Lloyd C. Gardner

Vietnam : the early decisions

More than twenty years have passed since American military personnel finally withdrew from Vietnam, yet haunting questions remain about our involvement there. Perhaps the most persistent of these - and certainly the most unanswerable - is the question of what would have happened if President Kennedy had lived beyond 1963. Would he have ended American involvement in Vietnam? For many Americans, Oliver Stones powerful film JFK answered the question by leaving no doubt that before his assassination Kennedy had determined to quit Vietnam. Yet the historical record offers a much more complex answer. In this fresh look at the archival evidence, noted scholars take up the challenge to provide us with their conclusions about the early decisions that put the United States on the path to the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War. The tensions and turmoil that accompanied those decisions reveal the American presidency at the center of a storm of conflicting advice. The book is divided into four sections. Part one delves into the political context in which the early decisions were made, while part two considers the military context. Part three raises the intriguing questions of Kennedys and Johnsons roles in the conflict, particularly the thorny issue of whether Kennedy did, in fact, intend to withdraw from Vietnam and whether Johnson reversed that policy. Part four reveals an uncanny parallel between early Soviet policy toward Hanoi and U.S. policy toward Saigon.

Digging in the Sand Pit: America's New Longest War

While it may be hard to believe, our deep political involvement in the Middle East is of fairly recent origin. Prior to World War II, it was practically limited to a few oil wells and a small missionary presence scattered here and there. During the war, planning air routes for the immediate future and long-range needs engaged some policymakers in the Pentagon, while the biggest political question became the issue of a Jewish homeland. For FDR at the end of the war, and for all his successors down to today, how to reconcile the Arab world to the presence of Israel became a permanent dilemma. As the Cold War developed after the Truman Doctrine, the United States began sending arms and military advisers to practically all the countries; and Eisenhower intervened in a major way twice: first, in 1953, to put the Shah of Iran back on his peacock throne, and again in 1957 to force the British and French, with their new ally Israel, to pull back from Egypt. It can be argued that, with the exodus of the old colonial powers from the scene, the United States essentially took over guardianship of the West’s interest in keeping the oil flowing out by building up local constabularies to manage affairs within the various sheikdoms and monarchies. Largely, however, this was a task accomplished from afar, even if it was not always done. There was one small troop landing in Lebanon in 1958; but the American soldiers, welcomed ashore by ice-cream vendors, left soon afterwards. All that has changed in the last three decades. Today we are engaged in two wars at the same time, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan—and, potentially,

IRAQ AND THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM: Introduction

Abstract The following is the Introduction from a published collection of articles edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (New York and London: The New Press, 2007. 322pp. 978-1-59558-149-5). The books Table of Contents appears on p. 486 below. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula. — George H.W. Bush, 1991

Pictures at an Exhibition: Woodrow Wilson Portraits

Television programmes reviewed in this article The American Experience: Woodrow Wilson. Episode 1: “A Passionate Man” and Episode 2: “The Redemption of the World.”

From the American Archives

US Department of State.Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 2, Vietnam January–June 1965; vol. 3, Vietnam, June–December 1965

Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good-at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedys pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardners riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with diplomatic history, Gardner has written the first book on American involvement in the Vietnam War to use the full resources and newly declassified documents of the Johnson Library, and to tell whole the story of Johnson and Vietnam. The book is filled with fresh interpretations, brilliantly incisive portraits of the president and his men, and new perspectives on Americas most divisive foreign war. Gardner describes for the first time how, as tragedy swirled around the deliberations in Washington, Clark Clifford and Dean Rusk struggled for the presidents soul, culminating in the bombing halt of 1968 and the Johnson decision not to run. The war finally sundered the liberal cold war consensus, Gardner argues, and brought to an end the New Deal politics that had dominated American political life since 1933. Pay Any Price is a major work of history by one of our most distinguished historians.

America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century.

Americas Mission argues that the global strength and prestige of democracy today are due in large part to Americas impact on international affairs. Tony Smith documents the extraordinary history of how American foreign policy has been used to try to promote democracy worldwide, an effort that enjoyed its greatest triumphs in the occupations of Japan and Germany but suffered huge setbacks in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. With new chapters and a new introduction and epilogue, this expanded edition also traces U.S. attempts to spread democracy more recently, under presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and assesses Americas role in the Arab Spring.