Johnson Administration Research Articles

"A Fiasco of Noble Proportions"

The 1967 presidential elections in South Vietnam presented U.S. policymakers with their last opportunity to establish a potentially popular and legitimate non-communist government there. This article examines how and why the Johnson administration squandered this opportunity over the course of 1967. U.S. policymakers faced the choice of intervening actively to promote a more civilian popular government or adopting a stance of non-intervention that would effectively keep the government in the hands of South Vietnam's military rulers. Although many of Johnson's closest advisers and the State Department preferred the former policy, the administration largely pursued the policy of non-intervention advocated by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the Saigon Embassy. By choosing stability over reform, Johnson's policy toward the South Vietnamese election of 1967 helped ensure that U.S. efforts to wage war would continue to be compromised by its support of a corrupt, unpopular regime in Saigon.

An Anglo‐Barbadian dialogue: the negotiations leading to Barbados' independence, 1965–66

This article pays particular attention to Barbados' decisive move to independence in November 1966, using previously unseen archival evidence. It attempts to provide a solid explanation of why, unlike the neighbouring British dependencies in the Eastern Caribbean, Barbados moved smoothly to constitutional independence. Particular attention is paid to the island's domestic landscape, tracing the immediate catalysts leading it to go it alone. In evaluating Barbados' transition to independence, the study reconstructs not only the differing perspectives of the various components of the colonial leadership but, equally importantly, brings to the surface the positions espoused by British policy makers both in the Cabinet and Colonial Office, as well as the stances adopted by their counterparts in the Johnson Administration in Washington.

Refighting Vietnam in the History Books: The Historiography of the War

Given the burgeoning literature devoted to it, the Vietnam War is surely a contender with the Civil War for the title of America's most studied conflict. It has attracted an enormous amount of academic attention and continues to absorb the energies of many scholars. At the most recent meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Vietnam featured in almost a fifth of the conference panels. Lavish attention, however, has not led to scholarly consensus. Indeed, the war continues to generate vigorous disagreement among historians, as well as the wider public. This ongoing debate testifies not only to the kind of differences in interpretation that are part and parcel of the study of history but also to the extraordinary passions that the conflict still arouses nearly thirty years after the fall of Saigon. Disagreements about the war have revolved around several key issues. The first concerns the origins of America's intervention in Southeast Asia—why did the U.S. become involved in Vietnam? Walt Rostow, an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, once chided the maker of a documentary for asking what he called this “sophomoric” and “goddamn silly question” (1). Historians, however, have not found it so easy to dismiss. Why was Washington prepared to expend so much blood and treasure to defend a relatively small piece of territory, thousands of miles from America's shores? Was the U.S. commitment necessary, or a terrible mistake? The second issue concerns the outcome of the conflict. Why, in spite of the enormous power at its disposal, was the U.S. unable to preserve an independent South Vietnam? Would different military tactics have altered the outcome, or was the war simply unwinnable? Finally, scholars have sought to divine the larger meaning of the conflict and draw lessons from it. For example, did Vietnam illustrate the folly of U.S. intervention overseas, especially in the cause of nation building, or merely demonstrate the need for better strategy and leadership next time around? This kind of exercise has inevitably become caught up in contemporary political debates. From Central America in the 1980s to the present-day Middle East, the “lessons” of Vietnam have served as a point of reference for arguments about the merits of U.S. involvement overseas.

Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion

Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion. By Michael J. Towle. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. 176p. $37.95. Public support is vital to the governing strategies of modern presidents. Although presidents, White House staff, and presidency scholars take this for granted during the “permanent campaign,” little is known about how administrations react to and interpret information about the public's support for the president. Michael J. Towle asks, How do presidential administrations interpret their wealth of public-opinion polling data? He observes that interpretation of these data by the Truman, Johnson, and Carter administrations varies by the president's own public standing: The more the president's public support declines, the more “out of touch” he becomes with the public.

The Irony of Vietnam: The Johnson Administration's Tentative Bridge Building to China, 1965–1966

Drawing on recently declassified American documents, this article traces the shift in U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) initiated by the Johnson administration in 1965–1966. During the first two years of his presidency, Lyndon Johnson resisted proposals to adopt a more flexible stance toward China, owing in large part to his suspicion that Beijing was encouraging and supplying the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This perception remained intact for the duration of the Johnson years and stifled major changes in policy toward China. Yet ironically, the Vietnam War itself led to a reappraisal of long-standing strategy toward the PRC. Johnson's determination to head off the threat of Chinese intervention in Vietnam and to sustain public support for the war yielded a relaxation of travel restrictions, the promotion of unofficial contacts between the two countries, and a striking change in rhetoric.

The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the proposed Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac River became one of the most prominent controversies in the national debate over urban freeway construction. Because of the District of Columbia’s uniquefederal status, both highway advocates and opponentssaw the bridgeas a mat- ter of national importance. Previous accounts of the bridge’s defeat and of other highway protests have fo- cused on street demonstrations and grassroots organizations. This article highlights the role of elite highway protestors, who not only fought the bridge with lawsuits and studies but who also penetrated the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, creating a freeway revolt within the federal government. Their actions defeated the Three Sisters Bridge and helped move federal transportation policy away from inflexible insistence on urban freeways.

An Examination of Diversity Issues in SE Journalism College Newspapers

Diversity issues in college journalism curricula reflect concerns of professional newsrooms that college faculty prepare next generation of journalists for working in a multicultural world and a multicultural newsroom. This paper examines college newspapers through mirror of diversity statements, ethics codes and staffing. Campus newspapers were selected because a campus newspaper is frequently first place journalism students have to practice their craft under exposure of a large community.The issue is timely as college admission practices founded on concept of encouraging campus diversity face national scrutiny.1 In addition, Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications requires programs undergoing accreditation review to demonstrate a commitment to diversity.The topic is not limited to academia. Professional news organizations are tackling diversity issues through public commitments to have newsrooms reflect communities they cover and through adoption of newsroom guidelines that provide employees with strategies on how to diversify coverage, including hiring of a diversified staff.Keith Woods, director of diversity programs at Poynter Institute for Media Studies, contends that a commitment to diversity should accompany core journalism values of fairness, balance, objectivity and accuracy:A multitude of factors-as base as prejudice and as complex as societal structure-conspire to keep many people and their opinions out of news. It's our job to make sure we include them.2Literature ReviewProfessional media organizations have not ignored diversity even though, as Lehrman noted:The analyses of news finds over and over that certain groups get left out. Journalists repeatedly make error ofportraying America as primarily white and middle class when obviously that is not so.3The issue is at least a half century old. In 1947 The Freedom of Report, A Free and Responsible Press called for: the projection of a representative picture of constituent groups in society.4 Almost two decades later, Kerner Commission report, which was put together by President Lyndon Johnson's administration to examine civil unrest of mid-1960s, said because news media failed to report adequately on race relations and ghetto problems5 news was almost totally white, both in appearance and attitude.6Newsrooms are not only places lacking a firm grasp on meaning of diversity. Levine found that in university community, Few had any agreed upon definitions(s) of diversity or any explicit goals to help achieve diversity.7 Journalism students tend to define diversity in terms of race8 while others expand definition to include gender, religion, ethnic background and disability.9Little has been written specifically about college newspaper guidelines for covering diverse groups or for increasing diversity representation in newsroom. In contrast, Lederman and Shea found college newspapers are often criticized for poor coverage of minority groups, and few college newspaper editors are members of minority groups.10 Yet when it comes to diversity staffing, college newspapers appear to be doing a lot better than are commercial dailies.11With population of colleges and universities becoming more ethnically, racially, culturally and economically diverse, college newspapers not only protect their credibility by being diverse, but also serve as role models and public conscience for student body.12These views are similar to those found by Pease, who reported that news coverage is fairer and more substantive if there is strong agreement in newsroom about importance of racial diversity.13 Pease also showed that there is a persuasive connection between quality journalism and dedication to diversity. He noted too that greater attention to staff development and communication of management objectives on diversity is necessary to broaden diversity in newsrooms. …

The Oder-Neisse line: the United States, Poland, and Germany in the Cold War

Introduction The Border Issue at the Wartime Conferences Interpreting the Potsdam Agreement The Deterioration of U.S.-Polish Relations The Establishment of Two Germanys Eisenhower's First Term The Impact of the Polish October The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations Nixon to Bush Selected Bibliography Index

Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson's decision to take the United States into large‐scale war in Vietnam in 1964‐1965 must loom large in any evaluation of his presidency. This article argues that the decision was not forced on Johnson by pressures beyond his control, and that his choice for war is difficult to explain, in view of the international and domestic political context, the dynamics on the ground in Vietnam, and the thinking among U.S. officials themselves. The article maintains that Johnson could expect—on the basis of information available to him at the time—to pay a heavy political price if he Americanized the war, and examines why he nevertheless did so.

A Dangerous Miscalculation: New Evidence from Communist-Bloc Archives about North Korea and the Crises of 1968

When North Korean forces seized an American intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, in international waters on 23 January 1968, U.S. officials assumed that the attack had been orchestrated in conjunction with the Soviet Union, Communist China, or both. Based on this assumption, the Johnson administration contacted Soviet leaders and asked them to resolve the matter. But it turned out that Moscow could do little. Newly available documentation shows that North Korea was acting independently in 1968 and did not even inform Soviet or Chinese leaders in advance of the capture of the ship. The U.S. government's failure to recognize that North Korea had been acting on its own meant that a good deal of time was squandered on efforts to prod the Soviet authorities to intervene. The resolution of the prolonged crisis, in December 1968, was feasible only because the Johnson administration managed to accommodate North Korea's rather bizarre demands without yielding on the substance of the matter.

Influence and arms: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and the politics of arms sales to Israel, 1962–1966

This article examines the relationship between Israel and the United States in the years immediately preceding the June 1967 War. In doing so, it challenges the widely held view that prior to Israel's victory in that war the United States refrained from any significant strategic relationship with the Jewish state. In particular, by examining in detail the decision of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to sell advanced military hardware – the Hawk short-range anti-aircraft missile, the M-48A Patton tank and the A-4E SkyhawK fighter-bomber – to Israel in the first half of the 1960s, it clearly shows that the seeds of a strategic partnership had been planted prior to Israel's comprehensive defeat of its Arab opponents in 1967.

The Limits of US Power: Transatlantic Financial Diplomacy under the Johnson and Wilson Administrations, October 1964–November 1968

Historians' views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, which traded US financial help for a continuation of the United Kingdom's world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, and is often taken for granted in historical writing. There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact. However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which Britain was able to manipulate the relationship to its own ends. The United States still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain in a number of fields – diplomatic, economic and military.

The lost revolution: Edward Lansdale and the American defeat in Vietnam 1964–1968

This article examines Edward Lansdale's return to South Vietnam during the Johnson administration. Lansdale offered a persuasive critique of the mistakes the American policy in Vietnam, but his potential influence was severely limited by a combination of bureaucratic infighting in Saigon and a general indifference to the political aspects of the conflict in Washington. While Lansdale was unable to signiflcantly influence the policies of the Johnson administration, his experience in Saigon during 1965–68 offers historians a unique perspective on many facets of American and South Vietnamese policymaking during a crucial period of the Vietnam War.

Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War

Shedding light on a misunderstood form of opposition to the Vietnam War, Michael Foley tells the story of draft resistance, the cutting edge of the antiwar movement at the height of the war's escalation. Unlike so-called draft dodgers, who left the country or manipulated deferments, draft resisters openly defied draft laws by burning or turning in their draft cards. Like civil rights activists before them, draft resisters invited prosecution and imprisonment. Focusing on Boston, one of the movement's most prominent centers, Foley reveals the crucial role of draft resisters in shifting antiwar sentiment from the margins of society to the center of American politics. Their actions inspired other draft-age men opposed to the war - especially college students - to reconsider their place of privilege in a draft system that offered them protections and sent disproportionate numbers of working-class and minority men to Vietnam. This recognition sparked the change of tactics from legal protest to mass civil disobedience, drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely suburban, liberal, young, and middle class - the core of Johnson's Democratic constituency. Examining the day-to-day struggle of antiwar organizing carried out by ordinary Americans at the local level, Foley argues for a more complex view of citizenship and patriotism during a time of war.

Let someone else do the job: American policy on the eve of the six day war

The closure of the straits on 23 May 1927 placed the Johnson administration in an impossible position. Publicly committed to maintaining the freedom of passage through the straits, its own freedom of action was limited the congress, who insisted that it act only with some form of an international framework. It was obvious that unless something were to be done to open the straits and secure free passage for the Israeli ships, war was inevitable. In the first week, after the closure of the straits, the American administration made efforts to find ways to resolve the crisis, and especially in establishing a naval task force to breach the blockade. At the end of May it realized that there was no practical plan to end the blockade. Accordingly, it reconciled to the prospect of an independent Israeli action to open the straits.

Confronting the Johnson Administration at War: The Trial of Dr. Spock and Use of the Courtroom to Effect Political Change

The Johnson administration's 1968 decision to indict Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others for conspiracy to aid and abet draft resisters thrilled the antiwar movement because it demonstrated that the government could no longer ignore the growing number of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War. In the months leading up to the trial, expectations ran high as the antiwar movement looked forward to a courtroom confrontation in which they hoped to see the government's policies put on trial. This article argues that the trial did not live up to its billing, however, because the defendants and their attorneys pursued both political and civil libertarian trial strategies that were, in practice, mutually exclusive. Although the trial disappointed the peace movement, its shortcomings warrant renewed attention for the lessons it offers those who again will seek a courtroom confrontation with their governments during wartime.

In Search of a Panacea: Japan-Korea Rapprochement and America's "Far Eastern Problems"

The United States had three challenges in Asia in the mid-1960s: a hostile China, an assertive Japan, and a faltering South Vietnam. The Johnson administration's solution to these problems was to promote the normalizing of relations between its two vital Asian allies, Japan and South Korea. The two countries had refused to recognize each other diplomatically since the end of Japan's colonial rule over Korea after World War II. The acrimonious relations between Seoul and Tokyo weakened the containment wall in Northeast Asia while depriving Korea of Japanese investments, loans, and markets. These problems forced the United States to commit extensive military and economic assistance to Korea. As expected, a Tokyo-Seoul rapprochment buttressed the West's bulwark against communist powers in the region and hindered a potential Beijing-Tokyo reconciliation. It opened the road for Japan's economic penetration into Korea and enabled Seoul to receive Tokyo's help in economic development. Reassured by the friendship between Korea and Japan, Washington forged an alliance with Seoul in the Vietnam War. Between 1965 and 1973 Korea dispatched 300,000 soldiers in Vietnam, making it the second largest foreign power in support of Saigon. The Korea-Japan rapprochment proved to be a powerful remedy for America's problems in Asia.

Source Material: Presidential Data Locator

The Question of Approval This inaugural edition covers one troublesome data element: public approval. Does presidential public approval affect congressional support? The answer to this question constitutes a conundrum. To practitioners, the answer seems quite clear: Yes, certainly, why do you ask? When political scientists try to answer this question, their responses present a tumult. Empirical research has not consistently supported these arguments (see Collier and Sullivan 1995 for a review). While some studies have found evidence to support the impact of prestige (see Brace and Hinckley 1992; Edwards 1976, 1980, 1989, 1997; Ostrom and Simon 1985; Rivers and Rose 1985; Sullivan 1987), other studies have found little or no impact of public opinion on congressional support, especially when research focuses narrowly on just the administration's highest priorities (see Collier and Sullivan 1995; Lockerbie, Borrelli, and Hedger 1998; Cohen et al. 2000). Other research points to the complexity of the linkage between presidential popularity and congressional support, in which being popular leads to more support from the president's own party but in fact less support from the opposition (Bond and Fleisher 1980). Bond, Fleisher, and Wood (2002) suggest a theoretical rationale to account for approval's varying effects. As a profession, we are as unclear about the impact of public approval as the professionals are certain about its usefulness. One possible approach to explaining this conundrum goes to a measurement issue, challenging the use of national opinion polls, and is aided along by the release of a new data set. Two papers recently presented to the Midwest Political Science Association take this approach and use this new data. One, by a team of collaborators at Texas A&M and Fordham focused on senators and the electoral linkage assumed to drive the relationship between presidential leadership and congressional responsiveness (Bond et al. 2002). A second team of collaborators from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Minnesota, and Columbia focused on the House and whether more specific approval information affected the conversion of otherwise nonsupportive members (Hora et al. 2002). When we assume that legislative politics begins at the local level and never departs, reliance on national opinion thermometers, devoid of local contexts, seems a significant operational mistake. Until recently, we had little else to use but national opinion surveys. (1) Job Approval Ratings For decades, local organizations, mostly newspapers, have collected public opinion information focused on narrowly defined constituencies. A recent National Science Foundation-funded project at three universities began collecting and collating these statewide and sometimes city- or congressional district-sized public opinion surveys. While the bulk of the data (arranged in three data collections) focuses on governors, one data set presents approval ratings for presidents. The Job Approval Ratings OARS) database ranges over the core of the American century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt onward through Clinton, but presidential approval ratings concentrate mainly on the last three presidents. For example, Figure 1 presents the density of state-level polls for New York and Tennessee, two important states for the Clinton-Gore administration. Juxtapose that density with the fact that the data set holds only one state-level poll for New York during the Johnson administration. For the last three administrations, the database holds results from about 1,200 polls. For questions, like the Bond et al. (2002) examination of the electoral connection, this data set has a good deal to offer. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Minor Quibbles It does also have some problems. For example, the state codes in the data do not match the venerable Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) state codes that govern all congressional data sets. …

Specter of Stalemate: Vietnam War Perspectives in Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, 1965–1968

Several months prior to the military offensive by communists during Tet 1968, an event generally considered a turning point for news coverage of the Vietnam War, readers of Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report already had learned that victory seemed unlikely. Until summer 1967, each newsmagazine had provided different perspectives on the status of military progress. Negative commentary by the newsmagazines played a part in the decision by the Johnson administration in August 1967 to begin a campaign to persuade journalists the war was going well, a strategy that prompted a media backlash at Tet 1968.

Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969

Book Review| April 01 2002 Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969 Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969, Thomas Clarkin. Francis Paul Prucha Francis Paul Prucha Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2002) 21 (3): 124–126. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502883 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Francis Paul Prucha; Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2002; 21 (3): 124–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27502883 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2002 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.