ABSTRACT
Lyndon Johnson knew from the start of his administration that Vietnam was going to be one of his major foreign policy concerns. Since visiting Saigon as Kennedy’s vice-president in the late spring of 1961, he had followed the course of the war and the evolution of American policy, and had sat in on many White House meetings. As he began his presidency he understood well the scope of America’s commitment in Vietnam, and the potential trouble the war could pose for him. In a 2 December memorandum to Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the JCS, LBJ noted that the more he looked at it, ‘the more it is clear to me that South Vietnam is our most critical military area right now’ [205 IV p. 651]. Three days later, in a brief speech at the State Department, Johnson exhorted his listeners to ‘let no day go by without asking whether we are doing everything we can to win the struggle there.’
