Sometimes I take other people's judgments, and I get misled. At a post-retirement dinner in New York with McNamara, Bundy, and other former aides in attendance, LBJ accepted full responsibility. Charges of cronyism and corruption had dogged the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem for years, sparking public condemnation of his rule as well as successive efforts at toppling his regime. Just ask at the reception desk for directions to the meeting room. value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful But that endgame, when it did come during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, was deeply contingent on the course that Johnson set, particularly as it flowed out of key decisions he took as president both before and after his election to office. When Kennedy entered office, he too supported the unpopular regime, increasing substantially the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam. Operating under the code name Mr. In a sense, Johnson was able to avoid the label he so greatly feared would be pinned to his name. Nevertheless, in an effort to provide greater incentive for Hanoi to come to the bargaining table, Johnson sanctioned a limited bombing halt, code-named MAYFLOWER, for roughly one week in the middle of May. How Did Lyndon B Johnson Contribute To The Civil Rights Movement. The Battle of the Somme, by David White, Masculinity, Public Schools and British Imperial Rule, by David White, Chiang Kai-Shek and the USA: Puppet and Puppeteer, but Which Was Which? Copyright 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. The Vietnam war was a very controversial war. But it was the attack by Diems minions on parading Buddhists four months later that ignited the nationwide protest that would roil the country for the remainder of the year and eventually topple the regime. Thus ideological inflexibility and political self-interest snuffed out any alternative to escalation; and Johnsons pride and his domineering, machismo character led him to see any weakening of the American position in Vietnam as a personal humiliation. Fortas and Mann supported different paths to restoring stable government to the Dominican Republic, forcing Johnson to choose between divided opinion from his advisers. The choice: LBJ's decision to go to war in Vietnam From the above two quotations, there seems little doubt that Johnson genuinely believed there was a threat of world domination by Communism, a very mainstream Cold-War view among American politicians from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He emphasised four factors which justified not just a presence but an escalation of American military force. Those 3,500 soldiers were the first combat troops the United States had dispatched to South Vietnam to support the Saigon government in its effort to defeat an increasingly lethal Communist insurgency.