Building the Great Society by Joshua Zeitz

Author:Joshua Zeitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

CHAPTER 10

Guns and Butter

I don’t want to be known as a war president,” Lyndon Johnson insisted in the summer of 1965. Franklin Roosevelt would forever be remembered for leading the nation to victory in Europe and the Pacific, but Johnson vividly recalled how the exigencies of mobilization and combat had forced FDR to transform himself from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” effectively drawing to a close a decade of liberal domestic reform and forestalling the completion of the nation’s safety net. It was the story of every Democratic president in the twentieth century, from Woodrow Wilson, who largely sidelined progressive economic and social reform after America entered the European conflict, to Harry Truman, who became bogged down in Korea and ultimately spent down his political capital to raise armies and manage a wartime economy rather than pursue his Fair Deal programs. Foreign adventures had also consumed the Kennedy administration, much to the detriment of the Democratic Party’s domestic policy agenda. Johnson was acutely aware of this cumulative history and remained determined not to fall into the same trap. Yet in the early months of his full term, he made fateful decisions that proved his political undoing.

Before the early 1950s, few Americans had heard of Vietnam, a onetime French protectorate in Southeast Asia that fell under Japanese control during World War II and emerged after the war as one of many nations eager to shake off the yoke of European colonialism and achieve political independence. A nationalist guerrilla army, the Vietminh—led by a longtime communist insurgent, Ho Chi Minh—engaged in a ten-year struggle with the French, who fought to reimpose control on their former province. It was around this time that the U.S. government took an interest in Vietnam. Prevailing foreign policy wisdom held that if one country were to fall to the communist bloc, a “domino effect” would soon topple nearby democratic or colonial governments, thus emboldening communist China and depriving Americans and their allies of access to raw materials, markets, naval bases, and strategic positions throughout Asia. The Eisenhower administration watched with concern—but did not intervene—when the Vietminh defeated the American-backed French army at Dien Bien Phu. In subsequent peace talks held in Geneva, Switzerland, the United States stepped in as the lead Western power seeking to check the influence of Ho’s nationalist movement. By agreement, the country would be temporarily split in two at the seventeenth parallel, with reunification and free elections to follow two years later.

The United States subsequently installed a new leader in South Vietnam—Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic civil servant from the old French regime—and attempted to prop up his government with military and financial aid. With American consent, Diem canceled the scheduled elections in 1956. In the coming years, he would prove an expensive and troublesome client of the United States. Corrupt and inept, his government alienated large numbers of Vietnamese peasants and soon fell into open, armed conflict with southern remnants of the Vietminh, now rebranded the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong (VC).

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