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. Beginning in the mid-1960s, violence erupted in several cities, as the country suffered through long, hot summers of riots or the threat of riotsin the Watts district of Los Angeles (1965), in Cleveland, Ohio (1966), in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan (1967), in Washington, D.C. (1968), and elsewhere. While senior military and civilian officials differed on what they regarded as the benefits of this programcode-named Operation Rolling Thunderall of them hoped that the bombing, which began on 2 March 1965, would have a salutary effect on the North Vietnamese leadership, leading Hanoi to end its support of the insurgency in South Vietnam. Johnson announced an "unconditional war on poverty" in his first State of the Union address, in January 1964. Foundation and the Presidents Office of the University of Virginia, The Miller Centers Presidential Recordings Program is funded in part by the By December, with attacks increasing in the countryside, a look back at those earlier metrics revealed that State Department analyses were indeed on the mark.8, Yet Johnson did not need that retrospective appraisal to launch a more vigorous campaign against the Communists, for his first impulse as the new president was to shift the war into higher gear. The plan envisioned a series of measures, of gradually increasing military intensity, that American forces would apply to bolster morale in Saigon, attack the Vietcong in South Vietnam, and pressure Hanoi into ending its aid of the Communist insurgency. Those Tuesday Lunches would involve a changing array of attendees over the course of the next two years and, by 1967, would become an integral though unofficial part of the policymaking machinery.15. students. LBJ: Still Casting a Long Shadow | National Archives These were: that America keeps her word; that the future of all south-east Asia was the issue; that our purpose is peace; and that the war was a struggle for freedom. Upon taking office, Johnson, also. As his popularity sank to new lows in 1967, Johnson was confronted by demonstrations almost everywhere he went. The job, therefore, couldnt be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment. Lyndon B. Johnson - Vintage Photograph 1311039 | eBay Gender Spheres and Circles of Power: How American Women Won the Vote by David White, Gruppe 47 and the Post-WWII German Literary World, Products Which Changed the World Sugar and Oil, Hamish Henderson and the Spanish Connection by Mario Relich, Is Donald Trump a Jacksonian? Those officials included many of the same figures who had acquiesced in Diems removal, as the desire for continuity led him to retain Kennedys presumed objectives as well as his senior civilian and military advisers.5 Uncertainty about his own foreign policy credentials also contributed to Johnsons reliance on figures such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, all of whom had been with Kennedy since the outset of that administration. Much of the history of 1968 we recall now is . The credibility concerns of Johnson and his advisers were not limited to how the USA would be viewed if it did withdraw it would not have been seriously damaged since only Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan and South Korea backed continued American involvement it was equally the threat to their own and the Democratic partys standing. Drawn from the months July 1964 to July1965, these transcripts cover arguably the most consequential developments of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, transforming what had been a U.S. military assistance and advisory mission into a full-scale American war. Sometimes I take other people's judgments, and I get misled. Detail from "The Conquest of Siberia" (1895) by Vasily Surikov. His replacement was retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, formerly military representative to President Kennedy and then, since 1962, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the signal that the United States was becoming more invested in the military outcome of the conflict could not have been clearer. 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. Press Conference, July 28, 1965. The Cold War was essentially fuelled by a conflict of ideology, and Johnsons ideology was strongly rooted in the past. Beginning in 1965, student demonstrations grew larger and more frequent and helped to stimulate resistance to the draft. With vehemence that ultimately provided fodder for the administrations harshest critics, and betraying none of these doubts and uncertainties, administration officials insisted in public that the attacks were unprovoked. Like sending troops in there to Santo Domingo. A series of meetings with civilian and military officials, including one in which LBJ heard a lone, dissenting view from Undersecretary of State George Ball, solidified Johnsons thinking about the necessity of escalating the conflict. In an effort to achieve consensus about security requirements for those troops, key personnel undertook a review in Honolulu on 20 April. Just ask at the reception desk for directions to the meeting room. By September, the Dominicans had agreed to a compromise. The Open History Society is open to everybody and meets on the last Friday of the month between September and May to hear talks from historians and those interested in and knowledgeable about history. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor., It was for these reasons that Johnson carried out the military escalation quietly and almost clandestinely. Notably, Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and one of the officials most enamored of deposing Diem, had lost his job in the State Department within the first five months of the Johnson administration. By spring of 1965, Johnson was holding impromptu lunch meetings with only a handful of senior officials on Tuesdays where they hashed out strategy. But not wanting to get railroaded into large-scale military response by political pressure from hawks on the right in Congress, Johnson and McNamara privately and selectively conceded that classified sabotage operations in the region had probably provoked the North Vietnamese attack. Within days of the Pleiku/Holloway attacks, as well as the subsequent assault on Qui Nhon (in which twenty-three Americans were killed and twenty-one were wounded), LBJ signed off on a program of sustained bombing of North Vietnam that, except for a handful of pauses, would last for the remainder of his presidency. Those few more divisions eventually reached 550,000 men by 1968. Eisenhower authorised massive aid programs which merely made the country more corrupt and dependent on subsidies, and sustained a large ineffectual army whose violent and ham-fisted activities contributed to a guerrilla insurrection waged by the southern Vietcong and supported by the Communist North. Only that way, he argued, could he sell the compromise to powerful members of Congress. The decision to introduce American combat troops to the Vietnam War in March of 1965 was the result of several months of gradual escalation by President Lyndon B. Johnson. David Coleman, former Associate Professor and former Chair, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Marc Selverstone, Associate Professor and Chair, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia, I guess weve got no choice, but it scares the death out of me. Further indication of that resolve came the same month with the replacement of General Paul D. Harkins as head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) with Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, who had been Harkinss deputy since January 1964 and was ten years Harkinss junior. He had been in exile in Puerto Rico since. Lyndon Johnson. Particularly critical was J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who, in the wake of the crisis, took the Johnson administration to task for a lack of candor with the American public. In the spring and summer of 1965 Johnson was laboring to get through Congress some of the most controversial of his Great Society programs: the Voting Rights Act, federal aid to education, and Medicare, among others. I have nothing in the world I want except to do what I believe to be right. Two days after his first order sending in the Marines, Johnson again went on television to announce a rapid escalation in the U.S. military intervention that, within three weeks, would have approximately thirty thousand U.S. troops in the island nation. "We have lost the South for a generation," was spoken by a man named Lyndon B. Johnson. There is no media for this section. Johnson rejected a legislative strategy that would have entailed open-ended discussion, preferring to obtain the funds under the authority Congress granted him via the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964a move, he knew, that would further ratify that authority should he need to act even more boldly in the future. On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson culminated a weeklong series of meetings with his top diplomatic, intelligence and military advisers in . And in July he agreed to the dispatch of two combat divisions to Vietnam. In the late spring, developments closer to home offered striking parallels to the situation in Vietnam. Here was a nation born under the direst of circumstances. Its legacy was 58,220 American soldiers dead, a huge drain on the nations finances, social polarisation and the tarnishing of the reputation of the United States. But on 3 NovemberElection Dayhe created an interagency task force, chaired by William P. Bundy, brother of McGeorge Bundy and chief of the State Departments Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, to review Vietnam policy. April 7, 1965 Its just the biggest damned mess that I sawWhat the hell is Vietnam worth to me?What is it worth to this country? . Johnson ultimately decided to support Guzmn, but only with strict assurances that his provisional government would not include any Communists and that no accommodation would be reached with the 14th of July Movement. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/. this isa terrible thing that were getting ready to do. 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. Compounding the new administrations problems was the realization that earlier assumptions about progress in the war were ill-founded. The number increased steadily over the next two years, peaking at about 550,000 in 1968. Johnson had chosen to keep on Kennedys foreign policy team McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. See Conversation WH6505-29-7812, 7813, 7814, 7815. The deterioration of the South Vietnamese position, therefore, led Johnson to consider even more decisive action. The North Vietnamese were gambling that the South would collapse and the Americans would have nothing to support, leaving them no option but to withdraw.