This module contains three parts, a prerequisite, and a conclusion; you should complete only those sections requested by your instructor.
Overview
Prerequisite Activity One: (In-class assignment) For a sense of how Johnson struggled with the Vietnam policy that he inherited from Kennedy, listen to the clips below (each of which is less than 3 minutes), from a conversation between the President and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 2, 1964. Seeking to counter press criticism of the administration's Vietnam policy, the President pushed McNamara for a clearer sense of the U.S. justification for involvement in the war. Keep in mind that, by this time, Johnson had already been President for more than three months, and the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam had risen to more than 20,000.
Discussion Questions
Activity Two: (Blackboard assignment) Lyndon Johnson was someone who preferred doing business over the telephone, and who believed that formal meetings often were a waste of time. In contrast to his lobbying members of Congress, however, on foreign policy issues he had little choice but to work through the established bureaucracy, at least to some degree. These documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series detail U.S. policy toward Vietnam in the month following Johnson's March conversation with Secretary of Defense McNamara. You should read documents #74, 81, 84, and 100. Text Questions: What are the central features of the administration's policy toward Vietnam? How much leverage did the President possess compared to other key policymakers? Do you see any key "turning points" in the development of US policy? Source Questions: How does analyzing a government document differ from analyzing telephone calls between key policymakers? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each as a historical source? You should post at least twice, with the second post at least 12 hours after the first, and to include responses to the arguments of the other posters. Activity Three: (Writing assignment) Listen to President Johnson's complete conversation with McNamara (mp3 file), along with this discussion between the President and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy (mp3 file) about Vietnam from November 3, 1964. In what ways had the administration's approach to Vietnam changed between March and November 1964? What do you see as the one or two central principles of LBJ's policy? Be sure to consider the following issues:
Presidential biographies are among the most common, and popular, type of political history, and presidential historians have to balance the sometimes competing needs of presenting a faithful portrayal of the President's personal life with an understanding of his public policies. Striking this balance can be especially difficult when dealing with the tapes, since the recording systems often picked up unusual and perhaps atypical moments in a President's life that under any other circumstances never would have been retained. How much attention should historians devote to the private traits of 1960s chief executives? Keep this question in mind when listening to the following two calls: the first, between Lyndon Johnson and Joseph Haggar, in which the President ordered some slacks, giving some very specific tailoring advice; the second, between Richard Nixon and the late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time US ambassador to the UN, in which Nixon discussed his theories on the capacities of different races for effective governance.
Resources
|