Johnson, a southerner himself, worked to persuade congressmen and senators from the former Confederacy to acquiesce in, if not actively support, passage of these measures. I have nothing in the world I want except to do what I believe to be right. The Vietnam war was a very controversial war. By Kent Germany. Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term? Two days later, on the night of 4 August, the Maddox and another destroyer that had joined it, the USS C. Turner Joy, reported a new round of attacks by North Vietnamese military forces. In 1970 he reflected: I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. Johnson interpreted his victory as an extraordinary mandate to push forward with his Great Society reforms. Humphrey's advice that the United States should pull back on the Vietnam War nettled Johnson . While Johnson resumed the bombing and increased its intensity following the failure of MAYFLOWER, South Vietnam continued to suffer increasing strain from both political instability and pressure from Communists. Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was equally committed to winning the fight against the Communist insurgency in Vietnama fight that Kennedy had joined during his thousand days in office. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/. As each new American escalation met with fresh enemy response and as no end to the combat appeared in sight, the presidents public support declined steeply. My father was 17 years old when LBJ gave this speech, less than 18 months later my dad drops out of high school and enlists in the US Army and goes to war with the 101st Airborne Division to. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a coup in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt. Civilian rule in Saigon came to an end in mid-June as the Young Turksmilitary officials including Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Kyrose to prominence at the head of a new ruling war cabinet. On 2 August, the USS Maddox, engaged in a signals intelligence collection mission for the National Security Agency (known as a Desoto patrol) off the coast of North Vietnam, reported that it was under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. His Great Society programs to tackle poverty and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act were socially progressive measures carried out during a period of economic expansion and increased prosperity. by David White, Chroniclers, Detectives or Judges Just What Are Historians? While the Great Society policies dovetailed well with New Deal policies, Johnson misinterpreted Roosevelts foreign policy, reading back into the 1930s an interventionist course of action that Roosevelt only adopted in 1941. Washington was generally pleased with the turn of events and sought to bolster the Khanh regime. In fact, it was those advisers who would play an increasingly important role in planning for Vietnam, relegating the interagency approachwhich never went awayto a level of secondary importance within the policymaking process. Thus ideological inflexibility and political self-interest snuffed out any alternative to escalation; and Johnsons pride and his domineering, machismo character led him to see any weakening of the American position in Vietnam as a personal humiliation. The North Vietnam Army and the underground Vietcong were free to move in and out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Liberal. In late 1963 the North Vietnamese greatly increased supplies of weapons and equipment to the Vietcong and infiltrated regular army units into the South. He references the song "We Shall Overcome", . $17.93 . Convinced that Bosch was using and encouraging Communist allies, particularly those aided and abetted by the Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro, the reactionary military-backed junta sought to crack down on pro-Bosch groups, moves that only served to provoke the Dominican population to take their activism to the streets. In fact, Johnson himself grew up poor from Texas. He coupled that vision with rhetoric designed to highlight the administrations willingness to discuss, if not negotiate, aspects of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam We want nothing for ourselves. Other anti-Diem policymakers, such as Michael Forrestal and Averell Harriman, would also move away from the center of power, with Forrestal leaving the White House for the State Department in 1964 and Harriman leaving the number three post at the State Department by March 1965. In Santo Domingo, rebels sympathetic to the exiled liberal intellectual President Juan Bosch had launched an open, armed uprising against the military-backed junta. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation. July 28 - President Johnson announces further deployment of U.S. military forces to Vietnam, raising U.S. presence there to 125,000 men and increasing the monthly draft call to 35,000. As he expressed to longtime confidant Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia), LBJ understood the symbolism of sending the Marines and their likely impact on the combat role the United States was coming to play, both in reality and in the minds of the American public.16. The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive. Johnson was reluctant to intervene in South East Asia but once strategic and politic exigencies seemd to demand it, he began to develop a not unreasonable vision for the future of South Vietnam, one that helped him stay the course. Bundys presence in Vietnam at the time of the Communist raids on Camp Holloway and Pleiku in early Februarywhich resulted in the death of nine Americansprovided additional justification for the more engaged policy the administration had been preparing. It meant in particular that America could never send ground troops into the North. Concern over the fate of his ambitious domestic program likewise led Johnson deeper into Vietnam, fearing that a more open debate about the likely costs of the military commitment and the prospects for victory would have stalled legislative action on the Great Society. But the man that misled me was Lyndon Johnson, nobody else. From the above two quotations, there seems little doubt that Johnson genuinely believed there was a threat of world domination by Communism, a very mainstream Cold-War view among American politicians from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Industries; Vietnam War In his April 1965 speech, Johnson limited himself to a defensive strategy of containment in Indochina. In response, President Johnson ordered retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and asked Congress to sanction any further action he might take to deter Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. Yet Johnson was a genuine social reformer who wished to raise Americans out of poverty, expand education, provide enhanced welfare and free medical care, tackle urban renewal, preserve and protect the environment and end racial discrimination the Great Society vision. It pained him to hear protesters, especially studentswho he thought would venerate him for his progressive social agendachanting, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? To avoid the demonstrations, he eventually restricted his travels, becoming a virtual prisoner in the White House. The spate of endless coups and governmental shake-ups vexed Johnson, who wondered how the South Vietnamese would ever mount the necessary resolve to stanch the Communists in the countryside when they were so absorbed with their internal bickering in Saigon. We are there because we have a promise to keep. Restoration of colonial rule fanned the flames of nationalism still further in Vietnam, and significantly elevated the role of the Communist element within the national resistance to the point where it dominated what had previously been a politically broad-based independence movement. And there must be no such failure in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson. During the intense debated that occurred within the foreign policy establishment in the spring and summer of 1965, Johnson himself was frequently the leading dove. Sponsored. A genuine Communist threat had effectively been created by US policy, based on the speculative domino theory, and this was amplified when the French were defeated and pulled out of south-east Asia. Despite Democrat control of Congress, he felt hampered by conservative elements within his own party: Those damned conservatives, they dont want to help the poor and the Negroes but theyre afraid to be against it Theyll say we have this job to do, beating the Communists. From the incidents in the Tonkin Gulf in August 1964 to the deployment of forty-four combat troop battalions in July 1965, these months span congressional authorization for military action as well as the Americanization of the conflict. Fifty years ago, when the 89th Congress convened in January 1965 following Johnson's landslide election victory against Sen. Barry Goldwater, LBJ was at the height of his political power. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . Nevertheless, the State Departments influence in Vietnam planning was on the rise, as it had been since early 1963. Department of State Bulletin, April 26, 1965. They recommended that LBJ give Westmoreland what he needed, advice that General Eisenhower had also communicated to the White House back in June. But segregationists and red-baiters might well have blocked the civil rights achievements of the Great Society, prompting racial conflict at home that would have made Detroit seem like a picnic. The circumstances of Johnsons ascendance to the Oval Office left him little choice but to implement several unrealized Kennedy initiatives, particularly in the fields of economic policy and civil rights. LBJ was a nation-builder. He considered the depth and extent of poverty in the country (nearly 20 percent of Americans at the time were poor) to be a national disgrace that merited a national response. Johnsons actions, both domestically and internationally, arose from his early political experiences as a New Deal Democrat. When Republican supporters of Goldwater declared, In your heart, you know hes right, Democrats responded by saying, In your heart, you know he might. Goldwaters remark to a reporter that, if he could, he would drop a low-yield atomic bomb on Chinese supply lines in Vietnam did nothing to reassure voters. This was particularly true of his conversations with broadcast and print journalists, with whom he spoke on a regular basis.
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