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.

“[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).

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.

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.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1, Macquarie University, language: English, abstract: "Look, Mr. President, everything that the Secretary of Defense has been telling you this morning, I used to listen to with my French friends. They talked about the fact that there was always a new plan, and (...) that was going to win the day. And they believed it just as much as we're believing it sitting around the table this morning. I can tell you, however, that in the end, there was a great disillusion. And there will be one." - George Ball, 1971 - In spite of the advice given to him by his Under Secretary of State, George Ball, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson decided on the 27th July 1965 to push ahead and increase military forces from 75,000 to 125,000 in Vietnam. With this decision, Johnson escalated the American intervention in Vietnam and made what has been seen as the "formal decision for a major war" . The inability and, to an extent unwillingness, to foresee that the conflict was going to be as catastrophic as it turned out to be is what lead Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence, to say that the Johnson administration's "greatest failure of all was Vietnam." It was not until April 1975 and then under President Gerald Ford that the United States would finally withdraw from Vietnam, following a defeat of the South Vietnamese forces and a reunification of the country under the leadership of Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. With approximately 58,000 American casualties, not to mention the estimated 1,5 million Vietnamese killed, this military intervention continues to be seen as a sore point of American history .

Describes the history, organization, and capabilities of the U.S. Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division.