Lyndon Johnson's Involvement In Vietnam

LBJ made a decision to commit in Southeast Asia was rooted in the American pledge to battle and contain communism and Vietnam LBJ concluded is the place to make a power credible. If freedom is to be saved we need a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and a wholly different kind of training and commitment. Although Kennedy was willing to send U.S. military advisers into South Vietnam and mount covert operations in North Vietnam Cambodia and Laos he drew the line on U.S. combat units which meant that the South Vietnamese would be responsible for fighting. And on the 22nd of November Kennedy was assassinated Lyndon Johnson takes over the presidency. Johnson was especially uncertain about his presidency because he had realized his lifelong dream not through his own efforts to gain the support of the American people but through the murder of his president.
He became the chief advocate of the US air force pushing a 70-group air force of 12,441 planes centering his offensive campaign on air raids which suggested that he was entirely open to the prospect of going to war. This was part of the strategic campaign adopted by Johnson in approach to the Vietnam War was one of ‘Graduated Pressure.This was a fundamentally flawed strategic concept that permitted deepening American involvement in the war without consideration of its long-term costs and consequences. Taylor also deliberately misrepresented the Joint Chief’s opinion and helped McNamara force a consensus behind a fundamentally flawed strategic concept that permitted deepening American involvement in the