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Events so momentous in their consequences that they seem after the fact to have been the result of unalterable historical forces sometimes prove to have roots in decisions that appear to have been far from inevitable at the time they were made. A case in point is the transformation of the United States advisory role in Vietnam to a full-scale military intervention in the 1960s. On July 28, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced what in effect was an open-ended commitment to use American military force to defend South Vietnam. He justified his actions in terms that implied that he had little choice but to act as he had, stating that "three Presidents--President Eisenhower, President Kennedy and your present President--over eleven years have committed themselves and promised to defend this small and valiant nation." Yet Johnson's announcement came after six months in which he had authorized a series of incremental increases in the American military presence in Vietnam, doing so in a context in which there was nothing approaching consensus on the part of his advisers or of others in public life about what, if anything, the United States should do to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Communists. (1)
If American leaders were undecided about Vietnam in 1965, they were even more so before then, in spite of Johnson's attempt to portray agreement on the part of his predecessors. The lack of such a consensus became painfully evident to Johnson and his associates shortly after his July 28 announcement when one of the presidents who had ostensibly pledged the United States to defend South Vietnam, Dwight D. Eisenhower, denied that he had done so. (2) The discrepancy between Johnson's impression of what Eisenhower had obligated the United States to do and Eisenhower's own view of the matter produced a minor political storm in 1965, which might be of little interest today were it not that it has implications for a variety of larger issues bearing on the nature of political communication, the organization of national security decision making, the methodology of historical inquiry, and the perennial question of whether and to what extent the Vietnam War was a necessary consequence of the political convictions of American decision makers and the real or perceived...