#2: The Vietnam War (Top 10 Mistakes by U.S. Presidents)

Lesson for President Obama: Ask the tough questions before you go to war.  

War with North Vietnam had been on the minds of Americans since the mid-1950s when a communist-led insurgency split the country and drove out the French colonial forces. President John F. Kennedy had sent military advisors and then troops into South Vietnam. After Kennedy’s assassination, what to do about the Vietnam War became a pressing matter of business for the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

In the 1950s and ’60s the dominant idea in foreign policy circles was the Domino Theory, which stated that if one nation fell to the communists, the surrounding countries would fall, too. That is what had happened in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, and the West was worried that with communist governments already in place in North Korea and North Vietnam, a failure to come to the aid of South Vietnam would mean the collapse of that country as well as all its neighbors—Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, perhaps even Japan. Once the dominoes started to fall, there was no telling where they would stop.

As President Johnson and his White House advisors—which included many members of the Kennedy administration—discussed what to do, they failed to ask two hard questions: First, if the worst happened and South Vietnam fell to the communists, was it likely that all of South Asia would fall too? And, second, if the United States did commit its troops to fight alongside the South Vietnamese army, would this combined force be able to win the war? According to Robert McNamara, who was LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, neither he, nor President Johnson, nor anyone in the White House asked those questions.

In a televised address to the nation on August 4, 1964, LBJ declared, “I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making it clear that our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.”

Johnson was acting on high motives. A decade earlier the United State had been a signatory to SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), in which the U.S., France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan pledged to prevent communism from gaining ground and spreading in South Asia. “America keeps her word,” Johnson said. “A threat to any nation in that region is a threat to all, and a threat to us….This is not just a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.”

The bill to commit more American troops to fight in Vietnam became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, named for an exchange of gunfire between U.S. and North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin a few weeks earlier. It passed the House of Representatives 416 to 0, and it passed in the Senate by a vote of 98 to 2.

But the war did not go well. No matter how many troops LBJ sent to Vietnam, the North Vietnamese were not defeated. As U.S. casualties mounted and Americans back home began to believe that the war was unwinnable, anti-war protests—some of them violent—erupted across the country, with demonstrators denouncing the president as a war-monger and a murderer of innocent Vietnamese civilians.

Johnson’s decision to increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam hamstrung his presidency and ruined his reputation. The man who had brought about the passage of the Civil Rights Act and a host of new social programs as part of his War on Poverty was hounded from office.

By the time the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, more than 1.5 million Vietnamese had died, more than 58,000 U.S. troops had been killed, more than 150,000 were wounded, and 2,000 were missing in action.


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