Lyndon Johnsons Vietnam War Strategy

Lyndon conjurationsons Vietnam War StrategyLYNDON JOHNSONS PEACE INITIATIVES DURING THE VIETNAM WARWhat did the Johnson administration hope to achieve from diplomatic efforts to resolve the Vietnam War amongst 1965 and 1968 and with what success? excogitationLyndon Johnson had become highly besieged in the pursuit of his Vietnam policy. Most historical arguments centre round his inept handling of the property, in which he escalated the bombing offensives and thus tempered them down making a mess of the peace moves, which were never done with any serious intent. The core of the historical criticism of the president is that he allowed himself to be blindly guided by inappropriate advice from Robert McNamara, and caused avoidable loss to American lives. Obsessed with the idea of keeping the armed forces subordinate to the presidency, the Johnson administration gave instruction manual that were out of sync with the happenings on the battlefield. This paper takes a look at these dev elopments, plot listing in whatever detail the peace moves he act to make, and how they came a cropper. It finally looks at the reasons for their failures, and tries to lay out who could be held responsible for the fracas.Limitations of this paperSince this paper is active a highly narrowed down topic, a background to the warfare and its developments is not made this paper is limited to discussing its defined pur overhear, and hence these details and the persons involved in the war are taken as given.Need for negotiationsIn order to understand with what objectives the president initiated negotiations, it is necessary to understand the situation that forced him to make these moves. With a series of ill-conceived actions, the president had get across the Rubicon over Vietnam. Well into the middle of his term, it was a thorn in the flesh from which there seemed no reprieve for the beleaguered president, even as enormous pressure level mounted at home to end the war. As aptly sum med up, Vietnam was a stalemate producing irreconcilable domestic divisions and a nightmarefrom which Johnson could not awake. (Dallek, 1998, p. 443) From the sunny geezerhood of his presidential campaigning of 1964, when less than a third of the population saw Vietnam as the most pressing problem the nation faced to a almost doubling of this figure by the winter of 1965-66, the dec livestock in support for the presidents policies on Vietnam was rapid. (Dallek, 2004, p. 251) His gauche at handling the press was besides anformer(a) factor for this situation, with the result that Vietnam soon became, in the perception of the American public, President Johnsons war. (Liebovich, 1998, p. 45)Egged on by his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, Johnson had given the war efforts no respite he was firmly convinced that all it wished were a few more bombings and a few successful fights to end the war. He could not have been more off the target while the presidents men assessed that the Vi etcong and the North Vietnamese regular armies could be subdued, the latter resorted to rebel tactics, from scattered and well-spread positions. The result was calamitous by 1967, nearly half a million Americans had been move to Vietnam, of whom the total casualties were in the region of 100,000, among whom no less than a seventh had lost their lives. (Liebovich, 1998, p. 44)Although the Government of southeasternernmost Vietnam, (GVN), whose fragile nature had for so long worried the US, had coalesced, with the Cao Ky coup by the beginning of 1966, the Johnson administration was in a bind near the policy it had to pursue, because astronomical sums were going down the drain. An April 1966 intra-governmental policy review had not seen any major reason for hope. The views of the presidential staff differed astutely from those of the men on the battlefield. Air strikes, on which the administration had pinned its highest hopes to achieve a breakthrough in the war, had come to a vi rtual naught, and were becoming a colossal waste of resources. One of the prime personal credit line strike programmes, ROLLING THUNDER, in the assessment the Institute of Defense Analysis made in the summer of 1966 had had no measurable direct effect. This was after the air strikes on the highly strategic and vulnerable areas of Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants, (POL) of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (DRV). (Gelb Betts, 1979, pp. 146-148) At this point, the leave out of effectiveness of the bombing strategy was also severely compounded by the exorbitant cost of carrying out these operations, which according to the CIA, cost almost ten multiplication as much as the gains they brought. Having dropped as much as 643,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam, the cost of this on the US exchequer was $ 9.60 for every bucks worth of damage they inflicted on the DRV with only half the fighter bombers having the capability of surviving the year-long stint as pilots. (Wiest, 2003, p. 27) This terrible cost of escalation was also reflecting on the economy, taking it on an inflationary spiral, and threatening to neutralise its post-war gains. (Isserman Kazin, 2000, p. 224) Gold prices were becoming very volatile, and all these contributed to completely undermine his Great Society programme, on which he had come to power, (Reiter Stam, 2002, p. 121) and whose central theme was economic growth accompanied by poverty reduction. (Brown-Collier, 1998) In addition, another extremely important factor was threatening to commence the president on his knees sustained antiwar movement, that had been inspired by the success of the Civil Rights movement. On the field, the highhandedness of the American forces had only succeeded in making the south support the North, and the percolation of men and other supplies from the North. Through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an estimated 90,000 men infiltrated to the South between 1965 and 1967. The Americanisation of South Vietnam was a t otal disaster. (Best, Hanhimki, Maiolo Schulze, 2004, pp. 296) It was in the wake of these major drawbacks associated with go on bombing that the president was forced to mellow his position. By celestial latitude 1966, the administration was convinced that since there was no elan by which they could win the war, at least by election time, the only road that lay ahead was negotiation, (Dallek, 1998, p. 444) since this was the only way by which he could reverse these conditions. However, as the next section illustrates, he was no better at these negotiations, either.Johnsons objectives, the negotiations and reasons for their failureThese debacles were to reflect heavily on the president personally by December 1966, the realisation had clearly and irrevocably dawned on the administration that unless the Americans ended the war at the earliest, it would reflect badly on the nations elections of 1968. At this stage, there was no alternative to negotiation, if the president was to have the slightest chance of re-election. From the high perch at which the president was seated, the only non-negotiable point at the discussions now became a separate state within South Vietnam (SVN), and a non- communistic government for the president. (Dallek, 1998, p. 443) The first concrete steps towards negotiation were taken furtively, in 1966. At this point, the US was still very imperious, even though it was the one that initiated the negotiation. It made a blanket, unconditional demand that the DRV send away infiltration into the south for bombing to stop. The first of these steps, known as bombing pauses, was hardly fruitful. fetching off from here, the Johnson administration made a clearer move towards negotiation at the Manila Conference in the Declaration of Peace in 1966. The aim of the administration, which was to negotiate from a position of strength, offered the condition that the US would withdraw from South Vietnam within six months of Hanoi withdrawing the last of its troops from there. However, the DRV too was equally determined to negotiate from a position of strength. The result was that the Johnson administration was seen to be keen on making peace, but within the administration, the same problem of the mismatch in cerebration between the executive and the armed forces remained, (Gelb Betts, 1979, p. 151) because the president, in whose mind the famous spat between Harry Truman and Gen. Douglas McArthur during the Korean War had been weighing heavily, decided that the best way to avoid a repeat of such a situation now was to keep the military under the firm control of the presidency. Unfortunately, he was ham-handed in doing this, ending up in only isolating the military and creating a terrible disharmony between the ii. (Jacobsen, 1996, p. 216) Accordingly, after the raids of December 13 and 14, the president request a Christmas ceasefire, and extended it up to January 1 as a goodwill gesture. The main objective for Johnson at th is stage was securing the territorial integrity of the north and south of Vietnam, or all Vietnam, should its people choose reunification. His objective was also clearly aimed at silencing his critics at home, of whom there was no dearth. He sought to make these moves towards negotiations to sleek over the doves in the Congress, who kept press on negotiations, and the American public, who were becoming war-weary. (Dallek, 1998, pp. 443-448) The quick progress Eugene McCarthy made at the Hampshire primaries jolted the president about his sagging popularity. drawing off from McCarthys success, Robert Kennedy, too decided to challenge the president. (Isserman Kazin, 2000, p. 224) Internally, the most urgent need for him was to use the Vietnam War as a means to finish off his policy-making rivals at home, chief among whom was Robert Kennedy. For all his hope and brave talk about progress in the fighting, he still feared that the war would destroy him politically and extend the way to a successful Kennedy bid for the presidency. (Dallek, 1998, p. 448) There was also another factor a change in US attitudes towards China, following the perception of Chinese expansion being the cornerstone of a Vietnam policy getting significantly reduced around the middle of 1966. (Parker, 1989, p. 142)Johnson hoped that he could hold his people together while using the armed forces and air strikes to force the Hanoi government to buckle just in time to give him a great fillip for the 1968 elections. Internationally, too, he was keen to be seen as a man who was interested in peace, accepting British and Russian offers to mediate, albeit reluctantly. He followed these up with another ceasefire for February 6-13. (Dallek, 1998, p. 446)Peace moves cognitive operation Marigold was the name given to the Johnson administrations elbow grease to make peace with Hanoi through indirect means, by which intermediaries in the form of emissaries of neutral countries were sent to develop cha nnels of communication. It first started when the Polish member of the International Control Commission, Janusz Lewandowski app mug upd the Italian ambassador in Saigon, Giovanni d Orlandi and then the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., about Ho Chi Minhs mind. The North Vietnamese leader was surprisingly amiable to US propositions. He suggested that if the Americans suspended bombing, he was more than willing to talk with them an even greater surprise was that he was not going to insist that a socialist regime be open in the South, would not meddle in the affairs of the southern government, and that he was willing to consider a reasonable calendar for American withdrawal. Yet, in common hubris, the Johnson administration threw away an easy way out of the conflict that had presented itself on a platter. The reason? Washingtons perceived untrus dickensrthiness of the neutrality of communist Poland. Such a baffling, completely unfounded assumption destroyed a gre at chance for peace. A glaring example of the complete lack of coordination between the presidential and military staff, the basic reason for which bombing had not stopped earlier, showed itself up in December 1966. While the US ambassador in Poland, John Gronouski, was making preparations for a highly sensitive meeting with Polish officials, out of the blue, the US dropped bombs on sensitive targets in Hanoi heavily on December 2 and 3. This completely set the clock back on whatever little progress the Poles were making towards negotiating with the DRV, which centred round the issue of bombing. To this, the unrepentant administration offered the flimsiest of reasons for which the air strikes could not go ahead as planned on November 10 bad weather Further, even the planned attacks on December 13 and 14 went ahead as scheduled, giving the Marigold foremost a quick burial. Analysts are of the opinion that even after the bombings of December 2 and 3, there was hope for some salvage, but that the Johnson administration, which had in the first place created the truce move, killed it with its own hands. The simple reason for this was the total lack of sincerity on the part of the Johnson administration about going ahead with the bombing pauses. After briefly halting its bombings in mid-December, the US once again insisted that Hanoi reciprocate unequivocally. It read wrongly the situation on the ground in Hanoi in mid-late January 1967. With the DRV Foreign Minister, Ngoyen Duy Trinhs tough words on January 28, demanding that the US stop its bombings immediately, the official obituary to the Marigold initiative came to be written. (Gelb Betts, 1979, pp. 152, 153)The fate of another such mission, Operation Sunflower, was no different having been declared on February 6, 1967, the first reaction it drew was a strong letter from Ho Chi Minh, who warned the president that the people of Viet Nam are determined not to surrender under the threats of bombing. (Brigham, 1 998, p. 143) This phase offered a six-day bombing pause in February 1967. Even while the Americans were again strict on the condition of reciprocity from North Vietnam, that of stopping infiltration, the administration gathered evidence that the North Vietnamese were taking advantage and were supplying arms to the South, forcing Washington to drop the plan. Another initiative was the San Antonio formula of September-December 1967. This, too, did not offer anything new or different it reiterated American willingness to stop bombing and talk, if the North met its obligation of supplying arms to the South. North Vietnam, predictably, dismissed the offer. There were other initiatives for negotiation, too, between October 1966 and February 1968. Starting with moves initiated on the occasion of the funeral of Indian blush Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, other steps, clearly half-hearted, were taken. These, in addition to neutral moves by eminent persons and the Glassboro summit, were give n high sounding codenames such as Packers, Aspen, Ohio and Pennsylvania. (Gelb Betts, 1979, p. 163) Another prominent attempt of a peace mission was that of the Italian cleric, Giorgio La Pira in 1965. To his desperate pleas to end the war, all that the Johnson administration made was this indifferent reaction State discussion section Executive Secretary Benjamin Read commented to presidential advisor, Walt Rostow thus La Piras telegram is another in a voluminous series of peace messages. In view of La Piras well-known position on Vietnam and other issues, it is recommended no reply be made. (Miller, 1999, p. 143) The net result of these peace overtures was a near zero. All these gave rise to the Tet offensive. (Gelb Betts, 1979, p. 165) This was the event that signalled what a morass the US had got into. On the night of January 31, 1968, some troops owing their allegiance to the North Vietnamese leader attacked the American embassy of Saigon. Although the Americans stupefy it d own in no time, the event opened the floodgates to the seemingly never-ending nature of the war, showing up the complete lack of understanding of the war of the American soldiers, who went on the rampage, committing acts of unheard of savagery. (Isserman Kazin, 2000, p. 223) Thus, while peace was being sought, the actions of the administration took the two sides anywhere but there.ConclusionWhile fixing the blame for the failures of the negotiations processes, students of register need to see the situation in the backdrop of the Cold War era. In retrospect, in the age of extremely fierce rivalry between the two superpowers contend out through their allies, perhaps some of the blame can be mitigated from Johnson when he refused to trust the Polish, a staunch communist country. To be fair, he was only reciprocating an attitude of great mutual distrust of the Cold War protagonists. (Vandiver, 1997, p. 156) However, it needs to be said that on this particular, extremely important occ asion, he was allowing the history of their relationship to cloud his judgement, when there appeared no motive on the part of the Polish other than to bring about a ceasefire during Operation Marigold.The bottom line of the historic criticisms against Johnson relates to his oscillation between escalation and negotiation, the total disconnect between the executive and the armed forces, and the catastrophic consequences these produced. Offensives continued even as Operation Marigold was on later, two months into the Tet offensive, there were no concrete results, by when the president had made up his mind not to run for the 1968 elections. This decision made no great dissimilarity the purpose for which the bombing operations took place, forcing North Vietnam to end its support for Vietcong, was not served. The bombings of ROLLING THUNDER were in no way deterring a regrouping of the North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters, who still possessed all the strength to defeat the South Vietnamese Army. (Jacobsen, 1996, p. 216)Taking an overall view of the escalation and the failure of the peace negotiations, it is difficult to point an accusatory finger at anyone other than the president. The decision to escalate the offensive was entirely his and McNamaras. In dealing with the situation, the president had thoroughly misread the situation, and had kept insisting to the American public that the war was all but won. At no stage of the war did the president behave in a manner neat his office. In what was to be the ultimate show of lack of conviction in the peace moves, the man he appointed to oversee the peace negotiation, Averell Harriman, was never invited to the Tuesday Lunches briefings, where updates about the situation used to be made Moreover, the Johnson administration regarded bombings as its biggest bargaining chip, a basis upon which all its negotiations were to proceed. A lack of coordination and understanding between these two vital organs was one of the prime re asons for the failure of whichever peace missions the president undertook. (Gelb Betts, 1979, p. 151)Neither his offensives, nor the peace moves he made later when left with no other choice was done in the right spirit. As a result, the presidents handling of the Vietnam War was to dwarf the stature of one of Americas tallest presidents.ReferencesBest, A., Hanhimki, J. M., Maiolo, J. A., Schulze, K. E., (2004), International History of the Twentieth Century, Routledge, London.Brigham, R. 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