Lyndon johnson why we are in vietnam

I have a son who is now in Viet-Nam. My husband served in World War II. Our country was at war, but now, this time, it is just something that I don't understand. Well, I have tried to answer that question dozens of times and more in practically every State in this Union. Let me again, now, discuss it here in the East Room of the White House. Why must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote and distant place?

The answer, like the war itself, is not an easy one, but it echoes clearly from the painful lessons of half a century. Three times in my lifetime, in two world wars and in Korea, Americans have gone to far lands to fight for freedom. We have learned at a terrible and brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.

It is this lesson that has brought us to Viet-Nam. This is a different kind of war. There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. Some citizens of South Viet-Nam, at times with understandable grievances, have joined in the attack on their own government.

But we must not let this mask the central fact that this is really war. Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism. Most of the non-Communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist growing might and the grasping ambition of Asian communism. Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American protection. In each land the forces of independence would be considerably weakened and an Asia so threatened by Communist domination would certainly imperil the security of the United States itself.

Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history.

Moreover, we are in Viet-Nam to fulfill one of the most solemn pledges of the American nation. Three Presidents - President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and your present President - over 11 years have committed themselves and have promised to help defend this small and valiant nation. Strengthened by that promise, the people of South Viet-Nam have fought for many long years. Thousands of them have died. Thousands more have been crippled and scarred by war.

We just cannot now dishonor our word, or abandon our commitment, or leave those who believed us and who trusted us to the terror and repression and murder that would follow. First: We intend to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated by force of arms or by superior power. They are not easily convinced. In recent months they have greatly increased their fighting forces and their attacks and the number of incidents.

He has told me. We will meet his needs. I have today ordered to Viet-Nam the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75, to , men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested. This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call from 17, over a period of time to 35, per month, and for us to step up our campaign for voluntary enlistments.

After this past week of deliberations, I have concluded that it is not essential to order Reserve units into service now. If that necessity should later be indicated, I will give the matter most careful consideration and I will give the country due and adequate notice before taking such action, but only after full preparations. We have also discussed with the Government of South Viet-Nam lately the steps that we will take to substantially increase their own effort, both on the battlefield and toward reform and progress in the villages.

Ambassador Lodge is now formulating a new program to be tested upon his return to that area. I have directed Secretary Rusk and Secretary McNamara to be available immediately to the Congress to review with these committees, the appropriate congressional committees, what we plan to do in these areas.

I have asked them to be able to answer the questions of any Member of Congress. Secretary McNamara, in addition, will ask the Senate Appropriations Committee to add a limited amount to present legislation to help meet part of this new cost until a supplemental measure is ready, and hearings can be held when the Congress assembles in January.

In the meantime, we will use the authority contained in the present defense appropriations bill under consideration, to transfer funds in addition to the additional money that we will ask. These steps, like our actions in the past, are carefully measured to do what must be done to bring an end to aggression and a peaceful settlement. We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences that no one can perceive, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power, but we will not surrender and we will not retreat, for behind our American pledge lies the determination and resources, I believe, of all of the American nation.

Second, once the Communists know, as we know, that a violent solution is impossible, then a peaceful solution is inevitable. We are ready now, as we have always been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table. From the incidents in the Tonkin Gulf in August to the deployment of forty-four combat troop battalions in July , these months span congressional authorization for military action as well as the Americanization of the conflict.

In between lie incidents of increasingly greater magnitude, including the decision to deploy the Marines and the shift from defensive to offensive operations.

At the center of these events stands President Lyndon B. But LBJ was equally committed to winning the fight against the Communist insurgency in Vietnam—a fight that Kennedy had joined during his thousand days in office.

While Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had committed significant American resources to counter the Communist-led Viet Minh in its struggle against France following the Second World War, it was Kennedy who had deepened and expanded that commitment, increasing the number of U. Those outlays, however, contributed neither to greater success in the counterinsurgency nor to the stabilization of South Vietnamese politics.

Charges of cronyism and corruption had dogged the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem for years, sparking public condemnation of his rule as well as successive efforts at toppling his regime. Unhappy with U. If anything, he encouraged his closest advisers to work even harder at helping South Vietnam prosecute the counterinsurgency. That need was now more pressing because the counterinsurgency was deteriorating.

The Diem coup had unleashed a wave of instability below the seventeenth parallel that Communist forces were only too eager to exploit. All signs were now pointing to a situation that was more dire than the one Kennedy had confronted. Or so it seemed. Although State Department officials had maintained in October that that statistical evidence pointed not to success but to mounting troubles against the Vietcong, Pentagon officials—both civilian and military—had rejected those arguments.

By December, with attacks increasing in the countryside, a look back at those earlier metrics revealed that State Department analyses were indeed on the mark. Yet Johnson did not need that retrospective appraisal to launch a more vigorous campaign against the Communists, for his first impulse as the new president was to shift the war into higher gear. Meeting with his top civilian advisers on Vietnam, LBJ told them to forget about the social, economic, and political reforms that Kennedy had stressed.

These included a more aggressive propaganda offensive as well as sabotage directed against North Vietnam. But those enhanced measures were unable to force a change in Hanoi or to stabilize the political scene in Saigon.

Washington was generally pleased with the turn of events and sought to bolster the Khanh regime. Nevertheless, it remained dissatisfied with progress in counterinsurgency, leading Secretary of Defense McNamara to undertake a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March His report to LBJ was not a happy one, as signs pointed to a deterioration in South Vietnamese morale and an acceleration of Communist success.

McNamara thus recommended, and Johnson endorsed, a more vigorous program of U. Over the course of the next several months, American assistance to South Vietnam would play out against a backdrop of personnel changes and political jockeying at home and in Saigon.

The U. His replacement was retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, formerly military representative to President Kennedy and then, since , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the signal that the United States was becoming more invested in the military outcome of the conflict could not have been clearer.

Further indication of that resolve came the same month with the replacement of General Paul D. Harkins as head of the U. Having already decided to shift prosecution of the war into higher gear, the Johnson administration recognized that direct military action would require congressional approval, especially in an election year. Of all the episodes of the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the episodes of 2 and 4 August have proved among the most controversial and contentious.

Claiming unprovoked attacks by the North Vietnamese on American ships in international waters, the Johnson administration used the episodes to seek a congressional decree authorizing retaliation against North Vietnam. Passed nearly unanimously by Congress on 7 August and signed into law three days later, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—or Southeast Asia Resolution, as it was officially known—was a pivotal moment in the war and gave the Johnson administration a broad mandate to escalate U.

On 2 August, the USS Maddox , engaged in a signals intelligence collection mission for the National Security Agency known as a Desoto patrol off the coast of North Vietnam, reported that it was under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Using its own defense measures and aided by aircraft from the nearby aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga , the Maddox resisted the attack and the North Vietnamese boats retreated.

Turner Joy , reported a new round of attacks by North Vietnamese military forces. In response, President Johnson ordered retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and asked Congress to sanction any further action he might take to deter Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. As real-time information flowed in to the Pentagon from the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy , the story became more and more confused, and as frustratingly incomplete and often contradictory reports flowed into Washington, several high-ranking military and civilian officials became suspicious of the 4 August incident, questioning whether the attack was real or imagined.

The tapes included in this edition show vividly a president all too aware of shortcomings of the deeply flawed information that he was receiving, and by the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, several senior officials—and apparently the President himself—had concluded that the attack of 4 August had not occurred. But not wanting to get railroaded into large-scale military response by political pressure from hawks on the right in Congress, Johnson and McNamara privately and selectively conceded that classified sabotage operations in the region had probably provoked the North Vietnamese attack.

It was a political strategy that worked, and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed with minimal dissent, a striking political victory for Johnson even as the presidential campaign got under way with a vengeance. Just days before the vote, the U. Johnson opted not to respond militarily just hours before Americans would go to the polls.

The working group settled on three potential policy strands: persisting with the current approach, escalating the war and striking at North Vietnam, or pursuing a strategy of graduated response. The plan envisioned a series of measures, of gradually increasing military intensity, that American forces would apply to bolster morale in Saigon, attack the Vietcong in South Vietnam, and pressure Hanoi into ending its aid of the Communist insurgency.

The presence of several policy options, however, did not translate into freewheeling discussions with the President over the relative merits of numerous strategies.

Johnson abhorred the Kennedy practice of debating such questions in open session, preferring a consensus engineered prior to his meetings with top aides. In fact, it was those advisers who would play an increasingly important role in planning for Vietnam, relegating the interagency approach—which never went away—to a level of secondary importance within the policymaking process.

This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Viet-Nam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Viet-Nam—and all who seek to share their conquest—of a very simple fact: We will not be defeated.

We will not grow tired. Postwar America Lyndon B. Johnson , Vietnam War. President Johnson Justifies U. Intervention in Vietnam President Johnson, in this speech delivered at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, , lists the reasons for escalating the United State's involvement in Vietnam.

April 7, The world as it is in Asia is not a serene or peaceful place. This support is the heartbeat of the war.

Why are these realities our concern? Why are we in South Viet-Nam? We do this in order to slow down aggression. Johnson, , vol. Hunt, ed.