Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers

Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers PDF Author: Lyndon Baines Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 936

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Book Description
The recent declassification of "top secret" Vietnam War papers of the Johnson administration provides an unusually intimate portrait of presidential decision making and fills an important gap in the literature on presidents and on the Vietnam War. For years, the Pentagon Papers served as the most influential published collection of Vietnam-era policy making documents. However, as Vietnam scholar George McT. Kahin has written, the Pentagon Papers are "generally very sketchy and inadequate with respect to the political dimension; and for the critical years, 1964–1968, the gaps are particularly extensive." Drawing upon the newly declassified documents and many other Vietnam papers, David Barrett's Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam Papers fills the need for a one-volume collection detailing interaction and confrontations concerning the dilemmas of Vietnam policy. He chronologically presents notes of meetings and phone calls between President Johnson and advisers, as well as meetings with some war critics; memoranda to and from the president; and notes and letters written by friends and associates of Johnson describing his thinking and concerns about the war. This volume offers a first-hand documentation of how and why the United States fought in Indochina in the 1960s; an introduction to the archival holdings for future researchers; and documentary evidence of the major players and their roles in making policy.

Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers

Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers PDF Author: Lyndon Baines Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 936

Get Book Here

Book Description
The recent declassification of "top secret" Vietnam War papers of the Johnson administration provides an unusually intimate portrait of presidential decision making and fills an important gap in the literature on presidents and on the Vietnam War. For years, the Pentagon Papers served as the most influential published collection of Vietnam-era policy making documents. However, as Vietnam scholar George McT. Kahin has written, the Pentagon Papers are "generally very sketchy and inadequate with respect to the political dimension; and for the critical years, 1964–1968, the gaps are particularly extensive." Drawing upon the newly declassified documents and many other Vietnam papers, David Barrett's Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam Papers fills the need for a one-volume collection detailing interaction and confrontations concerning the dilemmas of Vietnam policy. He chronologically presents notes of meetings and phone calls between President Johnson and advisers, as well as meetings with some war critics; memoranda to and from the president; and notes and letters written by friends and associates of Johnson describing his thinking and concerns about the war. This volume offers a first-hand documentation of how and why the United States fought in Indochina in the 1960s; an introduction to the archival holdings for future researchers; and documentary evidence of the major players and their roles in making policy.

LBJ and Vietnam

LBJ and Vietnam PDF Author: George C. Herring
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292749007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
“[A] compelling analysis . . . A solid addition to our understanding of the Vietnam War and a president.” —Publishers Weekly The Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for Americans—partisans on all sides still debate why it 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. This in-depth analysis, from a prize-winning historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, exposes numerous flaws in Johnson’s approach, in a “concise, well-researched account” that “critiques Johnson's management of the Vietnam War in terms of military strategy, diplomacy, and domestic public opinion” (Library Journal).

Into the Quagmire

Into the Quagmire PDF Author: Brian VanDeMark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195357191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
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.

Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam PDF Author: Larry Berman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393307786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
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.

Lyndon Johnson's War

Lyndon Johnson's War PDF Author: Michael H. Hunt
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429930683
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
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, Michael H. Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War 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.

A War Remembered

A War Remembered PDF Author: Mark Updegrove
Publisher: LBJ Presidential Library and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin
ISBN: 9780988508385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
When former president Lyndon B. Johnson opened the LBJ Presidential Library in May 1971, he proclaimed, “It’s all here, the story of our time—with the bark off.” Accordingly, he wanted his library to reflect not only the triumphs of his administration, but the failures, too—and he wanted us to learn from them to build a better future for our country. In keeping with President Johnson’s vision, the LBJ Library took a substantive, unvarnished look at the Vietnam War, with the goal to shed new light on the war and the lessons it provides. The passage of years offers greater perspective on the complexities of a war that altered not only our history but our perception of ourselves as a nation. The result was the Vietnam War Summit, an intensive three-day conference in April 2016 that brought together policy makers, scholars, reporters, photographers, musicians, and importantly, those who were on the front lines of the war and the antiwar movement. In conjunction with the conference, the library displayed a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Twice each day during the summit, ceremonies recognized Vietnam War veterans. A War Remembered features photographs and documentation from the Vietnam War Summit, but also includes a number of historic photographs from both the LBJ Library and the Briscoe Center for American History, offering a diverse perspective on the conflict that defined a generation.

Lyndon Johnson and Europe

Lyndon Johnson and Europe PDF Author: Thomas Alan Schwartz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674010741
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
He faced the dilemmas of maintaining the cohesion of the alliance, especially with the French withdrawal from NATO, while trying to reduce tensions between eastern and western Europe, managing bitter conflicts over international monetary and trade policies, and prosecuting an escalating war in Southeast Asia."--BOOK JACKET.

LBJ's 1968

LBJ's 1968 PDF Author: Kyle Longley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108140572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His responses to the crises were sometimes effective but often tragic, and LBJ's refusal to seek re-election underscores his recognition of the challenges facing the country in 1968. As much a biography of a single year as it is of LBJ, LBJ's 1968 vividly captures the tumult that dominated the headlines on a local and global level.

Uncertain Warriors

Uncertain Warriors PDF Author: David M. Barrett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
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.

The British and the Vietnam War

The British and the Vietnam War PDF Author: Nicholas Tarling
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9814722235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the British government sought to avoid escalation of the war in Vietnam and to help bring about peace. The thinking that lay behind these endeavours was often insightful and it is hard to argue that the attempt was not worth making, but the British government was able to exert little, if any, influence on a power with which it believed it had, and needed, a special relationship. Drawing on little-used papers in the British archives, Nicholas Tarling describes the making of Britain’s Vietnam policy during a period when any compromise proposed by London was likely to be seen in Washington as suggestive of defeat, and attempts to involve Moscow in the process over-estimated the USSR’s influence on a Hanoi determined on reunification.