John Dumbrell

The Johnson Administration and the British Labour Government: Vietnam, the Pound and East of Suez

Recent accounts of Anglo-American relations in the mid-1960s revolve around the supposed existence of “deals” made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The memoir of Edward Short, Wilsons Chief Whip, goes so far as to describe a “deal” done before the 1964 general election, whereby the US would support the pound in return for an undertaking not to devalue if a Labour Government were to be returned. Clive Ponting, Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott all accept that a “deal” or “secret agreement” — Pimlotts phrase — had been made by the early summer of 1965. The US would organise a multilateral rescue for the sinking pound, in return for British policies of deflation at home, retention of overseas military commitments, and (limited) support for the Vietnam war. The 1965 “deal” appears to have been reinforced during the sterling crisis of July 1966, only to come adrift in 1967. Wilsons own account has him rejecting the excessive demands accompanying an American sterling rescue in 1967, and devaluing as — in effect — an assertion of British sovereignty.

British Involvement in Vietnam Peace Initiatives, 1966–1967: Marigolds, Sunflowers, and “Kosygin Week”

This article is the first detailed examination of a famous British peace initiative that proved to be a major incident in the history of Anglo-American relations in the 1960s and the Vietnam War peace negotiations. The article traces the evolution of the Harold Wilson-Andrei Kosygin peace initiative of February 1967 and situates it within a plethora of secret, third-party involvement in trying to find an end to the war. It also places the initiative within an increasingly strained Anglo-American relationship, and places some of the blame for its failure on the distrustful and tense working relationship between President Johnson and Prime Minister Wilson. The article was placed in the most appropriate international journal in the field and was written jointly after the authors discovered a mutual research interest. Both authors contributed to the writing of the article, making use of archival research that each had conducted in Britain and the US. Although both authors were familiar with key materials and had given papers on the subject, a collaborative partnership was desirable as a means of finding additional supporting evidence. The article subsequently received discussion on H-NET. Ellis’ reputation as the leading scholar on Anglo-American relations and the Vietnam War, has led to numerous funded invitations to speak on the topic, notably at the Colloquium on Anglo-American Relations and the Vietnam War, held at the University of Nottingham, March 2007. Her work in this area has also led to an invitation to work in collaboration with Professor Tony Edmonds, Distinguished Professor in History at Ball State University, on British public reaction to the war in Vietnam, and to a recent British Academy small grant to work on Harold Wilson’s private papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

President Bush: American Democracy and the End of the Cold War

What people mean, when they say we worry about a Vietnam, is they don’t want to put this nation through a long drawn-out inconclusive experience that had military action that just ended up with a kind of totally unsatisfactory answer…. I will not, as commander-in-chief, ever put somebody into a military situation that we do not win — ever. And there’s not going to be any long drawn-out agony of Vietnam.1

Reagan: The Waning of the Cold War and Iran-Contra

The previous chapter illustrated the continuing power of the Vietnam legacy during the Reagan years. This chapter will consider the development of this book’s three other major themes during the second Reagan term. The Reagan—Gorbachev dialogue constituted the crucial moment in the demise of the Cold War. This and the following chapter will examine and seek to explain the manner in which the international system which had held primacy since the late 1940s began to disintegrate. It will discuss the making of foreign policy under Reagan and the implications of the Iran-contr? scandal for democratic foreign policy. Finally, in the context of an evaluation of Reagan’s foreign policy, we consider again the debate over American decline.

Bush: Gulf War and New World Order

The invasion of Panama had shown that George Bush was prepared to go to war. Both in Panama and the Gulf, Bush sought directly to confront the legacy of the Vietnam War. In various remarks made in the closing stages of the Gulf War, Bush announced: ‘The specter of Vietnam has been buried in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula’. And: ‘By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.’1 He wished America’s options in the post-Soviet New World Order to be those which were appropriate to contemporary US strengths and interests. They should not continue to be affected by memories of defeat, division and humiliation in the early 1970s. Bush achieved much in the Gulf. However, he was as unable to extinguish the legacy of Vietnam as he was to secure his own electoral future.

Renewing America: Reagan and the Cold War, 1981–5

Ronald Reagan was content to allow the 1980 Presidential election to take its course as a referendum on Jimmy Carter’s performance in office. The hostage crisis, the second oil shock (resulting after the Iranian revolution in four hour gasoline lines in the US), domestic inflation, unemployment, appearances of disarray in the White House, the ‘window of vulnerability’: Reagan scarcely lacked opportunities to assault Carter’s record. Reagan entered the immediate pre-election period with a clear lead on domestic issues. Yet on foreign policy issues, the signs were that the American public, though more assertive than previously, were alarmed by Reagan’s bellicosity. Gallup polls taken in September 1980 suggested that Carter was ahead on foreign issues, and far more trusted to keep the peace than Reagan. (A year later, nearly two-thirds of Gallup respondents actually thought a nuclear war ‘likely’.)1

Jimmy Carter and ‘Global Community’

On his first full day in office, 21 January 1977, Jimmy Carter issued an amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters. Despite the efforts of peace activists at the 1976 Democratic convention, the amnesty did not amount to an absolute pardon. It did not, for example, apply to deserters.1 Nevertheless, Carter’s signal was clear. Here was the President as national healer: a ‘born again’ President inaugurating a ‘born again’ Presidency. Carter’s critique of the Vietnam War was couched not in terms of a glorious crusade gone awry, but attacked the underlying assumptions of preceding Democratic and Republican Presidents. In May, 1977, the new President delivered a speech at Notre Dame University, Indiana, in which he declared that his foreign policy would be ‘free of that inordinate fear of communism’ which had for so long underpinned US support for dictators in Southeast Asia and elsewhere: For too many years we have been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our values for theirs. We have fought fire with fire, never thinking that force is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.2

The Reagan Doctrine: War and Coercive Diplomacy

On 29 April 1985, Secretary Shultz gave a speech at the State Department to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Against the advice of Dick Childress, NSC staff specialist on Vietnam, Shultz offered the most sustainedly upbeat account of the recent war yet attempted by a senior figure in the Reagan Administration. While admitting that ‘mistakes’ were made in ‘how the war was fought’, Shultz declared that there could now be no question as to the morality of US intervention. America’s ‘sacrifice was in the service of noble ideals — to save innocent people from brutal tyranny’. The Secretary of State emphasised that this interpretation of the war inevitably ‘affects our conduct in the present, and thus, in part, determines our future’. Reagan himself added that US troops in Vietnam had been ‘fed into the meatgrinder’ by leaders who had no ‘intention of allowing victory’. He agreed with Richard Nixon that 1973 was actually an American victory.

Carter in Crisis

In 1982, Madeleine Albright of the National Security Council staff recalled that Carter was always ‘totally committed to human rights’. Carter’s personal commitment did not diminish. He saw the policy shifts of 1979–80 as involving, at worst, a postponement rather than a negation of the early ‘global community’/human rights agenda. By 1979, however, there was a pervasive awareness of crisis within the Administration. Albright recollected Carter’s reaction: As the real world began to fall in on him, we all, other than Zbig did, didn’t know how he would come down [sic].1 By the latter part of 1979, the Administration had essentially reverted to containment as its guiding principle. The triumph of containment was never total; individuals in the Administration like Patricia Derian (and, up to his 1980 resignation, Cyrus Vance) continued to fight the ‘global community’ corner. Nor was containment rediscovered overnight. Shortly after assuming office in 1977, Jimmy Carter was presented with worrying evidence about the vulnerability of the US Minuteman force to Soviet guided missiles.2 Later in the year, Carter signed Presidential Directive 18, a measure designed to establish special forces for flexible, low-intensity conflict in the Third World. In January 1978, Carter urged NATO countries to accept 3 per cent defence spending increases.

Clinton and Prospects for America’s Future: New Priorities for Old?

Describing the debate over post-Cold War priorities in 1992, Norman Ornstein recalled Oscar Wilde’s remark that there were two tragedies in human existence: never achieving one’s heart’s desire — and achieving it. The US had won the Cold War, but the American public was ‘bitterly unhappy over the failures of the political and economic processes at home and pessimistic about the future’.1 The Presidential election did not see a sustained debate over future priorities. Third candidate Ross Perot (who gleaned an extraordinary 19 per cent of votes cast) offered virtually no contribution to the debate over foreign policy priorities. He merely suggested that Germany and Japan might help ease the budget deficit by paying more for their defence. Clinton offered a few specific criticisms of the Bush Administration. It had coddled ‘dictators from Baghdad to Beijing’ and had missed opportunities accruing from the demise of Soviet communism. Clinton offered also scattered hints that he might embrace some form of modified protectionism (or ‘managed trade’) and undertook to advance America’s economic cause more forcefully than his predecessor.2