The Price of Loyalty
Vietnam: America in the War Years
Series Editor: David L. Anderson
California State University, Monterey Bay
The Vietnam War and the tumultuous internal upheavals in America that coincided with it marked a watershed era in U.S. history. These events profoundly challenged America’s heroic self-image. During the 1950s the United States defined Southeast Asia as an area of vital strategic importance. In the 1960s this view produced a costly American military campaign that continued into the early 1970s. The Vietnam War ended with an unprecedented U.S. failure to achieve its stated objectives. Simultaneous with this frustrating military intervention and the domestic debate that it produced were other tensions created by student activism on campuses, the black struggle for civil rights, and the women’s liberation movement. The books in this series explore the complex and controversial issues of the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s in brief and engaging volumes. To facilitate continued and informed debate on these contested subjects, each book examines a military, political, or diplomatic issue; the role of a key individual; or one of the domestic changes in America during the war.
Titles in the Series
Eugenie M. Blang, Allies at Odds: America, Europe, and Vietnam, 1961–1968
Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam
Mitchell K. Hall, Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation
Walter LaFeber, The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election
Joseph A. Fry, Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings
Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Like Rolling Thunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964–1975
David F. Schmitz, Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War: The End of the American Century
David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion
Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds
Edward K. Spann, Democracy’s Children: The Young Rebels of the 1960s and the Power of Ideals
David L. Anderson, Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy
Andrew L. Johns, The Price of Loyalty: Hubert Humphrey’s Vietnam Conflict
The Price of Loyalty
Hubert Humphrey’s Vietnam Conflict
Andrew L. Johns
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Introduction
“The Graveyard of Presidential Ambitions”
It’s like being naked in the middle of a blizzard with no one to even offer you a match to keep you warm: that’s the vice presidency.
—Hubert Humphrey
He who blinded by ambition raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher must thereafter fall with the greatest loss.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
The delegates assembled in the Miami Beach Convention Center cheered wildly as the newly crowned Democratic nominee raised his hands in triumph on stage. Standing next to Lyndon Johnson—who would serve longer in the White House (over nine years) than anyone except Franklin Delano Roosevelt and who had just finished introducing his presumptive successor as president—the former U.S. senator from Minnesota basked in the rapturous adulation of the crowd, equally exhausted by the long week of political maneuvering at the convention and energized by the prospect of running for president against Ronald Reagan in a battle of contrasting ideological prescriptions for the country’s future. The conservative governor of California, who had narrowly lost his party’s nomination four years earlier to Richard Nixon, had prevailed in the hard-fought GOP primaries against House minority leader Gerald Ford (R-MI), Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY), and Governor George Romney (R-MI). Reagan’s coronation as the Republican presidential candidate would take place four weeks later in the same building in which the vice president now stood on stage.
It had been a long and winding road to Miami for the Democratic standard-bearer. Over the past eight years, the Johnson administration had faced complex challenges both at home and abroad: social upheaval, racial strife, congressional battles over domestic reforms, and the omnipresent Cold War, just to name a few. But the president’s decision in February 1965 to disengage from Vietnam and allow the United Nations to oversee elections based on the 1954 Geneva Accords had not only prevented a potentially long and costly war but also made Johnson realize just how valuable the vice president’s domestic political acumen and foreign policy experience could be. Their partnership since that decision, based on mutual respect and loyalty, defined the administration’s legacy and contributed significantly to the success of Johnson’s presidency. Now, at long last, the vice president’s unwavering allegiance to LBJ had been rewarded with the president’s full support in the primaries. Now his political dreams and ambitions had been realized, and he had unbridled optimism for the future of the United States. Now he would build on the domestic achievements of the Great Society and lead the country and the world into a new era of peace, prosperity, and justice, all shaped by his deeply held liberal principles. As Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. approached the podium to formally accept the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, he was the personification of the politics of joy.
* * * * *
In reality, of course, history did not play out that way. Instead of following Hubert Humphrey’s perspicacious advice in February 1965, Lyndon Johnson chose war in Vietnam and escalated the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia exponentially. That decision would lead not only to a disastrous conflict that wasted billions of dollars and resulted in millions of U.S. and Vietnamese lives lost but also to deep and lasting divisions in U.S. society. The Vietnam conflict would cripple the once-dominant U.S. economy, weaken the nation’s diplomatic and moral influence, fundamentally alter the social and cultural fabric of the country, and cause permanent damage to U.S. political institutions. Moreover, it would cost LBJ and Richard Nixon their presidencies and would so undermine the public’s faith in its government that it would never recover. The war in Vietnam also become the decisive factor in Humphrey’s loss to Nixon in the 1968 presidential election, with Johnson’s lack of