate and repeated deception about what went on in the gulf in the days surrounding the affair.
This account was wholly correct about the first point: North Vietnamese vessels did attack the Maddox on 2 August, inflicting minor damage.
The question of whether the Maddox had been in international waters at the time of the attack, as the Americans claimed, or in the North’s territorial waters, as Hanoi claimed, is open to interpretation.
