The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963-1969 by Jonathan Colman (review)

Lyndon Johnson's passion as president was domestic policy, yet his administration came to be defined, then and now, by his escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Jonathan Colman with this brisk and thoughtful book is the latest in a growing number of revisionists who argue that Johnson's failures in Vietnam have been overstated and his judicious stewardship of a broader American diplomacy has been either ignored or unfairly maligned.

Colman devotes almost a quarter of his book to Vietnam and concludes that the escalation of U.S. military efforts was "a rational and well considered policy" (p. 4) driven by the consensus among political and military elites in 1964-1965 about the "Cold War verities" of containment, dominoes, and the overarching need to maintain U.S. credibility with friends and foes alike. Johnson dispatched increasing numbers of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam because he had no other viable alternatives to preserve the Saigon regime from a takeover by the Communist North. Colman even suggests a kind of prudence in Johnson's unsuccessful attempt to calibrate a multipronged strategy designed to prevent a Communist victory over a U.S. ally, to avoid provoking direct Chinese military intervention, and to maintain political support at home. In Colman's depiction, the Johnson administration made significant strides in shoring up the South's ability to defend itself, even into 1968, but was ultimately unable to devise a politically acceptable military game plan that would bring North Vietnam to the negotiating table.

As Colman moves beyond Vietnam, he claims to provide "perhaps the most sympathetic general account today of Johnson's foreign policies" (p. 4), yet his conclusions are unfailingly circumspect. He generally portrays the diplomacy of the Johnson administration as incremental rather than visionary and reactive rather than deliberate and anticipatory. Emphasizing the constraints on Johnson's actions, Colman seeks to explain the lack of more formidable diplomatic accomplishments—not only that Vietnam dominated the president's time and attention but also that the U.S. geopolitical position declined as a result of Soviet military parity, more assertive allies, and a U.S. economy under increasing strain from a "guns and butter" economic policy approach.

Colman argues that Johnson's greatest diplomatic successes involved dealing with the challenges of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) "in ways that left the alliance more unified in 1969 than in 1963" (p. 208). In trying to prevent war between Greece and Turkey in the gathering crisis over Cyprus in 1964, Johnson's administration was ultimately unable to broker a negotiated solution. However, through U.S. threats and admonishments "an uneasy peace prevailed," and NATO's southern flank was temporarily stabilized. Johnson failed to prevent Britain's withdrawal from East of Suez or Charles de Gaulle's withdrawal from NATO's integrated military command, but his diplomacy was infused with a willingness to bow gracefully to the inevitable. In the case of the French, for example, Colman praises Johnson's "restraint and courtesy towards de Gaulle," which "minimized the strains in the Franco-American relationship" (p. 89). More substantively, on the issue of nuclear sharing with the Federal Republic of Germany Johnson adeptly took the lead within his own administration in finally abandoning support for the Multi-Lateral Force concept, which was highly unpopular with the British, the French, and the Soviet Union, and in convincing the West Germans that their nuclear aspirations could be better addressed in the context of a NATO nuclear planning body.

Colman makes a strong case that Johnson in his tentative steps toward improving relations with the Soviet Union (and to a much lesser degree even the Chinese) established a "nascent détente" and paved the way for future triangular diplomacy. This was reflected in many small agreements as well as one significant accomplishment, the Soviet signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Johnson also took the initiative in...