Lyndon B. Johnson's Policy Towards Vietnam

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Region: USA grade: 1 Macquarie University language: English abstract: Look Mr. President everything that the Secretary of Defense has been telling you this morning I used to listen to with my French friends. They talked about the fact that there was always a new plan and (...) that was going to win the day. And they believed it just as much as we're believing it sitting around the table this morning. I can tell you however that in the end there was a great disillusion. And there will be one. - George Ball 1971 -In spite of the advice given to him by his Under Secretary of State George Ball United States President Lyndon B. Johnson decided on the 27th July 1965 to push ahead and increase military forces from 75000 to 125000 in Vietnam. With this decision Johnson escalated the American intervention in Vietnam and made what has been seen as the formal decision for a major war . The inability and to an extent unwillingness to foresee that the conflict was going to be as catastrophic as it turned out to be is what lead Robert McNamara Secretary of Defence to say that the Johnson administration's greatest failure of all was Vietnam. It was not until April 1975 and then under President Gerald Ford that the United States would finally withdraw from Vietnam following a defeat of the South Vietnamese forces and a reunification of the country under the leadership of Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. With approximately 58000 American casualties not to mention the estimated 15 million Vietnamese killed this military intervention continues to be seen as a sore point of American history .