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This chapter provides a brief biography of Lyndon B. Johnson and introduces his White House. After the murder of John F. Kennedy, President Johnson, seeking to promote stability and preferring to focus on domestic issues, emphasised the theme of continuity in foreign affairs. The foreign policy advisory system he inherited was an informal, teamwork-based ‘collegial’ one, but it soon developed into what has been described as a ‘collegial-formalistic hybrid’ system. This chapter outlines the respective roles of the main foreign policy advisers, namely Dean Rusk, Secretary of State; McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, successive National Security Advisers; and Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense. It also explores the CIA's role in policymaking. Generally, the Johnson White House was a smooth-running operation that closely reflected the needs and proclivities of the President, including the provision of advice from a wide range of sources.

This chapter describes the legendary personality of Lyndon B. Johnson that eliminated all doubt regarding whether he would be a strong chief executive or not. Johnson ascended to the presidency under extraordinarily difficult conditions, having to succeed a charismatic leader who, after capturing the imagination of the country, died under tragic circumstances. Having sworn to continue Kennedy's vision, Johnson inherited a fully staffed executive branch to which he could not make significant changes without seeming to abandon Kennedy's legacy. Although he was respectfully slow to make significant changes to the administration, it would be a mistake to construe his reticence to change personnel as hesitancy to exert full control over the workings of the executive branch. When Adlai Stevenson complained that he really wanted to be secretary of state rather than an errand boy, Walter Lippman quipped, “If you are Lyndon Johnson's secretary of state, you'll be an errand boy.”

While rarely focusing on foreign affairs, studies of the 1964 election generally acknowledge that Lyndon Johnson’s decision to position himself as the moderate to Barry Goldwater’s extremist was a successful campaign tactic. There is little consensus, however, regarding the degree to which international issues affected the election’s outcome. This chapter goes beyond previous studies by providing a more holistic assessment of the complex interrelationship of foreign affairs and electoral politics. In assessing the manner in which foreign affairs shaped the campaigns of both candidates and examining key examples of how electoral concerns shaped Johnson’s thinking on global matters, it makes clear that the issues are inseparable.

This chapter examines the political debates that accompanied the passage of the first of the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills, the Veterans' Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966. It considers the role of Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, a Texas Democrat, in pushing for a new G.I. Bill that would compensate all citizens called upon for military service and the opposition he faced from fellow Texan Democrat Olin Teague in the House. In particular, it explains how the Vietnam War helped Yarborough's cause, resulting in the Veterans' Readjustment Benefits Act that gave the same benefits to all Cold War veterans. It also discusses the arguments of President Lyndon B. Johnson regarding federal spending and his eventual signing of the bill into law. Finally, it reflects on the significance of the 1966 G.I. Bill with respect to veterans' benefits and to democratic citizenship more generally.

This chapter tells the story behind the start of the global effort to eradicate smallpox. On May 19, 1965, the World Health Assembly (WHA) passed Resolution WHA18.38, which devoted the assembly and its administrative body (the WHO) to “the world-wide eradication of smallpox.” While previous assemblies had made similar such declarations in vague (and unfunded) support of the eradication program proposed by the USSR in 1958, this particular resolution had the political, technical, personnel, and financial backing of the United States, under the leadership of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The American commitment to smallpox eradication represented a step toward a Global Great Society: a liberal effort to engage the decolonizing Cold War world by manipulating the nonhuman world, including diseases.

This chapter assesses the wartime leadership of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The Vietnam War was the only American conflict to end in unequivocal defeat, and subsequently dragged down two presidencies. Under Lyndon B. Johnson, the US pursued military strategies and fought under self-imposed constraints that assured a military stalemate. Richard M. Nixon then sought to extricate the US from the war in a way that guaranteed the ultimate collapse of its ally. Johnson was deserted by liberals who saw the war as unnecessary and wanted American troops brought home, and by conservatives who believed he had thrown away all chance for victory. Nixon insisted on violent measures that yielded transient military gains, which eliminated any possibility of building a domestic consensus in favor of long-term support for the Saigon government.

This chapter examines southern political leaders, newspapers, and the public during the decade leading to the US commitment to oppose communism in South Vietnam. Over this ten-year period, a clear majority of the South’s influential political figures in Washington opposed committing US military forces to direct combat in Vietnam. Despite developing powerful arguments in favor of restraint, southerners joined other congressmen and senators from across the nation in an overwhelming vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, proposed by President Johnson in August 1964. Particular attention is devoted to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk as southerners; to the role of Senators J. William Fulbright and Richard B. Russell in the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and to the influence of defense spending, honor, partisan politics, and personal ties to Johnson in the southern endorsement of this constitutional basis for the war.

Just as the withdrawal plan moved closer to implementation, President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, bringing the process to a close. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, assured Americans that he would continue his predecessor's domestic and foreign policies. Indeed, Newsweek observed that the White House intended to fulfill its October 2 decision to withdraw 1,000 troops by the end of the year. In a bitter irony, however, Johnson's pledge to continuity helped to undermine the rest of the withdrawal plan because the Kennedy administration had so carefully kept its existence from public view that any further troop reduction would appear to repudiate previous policy. The United States still intended to withdraw the first thousand troops in Vietnam by the end of the year; but the Johnson administration escalated the nation's military involvement, and the heart of the plan soon died.

The chapter focuses specifically on the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) administration's efforts in the Vietnam conflict during the Progress Campaign in 1967. This program, launched as a public relations offensive designed specifically to establish that the United States was achieving its goals in Vietnam, was a direct response to criticism from the media that had begun to erode public support for the war and the administration. The Johnson administration made a special effort during the campaign to sell the war in American living rooms. He was upbeat, insistent, and at times combative in asserting that U.S. forces were achieving their goals. LBJ recognized the need to “get a better story to the American people.” War and politics, then, were inextricably linked.

After criticizing Lyndon Johnson as a Senate leader, Drew Pearson became a strong supporter of his presidency, remaining sufficiently close to be jeered as “Lyndon’s lackey.” Access to the president provided a fountain of information but complicated his efforts to report candidly. If he wrote anything complimentary, critics charged that LBJ had dog-collared him. If he wrote anything unfavorable, Johnson protested bitterly. Although Pearson encouraged Johnson to withdraw American troops from South Vietnam, he supported the widening war. Anti-war activists accused him of selling out to Johnson, and his own wife picketed the White House. Pearson held his dissent until 1968, shortly before Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. The column assailed Robert F. Kennedy for approving the wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It also conducted an extensive anti-corruption campaign against Senator Thomas Dodd, which resulted in Dodd’s censure by the Senate.

This chapter examines why Lyndon B. Johnson aborted much of the progress made during the Kennedy years. It explains that Johnson told one Soviet official that when it came to arms control, Moscow and Washington “were like children hunting for Easter eggs.” The chapter shows that in this changing world system, nuclear weapons remained an important symbol of international status and Washington feared the uncontrolled proliferation of weapons within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), even as French president Charles de Gaulle questioned the U.S. commitment to Europe and threatened to split the alliance. It observes that as long as NATO nuclear force remained a possibility, a U.S.–Soviet nonproliferation agreement proved impossible, and notes that such a pact offered the best hope of containing the spread of nuclear weapons in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The tragedy of Lyndon B. Johnson was that despite his many legislative accomplishments in civil rights, health care, and antipoverty programs, his administration is best known for the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. However, it was in this arena, both as an informal adviser to Johnson and ultimately as secretary of defense, that Clark Clifford distinguished himself. With but one exception, Clifford was the lone voice in the Johnson administration speaking out against the war. In March 1965 the first combat troops were dispatched to Vietnam: two battalions, or about 6,000 men. The troops were sent to protect the air bases from which U.S. forces were unleashing the bombing campaign known as Rolling Thunder. General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. forces, requested that the president provide him with ground forces with which to pursue the enemy. Clifford was one of the few opponents of escalation who had any access to the president.

This chapter details how, despite the seemingly favorable situation for the Chilean government, in 1967 things would begin to go in a very different direction. After the first two successful years of the Frei administration, the attitude of the opposition stiffened noticeably, and even within the Christian Democratic Party some leaders began to voice their disagreement with the character and the pace of some of the reforms implemented by the government. Eduardo Frei himself was still a popular figure, a condition he would continue to enjoy for most of his tenure and beyond. In addition, his positive international standing reinforced his image in Chile. However, his own personal popularity would not translate into a continuation of the success of the first two years of his administration. The changing winds of Chilean politics and the declining fortunes of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration would get in the way, and it was, in fact, a situation connected to the close relationship between the Frei administration and the United States that marked the beginning of the end of the Revolution in Liberty.

This chapter examines how the chief executive exploits partisans in Congress to improve his chances of obtaining support from lawmakers. One of the president’s most demanding and frustrating tasks is trying to move Congress to support his policies. Presidents are unlikely to change many congressional minds, but they can take advantage of members’ ideological predispositions or their proclivities to support their party leader. Understanding strategic position with Congress is the key to successful presidential leadership. The chapter first provides an overview of congressional support for the president from both Democrats and Republicans before discussing the president’s role as party leader. It also considers Lyndon B. Johnson’s experience in dealing with Congress and concludes by explaining how presidents such as Johnson and Ronald Reagan improve their chances of obtaining support in Congress by increasing the number of fellow party members in the legislature.

This chapter explores the reasons for the mass strikes among the guestworkers laboring in Florida's cane fields during the 1960s. It argues that these strikes were caused by a confluence of two seemingly unrelated events: the Cuban Revolution and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Like the collision of two weather systems, these transformations—a revolution and a reform program—brought unintended but devastating changes to working conditions in Florida's fields. What had been a hard but coveted opportunity for poor black men from the Caribbean became, as Johnson's Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz put it only somewhat hyperbolically, “the worst job in the world.”

From the early 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal during the Great Depression, to the mid-1960s, when Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society during a much more affluent time, the pendulum of politics in America swung magisterially and seemingly inexorably to the left side. In the four decades following, the same pendulum swung to the right. The decades-long decline of liberal political fortune came in part because of social backlash. From the New Deal to the Great Society, there had just been too much equality, too much progressive social change, too much government, and too much disruption of settled manners, mores, and entrenched elites. There was bound to be growing resistance and the return to political power of the Republican side. While political movements are deeply affected in part by social forces, their fate is decided to some extent by whether they provide these social forces with effective rhetoric and voice.

This chapter examines why Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded in concluding the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. It notes that Moscow and Washington had concluded that nonproliferation enhanced both U.S. and Soviet national security, especially with respect to West Germany and non-Western nations. The chapter notes further that they envisioned a two-tier system in which their respective alliance partners would have tightly controlled access to nuclear weapons while the rest of the world pledged nuclear abstinence. It points out, however, that newly decolonized nations objected to this system of “nuclear weapons apartheid,” demanding that Moscow and Washington cut their nuclear arsenals to offset the sacrifice of non-nuclear nations. The chapter notes that the NPT that finally took effect in 1970 marked, in the words of one jaded proponent, a “worthless triumph.”

This chapter argues that, in contrast to the Korean War, differing inflation fears and public support for the Vietnam War explain the variation in outcome. Similar to President Truman, President Johnson could have paid for a larger percentage of the war with taxes, potentially avoiding some negative consequences. However, Johnson chose to rely on domestic debt for the early years of the war. He did not want to relinquish his Great Society, for unlike Truman, Johnson did not fear inflation. He believed that the U.S. economy could absorb a large increase in government spending without raising taxes to pay for it. Consequently, Johnson believed he could fund both programs simultaneously, without economic detriment.

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.