s taying the c ourse 215appear almost swayed by their warnings. Th en McNamara or Bundy
would crisply discount their arguments, warn against the extremes of
either withdrawal or all-out escalation, and leave, as the only respon-
sible choice, the latest version of the superfi cially reasonable middle
course that most of the president’s civilian, military, and political
advisors had long favored.
In March 1965 this middle course meant a shift from retaliatory air
attacks to an ongoing bombing campaign against North Vietnam; in
July, it meant the introduction of enough American troops to stabilize
the situation and then turn the tables on the VC and NVA. Most of the
politicians with whom the president conferred likewise counseled him
to meet mounting communist violence in kind, though they voiced
serious misgivings about the prospects for success. A few, especially
Senator Mansfi eld, continued to dissent and urged the president to
eschew intervention. Each time, Johnson, after admitting his own
doubts (partly, one suspects, for the historical record), would agree with
the mainstream recommendation, which after all fi t his own guiding
assumption that Vietnam must be held.
His approach and his decisions cast the idea of presidential freedom
of action in a new light. Given the assumptions that guided American
foreign policy and prevailing popular attitudes, any American president
of the era would likely have adopted a similar course in Southeast
Asia in 1964–1965. Defeat in South Vietnam would compromise the
American international position. Of note, the few advisors who
dissented from the dominant interventionist view still subscribed to the
larger Cold War perspective. Th ey tried to argue that even the mighty
United States needed to choose its battlegrounds, and Vietnam was
simply the wrong place to fi ght. But to most of those around the pres-
ident, history suggested that as the guarantor of international stability
the nation must take up the communist challenge wherever it presented
itself. Put another way, within the conventional foreign policy outlook of
American leaders in 1964–1965, a president facing the situation that
confronted Lyndon Johnson exercised no real agency or choice on the
decision to go to war. As with the wartime presidents before him,
circumstances drove Johnson in only one possible direction. All that
diff ered was the nature of the circumstances, here more ideological than
practical but no less binding.