Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Near the end of a three-day conference at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library on making peace in Vietnam someone from the audience asked: “It is all well and good to examine the many initiatives from all over the world that could have helped the United States to extricate itself from Vietnam, but how can one evaluate their significance unless we take into consideration the importance of the 1964 and 1968 presidential elections in all of Johnson's diplomatic and military interventions?” At that point, another member of the audience chimed in: “And the same goes for the Vietnam policies of Kennedy and Nixon.” Why did it take until the eleventh hour for a room full of experienced diplomatic historians to move to that subject? In the first place, despite a good deal of circumstantial evidence to the contrary, almost all presidents have maintained that they never considered their reelections when determining national security policy. It would be unseemly of them, they assert self-righteously, to consider such a selfish issue when confronting decisions concerning war and peace. Indeed, the minutes of presidential meetings concerning responses to foreign crises rarely reveal evidence that those in attendance discussed the domestic implications of their policy choices. But like the pink elephant in the room that nobody talks about, those unstated implications are almost always of concern ... log in or subscribe to read full text