IMHO, not to derail anything, but Nixon once said in the Gannon interviews:
"Johnson -- Johnson would have been -- frankly, Johnson would have been much better had he been Johnson. I -- I -- I hear these days, for example, some of the enthusiastic, sincere, ultra-conservative supporters of Reagan say, "Let Reagan be Reagan." Well, the best advice Johnson could have had, "Let Johnson be Johnson", rather than trying to pander to his liberal critics. If Johnson had been Johnson, he would not have had gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam."
"I think it wouldn't be useful to name names of some of the higher-ups, but I would say what we're talking about are people--and they are the most important of all--at the second level in the bureaucracy, in State particularly, a few in Defense, et cetera, who at the beginning went along in this macho business that--"Well, we've got to be strong and hold the line everyplace in the world against Communism," and then, when push came to shove, didn't want to do what was necessary to stop Communist dir--insurrection and revolutionary warfare in Vietnam. And then, when they began to see the media turning against it, they turned, too. And, as a result--let me put it bluntly with regard to Johnson. We sometimes hear today, people say, the conservatives, "Let Reagan be Reagan." Johnson's problem was nobody told him, "Let Johnson be Johnson." If Johnson had been Johnson in Vietnam, he would have finished it before I ever got to be president. And maybe if he'd finished it, I would have never been president. So--who knows?"
After studying him, my conclusion is that LBJ, left to his own devices, wouldn't have gone for the gradual escalation. He either would have stomped the North Vietnamese in the proverbial nuts like the Texan he was (Johnson treatment) or would not have bothered at all, with my inclination for the latter. But he worried about his own legitimacy too much, and felt that his Kennedy holdovers knew better than he did. Johnson was deep down a very, very insecure man with an inferiority complex or two. He wanted desperately to win them over like he was winning everybody else over, the Establishment "technocratic liberals" and thought he could translate his considerable domestic political skills into foreign policy. He knew Vietnam was a loser from the beginning, but felt that he couldn't politically afford to go, and trusted that his advisors were looking out for him, and when things started to go badly, they turned on him... Vietnam, combined with other factors, was the true splintering of classical Eastern liberalism and the New Deal status quo, when you think about it. The results of said fissure in the Democratic Party were the "New Left" like McCarthy or McGovern, or the "New Democrats" like RFK, Carter, and eventually Clinton. The fissure swallowed the man sitting on top who was in many ways the peak of FDR's legacy. Deep down, he was somewhat intimidated and awed by the pedigrees that he could never have. It's ironic in a man who in many ways could have been said to fall because of hubris.
Johnson bungled it, that's true, especially in being a little less than candid with the people. But it's far from being black and white. Lyndon Johnson was as much a casualty of Vietnam as anybody. He died right before the peace agreement was signed in Paris in early 1973, don't forget.
