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77 chapter five “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” November 24, 1963 “I don’t want to be known as a war president.” Summer 1965 —Lyndon B. Johnson JOHNSON “Let Us Continue” “Let us continue,” proclaimed the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, two days after John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. What Kennedy had begun, Johnson would continue—and finish. He saw himself as a tough Texan standing tall at the Alamo of America’s Vietnam policy; he did not want others to see him as a country bumpkin who knew little about the world. Moreover, there was that “commitment,” to which his predecessors had pledged the nation. He was not going to be a president who went back on his country’s word. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”1 Lodge had just briefed the new president on the situation in South Vietnam. It was spinning out of control. Lodge emphasized that “if we don’t do something, it’ll go under—any day.”2 With Kennedy, Lodge had been moderately optimistic about post-coup Vietnam. With Johnson, just weeks later, he had become decidedly pessimistic. It was the new president’s introduction to the uncertain intelligence and the fluctuating judgments of the American brass in Saigon, many of whom knew little about Vietnam’s history, politics, culture, or religion. Texas chronicler Ronnie Dugger explained that as Johnson began to consider his Vietnam options, two words from the 1930s kept “flashing” through his mind—“Munich” and “appeasement.”3 He would have none of either. The new president remembered that Kennedy, in one of his last public pronouncements on Vietnam, had stressed that “we are not there to see a war lost.” Johnson would not see it lost either. He knew that he had inherited “a 78 Johnson: “Let Us Continue” hell of a mess,” as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told him, but he actually believed at the time that the United States could “win the war.”4 Unfortunately, no one urged the president to define what “winning” meant in a guerrilla war. While it was true that Johnson had inherited the war, it was equally true that by the time he left office in January 1969, the war had become his. As Abe Fortas, a close friend and adviser, analyzed the president’s early predicament : “Johnson pursued the Vietnam war because of Dwight Eisenhower’s position and Kennedy’s position.”5 They had both “committed” the United States to the defense of South Vietnam, and Johnson, the newest member of the president’s Vietnam club, would not abandon what they had embraced as American policy. In April 1965, during a talk at Johns Hopkins University, Johnson tried to explain his thinking. He raised the question—“Why are we in South Vietnam ?”—and then answered in a broad cold war context. “We are there,” Johnson said, “because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954, every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. . . . Over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence . And I intend to keep that promise.” It was a moral undertaking. “To dishonor that pledge,” he went on, “. . . would be an unforgivable wrong.” It would “shake the confidence” of people “from Berlin to Thailand” in the “value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s word.” For this president, “the central lesson of our time is that the appetite for aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in Southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’”6 He invoked the Bible to restate a presidential “commitment” to resist communist expansion—in this instance, in South Vietnam. As Johnson was to learn all too painfully, South Vietnam marched to its own drummer. It did not necessarily accommodate its destiny to the “word” or “commitment” of a U.S. president, nor to his plans or dreams. The assassination of South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, three weeks before Kennedy ’s murder, opened a period of extreme instability, one general overthrowing...

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