Those of us old enough to have personal memories of LBJ and the Vietnam War still have a lot of questions regarding why the U.S. sharply escalated the numbers of American troops up to half a million in 1965.
The question lingers, because it is clear that LBJ knew that the U.S. could not "win" in Vietnam. Whatever "win" might mean, it obviously did not include pulling the U.S. troops out and turning South Vietnam over to the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi. It had also been perfectly clear to Eisenhower in 1956 when he prevented the Vietnamese elections on reunification because the Communist would win them that a win based on American military action was not possible.
By 1965 there had been the coup in Saigon and a lot of spilled blood and newspaper ink, but still nothing had changed. We still weren't going to "win" in Vietnam unless Ho Chi Minh and the Communists decided to turn their government over to the government of South Vietnam, and of the two governments, the Communist government of the north had the better reputation for lack of corruption and for working for the people. Our military presence in the South could not change that. As long as China threatened to go to war with us if we invaded the North and we did not think we could win a war with China on the Asian mainland, we could not win by military means.
Mark Klein has just posted a paper entitled No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection by Francis M. Bator which offers the first really rational explanation that I have seen for LBJ's sharp increase in the number of troops in country.
I was not a disinterested observer. My first Presidential vote ever was for LBJ, largely because what I knew of him was that he was an extremely bright and capable man who strongly favored Civil Rights and because Goldwater and the Republicans were (and remain today) absolutely wrong on Civil Rights.
I already belonged to the military. I transfered from the Army Reserves where I had late in 1964 just been promoted to Sp4 in an Artillery headquarters Battery to join advanced ROTC to become a Second Lieutenant, and it griped me that the Army would not let me draw both my Reserve Pay (about $42 a month) and also the $40 a month as a ROTC cadet at the same time. I had a stake in the pending troop increase, but did not know about it yet.
Politically I gave LBJ very high marks for the Civil Rights Bill and for Medicare. I didn't see the value of American troops in South Vietnam, though. Still, I did and still do have high respect for LBJ. The prevailing "wisdom" in the national news did not agree with me, but I knew people who knew him personally, and the news was wrong. Francis Bator (.pdf) now offers an explanation that does not require me to accept that LBJ was an uneducated country hick from Texas who was intimidated by the high-brow easterners with Harvard degrees who accompanied JFK when I remember how LBJ had literally twisted the Senate, and with it the Congress, around his finger and made it dance to his tune. The media-inspired fiction that LBJ was an uneducated country hick intimidated by high-powered eastern educated JFK advisers has led to a lot of mistaken explanations for the problem that the media called "Guns and Butter." I knew enough to not give any of those explanations much credence.
The explanation Bator offers for the sharp troop increase and the rather strange way it was handled (no reserves used, no taxes increased to pay for the escalation, no getting Congress behind the escalation) centers on America's social paralysis, brought on by the right-wing financial Republicans and the racist Dixiecrats who had worked together to prevent any social or economic progress in American society from 1938 on.
[The following is not in Bator’s paper. It is from my own study. I think it illuminates the source of America's problems, though.]
The American economic and social collapse between 1929 and 1933 occurred because of international financial problems stemming from the tremendous costs of WW I, the mishandling of German reparations in the Versailles Treaty at the end of WW I and the international effort to return to the Gold Standard after WW I, compounded by America's unregulated independent banks, inadequate accounting standards, an unregulated money supply and the refusal of Republicans and bankers to take any actions to correct the problems.
The requirement to stay on the Gold Standard exported the American financial disaster to the rest of the world and by the panicky attempt by Congress to erect barriers to the rest of the world using the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The American trade barriers were quickly copied around the world. Much of this could have been ameliorated by quick government actions to maintain the American money supply be protecting and regulating banks, by using the government to maintain employment, and by separating international exchange rates from the straight-jacket of the Gold Standard. Conservative Republicans fought every such measure tooth-and-nail for four years as the disaster of the Depression continued to get worse.
FDR came in to office and took actions highly unpopular with Bankers and Republicans, but they were actions that worked to bring the American economy into the early twentieth century. Bank Insurance and the associated federal inspections allowed the money supply to begin to recover. Labor legislation allowed unions to form and use their power to prevent big businesses and banks from dumping their financial problems all onto labor and small business. Elimination of the Gold Standard allowed international trade to begin again. The CCC camps put young people to work, and Unemployment Insurance protected a part of labor’s income when businesses had to let them go. But the Bankers, businessmen and Republicans hated this, and used the very conservative U.S. Supreme Court to stop and even roll back a lot of the progress. 1938 is about when the right-wingers recovered enough power to hold America down.
America’s economic progress for the next three decades was a result of the first five years of the Roosevelt Presidency and of the government takeover of the economy during WW II.
Truman's election in 1948 frightened the Republicans and right-wingers badly. It showed them that they had not recovered the all power and control they had lost because of the Depression. So in their fear they attacked Truman like rabid dogs with every weapon in their arsenal, building the threat of a war-devastated and land-locked USSR and the (mostly) fantasy of world-wide Communism into tools of fear and hate to use against Truman and the Democrats.
The conservatives and Republicans had lost a lot to the Depression, both economically and in terms of power and prestige, and they wanted it back. All of it. And they saw no reason to share with labor or society in general, since they never had done that before. As they saw it, leaders build a nation and an economy, not the workers or the other lower classes. The majority of Americans clearly did not agree with them. So the only way to recover their power was to sell fear.
The takeover of China by Mao Tse Tung's Communist party was a gift to them. Although the real problems China suffered that allowed Chairman Mao to run Chiang Kai-sheck off the continent to Taiwan stemmed from the globalization of Western trade in the 19th century and the Japanese invasion in the 1930's, those problems were compounded by the corruption and autocratic rule of the Kuomintang (KMT). The leaders of the KMT were mostly like the American conservative Republicans, in it for themselves. The Chinese peasants were nothing to them. Never had been anything important and never would be. Mao built his Communist Party on those disregarded peasants and promised to give China to them. With the assistance of the immensely corrupt KMT, Mao succeeded. This gave the American right-wingers (often financed by the KMT) the cry "Who lost China?" to attack Truman, which they used very successfully.
Most of the following is from Bator, to which I have added a bit of mostly military history and some history of Douglas MacArthur to supplement that Bator provides.
When the North Koreans invaded South Korea, Truman quickly organized the defense of South Korea through the UN, unfortunately placing it under Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur's brilliant counter attack with the amphibious landing at Inchon which rolled the North Korean Army up and left them open to further attack towards the Yalu Rive. Since this appeared to be an opportunity to unify Korea under Syngman Rhee, Douglas MacArthur attacked north towards the Yalu River.
Either unaware of or ignoring warnings that the Chinese sent through neutral parties that they would consider it a threat to China for the Americans to approach the Yalu River, MacArthur did exactly that. When the American and ROK Armies got close to the Yalu, in November 1950 the Chinese, as they had warned, attacked across the river and pushed the war back to the 38th Parallel, roughly where it had started. It remained there, chewing up American and ROK troops until April of 1953 when the new President, Eisenhower, negotiated a truce that ended hostilities.
Since the U.S. was not going to war with China, a repeated invasion of North Korea was not an option. At the same time, it was perfectly clear that the U.S. was not going to let North Korea conquer South Korea and had the troops in place to prevent it. So why did the Korean War drag on from the Spring of 1951 until April 1953? A major reason was that the on-going Korean War was the the major tool the American Republicans had with which to defeat Harry Truman and the Democrats in the Presidential election of 1952.
Douglas MacArthur publicly criticized President Truman's handling of the Korean War as not being sufficiently aggressive. This criticism made it almost impossible for Truman to stop the hostilities, and was very likely part of an effort by MacArthur to set himself up for a run for President [my opinion here, not Bator's. But there is no one who doubts that MacArthur thought he should have been President, and that he could have done a better job than the Haberdasher from Missouri.]
It worked, but Eisenhower was much better thought of than was MacArthur, so he got the benefit of the Republican right-wing maneuvers to win the American Presidency.
This was the background that allowed "Tail gunner" Joe McCarthy to become so famous spreading the "Red Scare" threats of a Communist take-over. Eisenhower was not in a position to stop McCarthy, particularly since the John Birch Society was even then accusing Ike of being a Communist himself. All of this was connected to the right-wing Republican efforts to regain the power they had lost because of the Depression that their individual greed and lack of system, thought or social concern had caused.
Remember. According to conservatives society and the economy exist by and for the leaders. This is their first and foremost creed. Everything else they do and say follows logically.
Now, back to Bator again, with a little bit of non-controversial history added.
All of this was the set-up for the problem in American politics caused by the conflict in South Viet Nam which remained when the French pulled out after their military defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The inevitable takeover of South Vietnam by the Communists was always going to be a tool for American right-wing extremists to use to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in the electorate before offering themselves as protection from the grave threat they warned of.
The state of Vietnam was established by the Geneva Accords of 1954 with unification awaiting on free elections to be held in July 1956. Backed by the U.S., Ngo Dinh Diem quashed the planned elections. Since the Communist Party of Ho Chi Minh would clearly have won the election and since Eisenhower was running for reelection in November 1956, there was no effective pressure to hold the elections at all. For reasons of American domestic politics Ike was not going to change anything.
The problem in South Viet Nam was not the domino theory. It was the political fear Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all had of being attacked by the American domestic right-wing for letting that piss-ant little country fall to the Communists - which is where the majority of the Vietnamese, both Southern and Northern, wanted it to go. Vietnam essentially ran on autopilot [*] for the remainder of the Eisenhower administration and it got passed off - with all the domestic American politics problems - to John F. Kennedy.
In addition, the corrupt right-wing Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista y ZaldÃvar, supported by a number of Florida-based American mafiosi who helped Batista stay in power, set up the conditions for another revolution in Cuba. Fidel Castro was able to succeed removing Batista and the Mafiosa by January 1, 1959. This, too, was handed off by Eisenhower to JFK, along with the disaster that became the Bay of Pigs invasion. The biggest problem from the Cuban Revolution was the right-wing extremist Cuban exiles who took up residence in South Florida. And that problem was what?
Not any real danger to America since the unified Communist threat never existed. The real problem was that the right-wing extremist Cuban exiles were able to shift Florida's votes in the electoral college to a Presidential candidate who they approved of. This set of domestic problems led to the farce of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As someone sensible asked - what was the difference between a missile coming from Cuba and one coming from Poland? We couldn't stop either one. But JFK was able to use the opportunity of the Cuban Missile Crisis to appear strong, and to pay off the Cuban Exile community to some extent. All he had to do was what Ike had done for one term - let Vietnam ride on automatic pilot and look tough against Castro. Then he could run for reelection in 1964, and enact the domestic program of Civil Rights and what was later called "The Great Society Programs" in his second term. Oh, and JFK would have been able to pull out of Vietnam after those were passed.
Someone may have thought he could pull it off. November 22, 1963 changed a whole lot of things. Including who was President.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) faced much the same limitations as JFK had, and like JFK he wanted to enact a domestic program that continued the progress made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the program that had been stalled by the right-wingers after 1938. There were some differences, though.
In the Depression the first set of problems had been economic. Job creation was no longer a the major problem, but access to health care was. There was no health insurance for anyone over age 65. When a person reached age 65, their health insurance was canceled and there was none available. Then, Civil Rights had moved past the economic problems to become first priority. In spite of greater public pressure to open society to all of its citizens, the right-wingers (Republicans and Dixiecrats) were able to continue to disenfranchise 13% of the American citizens. But that wasn't all. Distribution of food to the poor was a major problem. The Army was rejecting a large number of draftees because of malnutrition, and the problem was especially widespread in ghettos and the countryside.
JFK had been unable to move solutions for these things through the Congress against the combination of Dixiecrats and Republican economic conservatives. These and similar problems would make up LBJ's Great Society Program. First, though, LBJ had to defeat Goldwater in 1964. Before he won the election of 1964 though, LBJ appointed William Westmoreland to the command of MACV. LBJ, as we know, won big in 1964. Unfortunately, the choice of Westmoreland led to the a major part of his new problem.
Like Eisenhower and JFK, Lyndon would have been happy to let Vietnam remain on autopilot. Unfortunately, Westmoreland was not willing to do that. He intended to win in Vietnam, which set up the same problem for LBJ as MacArthur handed to Truman.
Leaving Vietnam would hand South Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh. That was no more politically [possible for LBJ than it had been for Eisenhower or JFK because the Republican domestic American right-wing would use that action to paralyze the Presidency. So how was LBJ to get Civil Rights legislation and the Great Society through Congress? LBJ had to keep Vietnam from torpedoing his domestic program.
This is the core of Francis Bator's argument. Rather than allowing VietNam to run on autopilot, Westmoreland started by requesting in increase of 16,000 troops when he reached took over MACV. Troops had been increased to 535,000 by the time Westy was promoted out in 1968, and Westmoreland was certain that the increased troop levels could be used in Search and Destroy missions in the jungle to destroy the Viet Cong. Westy also chose the disastrous strategy of fighting a war of attrition with the Viet Cong using search and destroy missions based on American troops. He didn't trust Vietnamese troops to do the job, probably with very good reason. Unfortunately for LBJ, a total commitment to the Vietnamese War would also torpedo his domestic agenda.
LBj knew that the U.S. military could not win in Vietnam, and he also knew that the South Vietnamese government would not be able to get its stuff together and defeat the Viet Cong. The South Vietnamese government was at least as corrupt as Chaing Kai-sheck's KMT had been in China. [I am aware that the Saigon Police Force, the White Mice, so called because of their white uniforms, were totally controlled by a criminal family that dominated the delta region of the Mekong River, for example.]
LBJ also knew that he had two years after the 1964 election to get his great Society and Civil Rights programs through Congress -- unless the extremist right-wingers would be able to start screaming that LBJ was giving Vietnam to the Communists. If LBJ didn't provide the support Westmoreland was requesting, those screams would derail his Great Society and Civil Rights legislation through Congress.
So Lyndon Johnson provided the additional troops Westmoreland had asked for - without calling up the Reserves, without increasing taxes and without permitting an invasion of North Vietnam as Westy and much of the top Pentagon brass wanted. [China was no more going to accept an invasion of North Vietnam than they did the invasion of North Korea in 1950.]
If LBJ hadn't appeared to support the requests of the commander on the ground. But a full support, total war, would have also killed the domestic program in Congress. Then there would have been no Great Society, no Medicare and no Civil Rights Law. The result was that Johnson permitted the increase of American troops up to half-a-million. It was the price he had to pay to keep the extremist right-wing Republicans from torpedoing his real program.
This was the nutshell version. The Bator paper provides a lot of interesting details as well as references.
The Bator paper placed a lot of twentieth century American political history into context for me. The rest of what is written below is my speculation, based on what I presented above and on Bator's paper. Francis Bator is in no way responsible for my speculations and conclusions here.
The political situation that Bator describes seems to be pattern. The American right-wing wants control of America, and wants no interference from the peons, plebians and miscellanous other lower classes - oh, and no immigrants unless they'll take jobs that are too unsafe to work, work at ridiculously low pay, just disappear of they get injured on the job, then go home to somewhere else and leave no dark-skinned children behind. This is what the conservatives want now, just as it was what the monarchists wanted at the time of the French Revolution, just as General Franco wanted in Spain when he overthrew the elected government in the 1930's, as General Pinochet wanted in Chile, as Chiang Kai-sheck wanted in China, and as Fulgencio Batista y ZaldÃvar wanted in Cuba.
Am I suggesting a secret right-wing conspiracy to control the world or something like that? No. I just think that bankers, top business persons (like Ken Lay), Generals, and a lot of inheritors of wealth (Richard Mellon Scaife) all want to closely control society so that they don't lose what they have to start with. They all see the common classes as enemies out to take what they have away from them, and they take similar political actions to control those they consider threats and prevent them from gaining enough power to become bigger threats. Trust, empathy and negotiation do not provide as much certainty as police and prisons do. It's not a conspiracy. It is what frightened people with wealth and power do.
The right-wingers also seem to have no hesitation to start wars to get what they want, and have no interest in negotiating with those they oppose. The latter characteristic makes the wars more likely.
To do all this, the right-wing extremists need to get elected to gain the power they want so badly. But they are a minority. To get elected they trade on lies and high fear levels. It's a form of extortion. The scream "There is ______ out there to fear, and if you give up your demands for fair wages, health care and your children's education we'll protect you from those monsters." If the so-called threat (the monsters) quit and go elsewhere, there is always another fake threat to gin up to create more fear. Communists quit fighting back, so now there is this strange "Global War on Terror." No nation. No fixed organization. Most importantly, unlike a nuclear-armed USSR, the Terrorists present no existential threat to America. They are a lot less dangerous than drug traffickers or highway accidents. Their face today is al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, which is probably why Osama bin Laden was permitted to escape Tora Bora and why he has been seen or captured since.
It is to the mutual benefit of the leaders of al Qaeda and to the American right-wing extremists that Osama bin Laden never again appear in public. If he ever did get caught, be found, or be proven dead, then much of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that is the mainstay of Republican voters would vanish. Poof. Similarly, the apparent power of al Qaeda in terrorist circles would disappear as quickly as did the reputation of Carlos the Jackal when he was caught and imprisoned by the French.
The real threats inside America have always been right-wingers. The right-wing Christian extremists have their Paul Hill, Shelly Shannon, James Kopp and Eric Rudolph.
Lee Harvey Oswald may not have been a right-winger, but he was certainly some one's dupe. Jack Ruby shut him up before he ever got a word out. Jack Ruby was connected to gangsters at the same time a lot of gangsters were angry about being kicked out of Cuba. He certainly made a lot of right-wingers happy.
Timothy McVeigh has a lot of history that hasn't surfaced yet, much of that because the FBI either didn't investigate it or refused to permit it to surface. For some reason, American assassins don't seem to go after right-wingers. There is a pattern here. If there is a real conspiracy here, they are good enough to eliminate the connecting links. If there is not a conspiracy here, then the pattern is an amazingly unlikely series of coincidences, much as can be said for the JFK and RFK assassinations.
Another such strange coincidences is that American political assassinations (or suspicious deaths) almost always happed to left-wingers, not right-wingers. The right-wingers are always the ones calling for someone's assassination, though. (*cough* Pat Robertson calling for Hugo Chavez' assassination. *cough*)
Whatever, the biggest threat America seems to face is our own, domestic right-wingers.
But that is just my set of speculations. For a much more fact-based view, stick with the Bator paper.
[*] Colombia is a similar low-level conflict that has been allowed to run on autopilot for nearly two decades now because the American right-wing extremists prefer to use the American government to fund ever greater military expenditures to protect the Colombian government from the drug-trade financed FARC and the similarly drug-trade financed Paramilitary groups. The threat of the drug trade is a major American right-wing extremist campaign issue used to sow fear in the voting public. That fear allows them to extort voters into voting for them, so that they can "protect" the voters from the threat fo drugs. The protection consists of building more prisons, extending prison sentences, building more and larger police forces, and especially it consists of repressing American African-Americans and minority groups.
Not only does the "fear, uncertainty and doubt" the politicians use the Drug trade for gain them votes (Liberals are "Soft on Drugs."), the drug users who are caught and imprisoned are mostly minority groups who otherwise would vote Democratic and support such things as drug rehabilitation programs.
A major program that reduced the demand for drugs would reduce the funding of the Colombian FARC and paramilitary organizations. If that happened, then the American contractors like DynCorp who get a lot of money providing aircraft, weapons and training to the Colombian government (paid for by the U.S. taxpayers) would not be needed and would lose a lot of revenue.
The American right-wing extremists wouldn't want that to happen. They would lose both electoral power and a lot of money, so we get no effective drug rehabilitation programs large enough to do much good and the civil war in Colombia, funded on one side by American drug users and on the other side by American taxpayers, continues on autopilot. A more rational set of solutions would be a lot more productive in both America and Colombia, but while society and the economies would gain from such a rational approach, the American right-wingers and the drug supplier organizations would lose massive amounts of money and power.
[Revisd for clarity June 20, 2007 -- Editor WTF.]
Addendum June 20, 2007
Think I have been a little intemperate in my characterizations of American extremist right-wingers? Consider this prescription for international relations by NeoCon Godfather Norman Podhoretz. This is their normal approach to international disagreements. Threaten to blow them to smithereens, and if they don't cave, do it. Then shrug and forget about it.
This is the normal approach used by the American right-wing. When you consider my speculations on assassination as a tool of politics by the American right-wing, keep this in mind. As Norman Podheretz and Pat Robertson have proven in recent public statements, it is the way they normally think. It is the language they use when speaking among themselves.
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