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Overview
It is still not popular - perhaps it never will be - to be sympathetic to Lyndon Johnson. Vandiver stops short of that but is, in the tradition of the biographer, empathetic with him. Readers may disagree with some aspects of this thought-provoking portrayal, but, as Vandiver has done for Stonewall Jackson and Black Jack Pershing, he offers an understanding of a major wartime figure as he likely saw himself. His purpose is to show what Johnson knew, felt, feared, and tried to do. This, then, is the Vietnam War through Lyndon Johnson's eyes, with Vandiver providing perspective and the missing puzzle pieces not available to Johnson at the time. Vandiver offers a broad, sweeping synthesis of the scholarship on Johnson's war presidency, along with new insights culled from numerous and extensive interviews and a far-reaching immersion in the primary documents housed in archives around the country. He provides an unusual combination of politico-military analysis with on-the-scene battle narratives, dramatically juxtaposing for the reader the reality in Vietnam with the perceptions of it in Washington. Compellingly addressing long-standing questions of whether the White House had become isolated from public opinion and whether Johnson was hardened to the voices raised against the war, Vandiver shows the president as a man who agonized, raged, and grew in response to crises in Vietnam and at home. In the most complete account yet of the period from late 1967 to LBJ's decision not to run for re-election, he probes the shifting honesty of the president's men on the Vietnam scene and identifies a playbill of White House villains who, over the years, have often been cast as heroes. He argues that Johnson entered the war honestly - fully believing that Russia and China were serious threats and convinced by his Tuesday Lunch advisors that aiding South Vietnam was essential to maintaining America's international reputationbut without confidence in his foreign policy role. InEditorials
Fred I. Greenstein
“The work of an able, thoughtful scholar with an original point of view and excellent narrative gifts. . . . an insightful reading of the thought processes of that mystery wrapped in a riddle who went by the name of Lyndon Johnson.”--Fred I. Greenstein, Princeton UniversityPublishers Weekly -
Vandiver considers this book more biography than anything else. As in his previous biographies, of Stonewall Jackson and John J. Pershing, Vandiver, a military historian at Texas A&M University, tries to identify with his subject to an unusual degree. This time the subject is Lyndon Johnson. How did Johnson view the Vietnam War? Vandiver wonders. What did he feel as he tried to direct policy in the war he inherited from the assassinated President John F. Kennedy? His actions are obvious, but what were his motives? This is treacherous ground for a biographer, so few try it to the extent Vandiver does. Some readers may decide that Vandiver's empathy for Johnson has turned into apologetic sympathy. That seems to be the case. Yet the sympathy is based on first-rate research on the paper trail as well as on the people trail. Traditionally, Presidents and other heads of state waging wars find their popularity soaring. Johnson's, however, nose-dived. Vandiver speculates intelligently on why a man so well-suited to become president turned out to be so ill-suited as a war president. While Vandiver's effort at empathetic psychobiography is credible, as far as it goes, it is likely that Johnson biographers of the complete life, including Robert Caro, Robert Dallek and Ronnie Dugger, will eventually arrive at answers based on a fuller record than that used here. MayKirkus Reviews
An attempted rehabilitation of Lyndon Johnson's foreign-policy failures, in which the smitten biographer attempts to turn LBJ into a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman.Forget the picture you have of President Johnson as a scheming politico who would stop at nothing to get his way. According to Vandiver (International Policy Studies/Texas A&M Univ.), LBJ was a brilliant, big-hearted, misunderstood man who was a loving husband and father, and "vigorously devoted" to his country "and to making things better" wherever he went. And don't point fingers at Johnson's mishandling of Vietnam. According to Vandiver, the war's dismal outcome was not the fault of this man, who "had a frightening prescience at times, caught nuances," and "understood things in Lincoln's way of country drollery." The war went terribly wrong, Vandiver says, because of an unremitting stream of bad advice that numerous generals, national security advisers, White House staffers, and Pentagon and State Department officials gave Johnson. This advice, Vandiver says, "wobbled between wishful thinking and fright." Johnson's efforts in Vietnam also were torpedoed, the author claims, by the news media, which turned against American interests, and by anti-war demonstrators, the "doves whose poison turned American determination flabby and remorseful." Vandiver undermines his weak defense of Johnson with his gushing prose and breathless exclamatory sentences.
Ironically, this zealous defense comes at a time when objective historians are looking more kindly at LBJ. But those historians, unlike Vandiver, have wisely refrained from exonerating Johnson totally; and none have come close to Vandiver's modus operandi of putting the most positive of spins on every move Johnson made in Vietnam.