ith and encouraged by advisers such as Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy who "had all played prominent roles in shaping Kennedy's Vietnam policy [and] had a deep stake in upholding that policy" (113). As Goodwin notes, Johnson's problems with Vietnam were largely the result of being handed "issues alien to his experience [and] resistant to his methods of leadership" which were also, unfortunately, "decisive for his Presidency" (284). The reasons why Johnson made his decisions about Vietnam include all these factors, as well as the personal. political, and patriotic desire never to appear weak or appear to be giving in to World Communism--the threat that he persistently believed was implicit in events in Vietnam. Even so, if he had not had to deal with Vietnam, Johnson would probably have been content to express his anti-Communism and reassert American strength through the occasional event such as the American intervention in the Dominican Republic.
In the period from November 1963 to July 1965 Johnson took the limited American commitment to help the South Vietnamese in their self-defense and transformed it into "an open-ended commitment to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam" (Herring 108). The process of "Americanizing" the war did not lead to victory or even any substantial progress (though it was sometimes reported that progress was being made). By the middle of his elected term, Johnson had escalated the war to the point where draft calls came to more than 30,000 men per month and the President had recommended " a 10 percent surtax to cover the steadily increasing costs of the war" (Herring 174). Disapproval of Johnson's performance was so high that a peace candidate, Senator Eugene McGovern, came within one percentage point of defeating him in the
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