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Kberggren MA Thesis.Pdf Hell No! They Won’t Go! Lyndon Johnson and the Nonmobilization of U.S. Army Reserve Forces Kathleen Marie Berggren Granby, Connecticut B.A., Georgetown University, 2010 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of Virginia December, 2013 1 General Harold K. Johnson considered resigning in protest over President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s refusal to mobilize U.S. Army reserve forces for active duty service in South Vietnam several times throughout his tenure as army chief of staff during the war in Vietnam. A sensitive and honorable man who had distinguished himself both on the battlefield and as an advocate for soldiers’ interests, the general ardently believed that, by not calling up reserve forces, the United States had adopted a misguided force planning model that would not only cripple the Army’s total force strength, but would lead to thousands of avoidable American combat deaths. For General Johnson, the president’s refusal to mobilize reserve forces was one of the worst executive decisions of the entire Vietnam War. It drove the Army to juggle inadequate resources, train units for combat duty that were intended for other important support functions, and—most egregiously— to send a crop of young, unprepared draftees into battle when drilled reservists were available for deployment. Having been repeatedly rebuffed by the Lyndon Johnson administration for voicing these concerns—forced, at times to endure the president’s bullying and personal attacks—General Johnson debated resigning his command, hoping his actions would send a strong message to government officials and the American public about the grave consequences of nonmobilization. However, in spite of his fears and frustrations about the president’s force planning policymaking, Harold Johnson ultimately decided to play the part of the “good soldier” and retain his position, deferring to executive leadership and continuing to advocate privately for an alternate course.1 1 Lewis Sorley, Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 268. 2 As Lewis Sorley notes in his biography of General Johnson, the soldier reached a different conclusion about the ethics of military leadership in the last years of his life. In a poignant conversation with his friend Brigadier General Albion Knight, Johnson remarked of his decision to work within the system: I remember the day I was ready to go over to the Oval Office and give my four stars to the President and tell him, ‘You have refused to tell the country they cannot fight a war without mobilization; you have required me to send men into battle with little hope of their ultimate victory; and you have forced us in the military to violate almost every one of the principles of war in Vietnam. Therefore, I resign and will hold a press conference after I walk out of your door.’ I made the typical mistake of believing I could do more for the country and the Army if I stayed in than if I got out. I am now going to my grave with that lapse in moral courage on my back.2 The general’s comments capture the divisiveness of a potential reserve force mobilization during the Lyndon Johnson administration, an important contemporary debate that has been eclipsed in recent years by an outpouring of scholarship on two key historiographical issues: the origins of American intervention in Vietnam and the sources of U.S. defeat.3 By treating a potential reserve force call up within these frameworks, scholars have tended to marginalize force planning, suggesting that mobilization was a 2 Albion W. Knight Jr., interview with Lewis Sorley, June 16, 1995, quoted in Sorley, Honorable Warrior, 304. 3 For some of the most influential studies of America’s entry into the Vietnam War, see, Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995); Andrew L. Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010); Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982); Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-61 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1986). On the sources of American defeat in Vietnam, see, Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982); Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977); C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam (Portland: Frank Cass, 2002); Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 3 peripheral concern for policymakers and a decision that was made once—in July 1965— before the president reversed himself nearly three years later. 4 Scholars have generally explained Johnson’s decision not to call up reserve forces—an apparent tactical error—in the context of domestic politics, arguing that electoral and legislative concerns dissuaded the president from revealing the extent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to either Congress or the public.5 Because a reserve force call up would have belied the depth of the American commitment to South Vietnam, Johnson decided to rely on other manpower sources like the draft and increased recruiting. According to David Halberstam, “. the use of the reserves would blow it all. It would be self-evident that we [the United States] were really going to war, and that we would in fact have to pay a price,” a cost, many historians have argued, the administration was unwilling to bear. 6 If Congress knew that the country was engaged in a full-scale ground war Johnson believed it would have likely reconsidered budget allocations in light of greater anticipated military expenses, jeopardizing funding for domestic initiatives including the president’s Great Society programs.7 Jeffrey W. 4 For studies that treat mobilization decision-making within the broader frameworks of U.S. entry into Vietnam and the reasons for its defeat, see, Gardner, Pay Any Price, 249-50; Berman, Planning a Tragedy, 119-23; Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 162; Kinnard, The War Managers, 117-22; Kahin, Intervention, 366-402. 5 On President Johnson’s decision not to mobilize U.S. Army Reserve Forces for domestic political purposes, see, Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006); Francis M. Bator, “LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection.” Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (June 2008): 309-340; Berman, Planning a Tragedy; Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little Brown, 1993); Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gardner, Pay Any Price; Jeffrey W. Helsing, Johnson’s War/Johnson’s Great Society: The Guns and Butter Trap (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945- 1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); Robert Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy.” Diplomatic History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 1996): 147-162. 6 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1969), 593. 7 On President Johnson’s decision not to mobilize U.S. Army Reserve Forces in order to protect Great Society legislation, see, Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam; Gardner, Pay Any Price; Hunt, Lyndon 4 Helsing summarizes the dominant historiographical explanation for nonmobilization when he writes that, by refusing to mobilize the reserves, “Johnson opted for a path by which he believed he could avoid the hard policy choices between the war and his domestic agenda – a path whereby he could minimize the costs by controlling the nature [and image] of escalation.”8 In contrast to the wider Vietnam literature’s tendency to treat a potential reserve force call up as a peripheral domestic political debate, operational military historians at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute have been particularly interested in tactical and strategic questions surrounding mobilization and force planning.9 However, because these studies serve not only historical but functional planning purposes as well, Strategic Studies scholars tend to focus on nonmobilization’s impact on the Army’s overall force structure and its ability to meet worldwide contingencies, not on Johnson’s rationale for eschewing a call up. Therefore, historians at the Strategic Studies Institute usually rely on secondary sources to contextualize and explain Johnson’s decision- making process, making their most significant contributions, instead, in the areas of military impact and response. Johnson’s War; Helsing, Johnson’s War/Johnson’s Great Society; Logevall, Choosing War; Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front. 8 Helsing, Johnson’s War/Johnson’s Great Society, 2.
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