Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam

There is a memorable episode of "Seinfeld" where George Costanza, that master of mendacity, is coaching Jerry on how to pass a polygraph. His pearl of advisory wisdom: "remember, it's not a lie if you believe it." This slender but rich volume by Larry Berman follows on his earlier work about American entry in South East Asia, "Planning a Tragedy." Ultimately Berman argues that Vietnam was, in fact, Lyndon Johnson's war. "In retrospect, the intelligence process was corrupted from above by an excessively paranoid president. It was Lyndon Johnson's war...Politics did not stop at the water's edge for Johnson. General Westmoreland was a pawn of a president fighting for his political life." The baffling thing about this book is that I found it incredibly engaging and illuminating - and yet I could not see how Berman reached his conclusions on the nature and role of President Johnson in Vietnam in 1967-68. What does it mean when your government genuinely believes something and they happen to be wrong? It's convenient and perhaps a bit cathartic to call them liars. But what if those officials sincerely believed their lies? Author Larry Berman does not demonstrate that LBJ and his key advisors knew that they were losing. McNamara came to the conclusion that the US Army strategy of attrition was bankrupt only in late 1967, and even then the president's most senior and thoughtful advisors, including Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, William Westmoreland, ambassador Bunker, and others all disagreed with McNamara. The administration, for the large part, sincerely believed that they were fighting the good fight and were winning - it was the press that actively and fecklessly undermined the US war effort, they believed. Berman quotes a distressed Johnson complaining that "NBC and the New York Times are committed to an editorial policy of making us surrender." Indeed, Berman argues that the president was obsessed with what he perceived as unfair, almost treasonous treatment by the American press, while Ho Chi Minh, who was "a lot like Hitler" according to LBJ, was never taken to task for violating periods of truce and rejecting all peace overtures, including the San Antonio proposal under which the US would unilaterally halt all bombing of the north if Hanoi simply agreed to talk. General Westmoreland's libel trial against CBS in the 1980s looms large in "Lyndon Johnson's War." So too does the CIA's special national intelligence estimate 14-3.67 (SNIE 14-3.67), which reported on the enemy order of battle in the South. The US Army intelligence forces in South Vietnam (MACV) under Westmoreland felt that local political defense forces should not be included in the order of battle; the CIA disagreed. It was an important question for two reasons. First, the self-defense militias numbered roughly 150,000, so including them in the enemy order of battle could give the communists a paper strength boost of nearly 35%. Second, the US Army's

The author uses the politicians own words to condemn them. Bob McNamara the best brighest and most able of all the Secrataries of Defense before or since really loused this war up, yet he was one of the first to realize, by mid 1967, that they war was a disaster and we needed to get the hell out, but the war, as berman convining argues, was lyndon johnson's not McNamara's Johnson's subordinates lied and cheated the american people into a false sense of confidence just because they wanted to please their boos, I think johnson did very many good things for america (Medicare, food stamps, college grants, evivil right, the list is quite long....) and yet he was such an egomaniac and wanted to desperately to prove america could do anything anywhere anytime that the North Vietnamese beat us at our own game, they proved to us that they could endure crushing losses and destruction anywhere, anytime, and still they would not give in. it was a faceoff and we blinked first,thus we lost the war fair and square, or rather Lyndon Johnson's war was a defeat for Johnson and thus for america, i think johnson saw himself and america as one, he personalized the war too greatly and once the war could not be won it killed him.I hope we never get involved in anything quite like that war ever again, true we killed millions of enemy soldiers, Viet Cong, and even innocent civilians but the Vietnamese were able to win through shear force of will. the sooner we accept the fact that we lost the better