An accidentally timely rejoinder to Robert McNamara's recently
published memoir. Historian Gardner (Rutgers; Spheres of Influence,
1993, etc.) traces the trajectory of the Vietnam War from a
small-scale police action to a full-scale (but undeclared)
conflict, showing how its conduct coincided with Lyndon Johnson's
attachment to New Deal - era programs meant to improve the lives of
the downtrodden. Johnson's making the war an international
expression of Great Society ideals of freedom and prosperity,
Gardner demonstrates, introduced entangling political elements into
a military problem and cast a certain unreality on the whole
affair: "If one could go to the moon," Gardner imagines a loyalist
reasoning, "and if one could help grandma with new medical
miracles, surely it would be possible to convince Ho Chi Minh to
accept a dam on the Mekong River instead of a residence in Saigon."
Manipulated by Rusk and McNamara, Johnson consistently valued bad
advice over good, believing that his schemes of regional economic
development would bear him out as a savior of the world's
oppressed. So strong was this conviction that an advisor said, "The
president is prepared to stake everything on this vision of what we
can bring about in Southeast Asia" - whether Southeast Asia asked
for it or not. The well-known result of the president's hubristic
gamble was disastrous: civil unrest and the erosion of confidence
in the American way of life, to say nothing of a military defeat
far from home. And, as the protagonist in Robert Stone's novel Dog
Soldiers puts it, "What a bummer for the gooks." Gardner's
suggestion that Vietnam was in some measure a moral drama played
out in the dark recesses of LBJ's conscience is an intriguing,
controversial contribution to the ongoing debate on the war, one
that he backs up with thorough research and sound scholarship.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook
steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government
intervention for the public good at home or abroad. Seeking to
fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a
fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist
imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of
the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the
highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered
optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with
diplomatic history, Gardner has written the first book on American
involvement in the Vietnam War to use the full resources and newly
declassified documents of the Johnson Library, and to tell whole
the story of Johnson and Vietnam. The book is filled with fresh
interpretations, brilliantly incisive portraits of the president
and his men, and new perspectives on America's most divisive
foreign war. Gardner describes for the first time how, as tragedy
swirled around the deliberations in Washington, Clark Clifford and
Dean Rusk struggled for the president's soul, culminating in the
bombing halt of 1968 and the Johnson decision not to run. The war
finally sundered the liberal cold war consensus, Gardner argues,
and brought to an end the New Deal politics that had dominated
American political life since 1933. Pay Any Price is a major work
of history by one of our most distinguished historians."
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