s taying the c ourse 235expansionist impetus of communism had stalled) or toward a more
aggressive use of force (because the likelihood that it would induce a
Chinese or Soviet military response had declined significantly).
Instead, old fears that the major communist powers would exploit or
overreact to a new American policy remained the default setting that
stymied fresh thinking.
In the fi nal analysis, the internal stalemate in the administration’s
Vietnam debates refl ects poorly on Johnson as a wartime leader. He
involved himself closely in certain details of the war—picking out spe-
cifi c bombing targets or having a sand table set up in the White House
in early 1968 to follow the siege of the Marine base at Khe Sanh. But his
selective absorption in the minutiae of warfare masked just how little
meaningful direction he exercised over any aspect of American military
operations. He never questioned Westmoreland about his tactics, even
though American ambassadors with close knowledge of the fi ghting
(General Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.) doubted the
effi cacy of major search-and-destroy operations.
Moreover, the exercise of promoting a full airing of policy options
became a substitute for actually resolving the differences between
civilians and the military. Despite McGeorge Bundy’s reminder that
retaining the confi dence of both the public and his own government
required the visible assertion of presidential leadership, Johnson never
seized control of the key policy discussions, never resolved the contra-
dictions that bedeviled military policy, and never established a coherent
strategy to achieve his war goals. Th e president, as one later critic puts
it, “refused to abandon his no-win policy.” Nor did he grasp the
openings that a shifting international setting offered him to regain
freedom of action—which, as is worth stressing again and again, is the
single most vital resource a wartime political leader can possess. Put
bluntly, for nearly three years, from July 1965 until February 1968,
Lyndon Johnson was a commander in chief in name only.
Eroding Political Support
Sustaining public support for the Vietnam War may well have been an
impossible leadership challenge. Johnson needed to stir the right amount
of popular enthusiasm: enough to back a limited war of indefinite