Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Clearly LBJ heard all sides of the debate and everyone recognized the limitations of each choice. In the end, the need to maintain credibility against future communist incursions was deemed to trump the risk of becoming bogged down. The president announced his decision to the nation in a July 28, 1965, press conference:

We have learned at a terrible and a brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace. It is this lesson that has brought us to Viet-Nam. . . . Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection. . . . I plan, as long as I am President, to see that our forces are strong enough to protect our national interest, our right hand constantly protecting that interest with our military, and that our diplomatic and political negotiations are constantly attempting to find some solution that would substitute words for bombs.14

In hindsight, as in the foresight of Undersecretary George Ball, as we have noted, many judge US involvement in Vietnam to have been a mistake. As clear as hindsight is, we should remember that Johnson was following a well-trodden path to promote what was understood to be the US’s national security interest. While his interests were elsewhere—in his proposals for the Great Society—he also understood the need for continuity and predictability in policy following Kennedy’s assassination. Indeed Johnson’s Vietnam policy is best understood as a perpetuation of Kennedy’s policy and of the post–World War II US commitment to prevent the spread of communism. That effort had already failed in China and in Cuba; Johnson was not keen to be the one to oversee its failure in Southeast Asia.

With the urgency of both the appearance and the reality of policy and programmatic continuity in mind, and despite some personal frays in relations, Johnson retained most of Kennedy’s cabinet and perpetuated the fallen president’s policy agenda, including his agenda to contain communism. In a meeting on November 24, 1964, he declared, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”15 Continuity in foreign policy and stability at home all dictated that he continue to resist the expansion of communism. But most assuredly this was not his primary interest as president. As he said well before his escalation of the American effort in Vietnam, “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? No, we’ve got a treaty but, hell, everybody else’s got a treaty out there and they’re not doing anything about it. Of course if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.”16

Vietnam was very much the chosen battlefield in the fight against communism and LBJ certainly supported the US security objective of containing communism just as JFK, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman had before him; however, had he not come to the presidency in the awful way that he did, it is quite plausible that his Vietnam choices would have been different. Jack Valenti often posed a fascinating hypothetical to student audiences when he spoke of LBJ and Vietnam: “If the United States had not had any soldiers in Vietnam in 1963, would the new president have sent them in?” His answer never varied: “I believe LBJ would not have sent in troops for the simple reason that his first objective was to build the Great Society. He knew this would be expensive and demand his focused energies. A war in a jungle half a world away would intrude seriously, and perhaps fatally, on his goal of lifting up the quality of life in this nation.”17

While the situation in Vietnam compelled changes in Johnson’s emphasis, his focus, especially early in his first full term, was to embark on his monumental domestic agenda to build what he called a Great Society. In his memoir, presidential aide Joseph Califano lists 202 legislative bills passed by Congress during Johnson’s presidency.18 Vietnam simply was not high on the agenda in 1964 or early 1965. For instance, Johnson’s inaugural address in 1965 made no reference at all to Vietnam.19 He mentioned it only once in his 1964 State of the Union Address, and then in connection with the ability of people of different races to work together. His 1965 State of the Union Address contained one reference to Vietnam, this time in direct connection to communist expansion in Asia. Subsequent State of the Union Addresses were dominated by the conflict, with the word “Vietnam” (or its derivatives) appearing 34 times in 1966, 46 times in 1967, 10 times in 1968, and 18 times in 1969.20

To Johnson, Vietnam was an unwanted but also an unavoidable distraction from what he in fact wished to do. Despite the growing pressure to escalate in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he made no secret that he intended to wield the power he had attained to implement his agenda. In his March 15, 1965, message before Congress, the president was explicit about his intention to promote equality in America. Talking about civil rights, he said:

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem. . . . This is the richest and most powerful country which ever occupied the globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election. I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties. I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.21

In the same speech Johnson made clear that he was not just articulating a rhetorical wish-list. Rather, he made it evident that now that he had the power to fulfill these goals he intended to act: “But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.”22

Johnson is widely recognized as a political master whose abilities to put together support for a bill was unrivaled, even if the way he got things done made him a huge SOB.23 When he achieved the highest level of power, he used it to implement his vision for equality in America. As a master politician, he surely knew that magnanimity, fairness, and the promotion of equality were political suicide. As we shall see, LBJ knew that in the long run his policies would drastically weaken his party. Perhaps he anticipated that he could achieve reelection for a second (full) term before the consequences of his civil rights legislation would jeopardize his position. The Vietnam War, and particularly how he extended his normative ideals of fairness and equality to the conduct of the war, undermined any such hope. We will return to this theme after reviewing Bush’s Iraq War, a war in which, unlike Johnson’s war, the president does not seem at all to have been a reluctant warrior.

Bush: A Willing, Optimistic Warrior

BUSH’S DECISION TO INVADE IRAQ IN 2003 FOLLOWED A RADICALLY different course from Johnson’s decision to escalate the existing American effort following the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Despite the failure by President George H. W. Bush to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime following military victory in the 1991 Gulf War, when George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, an invasion of Iraq certainly was not a consensus position either in the American public or among leading foreign policy advisers and decision makers. Indeed, it was an option to which very few people gave real consideration even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.