In public, the President was nothing but a hawk, after all there was an image to uphold and a Cold War to wage. But in the Spring of 1964, LBJ had serious doubts over American involvement in Vietnam. President Johnson would tell his NSA McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964 that Vietnam was “the biggest damn mess I ever saw” and would lament “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out.” A few days later he would confide to his close friend Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, “the more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this . . . it just worries the hell out of me,” adding that “it’s damned easy to get in war. But it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you do get in.” At the time, the American commitment to Saigon was limited to few thousand US military advisers to help train the South Vietnamese to fight the North in addition to a small amount of equipment.
By August of that year, however, the die was cast and Johnson would prove his dictum correct. The country plunged easily into a war that would see over half a million US military personnel served, 58,000 of them never to come home. In toto, there would be 350,000 US casualties plus an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Vietnamese deaths. The war once limited to Vietnam would spill over into Cambodia and Laos with lethal and fateful consequences. In financial terms, the war would cost an approximate $584 billion. It’s not clear if President Johnson ever answered his own doubts and that nagging question of what’s the endgame.
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