The Choice: LBJ's Decision To Go To War In Vietnam 60 Years Ago

2025-04-30 07:01:16

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Sixty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam.

His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey advised him against it. So did his long-time mentor and friend Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Inside the administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball also made the case for restraint.

The war, they said, would have to be limited in scope. The job, therefore, couldn't be finished, which would mean an open-ended commitment.

Communist China made it clear that it would not permit an invasion of North Vietnam. For fear of provoking an all-out war with the communist superpowers, the Johnson administration would forswear not only an invasion but also any attempts to sponsor an anti-communist insurgency in the North.

The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. Instead of a nation with a unique history, South Vietnam was a political compromise, the creation of the great powers (the US, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United Kingdom) at the 1954 Geneva Conference .

The flag of Vietnamese nationalism had been captured by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers in the north: it would not be wrested from them easily.

Indeed, George Ball predicted that the United States would eventually have to put half a million troops in Vietnam, a prediction that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara vehemently rejected.

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.

In conversation with Dick Russell, he said,

Shortly after, he vented to adviser McGeorge Bundy in a now familiar monologue:

But in February 1965 Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder , the aerial assault on North Vietnam. And in July he agreed to the dispatch of two combat divisions to Vietnam.

Why?

Containing communism

In April 1964 US intelligence reported that substantial numbers of regular North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail .

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