Annotations for Lbj: Vietnam War

It's our pleasure to have you. Fred is the author of 10 books. He's the author and editor of 10 books on American politics and foreign policy. Among my favorites and those which I know everyone has read, uh, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, which really transformed our understanding of Lyndon Johnson's choices for war in 1964-1965. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, which Fred co-wrote with Campbell Craig, another historian, which looks at the influence of domestic politics on American Cold War foreign policy. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire in the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam before we would, we traditionally called the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other rewards and then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well. And then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

Particularly following Daniel Ellsberg, who you mentioned before in his release of the Pentagon Papers, the internal history of the Vietnam War, which was very critical and exposed the lying of American political leaders about the war. Following that, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, there was a very strong effort within Congress to create legislation to protect whistleblowers and dissenters, and to manage this process and deal with many of the difficulties and paradoxes that Kaetan and you have pointed to.

And at the time, I wasn't even thinking very far back about our history. I was thinking we don't talk about the Vietnam War anymore. We've never really talked about Hiroshima.

So how did this relate to the anti-war movement of the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States? Was it a precursor or does the Port Huron statement sort of reflect an early anti-war sentiment?

There's a lot of talk about the military-industrial complex, among other sort of terms about the war machine in the United States. Yeah, I think the Port Huron statement did recognize some troubling trends that even though the Vietnam War wasn't exactly on their radar as much in 1962 as it would be two or three years later even, I think they did see that the United States government was making some decisions that, you know, were concerning to them.

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.

And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And then, as I started researching the book more and more, I realized what a significant role the US military would play. When I started this book, I sort of understood that the military today plays a major role in humanitarian operations, but I assumed this was a later 20th century development, sort of a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War effort to reinvent the military, but in fact, as early as the early 20th century, you start to see the US Navy, especially, but also the Army Marines, depending on if they're on the scene, responding to a lot of catastrophes, the War and Navy Department committing rations, tents, their supplies to help disaster victims, so these three together, the military, the State Department, and their partners in the voluntary sector, are really responsible for cooperating to carry out disaster relief operations.

And by 76, Humphrey is so ill with the cancer that'll kill him that he decides not to make one more try. And so he's not on that list of presidents. And I think even to the people who remember him, he suffers in the historical collective consciousness because the recollections of him are about the reviled latter part of his public life, when he's Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and they both support the escalation in Vietnam.

And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.

Ironic because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we've seen of leadership, of whether it was Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR's great orations about nothing to fear, but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.

Yeah. Really good question. I mean, so, you know, War Powers Act comes at an amazing time in American history because this act probably could never have been passed at any other time other than in 1973. Nixon is completely on his heels after Watergate. People are still fuming over the Vietnam War. Nixon, Nixon actually. So and the thing that's most remarkable is that Nixon vetoes the the amendment and then it's the the act and then it's overwritten. So from the beginning, this is a major departure that that the president is against going forward. Some presidents see it as unconstitutional and completely ignore it.

So and then, you know, you look at the 1970s and actually starting in the late 1960s. And in fact, that's something I think that it's really important to mention is the Fulbright Vietnam hearings. So holding hearings, the 1970s, you know, the uproar against Vietnam and the War Powers Act didn't just come out of nowhere in the 1970s. It came because of these public sized hearings and because of the Pentagon Papers and because of things like that, where Congress was doing investigations, you know, overseeing the executive branch as it should be.

Yeah. A lot of this has to do with the authorizations of force from the early 2000s, that the president points to and says, "This allows us to do this and you'll have to give us the money." Now, Johnson made a similar argument during the Vietnam War where he said, "You guys keep giving us the money. If you wanted the war to end, you could just stop giving us the money." The appropriations issue is difficult because as I said before, you have troops in the field. You have people who need this money. I think that the only thing that Congress can really do is plan ahead with scheduled decreases.