The Historical Debate

Hi, My name's Andrew Preston.

I'm a professor of history at the University of Cambridge,

and I'm here to give a lecture on the escalation of the Vietnam War.

So I'm going to be talking about the escalation of the Vietnam War,

the period between the autumn of 1963 and the summer of 1965 where the war moves from a

phase of American support for the South Vietnamese to

what historians call the Americanisation of the War.

Um,

by July 1965 Americanisation meaning when the United States took over

the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese or from the South Vietnamese.

And this period has been called by historians such as Frederic Logan Paul,

who teaches at Harvard University.

The long 1964.

It's about an 18 month period from the autumn of 1963 and I'm going to

finish in late July 1965 when the decision to Americanise the war was final.

There's some big questions here,

uh,

big questions over why the United States

decided to escalate this incredibly difficult war.

Uh, but also even bigger questions such as did, uh, JFK and LBJ. John F.

Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American presidents.

Did they have a choice, or were they pushed into it?

In other words, was the war avoidable? Or was it inevitable?

Um, and the really interesting thing about the Vietnam War,

especially the escalation period, is that the more evidence we discover, uh,

about JFK is thinking about LBJ is thinking about what was going on in the

White House and the State Department and elsewhere in this 1963 64 65 period.

The more evidence we discover, the more puzzling the whole thing becomes.

The less we understand their decisions,

because the more evidence we find,

the more we realise that Kennedy and Johnson were

extremely reluctant about going to war in Vietnam.

Um, if they were warriors, they were reluctant warriors.

Some American wars in history are unwanted,

but Americans eventually resolved to do them,

and they're confident that they'll be able to win the war.

World War one was like that. World War Two was definitely like that. The Gulf War.

It's not like the United States was looking to go to war.

In fact, the US in all of those cases went to war very slowly,

but There was a kind of resolve and a kind of confidence that if the US had

to go to war and eventually people agreed that they did have to go to war,

that they would win the war.

Some wars in American history have been wanted. They're not unwanted wars.

They're very much wanted wars.

And they're driven by a real sense of confidence that the U. S.

Will be able to achieve its objectives.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 being the most notable example.

And Vietnam bucks this trend in so many ways, Vietnam was an unwanted war.

And as we'll see in the period of the long 1964 American officials in the White House,

the State Department, the Pentagon, uh, in Congress, um,

we're not at all confident about the about what the result might be.

They were very realistic about the difficulty that the war in Vietnam would pose.

So it wasn't It was an unwanted war.

And yet, when Americans decided they did need to go to war, Um,

there wasn't really a sense of confidence.

And so it's a real puzzle. So why do it? Why would LBJ decide? Uh to go to war.

For a long time,

journalists and historians thought that LBJ was a kind of gung ho warmonger,

that he was this brash Texan who was confident of victory.

He referred to North Vietnam as a raggedy ass little

fourth rate country that there was no way that the North

Vietnamese and the Vietnamese communist in the South known as the

Nash Liberation Front or by the slang of the time,

the Viet Cong. There was no way that these

underdeveloped, poor, backward communists could defeat

the most powerful country in the world.

And there's a lot of reason to understand LBJ's thinking

at that time, if that's what he thought.

But we now know from this evidence that keeps coming out,

especially from the White House tapes,

a recording system that Johnson had installed

in the White House.

Um, and that came to light many years later.

We now know from the tapes,

along with other evidence that has surfaced over the last 15 or 20 years,

that Johnson wasn't confident that he wasn't brash, that he wasn't arrogant,

and he certainly wasn't, uh,

didn't assume that the United States could defeat this

raggedy ass little fourth great country with any ease.

We now know that he just wasn't

like that.

And so, unlike most episodes in history, the more evidence we discover,

the more evidence we uncover, the more puzzling, uh,

the the escalation of the war in Vietnam, uh, becomes

and that's the more perplexing it it gets.

And that's something that I'd like to explore

in the modules to follow in this lecture.