Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War

by Brian VanDeMark

In November of 1964, as Lyndon Johnson celebrated his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, the government of South Vietnam lay in a shambles. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor described it as a country beset by "chronic factionalism, civilian-military suspicion and distrust, absence of national spirit and motivation, lack of cohesion in the social structure, lack of experience in the conduct of government." Virtually no one in the Johnson Administration believed that Saigon could defeat the communist insurgency--and yet by July of 1965, a mere nine months later, they would lock the United States on a path toward massive military intervention which would ultimately destroy Johnson's presidency and polarize the American people.
Into the Quagmire presents a closely rendered, almost day-by-day account of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam during those crucial nine months. Mining a wealth of recently opened material at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and elsewhere, Brian VanDeMark vividly depicts the painful unfolding of a national tragedy. We meet an LBJ forever fearful of a conservative backlash, which he felt would doom his Great Society, an unsure and troubled leader grappling with the unwanted burden of Vietnam; George Ball, a maverick on Vietnam, whose carefully reasoned (and, in retrospect, strikingly prescient) stand against escalation was discounted by Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy; and Clark Clifford, whose last-minute effort at a pivotal meeting at Camp David failed to dissuade Johnson from doubling the number of ground troops in Vietnam. What comes across strongly throughout the book is the deep pessimism of all the major participants as things grew worse--neither LBJ, nor Bundy, nor
McNamara, nor Rusk felt confident that things would improve in South Vietnam, that there was any reasonable chance for victory, or that the South had the will or the ability to prevail against the North. And yet deeper into the quagmire they went.
Whether describing a tense confrontation between George Ball and Dean Acheson ("You goddamned old bastards," Ball said to Acheson, "you remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of buzzards sitting on a fence and letting the young men die") or corrupt politicians in Saigon, VanDeMark provides readers with the full flavor of national policy in the making. More important, he sheds greater light on why America became entangled in the morass of Vietnam.

Genres: History, War, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 3 out of 5]

On 27 July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson confirmed his decision to “give the commanders in Vietnam the men they requested”. The President had hearkened to many impassioned appeals to “hold to the present course, without dramatic escalation”, and ignored repeated warnings that America could not win a war in Southeast Asia because he would not risk American security or credibility by withdrawing from Vietnam. Johnson’s decision to authorize a vast increase in American combat forces — from 75,000 to 175,000 by the end of 1965, with another 100,000 planned for 1966 — drew America into a war no one wanted.

It is ironic that while Lyndon Johnson's actual dream was to go down in history as a great domestic reformer, he is remembered mainly for the chief disaster of his presidency, the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict. In his book, Brian VanDeMark addresses this irony, and tragedy, by tracing Johnson's simultaneous decision to escalate and work on passing his beloved Great Society program through Congress.

The author's treatment of the President is sympathetic, maybe even overly sympathetic from time to time. He portrays Johnson as an anguished Commander in Chief, who was so devoted to his domestic reform program that he approved military actions in Southeast Asia, which he sensed, rather than understood, to be unwise. VanDeMark explains that Johnson's attempts to hide his escalation decisions from Capitol Hill and the public by not asking for additional funds to meet the massive new military requests or pay for the Great Society were dictated by the fear that Congress might choose to fight Asian Communists instead of domestic poverty and prioritize foreign issues over Johnson's ambitious domestic agenda. His sweeping and expensive reform initiatives — the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, and the Voting Rights Act — had already provoked hostility among conservatives. The President's deception helped enact the Great Society, but resulted in a politically lethal loss of the American people's trust when the magnitude of his military commitment was revealed.

It is worth noting that although VanDeMark proves his thesis convincingly, he glosses over Johnson's less-flattering qualities instead of confronting them. For instance, he claims that Johnson listened to his closest aides and worried over their various recommendations. But there is little in his book to suggest that the President's attitude was not his usual intimidating, rash one, for which he was so often criticized. This why I believe that VanDeMark's work, along with the works of many others, remains inferior, in terms of objective Lyndon Johnson characterization, to Robert Dallek's brilliant book Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973 because Dallek manages to balance the sympathy he feels for the President with the truth that he was a person who believed that being feared is better than to be loved; who acted brusquely to attract attention; who was stubborn, paranoid, and insecure.

Furthermore, VanDeMark depicts the Johnson administration as having inherently good intentions that led to disastrous outcomes. However, I believe that it was the President's top advisers who failed intellectually and morally in their decision-making regarding Vietnam. The American policy-makers' fundamental mistake was to think that the conflict in Vietnam was controlled by North Vietnam alone, with the National Liberation Front and Viet Cong operating as agents of Hanoi. In reality, the NLF was composed of insurgent South Vietnamese opposing the Saigon government for reasons and in ways of their own. Therefore, the American bombing of North Vietnam in the attempt to obstruct supply routes and coerce Hanoi into submission were irrelevant to the struggle in the South and only fortified the Communists' will. As I found out recently, this fact is usually overlooked by the post-1965 histories of the Vietnam conflict. On the other hand, historians focusing on the pre-escalation period, and especially on what happened after Ngo Dinh Diem's assassination, frequently draw attention to the chaos that reigned in Saigon after the Ngo brothers' overthrow – the people of South Vietnam definitely had reasons to be upset with their government and its handling of the war.

Meanwhile, American ground operations were as unreasonable as the bombing strikes. The American takeover of ground combat resulted in a seize of American efforts to reform South Vietnam, giving South Vietnamese officials reasons to assume that from now on Saigon could do whatever it wants because the Americans would go to whatever lengths necessary to not allow South Vietnam to fall. 

Thus, the American government was not outfought, but out-thought because its military leaders refused to come to terms with the failure of their assumptions and adapt their strategy to the conditions in Vietnam. As VanDeMark points out, Johnson's initial urge to re-think the recommendations for massive air and ground escalation were correct, but what he does not acknowledge is that the President shared his advisers' belief in the containment strategy and dislike for "Munich-like" appeasement. I wish that VanDeMark had cited, like other Johnson biographers such as Larry Berman, Edwin E. Moïse, and Lloyd C. Gardner, the ample existing evidence that the high-ranking American policy-makers had access to information, especially CIA reports, that should have helped them avoid and correct many costly errors. Instead, he strays away from this line of reasoning and towards vague interpretations of Hanoi's strategy, which he presents as much more sophisticated than it actually was. In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, William J. Duiker convincingly argues that the Communists were not clever strategists. Hanoi stumbled and blundered enough for American policy-makers to have outplayed them had they devoted more time and energy to assessing the situation clearly. 

VanDeMark also attempts to portray Johnson's turmoils as he tried to juggle an increasingly costly and unpopular war with the realization of his Great Society initiatives, yet here again the author is surpassed, this time by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, based on personal conversations with Johnson, offers a fascinating glimpse into Johnson's tormented mind, caught between pressures for domestic reforms and the American commitment to saving the non-Communist South Vietnam. 

All in all, INTO THE QUAGMIRE can hardly rank among the most perceptive analysis of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and Vietnam policy. This book contains some insightful observations, but they are not as fully developed as those of other historians I have read, in my opinion. I do not recommend it.

[Brett C · Rating 3 out of 5]

"LBJ's determination, however understandable, nonetheless led him deliberately and seriously to obscure the nature and cost of America's deepening involvement in the war during 1964-1965. This decision bought Johnson the short-term political maneuverability he wanted, but at a costly long-term political price. As LBJ's credibility on the war eroded, public confidence in his leadership slowly but irretrievably evaporated." pg 217

This was an informative narrative on LBJ's dilemma on the rising issues leading to the Vietnam War. Brian VanDeMark wrote this encompassing specifically the events and decision- & policy-making within the scope of 1964-5. He wrote from the political and military aspects of the escalation of war.

The escalation into Vietnam was a tricky situation and I don't think most historians (other than telling the events leading up to) can articulate other courses of action. Lyndon Johnson and his advisors were dealing with lessons learned from Korea, tip-toeing with public discretion, trying to manage and run a country, and keeping voter approval while dealing with Vietnam.

VanDeMark articulated the surmounting decision-making, the deteriorating political platform of South Vietnam, and the increased threat to US service members and installations inside South Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin, Camp Holloway, Pleiku, Bienhoa, Quinhon, the Brink Hotel car bombing) that led to Operation Rolling Thunder and the deployment of US Marines in March 1965.

Johnson's reluctant decision to commit additional soldiers and the change their mission only deepened his anxiety about Vietnam's domestic repercussions. With American troops involved in the fighting, U.S. casualties and costs would surely rise, straining the political consensus and economic resources sustaining the Great Society. pg 109

Overall I likes this book but for me the flow of the narrative at times seemed choppy and bumpy at times. Ultimately this is not a bad book: the information was great and I learned things from a different perspective. I would recommend this or Larry Berman's books Planning a Tragedy and Lyndon Johnson's War as additional sources for this topic. Thanks!

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a detailed history of the decisions Johnson and his advisors made regarding Vietnam from the fall of ‘64 up to the summer of ‘65, when LBJ decided to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops there. VanDeMark shows that these decisions were based on faulty assumptions about global politics (outdated conceptions of monolithic communism and belief in the domino theory, while remaining blind to Moscow-Peking discord and Vietnam’s indigenous troubles) and a justified fear of conservative backlash if LBJ “lost” Vietnam to communism. This fear caused LBJ to obscure his actions in Vietnam so he could keep attention focused on his Great Society; in the end, this secrecy cost him his credibility. It seemed clear to me that instead of accepting criticism as a given if he pulled out, thus waging a war which his own military admitted was a slim hope, LBJ should have seen that losing the war was a given and thus tried to put a positive spin on pulling out, tackling his critics’ objections before they were made. But he wavered to the end, and tried to cover his political ass with a short-term solution to a long-term problem. This story has all the elements of Greek tragedy: hubris, good intentions, a “chorus” of nay-sayers no one believes. Fascinating stuff.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book, recommended by a member of the St. Thomas More Society. I can remember being moved so much about the futility of war in only one other situation, the description by an admiral friend of Admiral Yamamoto who described Yamamoto's realization that to attack America was futile but he was Japanese and had to go along with the policy.

This book describes what I wish I had known in 1964 and 1965. The description of the "hawks," Rusk, MacNamara, etc. who were battling world Communism fit me to a T. I am of Hungarian descent, anti-Russian in some ways, anti-Marxist absolutely, fearful at that time of the spread of communism and believing in the policy of containment, all in such a way that I like our leaders, could not see that what we had in South Viet Nam was a civil war against a government that could not govern. We tried to bear the load and failed.

The description of Johnson is poignant, a man who did not want the war, who wanted to work on the Great Society but was ill-served by most of his advisors (I would have advised the same and still would, assuming I did not know what I know now).

The attempts by Ball, Clifford and Mansfield who were statesmen who could see beyond the present are hard to read now. The currents of policy argument around Johnson are horrendous to read. We failed and we lost.

I mentioned this book to a member of my Jesuit Community who is Vietnamese, whose father was an agent for the American government and in prison under the Marxists for 10 years. He has a different perception, of an America which did not see the war through to the end. When he asked me if we had lost the war, I said yes. He said, we had not. I think he meant that we walked away from it when we were winning.

Obviously, we are still trying to find our way.................

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A readable and scholarly look at the years of 1964-65 when Johnson and his cabinet made the fateful decisions to ramp up our presence in Vietnam. We all know the outcome; this book explicates the mood of the country, the political instability of South Vietnam and the assuredness of the north. The book makes clear that Johnson had no easy answers, but that he did indeed have choices.

[Paul Medici · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a great deal

[Tim Parnell]

Really good so far. And not a massive book like Sideshow or Dereliction of Duty.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Concentrates on the decisions Johnson made (and didn't make) between 1964–65. The conclusions, written before the start of Iraq II and the global war on terror, were painfully ironic.