Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 by Michael H. Hunt (review)

Book Reviews 205 policy toward China and Taiwan in the early 1950s. Whereas the U.S. archives reveal many of the U.S. government's warts and other imperfections , historians cannot get comparable data on what the leadership overseas was thinking and doing. Accinelli seems to overreach his material in the book's strongest assertion: That the Eisenhower administration mishandled the 1954-55 Offshore Island's crisis. He offers no documentation for his claim that U.S. threats played no role in bringing China to the table after the Bandung conference of 1955 (232), and, perhaps more importantly, overlooks the Soviet Union's role in the settlement of the crisis. Accinelli also fails to consider the degree to which governmental and diplomatic activities tend to be piecemeal, even under the best leadership. That said, Crisis and Commitment offers a very thorough and interesting explication of how, in spite of its wishes and early intentions, the United States came to stand behind the nationalist regime on Taiwan. Elizabeth C. Henderson University of Michigan Michael H. Hunt. Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Pp. ix + 128 and bibliography and map. Journalists and scholars have long acknowledged that the combination of American ignorance of Vietnamese history and an anticommunist paternalism was a prescription for failure. Bernard Fall's writings prior to his death in 1967, Frances FitzGerald's prize-winning Fire in the Lake (Little, Brown and Company, 1971) and more recently Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (Harper Collins, 1990), have, among others, stressed the cultural gap in the American-Vietnamese encounter. Approaching the Vietnam conflict from a comparable framework, Michael Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War provides a distinctive and engaging addition to the several overviews of the Vietnam War that have been written in the last decade. It reflects the concerns in Hunt's prolific scholarship which have underlined the need to study U.S. foreign relations within its full international context and to appreciate its ideological component. 206 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' etudes americaines The subtitle, more than the title, conveys the scope of the book. Indeed Hunt concludes that intervention was "a national crusade whose sources transcended one man.... Perhaps, above all, it emerged cut of an American culture which claimed to speak and act for other peoples without knowing their history, language, and aspirations" (107). Hunt's account of Johnson's presidency comprises about one-third of the text; the greater part of the book is devoted to tracing the reasons for the escalating U.S. interest in Vietnam through 1963. Hunt begins by recounting the intellectual and political anguish of the waning days of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration touched off by William J. Lederer's and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American (Norton, 1958), which foresaw Americans losing the struggle against communism in southeast Asia unless they learned how to appeal to the "hearts and mrnds" of common people. In the end, as Hunt shows, they lost the struggle 111 Vietnam, not for lack of effort at winning "hearts and minds" but because they dismissed the connection between communism and nationalism. Ho Chi Minh's "brocade bags" of traditional patriotism, Leninism, and a populist program gave his movement an appeal and momentum that eventually overwhelmed the French in the First Indochina War and threatened the subsequent U.S.-fostered South Vietnamese government. As that struggle intensified, Americans continued to ignore realities, notably the National Liberation Front's (NLF) resilience and South Vietnam's deficiencies, both of which were evident in the battle of Ap Bae in January 1963. By that time, President John F. Kennedy had brought to Washington the ubest and the brightest" who constituted a cult of anticommunist toughness and significantly increased the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. As the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem embarrassed Americans by its suppression of Buddhist protesters, the Kennedy administration quietly engineered his overthrow. In the face of further political turmoil in Saigon and North Vietnam's determination to push the NLF's advantage, Johnson was thus the president who had to fully confront the choice...