Lyndon Johnson and Foreign Policy: What the New Documents Show
Article Summary and Author Biography
Newly released records show that L.B.J., for all his political canniness and cunning, never managed U.S. foreign policy well-even excluding the Vietnam War.
David Fromkin is Chairman of the International Relations Department, Director of the Center for International Relations, and Professor of Law, of History, and of International Relations at Boston University. His book about America's role in the modern world, In the Time of the Americans, will be published this spring.
Lyndon Johnson should have been a great president. He was better than anybody alive at getting things done in Washington. He proved it in his first few years as president, when he persuaded the hitherto squabbling branches of government to work together. Freed for a time from checking and balancing, the president and Congress dealt with a long overdue domestic agenda; the result was the more than 200 laws and programs constituting the "Great Society" initiative. The United States witnessed the rare spectacle of its system of government actually working. A Republican business leader remarked, "Now that Americans have seen what a really professional politician can accomplish, they’ll never elect an amateur again."
A broad consensus supported the goals to which Johnson devoted his amazing energies and persuasive powers. At home, he acted to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination and to improve education—a closely related goal. Abroad, he tried to achieve a working relationship with the Soviet Union so the two superpowers could conduct their disagreements peacefully. In L.B.J., the United States seemed to have found a leader who knew both where to go and how to get there.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
What went wrong was Johnson’s foreign policy: foremost, the disaster of Vietnam. That seemed evident at the time. Now, recent and forthcoming studies question that verdict. Not everybody regards the outcome of the Vietnam War as a complete loss. Some point to the successes that (arguably) flowed from the U.S. stand in Southeast Asia: the failure of the attempted communist takeover of Indonesia in 1965 and the fact that the fall of much of Indochina was not followed by other dominoes: Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore. There is even the view that, in losing the Vietnam War, the United States actually won. General William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, has made that case recently, saying that America’s strategic goal in Indochina, in the end, was achieved. That goal was and is to establish a strong buffer state to protect the nations of Southeast Asia from the threat posed by China. Westmoreland says that Vietnam, ironically, has fulfilled that objective. So it turns out that Hanoi’s triumph was in the best geopolitical interest of the United States. That far one can go with Westmoreland, but no further along the tortuous road that ultimately leads him to credit the Johnson administration for that result. There are many points that may be reconsidered in Johnson’s favor, but this is hardly one of them: it clearly never occurred to L.B.J. that letting North Vietnam win might be a good thing.
In 1993, attempting a reassessment of Johnson’s foreign policy, a group of historians posed 31 unresolved questions to a panel of Johnson administration officials. The recollections of the participants at times emphasized the gulf that separates practitioners of international relations from its students. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote in response to one written inquiry, Question No. 13, "Anyone who asks such a question should have his head examined." To Question No. 14: "My answer is the same as that given to Question 13."
This past year, the academics had their turn: nine leading U.S. scholars contributed to Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World, an outgrowth of their research at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas that provides, in the words of one coeditor, "the first comprehensive examination of foreign policy making in the Johnson years." Its other coeditor explains that although the government documents for the period are only beginning to be published, an enormous amount of material has been declassified and is available at the L.B.J. Library, and so great has been the helpfulness and archival support of the library that "we concluded that a scholarly examination of the record of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy was not only needed, but practicable."
H. W. Brands, a history professor at Texas A&M University, decided paradoxically that this was the time to reassess. A revisionist on the post-World War II history of U.S. foreign policy, he is publishing his book now because, as he sees it, there is no point in waiting until later. "Anything approaching a comprehensive account of Johnson’s foreign policy," he writes, "remains years off. The Johnson Library in Austin has opened many of its files, but much high-level material is still classified. Available records of the State and Defense Departments are even thinner. If the cia ever releases the bulk of its working papers for the 1960s, many researchers, including this one, will be surprised."
CARRYING ON AFTER J.F.K.
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