402 notes to pages 207‒210
Vietnam. Langguth says the Politburo in Hanoi, though hoping to
overturn the Saigon government before decisive American intervention,
still declined in December 1963 to send northern troops into combat.
Langguth, Our Vietnam , 275. However, the Ninth Party Plenum in late
1963 approved the dispatch of northern troops to the South. Schandler,
America in Vietnam , 43. Harry Summers dates the introduction of regular
NVA troops to late summer 1964. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A
Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Presidio, 1982, 1995), 87.
Hanoi claimed after the war that none of its troops joined the struggle
until after American forces arrived in large numbers, an assertion few
Western observers then or later have accepted.- Hanoi clearly accelerated its eff orts to achieve victory before the United
States could intervene on a massive scale. Schandler, America in Vietnam ,
43, 45. - H. W. Brands, Th e Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of
American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 220. - Langguth, Our Vietnam , 266–67; Doris Kearns [Goodwin], Lyndon
Johnson and the American Dream (New York: New American Library,
1976), 268. Not all scholars accept this view of an insecure Johnson on
foreign policy. For contrasting assessments, see Gary R. Hess, Presidential
Decisions for War: Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 80 ; Elizabeth H. Saunders, Leaders at
War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2011) , chap. 5. - Brands, Wages of Globalism , 235; Langguth, Our Vietnam , 118.
- Hess, Presidential Decisions for War , 79.
- Hess, Presidential Decisions for War , 107.
- Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam,” 148.
- Former President Eisenhower advised Johnson in 1965 that if the Chinese
entered the war the United States should use tactical nuclear weapons
if necessary, and expressed confi dence the Chinese would not retaliate.
Langguth, Our Vietnam , 349. Others, fortunately, were not so sanguine
about where the use of nuclear weapons might lead. - James S. Robbins, Th is Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Off ensive (New
York: Encounter Books, 2010), 24. Th ere was good reason for uncer-
tainty about Chinese intentions. Mao Zedong in early 1965 signaled
via the writer Edgar Snow that China would not intervene in the war
unless attacked and added that Beijing expected to establish friendly
relations with the United States at some point. But Mao also off ered
Ho Chi Minh support troops in April 1965 and pledged combat troops
in the event of an American invasion of the DRV. As Johnson weighed
sending major American ground units in summer 1965, General Harold
Johnson, the army chief of staff , predicted that China would not send
troops into the confl ict, but could off er no answer when the president