Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and The Wars for Vietnam.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen

In the opening pages of his lengthy history of the Johnson administration's Vietnam policy, Lloyd Gardner observes that explaining America's involvement in Vietnam is not a simple matter. To his credit, Gardner endeavors to provide a multidimensional analysis of an extraordinarily complex topic. He faces a difficult task, for at the most basic level he must provide a convincing thesis to explain why an American president persisted in a policy that showed unmistakable signs of failure early on. Indeed, that president refused to retreat even when it became apparent that the Vietnam intervention was undermining his Great Society domestic agenda, supposedly his highest priority, and imperiling his political future.

Gardner's effort to provide a comprehensive and compelling explanation is only partially successful. The most serious weakness is his emphasis on the economic dimensions of American policy. Readers of Gardner's previous works will hardly be surprised at the prominence of that factor in Pay Any Price. And there is no denying that economic considerations played a role in the Johnson administration's Vietnam policy. Gardner argues that LBJ's formative experiences during the New Deal era led to an unusual attachment to the gospel of government-directed economic development. Johnson believed that generous offers of developmental aid to North Vietnam would persuade Ho Chi Minh to abandon his aggressive strategy to subjugate South Vietnam and instead join in cooperative enterprises that would benefit all of Vietnam. As Gardner puts it, Johnson was confident that it was possible to convince Ho "to accept a dam on the Mekong River instead of a residence in Saigon" (p. 23).

That approach was certainly evident in Johnson's April 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University. In that address, which many scholars of the Vietnam War era have dismissed as a crude piece of propaganda, the president proposed a massive TVA-style development project for North Vietnam if Hanoi renounced its efforts to reunify the country by force. There is every reason to believe that the offer was not a cynical ploy but a genuine carrot in a carrot-and-stick strategy. Moreover, Johnson was not the only member of the administration to hope that such rewards might induce Hanoi to adopt a more cooperative policy. Some of the president's most influential advisers, most notably Walt W. Rostow, also embraced that approach.

Unfortunately, Gardner takes that application of the...