Before Lyndon Johnson made his decision to increase American involvement in the Vietnam conflict, he had received written recommendations from the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These documents are key in understanding Johnson’s decision but they only comprise part of the decision making process. While well-written and thoughtful position papers can make a persuasive argument, they are not the most important factor in making a decision. The most important factor in decision-making is the schema of the decision maker.
The use of a variety of tools can provide insight into how Johnson made his decision. Allison’s three models of decision-making are all useful to build the picture and try to gain an understanding of why Johnson decided to increase America’s military role in the Vietnam War. Each model can provide an added layer of insight, which combined with an analysis of Johnson’s schema, can help explain why Johnson made the decision he did.
Allison’s Model I, The Rational Actor, serves as a good starting point for analysis. This model provides an initial outline of the stated “goals and objectives” . These stated objectives can offer insight for what decision makers and advocates see as important. The position paper from the executive committee makes the objectives clear. First, to have “...North Vietnamese (DRY) support and direction removed from South Vietnam….” Second to “Re-establish an independent and secure South Vietnam….” Lastly to “Maintain the security of other non-Communist nations in Southeast Asia….”
While Model I illustrates the stated goals and objectives, it does not give the whole picture. As Allison explains, it neglects to take into account Bounded Rationality . Th...
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White House Executive Committee, “Position Paper on Southeast Asia” 2 Dec 1964 (School of Advance Warfighting 7190 Writing Assignment Reader) 17. Cited hereafter as White House, “Position Paper on Southeast Asia”
White House, “Position Paper on Southeast Asia” 17
White House, “Position Paper on Southeast Asia” 17
Allison, 20
Allison, 145
Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCSM-982-64 “Memorandum regarding Courses of Action in Southeast Asia” 23 Nov 1964 (School of Advance Warfighting 7190 Writing Assignment Reader) 15. Cited hereafter as JCSM-982-64 “Memorandum regarding Courses of Action in Southeast Asia
National Security Council Working Group “Course of Action in Southeast Asia” 12 Nov 1964 (School of Advance Warfighting 7190 Writing Assignment Reader)
JCSM-982-64 “Memorandum regarding Courses of Action in Southeast Asia, 17.
Allison, pg 264
One of the key strengths of this book is the author's first-hand knowledge of the people, places, and events that he is writing about. He also supplemented this first-hand knowledge with extensive interviews. In one example, he elaborated on the "chain of command" in Vietnam, which began with General Paul Harkins (and William C. Westmoreland) to the CINCPAC (Admiral Harry Felt) and from CINCPAC to Washington. "Not once in their four years of mutual agony in Vietnam did Harkins's successor, General Westmoreland, pick up the telephone and call his commander-in-chief, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Westmoreland did not have the authority, he told me."(169) This information came directly from an interview with Westmoreland. There are other anecdotes similar to this with each contributing to the extensive nature of the book's detail.
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The investigation assesses the level of success President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization policy attained during the Vietnam War to end U.S. involvement in the war. In the strive to evaluate the level of success this policy demonstrated, the investigation evaluates the ability of the policy to equip, expand, and train Southern Vietnamese forces and allocate them to a substantial combat position, all while simultaneously reducing the quantity of U.S. combat troops in a steady manner. The Vietnamization policy is investigated and analyzed by both its causes and effects. The motivation that led to Nixon’s creation of this policy will be investigated as well. The investigation encompasses an array of sources, which will be analyzed for their purpose, value, bias, accuracy, and any further limitations.
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At the start of the movie, photos of the medium-range ballistic Soviet missiles in Cuba are revealed to President Kennedy. This new information the United States possessed was unbeknownst to the public, press and the Soviets themselves. Therefore, a team of advisors known as exComm, including special assistant to the President, Kenneth O’Donnell, Robert Kennedy, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, are assembled to discuss the next course of action privately. The various public administration theories of decision making are useful in analysing the president and his team’s various deliberations on actions that should be taken to tackle the crisis as portrayed in the movie. Ideally, the President should have adopted the rational comprehensive approach in his decision making process; engaging a systematic ana...
The Vietnam War was the longest and most expensive war in American History. The toll we paid wasn't just financial, it cost the people involved greatly, physically and mentally. This war caused great distress and sadness, as well as national confusion. Everyone had that one burning question being why? Why were we even there? The other question being why did America withdrawal from Vietnam. The purpose of this paper is to answer these two burning questions, and perhaps add some clarity to the confusion American was experiencing.
The decision to aid Vietnam was a difficult one that all five Presidents struggled with but it was in 1961 when Kennedy sent a team to Vietnam to report on conditions in the South and to assess future American aid requirements (Rorak, 1,065). The problem was that this decision was like a snowball roiling down a hill, gaining size and momentum as it tore a path down the hill. While I agree with President Kennedy’s analysis that “this is their war and that they are the ones who have to win it or lose it” it does not spport the fact that the war lasted for MMM years. President Kennedy further states that, ”We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but t...
So many things influenced our involvement in the Vietnam War, and Lawrence examines the decisions we made in a greater context than just our own. He argues that international pressures controlled the attitudes and ideas of the United States, for the most part.
This book details the discussion of government policy in the stages of the Vietnam crisis from 1961-July 1965. It examines the main characters of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, in addition to the military, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It began in the Kennedy era amidst the Bay of Pigs incident and how that led to mistrust of the military planning by advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It continues with Johnson and his administration making decisions over and over that continued to commit more and more involve...
The purpose of this paper is to better understand the political dynamics that were in play at the very beginning of the Vietnam crisis that eventually lead to the disastrous war in Vietnam. It will examine the historical record from various viewpoints and hope to discover those instances where a failure in communication lead to a cascade effect of fear and uncertainty that set into motion those events that drew the political leaders of the United States deeper and deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam and south-east Asia. How did the Logic of Fear dominate the thinking and policies at the time? The hypothesis of this paper is to show that those failures in communication and signaling could plausibly have been avoided with more adept diplomacy, and subsequently the war in Vietnam could have been averted.
During the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential administration, both those policy makers who supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and those who opposed the war were part of the “containment generation.” They had reached political maturity during World War II and the early years of the Cold War and had experienced the intense anticommunism of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. These leaders understood and applied the lessons of American nationalism, which had the primary message that the U.S. was the dominating nation that had to embrace its responsibility to aid and improve nations in America’s image. Therefore, when they saw that there was a threat of the spread of communism to areas of Southeast Asia, a majority of the politicians were in favor of the war, which was the most costly U.S. foreign policy intervention during the Cold War. President Johnson and others considered Vietnam a crucial Cold war battleground where an American loss would trigger dire domestic and international repercussions. This view led him to decide to enter the Vietnam War, which was a condemnable action considering that there were intensifying domestic issues that he neglected because he was engrossed in the Vietnam situation. Anti-War protesters, a few politicians, and even the South Vietnamese all pointed out that this war was immoral and was resulting in destruction. Ultimately, Johnson’s decision resulted in a huge price paid on America’s part for its determination to prevent the spread of communism through this war and in the deaths of more 50,000 in an overseas war that was extremely difficult to win and that deepened divisions at home.
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President Johnson’s in-group avoided reconsidering its escalation policy when time and again the expectation on which they based their decisions turned out to be wrong. The policy-makers avoided the discussion of prior decisions and kept inventing new rationalizations to recommit themselves into defeating the North Vietnamese.