“There Ain’T No Daylight”: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Escalation

Abstract For a man who led his country into what is widely seen as a disastrous war, Lyndon Baines Johnson has enjoyed surprisingly gentle treatment from historians. He has had his detractors over the years, to be sure, but most authors have been at once critical of his Vietnam policy and sympathetic to his plight. Johnson made the wrong decision in 1965, they in essence argue, but how can you blame him?

After all, with the exception of poor old George Ball, the undersecretary of state, all of the president’s senior advisors advocated a military solution in the key months of decision, while in the broader foreign policy bureaucracy, the pressure was all in the direction of escalation. On Capitol Hill and in elite public opinion generally, so it is implied, the mood in the same period was likewise hawkish, or at least unquestioning. An all-powerful “Cold War consensus”—never much analyzed in this literature—reigned supreme in American opinion and dictated that the commitment to South Vietnam had to be maintained, through major military escalation if necessary.

In real political terms, therefore, so the argument goes, LBJ had no choice but to expand the war. (To the extent that he had a choice, it was whether or not to move faster and harder militarily, along the lines suggested by a few military analysts.) He was thus not really personally responsible, he cannot fairly be held accountable, for his “nonchoice” to escalate the fighting. No one else in his position would have done differently.