Johnson, Lyndon Baines

(b. August 27, 1908; d. January 22, 1973) Thirty-sixth president of the United States (1963–1969).

Lyndon Baines Johnson, the son of a Texas legislator and a proponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937 and to the U.S. Senate in 1949. He served as Senate majority leader from 1955 to 1961 and as vice president to John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, becoming president after Kennedy's assassination. Although Johnson is noted for his Great Society domestic programs, including Medicare, the expansion of civil and voting rights, and a "war" against poverty, his legacy has been defined by his role in escalating the Vietnam War. Johnson's performance as a wartime president between 1963 and 1968 has generally received bad reviews. Critics charge that, in escalating the conflict, he both misled the American people and mismanaged the fighting itself. His close supervision of the bombing campaign in North Vietnam, including the selection of targets, provides crucial evidence to Johnson's detractors of his failings as commander-in-chief.

Johnson brought little military experience to the White House. His service as a Naval Reserve officer in World War II was brief. He experienced combat only as an observer on one flight in the South Pacific. Even the Silver Star, awarded to him by General Douglas MacArthur, became controversial because of implied favoritism to a politician. As a member of the House and Senate, Johnson supported the military. During his years as vice president, he also endorsed the growing involvement in Vietnam.

As president from November 1963 onward, however, Johnson sought to block the victory of the Communists in Vietnam so Republicans would not attack him as soft on foreign policy. Not wanting to confront the American people with hard choices about war and peace, Johnson overcame his own doubts about the wisdom of the Vietnamese commitment. During his first year in office, when he would face the voters in November 1964, the new president sought to keep the conflict out of the headlines and avoid alarming the public.

In the Tonkin Gulf episode of August 1964, American Navy vessels said they had been attacked by the North Vietnamese. Johnson used the ambiguous events in the area to gain congressional authorization for retaliatory air strikes at that time and into the future. In the presidential campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, Johnson pledged not to withdraw from Vietnam and also indicated he would not intensify the war.

Following his landslide victory in 1964 and with the military situation in South Vietnam deteriorating, Johnson authorized a major escalation of the war through a bombing offensive against the North. Mindful of the possibility of Chinese and Russian intervention into the conflict, Johnson's bombing was intensive but designed not to provoke North Vietnam's allies. Critics then and later charged that these self-imposed restrictions limited any chance for victory.

To protect American air bases in South Vietnam, and given the imminent defeat of South Vietnamese ground forces in 1965, Johnson sent larger numbers of

American ground troops to Vietnam that summer. By 1967 there were 500,000 American soldiers involved. Johnson contended that the large involvement was necessary to bring North Vietnam and the guerrillas in South Vietnam to the conference table. Because the enemy had the manpower and resources to counter each American escalation, Johnson's policy was doomed to failure.

By early 1968 the war seemed stalemated. Then came the Tet offensive in late January. The Americans and their South Vietnamese allies inflicted heavy losses on the attacking North Vietnamese; however, the episode undermined Americans' confidence in Johnson's leadership and made ultimate victory seem unlikely. A request from military leaders for an additional 200,000 men sparked a reconsideration by the president of his military and political options. He decided against further escalation of the war and concluded that he should withdraw from politics. On March 31, 1968, he announced a willingness to open talks with the North Vietnamese and his own decision to end his presidential candidacy. In the year that remained in his administration, Johnson was unable to produce a negotiated settlement or an end to the fighting, which went on for seven more years during the Nixon administration. Johnson had revealed that he was no longer confident the United States could prevail in Vietnam through military means.

Johnson's record as a military leader has been heavily criticized. His detractors on the right say that if he had unleashed American power in 1965, victory would have been possible. Yet these critics offer no firm definition of what "victory" would have entailed, nor any clear indication of the role of the Soviet Union and the Chinese in the event of all-out war. On the left, Johnson is assailed for having unleashed a destructive conflict in Southeast Asia. Johnson's reputation has suffered further because of the brutal history of the postwar Vietnamese regime. The president's failings as a wartime executive have undermined his historical reputation and cast a cloud over his other achievements.

Antiwar Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Containment and Détente; Goldwater, Barry; Great Society; Kennedy, John Fitzgerald; 1968 Upheavals; Nixon, Richard M.; Pentagon Papers; Politics and Elections; Tet, Impact Of.

Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Gardner, Lloyd. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1995.

Herring, George C. LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Hunt, Michael H. Lyndon Johnson's War. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Kaiser, David. M. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000

McMaster, R. H. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1997

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