Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam. By Blema S. Steinberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. 397p. 40.00cloth,40.00 cloth, 40.00cloth,17.95 paper (original) (raw)
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Presidential Decisionmaking and Vietnam: Lessons for Strategists
1996
Winter 1996-97, pp. 66-80. "Looking back, I clearly erred by not forcing. .. a knock-down, drag-out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analyses underlying our military strategy in Vietnam. I had spent twenty years as a manager identifying problems and forcing organizations-often against their will-to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences. I doubt I will ever fully understand why I did not do so here."-Robert McNamara, In Retrospect[1] "Even after twenty years, the American public debate [on Vietnam] has not attained an objective perspective and still seems more eager to assign blame than to draw lessons from the experience."-Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy[2]
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Academic and Applied Research in Military and Public Management Science
The name of Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States, has practically been tied together with the Vietnam War, which raged on during the entirety of his presidency. The Johnson Presidency could have been remembered after the numerous and admirable domestic policy steps he took, yet it is Vietnam, which overshadows his historical legacy. Both the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the longest campaign of the Vietnam War, Operation Rolling Thunder took place during his terms in office. This latter was harshly criticised by his peers, especially from military leadership circles, thus it is worth re-examining this period of the war using now publicly available sources. This article aims to examine how President Johnson and his inner circle of advisors made their decisions during the period in question.
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After the end of the Vietnam War, both the Vietnamese and American governments wanted to normalize relations, and yet they failed to do so until 1995. Why was this the case? This paper focuses on the missed chance for normalization of relations between 1975-79. I argue that domestic economic imperatives rather than pride was the primary driver of Vietnam's insistence on postwar reparations. By the time the Chinese-Khmer Rouge threat had driven Vietnamese leaders to drop this condition, American leaders sought to prioritize normalization of relations with Beijing first. I argue that this decision was taken mainly at National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's own initiative to counterbalance Soviet and Cuban activities in Africa rather than due to Chinese pressure, and that the Carter Administration did not conclusively shelve normalization plans with Vietnam until the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia.
Rising Asia Journal, 2022
Most diplomatic historians conclude that the failure of the Johnson administration’s second bombing pause over North Vietnam and first major peace offensive from December 25, 1965 to January 31, 1966 was a fait accompli. Moreover, the resumption of bombing was ordered without major debate within the national security state. “The Unauthorized Diplomat” challenges this interpretation by exploring the aftermath of Staughton Lynd’s ten-day fact-finding trip to North Vietnam and discussions with representations of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Prague, Moscow, and Hanoi. Ultimately, Lynd’s experiences throughout 1965 and his conversations with “the other side” during the peace offensive convinced him that alternatives to escalation existed in January 1966 and, unbeknownst to him, were reflected in the high-level deliberations and decision-making in the White House. This was perhaps the last best chance to avoid even greater U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War.