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Lyndon Johnson's decision to take the United States into large-scale war in Vietnam in 1964-1965 must loom large in any evaluation of his presidency. This article argues that the decision was not forced on Johnson by pressures beyond his control, and that his choice for war is difficult to explain, in view of the international and domestic political context, the dynamics on the ground in Vietnam, and the thinking among U.S. officials themselves. The article maintains that Johnson could expect-on the basis of information available to him at the time-to pay a heavy political price if he Americanized the war, and examines why he nevertheless did so.
In 1965, the United States undet Lyndon B. Johnson entered large-scale war in Vietnam. It did so incrementally, over a period of several months in the first half of the year. The contingency planning for war, however, went back considerably further. Already in the spring of 1964, Johnson administration insiders had agreed that the present policy-which limited overt U.S. involvement to funding, equipping, and advising the South Vietnamese government in its struggle against a Hanoi-directed insurgency-no longer had a reasonable chance of being successful. Absent a more active American intervention, involving either air and naval attacks on the North or ground troops in the South, Communist-led forces would take over in South Vietnam, probably within months, whether by way of a military victory, a collapse of the Saigon regime, or a diplomatic settlement among the Vietnamese.1
American planners hoped any escalation could be delayed until after the 1964 presidential election. On November 3, 1964, the very day voters gave Johnson a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, senior officials commenced secret deliberations concerning how to stave off a South Vietnamese defeat. By early December, the president and his aides had decided to implement a two-phase escalation of the fighting. The first would involve "armed reconnaissance strikes" against infiltration routes in Laospart of the so-called ho Chi Minh Trail that carried men and materiel into the South-as well as retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam in the event of a major Vietcong attack. The second phase would see "graduated military pressure" against the North, in the form of aerial bombing, and, almost certainly, the dispatch of U.S. ground...