|  |
The U.S. Entry into Vietnam
Contributing teacher: Michael Flamm
Time period: 1960s
Point
Why, by mid-1965, was the United States committed to a war in
Vietnam? In the e-seminar The Vietnam War, Alan
Brinkley explains that policy makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations weighed the political and diplomatic costs of engagement against those of disengagement and concluded that the latter outweighed the former. President Johnson believed that U.S. withdrawal would undermine his credibility in foreign affairs and even in domestic affairs. In foreign affairs, the United States needed, he felt, a strong executive to steer the country through the Cold War, and with respect to domestic affairs he was eager to use his office to promote the ambitious social programs of the Great Society. And so Johnson decided to intervene in the Vietnam War—a decision that, ironically and tragically, led to precisely the consequences he most feared.
Counterpoint
Few historical questions have generated more popular or
scholarly debate than why the United States became entangled
in Vietnam. On one level, the debate focuses on broad
objectives and interests. Was the United States in Vietnam to
defend freedom and halt communism, as Guenter Lewy maintains
in America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978)? Or was the United States in Vietnam to secure
raw materials and protect global capitalism, as Gabriel Kolko
argues in Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985)?
On another level, the debate focuses on the decision-making
process in 1964 and 1965 and how it led to the deployment of
U.S. combat forces. David Halberstam in The Best and the
Brightest (New York: Penguin, 1972) contends that the
advisers to Kennedy and Johnson did not seriously consider the
possibility of failure because they were blinded by
arrogance. H. R. McMaster in Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon
Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the
Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997)
maintains that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, divided by personal
and professional rivalries, also failed to provide accurate
assessments or appropriate counsel. By contrast, Larry Berman
in Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in
Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1982) argues that it was
Johnson's fears of political ruin and his wish to protect the
Great Society from any political fallout that deafened him to
the advice of his inner circle. But Leslie Gelb and Richard
Betts in The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979) emphasize, as
does Professor Brinkley, the rational over the emotional
nature of U.S. policy making. Finally, David Kaiser in American Tragedy (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), suggests that President Kennedy's assassination was a pivotal moment because by late 1963 Kennedy had grown increasingly skeptical about the possibility of success in Vietnam.
|
| |
