The decision of Lyndon B Johnson in refusing to call his troops during the Vietnam war even though he certainly has the power to do so was really controversial. Different scholars have different opinions and theories on why president Johnson decided to let the war continued and escalated it. The two scholarly sources that will be evaluated and examined during this paper is Indomitable Will: LBJ In The Presidency by Mark K. Updegrove (2012) and Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster (1997). The origin of Indomitable Will: LBJ In The Presidency is 2012 and its author Mark K. Updegrove is an historian, an American author and the Lyndon Baines Johnson library and museum director. The purpose of his book is to redefine Lyndon B Johnson’s personality …show more content…
R. McMaster is an American soldier and a career officer in the U.S army. The purpose of McMaster’s book is to analyze how and why the United States becomes involved in the Vietnam War. During this, the author also explains on what he thinks why the president decided to keep the war going instead and escalate it. McMaster came to a conclusion that Johnson made the mess himself and he chose to escalate the war. The author presents the war as a consequence of specific decisions made by specific men, Lyndon B. Johnson. McMaster also talked about how president Johnson believed that he would be able to control the U.S involvement in vietnam and part of that belief is based of of McNamara's confident assurance. (McMaster 333) Because of Lyndon B John secret decision made in Washington between November 1963 to July 1965, he got the United States deeper and deeper into the war. President Johnson also believed that it would be possible to preserve American credibility even if the U.S armed force withdrew from Vietnam (McMaster 332). He was totally wrong. “After the United States become committed to the war, however, more American soldiers, airmen,... had died in the conflict, it would become impossible simply to disengage and declare America’s credibility intact…” (McMaster 332). So in the end, LBJ couldn’t just recall his troops so he just followed his personal interests and escalated the war. The value of this book is that it is based on recently released transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations and decisions. Dereliction of Duty is one of the few book that fully re-creates what happened and why it happened. The background of the author also enhances the value of this book ( H. R. McMaster served in the U.S military). The limits of this book is that it does not provide much information on why LBJ decided to escalate the war since this book is mainly about specific
Robert S. McNamara’s legacy is undoubtedly how he redefined the Secretary of Defense's role in the White House, but I am interested in his thoughts on the war afterward. From my research, I have found that McNamara heavily regretted the Vietnam War as a whole. In his memoir, “In Retrospect”, he writes about how he believed the communist threat was truly not that large of a threat, and he questioned if Soviet and Chinese behavior would have been different if the United States had not ever been involved in the Vietnam War. He also pinpointed eleven different “failures” of the war, like how there was a failure to involve Congress and the American people in a pros-and-cons-Esque discussion of entering Vietnam. McNamara retained the idea of how
In 1963, Lindon B. Johnson inherited the White House from John F. Kennedy as well as the Vietnam War. Johnson vowed to not lose the war as he saw a Communist Asia would form if he failed to act correctly. When the counter insurgency in Vietnam began to fail, due to the Diem Coup, Johnson immediately increased America’s political and military presence in Vietnam. While being fully aware of the reports and documents he was given, he decided to intentionally mislead Congress as well as the public on America’s position in the war. Johnson and his administration knew that entering the war would be expensive and consuming, but they had motives to do so anyways.
This investigation will assess to what extent did Nixon achieved the ‘Peace with Honor’ in the Vietnam war? This investigation will focus on Nixon’s Peace with Honor statement given for Vietnam in the early 1970s after entering office. Whereas Nixon was involved within the combat in Vietnam for almost four years. During the Vietnam war, Nixon planned to ‘de-Americanize’, which also became known as Vietnamization plan. From this plan, Nixon built up the South Vietnamese armed forces to create a more improved combat responsibility, while he was withdrawing the American troops therefore Vietnam can create opportunity for its own political future.
H.R. Mcmaster, author of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. McMaster explains who was responsible for the Vietnam war and why. H.R. McMaster wrote Dereliction of Duty to provide information to the public on what really happened during Vietnam, wanting others to know what the military leaders did. Also believing that if you go into the military you should know about previous issues and happenings that occurred to provide the best work. McMaster began digging deeper into the Vietnam war and the people behind it all in America.
This is known since President Nixon himself stated,” I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy” (Nixon). This speech was given as a response to the growing anti-war movement by reaching out to the “silent majority” of people who believed in their
Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, along with President Nixon believed that it would be in the best interest of the United States to keep the Cambodian bombings a secret. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson had been public about his involvement in Vietnam, which did not completely bode well for him. Protests and riots errupte as a result of Johnson’s exposure of war efforts. For these reasons, Nixon decided to keep all his Cambodia plans within a small circle of his trusted advisors. Before 1863, Cambodia mainly served as a vassal territory for either the Thai or Vietnamese governments' to own.
In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant.
“I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it” - George McGovern. There are numerous controversial topics dispersed among the subject of American history due to the amount of unethical decisions that have been made in order to improve the lives of the people or keep America out of the clutches of war. Throughout American history, historians have debated the ethical impact that the Vietnam war had on the United States. Although some people may believe that the Vietnam War achieved the goal of avoiding communism and protecting the people, the overarching idea is that it was an unjust war because of the countless lives that were lost from the participating countries, the
VanDeMark uses primary source and secondary sources to find information from Lyndon Bines Johnson library in Austin, Texas (VanDeMark, 1995). VanDeMark uses Vietnam documents, National Security File (NSF), Pentagon Papers, government publication, newspaper/ Periodicals, contemporary books. For the secondary sources, VanDeMark use Richard Dean Burns and Milton Leitenberg, The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, 1945-1982: A Bibliographic Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1983) and Richard Dean Burns, Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700 (Santa Barbara: ABC- Clio, 1983) (VanDeMark, 1995). The author document the book well because he arranges the event in chronological order from the beginning to the end of the Vietnam War.
In Martin Luther King Jr's passionate speech about America's involvement in Vietnam, he manages to create a strong and compelling argument that America's involvement in unjust . He does this by appealing to certain issues the public see as important, using irony, and using diction and tone in persuasive ways. Martin Luther King Jr says in his first paragraph that,"It seemed as if there was a real promise fr hope... to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destruction suction tube." Here, Martin Luther King Jr is getting the audience emotionally and completely invested by showing the effect of America in Vietnam on their lives. The audience now feel as though this is very important because it has to do with regular poor people and t effects them as well.
Section One: Identification and Evaluation of Sources The topic of this investigation is: To what extent was Martin Luther King Junior justified in his disapproval of the Vietnam War? The first source that was critical to this investigation was “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr,” It contained All of the speeches and some other writing that were written by Martin Luther King Jr. who was arguably one of the most famous Civil Rights Leaders in the 60’s. His peaceful work against racial prejudice in the United States earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1964. He worked as Civil Rights Leader and humanitarian until he was assassinated on April 4th 1968.
In the end, the doubts festering just beneath the official optimism in Washington had a profound influence upon the willingness of Johnson administration officials to accept the Saigon correspondent’s erroneous conclusions over Westmoreland’s assurances that the Tet Offensive had been an American
“American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and our National Identity” is a book that takes us through 20 years of the War in Vietnam from about 1955 to 1975. The Vietnam War is the second longest war in US history encompassing 5 presidents which include Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Appy’s book gives a unique American perspective on incredible, horrifying, and inspiring stories in Vietnam as well as American. Through Apps book readers learn about different communism containment methods that America used. Readers also learn about different methods of attack on Vietnam from an American standpoint and how the different failures of the US army and US politicians turned many heads into hard truths about the war.
The thesis that I took from his writing was that the we entered the war because allowing North Vietnam to obtain a communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for the people of Vietnam, damage American strategic interests and pose a threat to non-communist allies and friends. One interesting topic I learned from Nixon’s book was that he did not want to fully cut all ties with the Vietnam War even though he pushed for the policy to pull out our troops. He still wanted to support the South Vietnamese units because he thought we could still win the war. He then goes on to blame Congress for the loss of the war because they initiated a “total retreat from our commitments to the South Vietnamese people.” The book was great because it provided a lot of factually information through the lens of not just any historian or writer, but through the lens of America’s commander in-chief during the war’s most difficult stage.
A combination of doctrines and emotions – belief in permanent and universal crisis, fear of communism, faith in the duty and right of the United States to intervene swiftly in every part of the world – had brought about an unprecedented centralization of decisions over war and peace in the presidency. ”(Schlesinger 208). Playing to the constant fear of communism emerging after World War II, presidents have used that as enough of a justification to send our troops away. Surpassing congress by saying we were in imminent danger and essentially, what