Lyndon Johnson Administrations - Foreign Issues
Foreign Issues
When Johnson became president in 1963, most American's were indifferent to the conflict in Vietnam. During the 1964 campaign Johnson promised that no more U.S. troops would be sent to Southeast Asia. This was not true. In fact, Johnson had already come to believe that a Communist victory in Vietnam would eventually lead to Communist domination of other nations in the region, a process known as the "domino effect." In 1947 the U.S. foreign policy establishment had called for the "containment" of Communism. This view of the world had been confirmed in the "fall of China" to the Communists in 1949, and it had been tested in the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and 1949 and in the bloody stalemate in Korea of the early 1950s (See also, ). Johnson did not intend to see the process repeated in Vietnam. His attempt to contain the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia became an obsession that utterly overwhelmed his efforts in...
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