ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War has emerged as one of the most important foci in the growing debate over the origins of US foreign policy. This chapter shows that the lack of closure in the debate over Vietnam is the result of a critical weakness in the existing literature. Simply stated, the scholarship on the war fails to understand the domestic origins of the Vietnam policy. The chapter considers the domestic economic and political considerations that encouraged the 1965 escalation and presents an account of the way in which a consensus was forged in the business and media communities to support the escalation. It presents an analysis of how the economic impact of the war destroyed the pro-Vietnam consensus. The chapter concludes by relating the Vietnam case to the evolution of US foreign policy since the New Deal and then offering a further theoretical analysis of the media and foreign policy making in the United States.
