LBJ’s War

It is now more than 50 years since President Lyndon Johnson went all-in on the Vietnam War. At the New York Times Mark D. Updegrove muses:

After the French left Vietnam in 1954 and the country was partitioned, Dwight D. Eisenhower and, after him, John F. Kennedy sent billions in aid and advisers to support the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. His weak regime needed the money to ward off the Communist insurgency of the Vietcong, a guerrilla force aided by the north’s Ho Chi Minh, who had designs to reunify Vietnam. It was an outcome the Americans couldn’t accept: According to the so-called domino theory, a Communist victory in Vietnam would inevitably snowball across the region.

And yet Vietnam remained a trouble spot that continued to fester. With the tacit backing of the Kennedy administration, a military coup occurred on Nov. 1, 1963, resulting in Diem’s assassination.

It was a move about which Johnson had deep misgivings. “I don’t believe assassination is ever justified,” he said later. “They were ruthless people. Ho Chi Minh was. But I mean it was ruthless of the United States government, with our boasted list of freedoms, to condone assassination because you don’t approve of a political philosophy.” Still, after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson dived into Vietnam immediately. “Those first few days,” he remembered, “Vietnam was on top of the agenda, before the visiting heads of state got home from the funeral.”

It’s easy enough to explain. He was minimizing personal downside risk. If he had “lost Vietnam” he would have paid for it at the polls. He made the cynical calculation to escalate the U. S. involvement, presumably under the mistaken impression that the war could be won quickly and at little cost.

As it turned out it cost him another term as president and his reputation, still in tatters with the Democratic Party, and cost more than 50,000 young Americans including many of my friends and acquaintances their lives and many more their health and youth.