Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam

Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam

Lloyd C. Gardner
Reviewed by By David C. Hendrickson
March/April 1996
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Lloyd C. Gardner
Ivan R. Dee
1995
610 pp.
$35.00

A richly detailed and well-crafted account of the escalation in Vietnam. Gardner, a prolific historian at Rutgers, makes Johnson into an oddly sympathetic figure--"a man by his own aims empoison'd, And with his charity slain." The president emerges as a leader imprisoned by historical analogies--the New Deal showing the wonderful curative powers of governmental intervention on behalf of economic development, Munich demonstrating the folly of negotiations with aggressors, Korea the dangers of uncontrollable escalation, and the Cuban missile crisis the virtues of using American power in a tough yet calibrated fashion. Add all this up--as Johnson, the consummate consensus politician, was ever ready to do--and the all-out limited war to defeat aggression seems utterly inevitable and massively overdetermined. Only divine intervention might have stopped it, and divinities, as Gardner shows, were in short supply. It is always instructive to read of prophecies unrealized, experts confounded, and ideological axioms transmogrified into caricatures of themselves. Happily for the author, though not so for the nation, his materials do not fail to offer him an abundant array of such examples.

Related

Essay, Apr 1967
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Debate
J. I. Coffey

One of the great problems in arms control is that advances in technology, and their application to military programs, tend to invalidate or render meaningless even the soundest arms-control proposals. Twice in the last decade this has occurred, once when the diffusion of nuclear technology and the production of large numbers of nuclear weapons rendered futile any hope of complete nuclear disarmament, and again when the advent of intercontinental missiles made necessary a rethinking of all the proposals for limiting or abolishing strategic strike forces. It may well be that we are about to witness a similar overtaking of current arms-control proposals because of the possibility of deploying highly effective ballistic missile defenses.

Read
Essay, Oct 1968
SHOULD THE U.S. WITHDRAW FROM ASIA?
Owen Harries

Let us make two assumptions: first, that the Viet Nam war has reached the beginning of the end and that it will be over within the next year or two; second, that the settlement will involve an American defeat and the extension of communist power to South Viet Nam. Events may falsify both these assumptions, but they may not; it is worth thinking about what the situation will be like if they do not.

Read
Essay, Oct 1969
Can Military Spending Be Controlled?
Jonathan E. Bingham

Nineteen sixty-nine may be remembered as the year Americans woke up to the importance of an issue that was to be a dominant one in the 1970s. The question of Viet Nam still had the emotional clout. The great ABM debate still captured most of the headlines. But more and more people were beginning to see that bigger and more permanent than both of these was the question of whether America's military spending could be brought under more rational control. In the winter of 1969 it became increasingly clear that we had to find a way to reorient our national priorities so that imperative human needs on the home front were not always being shunted aside because of the claims of "national security." No longer could it be successfully argued that we could afford the needed amounts of "guns and butter." A difficult choice-or at least choices-had to be made, and would have to be made repeatedly, for many years to come.

Read