Vietnam's Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War by Andrew L. Johns (review)

Andrew Johns's account of the domestic political history of the Republican Party during the war in Vietnam makes for deeply depressing reading. Moreover, the story he tells about the Democrats does not lighten the mood. From John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon, all the presidents who made war suffered one major anxiety: not how to contain China, North Vietnam, or Communism in Southeast Asia (or indeed whether these were worthy goals) but only how to contain the bad news from the battlefront. "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam," Kennedy said—privately, of course. "Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and get the American people to re-elect me" (p. 31). "God Almighty," Lyndon B. Johnson moaned to John Knight (among many others), "what they said about us leaving China would be just warming up compared to what they'd say now" (p. 48). God Almighty, one wishes one could respond, are you seriously balancing millions of lives against what Republican critics might say? The answer is always yes, though that is hardly the only possible response. Surely Knight might have responded: yes, they did say that about losing China, but Kennedy went on to defeat the candidate who said it most loudly. The full irony of Johnson's lament would become apparent in 1972.

Johns's focus on what Republican critics were saying about Vietnam constitutes an extended review of the role played by domestic American politics in the destruction of Vietnam. I want to put it this starkly because often scholarly debates about Vietnam allow the war itself to drop out of sight. It is important to note the extent to which U.S. politicians protected themselves from knowledge of the war on the ground so as to pursue politics as usual; it is crucial that scholarly analysis not imitate them.

Vietnam did not become a major issue for the Republicans during the Kennedy administration because they preferred to focus on the president's perceived failures in Cuba, Berlin, and Laos. Nor did all Republicans criticize Johnson's handling of the war. In April 1964, John Sherman Cooper, the Republican senator from Kentucky, who had opposed U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia since the mid-1950s, called for the reconvening of the Geneva conference as the first step in disengagement. Johnson's response to Cooper remained his response to such appeals throughout his presidency: "Neither Johnson nor his advisers paid much attention to those in either party like Cooper (or U.S. allies, for that matter) who urged reducing the American commitment or pursuing some sort of mediated settlement" (p. 53).

To whom, then, did these presidents pay attention? In Johns's view not the antiwar movement (possibly for this reason he does not discuss the movement at any length) but the "right-wing monster" lurking at the door. Johns's response to historians who find such fears exaggerated is to point out that, real or imagined, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon believed they were real and acted on their beliefs. The "anxiety about a right-wing backlash" displayed by all three war presidents "reflected the extensive and serious criticism emanating from conservatives." "The war was fought on two fronts," Johns writes, "with actions in Southeast Asia invariably affecting the political battlefield at home, and vice versa" (p. 328). However, he does not discuss the situation on the ground in Vietnam in any detail, making it difficult to tell with any precision how, or even whether, the two fronts interacted.

To be fair, the war as such is not Johns's subject. His subject is what Republicans had to say about it, and he tells this story in impressive detail. The reader learns a good deal about the role...