Vietnam's Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War. By Andrew L. Johns. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. x, 434 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2572-5.)

Abstract

If we are to understand adequately the determinants and effects of American foreign policy, both in general and especially during the turbulent and important period from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, we need to have studies of the groups that make up the U.S. social-political-economic world. Andrew L. Johns has given us such a book. Vietnam's Second Front focuses on the Republican party as it helped influence, and was influenced by, “the trajectory, scope, and character” of the developing war in Vietnam (pp. 2–3). Johns is particularly effective in breaking down the myth that politics stops at the water's edge—that is, in demonstrating that domestic politics plays a critical role in prompting and perpetuating American involvement in foreign wars and that these conflicts in turn affect the presidency, executive-legislative relations, and politics at home. Along the way, Johns throws an interesting light on the “imperial presidency,” illustrating not only its steady growth and increasing power but also, under Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, its vulnerability—and that of Congress—to what was perceived as a huge danger of rightwing backlash (such as the backlash that allegedly followed the “fall” of China in 1949) if the government of South Vietnam was overthrown. This was not quite the same as fearing a Republican backlash, the author asserts, pointing out that the Republican party experienced the same divisions and upheavals over the war as the rest of the country and that Nixon as president exhibited a fear of backlash from the Right. In any case, the gop proved to be a crucial source of support for all three presidents as they waged war to contain Communism and constrain “extremism” and as the foreign conflict brought conservatives into an ascendant position in the Republican party.