The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Johnson reported to the President that Communism must be and could be stopped in Southeast Asia (“The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination to achieve success there”) and that even Vietnam could be saved (“if we move quickly and wisely. We must have a coordination of purpose in our country team, diplomatic and military. The most important thing is imaginative, creative American management of our military aid program”). It was a fine example of the hardening American view of the time, looking at Vietnam through the prism of American experience, American needs and American capacities. American purpose with Americans doing the right things could affect the destinies of these people. The Vietnamese were secondary, a small and unimportant people waiting to be told what to do by wiser, more subtle foreigners. If it was one more example of the can-do syndrome, it was similarly to stand as an example of the dangers of the game of commitment. Kennedy had sent Johnson to Vietnam as a sign of good will, as a means of reassuring a weak and unsatisfactory government of his commitment; the lasting effect, however, was not on the client state but on the proprietor, and in this case, most importantly, on the messenger himself, Lyndon Johnson; he had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply to Diem and Vietnam, attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, b...