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Modern War Studies
Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945-1975
Harry Truman's administration began searching for an American response to the clash in Indochina between Frech colonialism and Vietminh communism in 1945. Thirty years and five administrations later, Gerald Ford and his aides tried unsuccessfully to solicit additional aid for South Vietnam from a reluctant Congress. For Truman, Ford, and every American leader in between, the dilemma in Vietnam hung ominously over the presidency.
In Shadow on the White House , seven prominent historians examine how the leadership of six presidents and an issue that grew into a difficult and often unpopular war shaped each other. Focusing on the personalities, politics, priorities, and actions of the presidents as they confronted Vietnam, the authors consider the expansion of presidential power in foreign-policy formulation since World War II. In their analyses, they chronicle the history of executive leadership as it related to Vietnam, assess presidential prerogatives and motives on war and peace issues, and clarify the interconnection between the modern presidency and the nation's frustrating, tragic, and humiliating failure in Southeast Asia.
Although other histories have been written about the Vietnam experience, this book is the first systematic and comparative survey on presidential leadership as it relates to the war issue. It is organized by presidential administrations, giving a detailed examination of each president's decisions and policies. Based on the most recently opened archival sources, the essays provide a framework on which to hang the kaleidoscopic events of the war.
In Shadow on the White House , seven prominent historians examine how the leadership of six presidents and an issue that grew into a difficult and often unpopular war shaped each other. Focusing on the personalities, politics, priorities, and actions of the presidents as they confronted Vietnam, the authors consider the expansion of presidential power in foreign-policy formulation since World War II. In their analyses, they chronicle the history of executive leadership as it related to Vietnam, assess presidential prerogatives and motives on war and peace issues, and clarify the interconnection between the modern presidency and the nation's frustrating, tragic, and humiliating failure in Southeast Asia.
Although other histories have been written about the Vietnam experience, this book is the first systematic and comparative survey on presidential leadership as it relates to the war issue. It is organized by presidential administrations, giving a detailed examination of each president's decisions and policies. Based on the most recently opened archival sources, the essays provide a framework on which to hang the kaleidoscopic events of the war.
- GenresHistory
232 pages, Paperback
First published May 24, 1993
About the author
David L. Anderson
42 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 26, 2026
This is an excellent case study of the involvement and escalation of America's dilemma in Vietnam. Each chapter was roughly 20-pages of each president and the decision-making processes during his administration.
• Harry Truman:
Harry Truman started the Indochina involvement in 1945. His administration, which had done so much elevate Southeast Asia to a diplomatic prize of the greatest importance, failed to deliver the means necessary to secure that prize. It never reconciled strategy with tactics, nor did the administration ever decide on an appropriate U.S. response should the French position suddenly collapse. Truman simply passed those daunting issues, along with an increasingly perilous U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia, onto his successor. It was a legacy full of problematic and as wracked with contradictory currents as the one he had inherited from Roosevelt.
• Dwight Eisenhower:
The Eisenhower administration increased support after the end of French colonialism. The turning point was in 1955 when U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem, who seen as the democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh, was elected and led to financial contribution. However, Diem's narrow political base, his regime's weak military structure, South Vietnam's weak economy, and the growing insurgency were problematic. When Eisenhower yielded the White House to Kennedy, the policy of wholehearted support of Diem remained in place, not because it was achieving U.S. objectives, but because to waver even slightly could risk collapse of the administration's eight-year effort to keep the dominoes from falling. Eisenhower's accomplishments in Vietnam were negative: no war but no peace. It was a record of nonsolution and ever-narrowing options.
• JFK:
Kennedy never lived to see the consequences of Diem's downfall, the continuing downward spiral of the Saigon regime, characterized by frequent political changes and a virtual revolving door of military and civilian leaders. Kennedy's thinking about Vietnam went notably beyond fulfilling a commitment while avoiding military intervention, he seemed determined to draw a distinction between the U.S. supportive role and the military mission of the South Vietnamese. He never had to face a difficult choice between accepting the loss of Vietnam and increasing U.S. military intervention. What Kennedy never resolved—because his administration was not forced to do so—was the U.S. response in the eventuality that the South Vietnamese could not win militarily on their own.
There was a certain logic that Kennedy pursued, given the inherited commitment, the concern with credibility, the consequences of defeat, and the heightened sense of the urgency of combating wars of national liberation. It may have been expecting too much for Kennedy to call for a more careful analysis of the assumptions underlying U.S. policy. It seems that as the interactability of the problems of Vietnam became more evident, Kennedy was thinking on two levels. The commitment of South Vietnam was still integral to U.S. national security, but the price of upholding it seemed less controllable. That he said contradictorily, things about Vietnam in 1963 should not be surprising.
• LBJ:
To an even greater extent, Lyndon Johnson's own highly personalized style indelibly marked the conduct of the war and contributed to his particular frustrations: the reluctance to provide precise direction, define a mission, and set explicit limits; the unwillingness to tolerate any form of intragovernmental dissent, or to permit a much-needed debate on strategic issues, the highly politicized approach that gave everybody something and nobody what they wanted, that emphasized consensus over results, whether on the battlefield or in diplomatic councils. All of these were products of a thoroughly political and profoundly insecure man, a man especially ill at ease among military issues and military people.
A master of domestic politics, Johnson knew little of the world or world affairs. He was narrowly provincial, especially for a leader of a modern nation, and his awkward efforts to intimidate Vietnamese enemies and cajole Vietnamese friends in ways that worked in U.S. politics proved to be disastrous for U.S. friends and foes alike. Moreover, his great talent for persuasion and consensus building, which had made him a dominant force in the U.S. Senate and enabled him to craft the great society as president, failed him in Vietnam. His doomed effort to juggle the requirements of major domestic reform and limited war abroad was beyond the magic of even his practiced political skills.
Although he was able to exploit his role as commander in chief to launch and sustain one of the largest foreign military operations in U.S. history, he was never fully in charge of America's war management, he often avoided deciding among conflicting recommendations or blurred points of debate, and thus created a stalemate in U.S. policy that was neither a strategy for victory nor a plan for retreat.
•Richard Nixon
To construct an exit from the war, both for himself and for the executive branch, Nixon battled on two fronts: (1) against the DRV and Viet Cong, (2) against the war's domestic critics. At home, he devised tactics to manage media coverage of the war, and he worked to undermine the youthful anti-war movement through his appeal to the silent majority and the reduction of the military draft. Despite his design for peace next, his elaborate schemes to limit their activities were grudging recognition of the limits they set on his presidential power to fight the war. As for the battle front itself, Nixon subtly redefined the war's objective from the limitless defense of freedom to the equally abstract notion for of "peace with honor." The settlement he sought was one that would allow U.S. forces to withdraw and leave the government of Nguyen Van Thieu in place in Saigon.
•Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford's frustration with Southeast Asian problems contrasted starkly with the confidence (outwardly, at least) and conviction that characterized the Vietnam decisions of previous presidents. Public and congressional wariness of the wake of Vietnam and Watergate had incapacitated the once imperial presidency, that but had not rendered it impotent. Despite his own frustrations in trying to end the war satisfactorily, Ford maintained the conviction that all his predecessors since Truman had shared that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was merited and could be successful.
This is an excellent brief and overview style read about each president. I learned quite a lot and was able to piece together more of the history of the conflict. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in the U.S. involvement with the Vietnam conflict. Thanks!
• Harry Truman:
Harry Truman started the Indochina involvement in 1945. His administration, which had done so much elevate Southeast Asia to a diplomatic prize of the greatest importance, failed to deliver the means necessary to secure that prize. It never reconciled strategy with tactics, nor did the administration ever decide on an appropriate U.S. response should the French position suddenly collapse. Truman simply passed those daunting issues, along with an increasingly perilous U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia, onto his successor. It was a legacy full of problematic and as wracked with contradictory currents as the one he had inherited from Roosevelt.
• Dwight Eisenhower:
The Eisenhower administration increased support after the end of French colonialism. The turning point was in 1955 when U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem, who seen as the democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh, was elected and led to financial contribution. However, Diem's narrow political base, his regime's weak military structure, South Vietnam's weak economy, and the growing insurgency were problematic. When Eisenhower yielded the White House to Kennedy, the policy of wholehearted support of Diem remained in place, not because it was achieving U.S. objectives, but because to waver even slightly could risk collapse of the administration's eight-year effort to keep the dominoes from falling. Eisenhower's accomplishments in Vietnam were negative: no war but no peace. It was a record of nonsolution and ever-narrowing options.
• JFK:
Kennedy never lived to see the consequences of Diem's downfall, the continuing downward spiral of the Saigon regime, characterized by frequent political changes and a virtual revolving door of military and civilian leaders. Kennedy's thinking about Vietnam went notably beyond fulfilling a commitment while avoiding military intervention, he seemed determined to draw a distinction between the U.S. supportive role and the military mission of the South Vietnamese. He never had to face a difficult choice between accepting the loss of Vietnam and increasing U.S. military intervention. What Kennedy never resolved—because his administration was not forced to do so—was the U.S. response in the eventuality that the South Vietnamese could not win militarily on their own.
There was a certain logic that Kennedy pursued, given the inherited commitment, the concern with credibility, the consequences of defeat, and the heightened sense of the urgency of combating wars of national liberation. It may have been expecting too much for Kennedy to call for a more careful analysis of the assumptions underlying U.S. policy. It seems that as the interactability of the problems of Vietnam became more evident, Kennedy was thinking on two levels. The commitment of South Vietnam was still integral to U.S. national security, but the price of upholding it seemed less controllable. That he said contradictorily, things about Vietnam in 1963 should not be surprising.
• LBJ:
To an even greater extent, Lyndon Johnson's own highly personalized style indelibly marked the conduct of the war and contributed to his particular frustrations: the reluctance to provide precise direction, define a mission, and set explicit limits; the unwillingness to tolerate any form of intragovernmental dissent, or to permit a much-needed debate on strategic issues, the highly politicized approach that gave everybody something and nobody what they wanted, that emphasized consensus over results, whether on the battlefield or in diplomatic councils. All of these were products of a thoroughly political and profoundly insecure man, a man especially ill at ease among military issues and military people.
A master of domestic politics, Johnson knew little of the world or world affairs. He was narrowly provincial, especially for a leader of a modern nation, and his awkward efforts to intimidate Vietnamese enemies and cajole Vietnamese friends in ways that worked in U.S. politics proved to be disastrous for U.S. friends and foes alike. Moreover, his great talent for persuasion and consensus building, which had made him a dominant force in the U.S. Senate and enabled him to craft the great society as president, failed him in Vietnam. His doomed effort to juggle the requirements of major domestic reform and limited war abroad was beyond the magic of even his practiced political skills.
Although he was able to exploit his role as commander in chief to launch and sustain one of the largest foreign military operations in U.S. history, he was never fully in charge of America's war management, he often avoided deciding among conflicting recommendations or blurred points of debate, and thus created a stalemate in U.S. policy that was neither a strategy for victory nor a plan for retreat.
•Richard Nixon
To construct an exit from the war, both for himself and for the executive branch, Nixon battled on two fronts: (1) against the DRV and Viet Cong, (2) against the war's domestic critics. At home, he devised tactics to manage media coverage of the war, and he worked to undermine the youthful anti-war movement through his appeal to the silent majority and the reduction of the military draft. Despite his design for peace next, his elaborate schemes to limit their activities were grudging recognition of the limits they set on his presidential power to fight the war. As for the battle front itself, Nixon subtly redefined the war's objective from the limitless defense of freedom to the equally abstract notion for of "peace with honor." The settlement he sought was one that would allow U.S. forces to withdraw and leave the government of Nguyen Van Thieu in place in Saigon.
•Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford's frustration with Southeast Asian problems contrasted starkly with the confidence (outwardly, at least) and conviction that characterized the Vietnam decisions of previous presidents. Public and congressional wariness of the wake of Vietnam and Watergate had incapacitated the once imperial presidency, that but had not rendered it impotent. Despite his own frustrations in trying to end the war satisfactorily, Ford maintained the conviction that all his predecessors since Truman had shared that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was merited and could be successful.
This is an excellent brief and overview style read about each president. I learned quite a lot and was able to piece together more of the history of the conflict. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in the U.S. involvement with the Vietnam conflict. Thanks!
Displaying 1 of 1 review