"Loss" of Vietnam in 1968 election

What would be the result of 1968 election if no ground troops mean South Vietnam went Communist

  • Caused the Republican landslide.

    Votes: 9 31.0%
  • Crucial in the narrow Republican victory.

    Votes: 13 44.8%
  • May have been a factor but Democrats still squeezed in.

    Votes: 4 13.8%
  • May have slightly reduced the Democrat landslide but not important

    Votes: 3 10.3%

  • Total voters
    29
  • Poll closed .

raharris1973

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The number of choices are insufficient. The Democrats could lose for reasons largely unrelated to Vietnam but more related to urban riots and post-civil rights backlash.

The GOP might try to make the "loss" of South Vietnam their winning issue, like the "Who Lost China?" debate. On the other hand, South Vietnam might not have the same resonance as China given all the other global and domestic subjects the candidates have to talk about.

It's probably best for the GOP to criticize LBJ's foreign policies and outcomes in very general terms and not get caught discussing what they would have done different.

It is not like an appeal to voters that says "hey, you should have voted for us and we could have a Korean like wr over the last couple years" would have much appeal.
 
Aren't we making the assumption that Diem won't last? Ngo Dinh Diem basically overcame the odds against crime syndicates, monarchists, and ethnic minorities to lead the Republic of Vietnam. If Diem doesn't U.S have ground troops as a guarantee he could play it a lot smarter with non-Catholics, I still suspect he would still be getting aid as well.
 
It depends on how this scenario plays out. Are you saying we do not Americanize the war in 1964/1965? I think the loss of South Vietnam despite American efforts would be the more complicated scenario. By that point, Humphrey has distanced himself from the war anyway, so Johnson would be left alone with the bag, although there may be residual ire from the people who supported the war and saw it lost, and lives and effort wasted. But, on the topic of no American ground fighting in the war, it is going to depend on Americanization. Is LBJ making Vietnam an issue, and sending bombers and all the rest without boots on the ground? Because if it is just a status quo pre-1964 situation with American involvement in Vietnam, it probably is not going to matter. Before we sent in the Marines, Vietnam was one of many flashpoints on the map, which most Americans could not point to on the map, if they had even heard of it at all. William F. Buckley may lament, but to the farmer in Iowa it isn't going to mean diddlydick. It would be like hearing Nepal fell to rebel Communist forces. That is a fear in terms of the Cold War and international Communism, but the focus would be more on the Sino-Soviet threat and not on the nation itself, and it would be a drop in the bucket.

That is the thing. Our actual history puffed up Vietnam into such an issue that it is hard to think of it as something that could have not really mattered to Americans. And it easily could have, because it did not matter to Americans until we sent ground forces. It was a small third world country of limited economic prospect and no ability to project influence on a global scale. It could easily have fallen into the ether of history, just like Laos, another place where we could have had a quagmire war which we avoided and now who remembers Laos or argues that it would have crippled the sitting president to not go into a war in Laos (which we ended up not doing)? There are parallel realities where this thread is "WI: Loss of Laos in the 1968 Election", or "WI: Loss of Algeria in the 1968 Election", where there are these are forgotten crises which were navigated without war, which became a big deal because of some parallel world's war and involvement and no one can see how they could be anything but pivotal and dominating.
 
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Even without Vietnam, I think it would still be close either way. The post-civil rights backlash and any urban riots will ensure this. OTOH, without an Americanized Vietnam War you most likely don't have the OTL debacle of the Democratic convention, particularly if LBJ runs. Without Vietnam, he most likely gets easily nominated, with McCarthy ending up as a flash in the pan, if he even contests the nomination in the first place.
 
Even without Vietnam, I think it would still be close either way. The post-civil rights backlash and any urban riots will ensure this. OTOH, without an Americanized Vietnam War you most likely don't have the OTL debacle of the Democratic convention, particularly if LBJ runs. Without Vietnam, he most likely gets easily nominated, with McCarthy ending up as a flash in the pan, if he even contests the nomination in the first place.

It depends how the scenario plays out. But I do hold to the belief that Vietnam turned things up to 11. Yes, there would have been backlash and intergenerational politics at play. But Vietnam took everything that was there and made it much more militant, bitter, angry and hostile. It was not something so simple as John growing up and growing his hair and listening to that weird music. With Vietnam, John is calling his father a fascist, and his father still thinks that you do what your country asks you to do and John needs to go to Vietnam since he's been drafted, and his son and his friends are unamerican and dangerous. Vietnam is a serious moral issue which forced a call to action by the New Left and allied thinkers, which bundled itself with all the other culture politics of the time and impacted them. And the backlash reacted to the whole of that bundle of cultural issues. Avoiding Vietnam lessens the extremes and the tension. It will be there, but not as harshly.
 
Why would Johnson lose the election? Without Vietnam he is relatively successful and the incumbent so likely to win.
 
Aren't we making the assumption that Diem won't last? Ngo Dinh Diem basically overcame the odds against crime syndicates, monarchists, and ethnic minorities to lead the Republic of Vietnam. If Diem doesn't U.S have ground troops as a guarantee he could play it a lot smarter with non-Catholics, I still suspect he would still be getting aid as well.
Diem was an idiot. The reason why he was overthrown in the first place was because he was doing a bad job of battling the insurgency. He only became leader in the first place because there was nobody else available. And Diem relied upon Catholics for his support, so there's no way in hell he'd start acting tolerant.
 

raharris1973

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It depends on how this scenario plays out. Are you saying we do not Americanize the war in 1964/1965? I think the loss of South Vietnam despite American efforts would be the more complicated scenario. By that point, Humphrey has distanced himself from the war anyway, so Johnson would be left alone with the bag, although there may be residual ire from the people who supported the war and saw it lost, and lives and effort wasted. But, on the topic of no American ground fighting in the war, it is going to depend on Americanization. Is LBJ making Vietnam an issue, and sending bombers and all the rest without boots on the ground? Because if it is just a status quo pre-1964 situation with American involvement in Vietnam, it probably is not going to matter. Before we sent in the Marines, Vietnam was one of many flashpoints on the map, which most Americans could not point to on the map, if they had even heard of it at all. William F. Buckley may lament, but to the farmer in Iowa it isn't going to mean diddlydick. It would be like hearing Nepal fell to rebel Communist forces. That is a fear in terms of the Cold War and international Communism, but the focus would be more on the Sino-Soviet threat and not on the nation itself, and it would be a drop in the bucket.

That is the thing. Our actual history puffed up Vietnam into such an issue that it is hard to think of it as something that could have not really mattered to Americans. And it easily could have, because it did not matter to Americans until we sent ground forces. It was a small third world country of limited economic prospect and no ability to project influence on a global scale. It could easily have fallen into the ether of history, just like Laos, another place where we could have had a quagmire war which we avoided and now who remembers Laos or argues that it would have crippled the sitting president to not go into a war in Laos (which we ended up not doing)? There are parallel realities where this thread is "WI: Loss of Laos in the 1968 Election", or "WI: Loss of Algeria in the 1968 Election", where there are these are forgotten crises which were navigated without war, which became a big deal because of some parallel world's war and involvement and no one can see how they could be anything but pivotal and dominating.


Brilliant exposition of why the default consensus among what-iffers may be wrong about the domestic consequences of not escalating in Vietnam. I mean, valid counter-arguments or possible, but the above is as good an explanation as any for how even a forcibly communist unified Vietnam might fade into obscurity.
 
Hmm. On one hand no ground troops meets South Vietnam falls which is a bonus for Republicans. On the other it means more funding goes into the Great Society so that's more successful.
 

raharris1973

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Assuming its still LBJ versus Wallace versus Nixon, maybe the result is a narrow win for LBJ, with him getting all of Humphrey's states plus a couple Nixon states, with the Wallace being the 2nd place finisher and Nixon the third place?

Maybe the same dynamic could occur if Rocky is the GOP candidate?
 
This was the one thing LBJ and even Nixon feared the most. The fall of Saigon during their watches. They really feared that the fall of Saigon could result in a Second Joe McCarthy Red Scare, led by goodness knows who. You have to remember that they and JFK and Gerald Ford were all in Congress in the early Fifties and personally witnessed the horrors of McCarthyism. A fall of Saigon in 1968 would probably have either Nixon or Reagan or even Rockefeller win the Republican nomination. Goldwater, Reagan, and even Scoop Jackson were anti-communist to the core but they were certainly not fruitcakes like Tailgunner Joe.
 
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