In the spring of 1995 Robert McNamara published a memoir that stunned long-time defenders of the war and confirmed the beliefs of those who had opposed it. The war had been a great mistake, he concluded. The Johnson administration could—and should—have avoided sending hundreds of thousands of Americans into the conflict. Moreover, McNamara implied that if Kennedy had lived, he would not have escalated the war as Lyndon Johnson had. In other words, even though presidents from Truman through Kennedy had involved the United States in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was truly Lyndon Johnson's war. Some historians have argued that by the summer of 1963, Kennedy had become convinced that American forces had to be gradually withdrawn but that politically he dared not do so until the election of 1964. "If I tried to pull out now from Vietnam," one aide recalls him saying, "we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands."

Other historians have been more skeptical. They argue that even in 1965, no official of importance was suggesting that the United States should allow Vietnam to fall to the Communists. Senators Fulbright and Mike Mansfield and Undersecretary of State George Ball, who criticized Johnson by 1968, all backed the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1965. Further, historians have evidence that President Kennedy would have escalated the war, though perhaps not as quickly. "We want the war to be won, the Communists to be contained, and the Americans to go home," Kennedy asserted only two months before his death; ". . . But we are not there to see a war lost." As one historian concluded, "The widespread and prevailing opinion in the administration, Congress, and the press and among the mass of Americans was that the United States simply could not walk away from Vietnam and sacrifice a pro-Western country to Communist aggression." In this historian's view, Vietnam was America's war: a product of the cold war mentality that had arisen over the previous two decades, not the act of a single, stubborn president.

1			Read this interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Johnson administration. How does he characterize the American intervention in Vietnam during Johnson's presidency? On whom does he place the blame for American mistakes in Vietnam? Based on what evidence? What factors should historians take into consideration when evaluating the credibility of McNamara's opinions? How does Michael Jay Friedman's assess responsibility for American policies in Vietnam during this same period? Does his argument concur with that of McNamara? Why or why not? Does Friedman's status as an "outsider" examining these events give him more or less credibility in your opinion? Should such assessments even factor into a historian's analysis? Why or why not? http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/McNamara/mcnamara6.html http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH41/Friedman41.html