The Great Society and the Tragedy of Vietnam

The New Frontier at Home

• JFK proposed reforms – increased minimum wage, federal aid to education, health care for the aged

• Influenced by “reactionary Keynsianism” (Galbraith) of Walter Heller, head of Council of Economic Advisers, who proposed tax cut

Limits to Domestic Reform

• JFK’s lack of leadership

• Conservative majority in Congress: “There is no sense in raising hell, and then not being successful.”

• Interest groups controlled reform agenda? Lack of willingness to fund programs properly?

The Politics of Hope

• Social Science: Rostow and Harrington

• Economics: Galbraith• Cold War: need for a healthy society• Political calculation: maintaining the

New Deal coalition• Moral impulse in Democratic Party

tradition

The Long Shadow of FDR

“Today in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us

continue.”

The 1960s: A decade of polarisation

War on Poverty

“This administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty” (Jan, 1964)

1965 Budget for the OEO: $960Million1965 Defence Budget: $50BillionEconomic causes of poverty unaddressed?

Economic Opportunity Act, 1964

• Head Start • Job Corps • Work-Study program for university

students • VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America)

- a domestic version of the Peace Corps • Neighborhood Youth Corps • Basic education and adult job training • CAPS (Community Action Programs)

http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/election/index.php?nav_action=election&nav_subaction=overview&campaign_id=168

The Great Society“The Great Society …demands an end to poverty and racial injustice. The Great Society …is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents…where man can renew contact with nature….where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

The Great Society

• 1965-1968: 500 social programmes launched

• Enhanced food stamps, AFDC• Federal money to schools in poor

areas• Higher Education Act, 1965: loans

and scholarships

The Great Society

First black cabinetmember: Robert WeaverHead of new Dept ofHousing and UrbanDevelopment

The Great Society

Medicare & Medicaid, 1965

African Americans and the War on Poverty

Why (not) Vietnam?

• Containment; Domino theory

• Ambiguity of US anti-imperialism

• Shadow of appeasement

• Domestic anti-communism

• Liberalism: Faith in progress, government action, economic development

I'm like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway: I can't run. I can't hide. And I can't make it stop.

Americanisation 1964-65

The president is authorised to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 1964

Americanisation 1964-65

• Rolling Thunder: “Now I have Ho Chi Minh’s pecker in my pocket” (LBJ)

• 8 March, 1965: Marines land at Da Nang with a combat mission

• 28 July, 1965: LBJ approved deployment of 50,000 US troops

US Troop Levels in South Vietnam

My solution to the problem [of North Vietnam] would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. Gen. Curtis LeMay, 1965

Strategy for defeat

• War by numbers: body counts• “Search and destroy”: deforestation• Attrition: “Killing guerrillas is like killing termites

with a screw driver where you have to kill them one by one and they’re inclined to multiply as rapidly as you kill them.” General Westmoreland to LBJ, while asking for more troops, 1967

• Pacification: strategic hamlet program, “hearts and minds”… while establishing “free-fire zones”

The Cost

• 4.6M tons of ordnance (plus 2M more on Laos and Cambodia)

• 11M gallons of Agent Orange

• 400,000 tons of napalm

• 60% of RVN hamlets, 25M acres of farmland, 12M acres of forest destroyed

• 15M refugees

US Deaths: nearly 60,000, and 300,000 injured.

Vietnamese Deaths: about 2,000,000, and many millions injured.

http://www.benbarrack.com/barrack_leadership5_lbj.html

Robert S. McNamara

We had “sparse knowledge, scant experience and simplistic assumptions… I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one -- involving national pride and human life -- that could not… We were wrong, terribly wrong.”

What went wrong?

• “We had no time to think” (McNamara)

• Lack of expertise (c.f. USSR)

• Foreign policy consensus: containment

• Domestic anticommunism