Lyndon Johnson's Foreign Policy in Perspective

The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, obscuring many of his achievements both at home and abroad. Irving Bernstein complains in Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (1996, p. vii) that “Lyndon Johnson has been short-changed. He has been charged with what went wrong and has not been credited with what went right.” In dealing with Johnson’s foreign policy, historians have been preoccupied with miscalculations in Vietnam and have been slow to reassess the whole of Johnson’s record in foreign affairs. Two of these three books represent the first cut through recently released materials in the Johnson Library that illuminate the whole range of the Johnson administration’s relations with the world, while the third reminds us of how revealing manuscript material, in this case the papers of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., can be. Together these three volumes give us a better understanding of the reasons for Johnson’s uneven performance in world affairs.

Brands, Cohen, and Tucker take a similar approach to the analysis of Johnson’s foreign policy. After a brief description of Johnson’s decision-making style and his use of advisers, Brands proceeds geographically, devoting chapters to Latin America, Greece and Turkey, Western Europe, South Asia, Indonesia, the Middle East, and Vietnam. Of the ten essays in Cohen’s and Tucker’s book, the first, by Waldo Heinrichs, reflects on Johnson’s personality and style of leadership; the next two, by Walter LaFeber and Richard H. Immerman, focus on aspects of the Vietnam War; while the remaining seven cover the globe. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker deals with East Asia, Robert J. McMahon with South Asia, Frank Costigliola with West Germany and Europe, Joseph S. Tulchin with Latin America, Terrence Lyons with Africa, and Warren I. Cohen with the Middle East. Both books produce new information and many insights, although Brands is far more modest in his claims than Cohen and Tucker. He recognizes that his study is only a “first step” (p. viii) in evaluating the whole of Johnson’s foreign policy, noting that much important material remains classified. In contrast, Cohen and Tucker claim that the chapters in their volume “provide the most comprehensive and revealing study of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy that we have thus far—or are likely to get in the 1990s” (p. 8).

These two volumes reveal both the strengths and weaknesses that Johnson brought to the making of foreign policy. Immensely intelligent and energetic, Johnson was a prudent decisionmaker. He read his briefing papers thoroughly, mastered complex issues, consulted a wide range of formal and informal advisers, allowed dissenters to be heard, and in general respected administrative lines of authority. As Heinrichs points out in his superb essay, Johnson treated government departments in a conventional way, while his treatment of his White House staff was “prebureaucratic in the sense that assignments were loosely defined and overlapping. Like an early medieval monarchy, power depended on access, even to the bedchamber” (p. 21). Trouble arose not from Johnson’s procedures, but from his lack of knowledge about the outside world. Immersed for years in domestic politics, Johnson lacked curiosity about other nations and was not inclined to question widely held assumptions about America’s role in world affairs. Or, as Heinrichs concludes, “he proceeded cautiously, read carefully, questioned intently, consulted widely, and sought options. Yet he had no independent way of thinking about the world, no framework of analysis, that could offer him more satisfying answers than...