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Lyndon Johnson's war focuses on the repercussions from President Johnson's failure to address the fundamental incompatibility between his political objectives at home and his military objectives in Vietnam.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Hunt reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.
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.
Decades later, the Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for American society. Partisans on all sides still debate why the war was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all. In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionately how and why President Lyndon Johnson and his administration conducted the war as they did. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the LBJ Library, including the Tom Johnson notes from the influential Tuesday Lunch Group, George Herring discusses the concept of limited war and how it affected President Johnson's decision making, Johnson's relations with his military commanders, the administration's pacification program of 1965-1967, the management of public opinion, and the "fighting while negotiating" strategy pursued after the Tet Offensive in 1968. The author's in-depth analysis exposes numerous flaws in Johnson's management of the war. In Herring's view, the Johnson administration lacked any overall strategy for conducting the war. No change in approach was ever discussed, despite popular and even administration dissatisfaction with the progress of the war, and no oversight committee coordinated the activities of the military services and various governmental agencies, which were left to follow their own, often conflicting, agendas.
Argues that Johnson's downfall was caused by the press, and the Vietnam War
Lyndon Johnson, when it comes to his role in the Vietnam war, is popularly portrayed as an irrational hawkish leader who bullied his advisers and refused to solicit a wide range of opinions. That depiction, David Barrett, argues, is simplistic and far from accurate.
In the summer of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson faced an agonizing decision. On June 7, General William Westmoreland had come to him with a "bombshell" request to more than double the number of existing troops in Vietnam. LBJ, who wished to be remembered as a great reformer, not as a war president, saw the proposed escalation for what it was—the turning point for American involvement in Vietnam. This is one of the most discussed chapters in modern presidential history, but George Herring, the acknowledged dean of Vietnam War historians, has found a fascinating new way to tell this story—through the remarkable legacy of LBJ’s taped telephone conversations. Underused until now in exploring Johnson’s decision making in Vietnam, the phone conversations offer intimate, striking, and sometimes poignant insights into this ordeal. Johnson emerges as a fascinating character, obligated to pursue victory in Vietnam but skeptical that it is even possible, the whole while watching his plans for domestic reform threatened. The president walks a fine line between a military he must placate and a Congress whose support he must maintain as he tries to implement his Great Society legislation. The reader can see the flaws in the Cold War sensibility contributing to Johnson’s tragic attempt to hold ground against an enemy with whom he had no leverage. The cast includes many of the era’s most iconic players, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Westmoreland ("I have a lot riding on you," LBJ tells him—"I hope you don’t pull a MacArthur on me!"), House minority leader Gerald Ford, anti-war advocate Robert Kennedy ("I think you’ve got to sit down and talk to Bobby," LBJ tells McNamara), and former president Eisenhower, a valuable contact in the Republican camp. A concise, inside look at seven critical weeks in 1965—presented as a Rotunda ebook linking to transcripts and audio files of the original presidential tapes— The War Bells Have Rung offers both student and scholar a vivid and accessible look at a decision on which LBJ’s presidency would pivot and that would change modern American history. Miller Center Studies on the Presidency is a new series of original works that draw on the Miller Center's scholarly programs to shed light on the American presidency past and present.
Though Lyndon B. Johnson did not make the initial decision to enter the conflict in Vietnam, he accepted the burdens of the unofficial war when he took office. Through full-color and black-and-white photos, informative sidebars, and engaging text, readers sneak a peek into the Johnson administration and the people who advised him, gaining insight into the combat and political strategies of the war itself and its legacy. Understanding the pressures of this unpopular war and what went into the decision making to ramp up the conflict will give readers a new perspective on the frustrating struggle that took place in this small nation in Southeast Asia.
This book examines the events that led up to the day--March 31, 1968--when Lyndon Johnson dramatically renounced any attempt to be reelected president of the United States. It offers one of the best descriptions of U.S. policy surrounding the Tet offensive of that fateful March--a historic turning point in the war in Vietnam that led directly to the end of American military intervention. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.