Canada and the United States
H. W. BRANDS, editor. The Foreign Polities of Lyndon
Johnson: Beyond Vietnam. (Foreign Relations and the
Presidency, number 1.) College Station: Texas A&M
University Press. 1999. Pp. 194. $29.95.
Lyndon B. Johnson's historical legacy is forever linked
to the Vietnam War. Early in his administration,
Johnson identified Vietnam as the nation's greatest
foreign policy concern, and his subsequent decision to
fight a large-scale American war on behalf of South
Vietnam would prove to be his political undoing; he
departed the Oval Office in 1969 a man broken by the
war and the deep social divisions it created. He died a
scant four years later, just as the American phase of
this long and bloody war was drawing to a close.
But there was more to Johnson's foreign policy than
Vietnam. In recent years, several worthy studies have
appeared that have gone beyond Indochina and examined the larger spectrum of American foreign policy in
the years 1963-1968; in particular, there are edited
volumes by the team of Warren I. Cohen and Nancy
Bernkopf Tucker and by Diane B. Kunz (the Jatter of
which also covers the Kennedy years) and a singleauthor study by H. W. Brands. Now Brands has
returned to the subject, editing a very useful collection
of essays by established specialiste. Beginning with a
chapter by Robert Dallek on Johnson as a world
leader, the book proceeds with chapters by John
Prados on the Strategie Arms Limitation Talks
(SALT), Thomas A. Schwartz on Johnson and Western Europe, and William 0. Walker III on relations
with Cuba. In the second half of the book, we find
Peter Feiten on the intervention in the Dominican
Republic, Douglas Little on the Six-Day War, and,
finally, Robert J. McMahon on the administration's
relations with three Asian allies.
If a single theme runs through the essays, it is that
Johnson himself dominated foreign policy making
during his presidency, even as he preferred to focus his
energies on domestic affairs. Maybe, but on the basis
of the evidente mustered in this book it is hard to be
sure. Even more open to question is the suggestion in
several of the essays that the president was also a very
well-informed and sophisticated foreign policy strategist. Dallek is surely correct that "the jury is stilt out on
Johnson as a foreign policy leader" (p. 8), but for the
present there still seems much to recommend the
"orthodox" view that he was a parochial and unimaginative foreign policy thinker, a man vulnerable to
clichés about international affairs and lacking interest
in the world beyond America's shores.
Whatever the jury's ultimate verdict, it does not
necessarily bear on our assessment of foreign policy in
the Johnson years, and it is possible even now to reach
genera( conclusions about a number of specific issues.
With the exception of Vietnam, the record looks
reasonably good. Prados makes a convincing case that
the administration laid important ground work for the
SALT I agreements that would come in the Richard
M. Nixon presidency, and Schwartz demonstrates that
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 217
senior officials scored real successes in their efforts to
keep the Western alliance on an even keel despite the
numerous crises that roiled during the mid and late
1960s. The Walker and Feiten essays enhance our
understanding of Caribbean policy and demonstrate
just how large the figure of Fidel Castro loomed in
U.S. strategizing about the region. Walker concludes
that, by the end of Johnson's tenure, Washington had
won the battle with Castro over dominance in the
Western Hemisphere, and Felten shows how the administration framed the choice in the Dominican
Republic in 1965 as one between a Castro victory and
U.S. intervention. On the Middle East, Little ably
describes both the limits of American power to affect
developments and the intense mistrust with which the
Johnson team viewed Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in
the lead-up to the Six-Day War. And McMahon, a
leading scholar of U.S. relations with the so-called
periphery in the Cold War, sheds new light on ties with
some of the Asian allies other than South Vietnam,
specifically Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
But of course, South Vietnam still looms large.
McMahon shows just how deeply all three of these
bilateral relationships were affected by the large-scale
fighting in Indochina. The same was true elsewhere.
Notwithstanding the "Beyond Vietnam" focus of this
volume, the war in Vietnam is an important subtext
throughout the book. It deserved more explicit treatment. This is a slim volume, and I would have liked to
see inciuded a chapter—perhaps even two—that examined the wider international context of the Vietnam
War and the impact it had on the broader U.S.
diplomacy. If the war was in fact items one, two, and
three in the administration's foreign policy deliberations after the start of 1965, what did this mean for
other important policy issues? In particular, what did it
mean for East-West relations, for the prospect of
detente with the Soviet Union and possible rapprochment with the People's Republic of China? And
what about North-South relations, the difficult frictions in the 1960s between rich and poor nations?
Vietnam was a towering issue in world affairs during
the second half of the decade, and greater attention to
it would have made this valuable volume an even
better one.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL
University of California,
Santa Barbara
FREDRIK LOGEVALL. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for
Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999.
Pp. xxviii, 529. $35.00.
Fredrik Logevall's articulate, tightly argued, and welldocumented monograph is an impressive analysis of
Vietnam War policy making during what he terms "the
Long 1964" (p. xiii). This period began with John F.
Kennedy's decision to end support of Ngo Dinh Diem
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218
Reviews of Books
in August 1963 and ended with Lyndon B. Johnson's
ordering of the Rolling Thunder bombing operation
and landing of marines at Danang in February and
March of 1965. Abetted by Robert S. McNamara,
Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, Johnson chose war
in Vietnam over negotiations in 1965, the author
concludes, primarily to avoid the personal and political
stigma of a leadership failure. Considering the enormous human and social costs that flowed from the
decision, it must, in Logevall's view, be judged "immoral" (p. 412). The book is something of a scholarly
equivalent of "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you
kilt today?"
Logevall challenges historians of the Vietnam War
to reexamine Johnson's Americanization of the conflict. His book deserves accolades for its solid research
and bold argument. Rejecting the quagmire notion
that top U.S. officials unwittingly led their nation into
disaster in Vietnam, Logevall rehabilitates the socalled stalemate idea that national leaders knew there
were no good outcomes available for U.S. policy but
were loath to admit defeat. The cynicism of the
stalemate thesis has been softened by the work of
liberal-realist historians who have written that presidente meant to protect the national interest and
promote democracy but made any number of cultural,
strategic, or down-right stupid mistakes. On Johnson
specifically, major works by Robert Dallek, Lloyd C.
Gardner, and George C. Herring have examined why
the president was hemmed in by limited options or was
personally ill-suited to preside over a counterinsurgency war. Logevall dramatically reverses the trend of
broadening responsibility for the war and places accountability directly on Johnson.
Logevall maintains that Johnson had a genuine
choice. He dismisser structural explanations—such as
Cold War consensus or economie imperatives—as
"fuzzy" (p. xxiv) and stresses contingency: that is, the
existence of real options. With evidence from U.S.,
British, Canadian, French, and Swedish archives and
American and European newspapers, he contends that
a negotiated settlement was available in "the Long
1964." Leaders of major U.S. allies, influential members of the U.S. Senate, and prominent journalists,
Logevall reports, were on record as being in favor of a
Laos-type neutralization of Vietnam. There are signs
that Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing were amenable to
negotiations. The American public was largely indifferent, and the South Vietnamese people were growing
weary of instability and violence. Kennedy and Johnson resisted negotiations, however. The best time for
arranging a peaceful settlement came in the weeks
following Johnson's sweeping electoral triumph in
November 1964, but, Logevall maintains, Johnson had
already decided to escalate. A "permissive context" (p.
403) in which international and domestic doubters
failed to stand up to Johnson allowed the president to
place the United States on the escalator. The war
seems so clearly unnecessary as to make it nearly
unfathomable how intelligent leaders could have made
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW such a terrible choice. Logevall discovers a number of
sensible voices, but Johnson's conduct he labels a
"mystery" (p. 298), explainable only by a psychological
need (not fully defined) to dominate, win, and never
concede defeat. While not entirely new, the argument
is presented with great cogency and with new documentation of the international context of Washington's
choices.
The big Texan was an imposing personality, but
Johnson's power to intimidate can be overdrawn. He
did not have to coerce McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, or
others to accept the strategie importante of Vietnam.
They all held a world view influenced by Munich,
containment, the domino theory, and faith in military
force. If the United States compromised without having deployed its enormous power, there would be
domestic consequences (a who-lost-Vietnam charge
similar to who-lost-China earlier) and an international
consequente (a weakening of the deterrent effect of
U.S. arms). We now know that Hanoi withstood U.S.
power, but that outcome was not deemed inevitable in
1965. For Johnson, doing something was better than
doing nothing.
Logevall establishes that Johnson had a choice, but
did Johnson know that he had a choice? Logevall is not
sure. He says that "perhaps [Johnson] understood that
he could choose" (p. 374). If Johnson believed he had
no choice but to pursue a war he did not want in order
to protect the credibility of U.S. power and to preserve
his domestic leadership to gain his beloved Great
Society, then he and countless others were tragic
victims of his ego and his burden of prior U.S.
commitments to the fictional government in Saigon.
Logevall writes that Johnson "failed to see that the
international and domestic political context gave him
considerable room to maneuver" (p. 392). If that is
true, he was ill-served by his advisers and by his
political, strategic, and personal frame of reference:
that is, by the structure within which he made his
decisions.
Logevall also advances a counterfactual scenario
that portrays Kennedy, if he had lived, as not choosing
war. It is fashioned on Johnson's idiosyncracies and
will doubtless spark much discussion. More important,
however, is that Logevall has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the setting of Johnson's
decisions and thus has elevated the level of debate
about those decisions.
DAVID L. ANDERSON
University of Indianapolis
Nixon's Vietnam War. (Modern War
Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1998.
Pp. xvi, 495. $39.95.
JEFFREY KIMBALL.
In many respects, the period of the Nixon presidency is
the least known aspect of the Vietnam War. Although
a number of senior figures in the administration,
including Richard Nixon himself and his foreign policy
adviser, Henry Kissinger, have written extensively on
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