States of Disorder: Understanding State Failure and Intervention in the Periphery by Dan Halvorson

Author:Dan Halvorson [Halvorson, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317050131
Google: kJLeCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29879542
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

it looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with, once we’re committed. I believe that the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them ten thousand miles away from home … I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think that we can get out.

Bundy (in Beschloss 1997: 370) agreed that South Vietnam, in itself, was not worth fighting for, but making the link to Cold War credibility, added that it was ‘what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That’s the dilemma’.

Input into the elite decision-making process from Congress tended to mirror Rusk’s view rather than that of the JCS and Defense Department. In a conversation with Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Russell, Johnson (in Beschloss 1997: 364–5) said most of his advisors did not believe ‘that the Chinese Communists will come into this thing. But they don’t know and nobody can really be sure’. Russell replied that he did not see how the administration could get out of this mess ‘without fighting a major war with the Chinese’. Johnson said the American people were not ready for such a war: ‘I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less’. The conversation turned to the hawkish Republican position. Johnson (in Beschloss 1997: 369) commented that ‘all the Senators, Nixon and Rockefeller and Goldwater [were] all saying let’s move, let’s go into the North’. The President concluded by observing that ‘practically everyone’ was saying he had to go in.

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