Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In an extraordinary August 1967 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] America's military leaders, frustrated and angry over what they perceived as the civilian-imposed military policy of the Vietnam War, apparently discussed and agreed to resign en masse to protest President Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war. Though not carried out, the chiefs' plan demonstrates the depths to which civil–military relations had sunk and the extent to which politics had come to dominate military affairs regarding Vietnam. Since that time, however, US military leaders, politicians, and scholars critical of Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the war have in large part rehabilitated the US role in Vietnam. American military forces in Indochina, these conservative revisionists argue, had performed well enough to achieve victory, but had been forced to fight with “one hand tied behind their back” by craven politicians, an adverserial press, and the Peace Movement. The war then was lost in Washington, DC rather than in Vietnam. The revisionists are correct. American leaders – both civilian and military – did base their approaches to the war in Vietnam on considerations of politics within the United States as well as in the Republic of Vietnam [RVN] in the south and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [DRVN] in the north. Especially during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, from late 1963 until the crisis of ... log in or subscribe to read full text