Lyndon Johnsons War Americas Cold War Crusade in Vietnam Review

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Book Reviews 205 policy toward Red china and Taiwan in the early 1950s. Whereas the U.Southward. archives reveal many of the U.S. government's warts and other imperfections , historians cannot get comparable data on what the leadership overseas was thinking and doing. Accinelli seems to overreach his fabric in the book's strongest assertion: That the Eisenhower administration mishandled the 1954-55 Offshore Island's crisis. He offers no documentation for his claim that U.S. threats played no role in bringing China to the tabular array after the Bandung conference of 1955 (232), and, perhaps more than importantly, overlooks the Soviet Union's role in the settlement of the crunch. Accinelli also fails to consider the degree to which governmental and diplomatic activities tend to exist piecemeal, even under the best leadership. That said, Crisis and Commitment offers a very thorough and interesting explication of how, in spite of its wishes and early on intentions, the United States came to stand up behind the nationalist regime on Taiwan. Elizabeth C. Henderson University of Michigan Michael H. Hunt. Lyndon Johnson's State of war: America's Cold State of war Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Pp. 9 + 128 and bibliography and map. Journalists and scholars accept long acknowledged that the combination of American ignorance of Vietnamese history and an anticommunist paternalism was a prescription for failure. Bernard Fall's writings prior to his expiry in 1967, Frances FitzGerald's prize-winning Burn down in the Lake (Trivial, Brown and Company, 1971) and more recently Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (Harper Collins, 1990), accept, amid others, stressed the cultural gap in the American-Vietnamese encounter. Approaching the Vietnam disharmonize from a comparable framework, Michael Hunt'southward Lyndon Johnson's War provides a distinctive and engaging addition to the several overviews of the Vietnam War that have been written in the final decade. It reflects the concerns in Hunt'due south prolific scholarship which have underlined the demand to study U.S. foreign relations within its full international context and to capeesh its ideological component. 206 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' etudes americaines The subtitle, more than than the title, conveys the telescopic of the book. Indeed Hunt concludes that intervention was "a national crusade whose sources transcended one man.... Perhaps, above all, it emerged cutting of an American culture which claimed to speak and human activity for other peoples without knowing their history, linguistic communication, and aspirations" (107). Hunt's account of Johnson's presidency comprises about one-3rd of the text; the greater part of the book is devoted to tracing the reasons for the escalating U.S. interest in Vietnam through 1963. Hunt begins past recounting the intellectual and political ache of the waning days of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration touched off by William J. Lederer's and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American (Norton, 1958), which foresaw Americans losing the struggle against communism in southeast Asia unless they learned how to appeal to the "hearts and mrnds" of common people. In the end, as Hunt shows, they lost the struggle 111 Vietnam, not for lack of endeavor at winning "hearts and minds" but because they dismissed the connection between communism and nationalism. Ho Chi Minh'due south "brocade bags" of traditional patriotism, Leninism, and a populist program gave his movement an appeal and momentum that eventually overwhelmed the French in the Offset Indochina War and threatened the subsequent U.Southward.-fostered Due south Vietnamese government. As that struggle intensified, Americans continued to ignore realities, notably the National Liberation Front'southward (NLF) resilience and South Vietnam's deficiencies, both of which were evident in the battle of Ap Bae in January 1963. By that time, President John F. Kennedy had brought to Washington the ubest and the brightest" who constituted a cult of anticommunist toughness and significantly increased the U.Southward. delivery to South Vietnam. As the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem embarrassed Americans by its suppression of Buddhist protesters, the Kennedy administration quietly engineered his overthrow. In the face of further political turmoil in Saigon and Due north Vietnam's determination to push the NLF's reward, Johnson was thus the president who had to fully face up the pick...

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Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/681502/pdf

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