Scriptie: 'Witness to human folly.'

‘WITNESS TO HUMAN FOLLY’ Lyndon Johnson’s Rhetoric on the Vietnam War and the Great Society

KOEN UFFING

‘WITNESS TO HUMAN FOLLY’ Lyndon Johnson’s Rhetoric on the Vietnam War and the Great Society

©2018 KOEN UFFING EEN UITGAVE VAN UITGEVERIJ JONGE HISTORICI REDACTIE PRISCILLA PATELSKI OPMAAK WOUTER WOUDA OMSLAGFOTO PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON ADDRESSES THE AUDIENCE BEFORE SIGNING THE WHOLESOME MEAT ACT

JONGEHISTORICI.NL

Contents Introduction 4 Chapter Structure, Sources and Thesis Statement Theoretical Framework Historical Context

6 7 10

I: The Rhetoric of the Great Society

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The ‘Great Society’ Speech Johnson’s Inaugural Address Lyndon Johnson’s Exceptionalism The Narrative of the Great Society

II: Civil Rights, the Great Society, and the Progressive Jeremiad

13 15 16 18

19

The ‘We Shall Overcome’ Speech The Progressive Jeremiad The Great Society and Voting Rights

20 22 25

III: The Rhetoric of Vietnam

26

The ‘Peace Without Conquest’ Speech A Great Society at Home and Abroad The Rhetoric of Dissent The Rhetoric of Johnson’s Decline Intertwining the Vietnam War with the Great Society

Closing Remarks The Rhetoric of the Great Society The Rhetoric of Voting Rights The Rhetoric of Patriotism The Rhetoric of Vietnam The Rhetoric of President Johnson

27 28 29 31 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

Sources Used 41 Bibliography 43

Introduction ‘In the countryside where I was born,’ president Lyndon Johnson of the United States reminisced in an April 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University, ‘I have seen the night illuminated, and the kitchens warmed, and the homes heated, where once the cheerless night and the ceaseless cold held sway.’1 All of this happened to the poverty-stricken Texas Hill Country of the president’s youth, because ‘electricity came to our area along the humming wires of the [Rural Electrification Administration.]’ This, Johnson held, was impressive.

Unlike feats of war and the temporality of power - mere ‘witness to human folly’ - a ‘rich harvest in a hungry land,’ and the ‘sight of healthy children in a classroom’ were true feats of civilization: achievements which did not define the powerful society, or even the wealthy society, but the society the president described in May 1964 as the place where ‘the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit’ were to be fulfilled; prioritized and protected by a government seeking to ‘pursue the happiness’ of its people.

It was a place Johnson designated as the Great Society: a design aim-

ing ‘to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit,’ and would start a new chapter in the history of American civilization.2 Yet, in that fateful Baltimore address, President Johnson was hardly selling the works of peace.

Instead, he was defending his administration’s policy to escalate Amer1

2

President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’, delivered at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, April 7, 1965, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/exhibits/the-presidents-address-at-johns-hopkins-university-peace-without-conquest (accessed: 25 November, 2016).

President Johnson, ‘The Great Society’, delivered on May 22, 1965, Ann Arbor, Michigan, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/lbjthegreatsociety.htm (accessed: January 24, 2017).

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ican involvement in a conflict that was dragging the remote nations of North and South Vietnam into the dark abyss of war, their armed struggle sustained by the deployment of 184,000 U.S. troops at the close of 1965.

Thus, even in defending hawkish Vietnam policy, Johnson relied on

the hopeful rhetoric of his Great Society to explain policies to the public. But how did Lyndon Johnson incorporate the themes of Great Society reform into the broader body of his early Vietnam War rhetoric? The historiographical relevance of this research question is twofold. Firstly, this question challenges the conceptual dichotomy found in the literature on the escalation of the Vietnam War. In maintaining this dichotomy, foreign policy considerations are overwhelmingly singled out by political historians as the predominant factor in explaining the administration’s strategy, while their relationship with domestic affairs are given scant notice.

‘Policymakers’ blind devotion to a static Cold War vision,’ Brian Van-

DeMark observed in his historical study, ‘led America into misfortune in Vietnam.’3 In VanDeMark’s narrative, a lack of ‘critical perspective and sensibility’ towards the assumptions underpinning Cold War doctrines confirmed flawed reasoning which ‘failed to perceive Vietnamese realities accurately.’

To make matters worse, this deficit was compounded by ‘an arrogant and stubborn faith in American power’ to ‘stimulate political order in South Vietnam through the application of military force against North Vietnam.’4

While Fredrik Logevall’s historical research has suggested that even

internal government pessimism about American success was unable to challenge this Cold War rigidity,5 military historian David Kaiser has pointed out the collective flaws of the so-called GI generation in explaining why contemporary foreign policy wisdom went unquestioned.6 In Kaiser’s view, the formative and successful World War II experience had shaped a generation of officials that ‘contained almost no doubters about the wisdom or the success of the enterprise,’ preventing critical assessments from taking root in the policy-making processes that ultimately resulted in sustained escalation of Washington’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict.7 However, the way

3 4 5 6 7

Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire. Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York 1991), xiv.

Ibidem.

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War. The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley 1999), xvi-xix.

David Kaiser, American Tragedy. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge 2000), 8.

Ibidem.

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in which White House policy was influenced by domestic politics deserves equal scholarly attention, as noted by Andrew John’s political history of the Republican Party’s role during the war.8 Johnson’s usage of themes linked to Great Society legislation in Vietnam rhetoric serves to underline this point.

Secondly, the need for a study focusing on the president’s Vietnam

War rhetoric is compounded by the scant attention Vietnam scholars like VanDeMark, Logevall and Kaiser direct to rhetoric in their political histories. Instead, these political historians appear to prioritize the proceedings of internal government deliberations over scrutinizing Johnson’s policy speeches. Hence, I contribute to the existing literature on the escalation of the Vietnam War by casting the president’s rhetoric in a feature role.

Chapter Structure, Sources and Thesis Statement This thesis is split into three chapters. In the first chapter, I establish the tone and content of domestic Great Society rhetoric, directing particular attention to the way Johnson presented the overarching themes of his reforms.

In the second chapter, I discuss the manner in which Johnson framed civil rights legislation as part of the Great Society, and expand my narrative so as to include a critical analysis of the progressive merits of the president’s rhetoric. In the third chapter, I explore how the themes of Great Society reforms were incorporated into Johnson’s early Vietnam War rhetoric.

A number of presidential speeches are analyzed in the pages of this

study. The most important of these constitute Johnson’s May 1964 ‘The Great Society’ speech at Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan, his January 1965 inaugural address, the president’s March 1965 ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech to a joint session of Congress, and his April 1965 ‘Peace Without Conquest’ address at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. Each of these speeches were delivered at formative moments during the Johnson presidency, and each of these speeches were delivered in the ritualistic fashion that characterized contemporary political practice. Consequently, these sources represented a moment in time where presidential powers were exercised and public responsibility was assumed, binding the administration to the policy positions promulgated by the president. These speeches were, in other words, a key part of Johnson’s political repertoire and account-

8

Andrew L. John, Vietnam’s Second Front. Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington 2010), 1-3.

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ability, and are therefore considered to be a critical component of the president’s strategizing at decisive moments during his term in office.

The sources used support the argument that Johnson’s early Vietnam

rhetoric was intimately linked with his public defense of Great Society reforms. In the final analysis, I hold that the similarities between President Johnson’s Great Society and Vietnam War rhetoric challenge the conceptual dichotomy between domestic and foreign affairs. Such an observation is especially poignant in the context of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, which scholars and lay observers frequently describe in dualistic fashion: emphasizing the political success of his civil rights and Great Society legislation on the one hand, while harshly criticizing the misjudgments of the Vietnam War on the other. In this study, I argue that such duality is hardly reflected in the way Johnson chose to portray his own presidential leadership.

Theoretical Framework The particular application of rhetoric under study here is the presidential address. Travelling such a road has meant that no attempt to discern the private, or ‘real’ views of President Johnson has been undertaken.

Acknowledging this methodological approach is, however, not to say that my interpretation of Johnson public remarks lacks historiographical merit.

For as the highest government official elected on a nationwide basis, the president has the unique ability to frame issues on said nationwide basis, and to set the terms for the public debate that ensues. As a repertoire of what political scientist Richard Neustadt has famously dubbed the executive ‘power to persuade,’ or ‘vantage point,’ his or her speeches stake a claim on the political values of the society in which they are delivered.9

In such fashion, the study of presidential remarks highlights the ways

in which policy is associated with American national identity, and becomes a methodological part of the process that reveals, in the words of political scientist Jeffrey Tulis, ‘the set of ideas that legitimizes political practice.’10 But while Tulis’ The Rhetorical Presidency offers a relevant perspective on how to think about the role of rhetoric in the context of the modern presidency and the politics empowering it, Tulis is limited by a narrow outlook on the significance of political speeching that prioritizes its analytical 9 Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power. The Politics of Leadership from FDR to Carter (New York 1980), 26-29.

10 Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton 1987), 13.

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relationship with policy-making processes over scrutinizing the narrative choices implied in the phrasing of presidential rhetoric. Even though Tulis identifies the analytical link between rhetoric and the policy-making process, his narrative only appreciates said link in light of the political interests policy speeches serve. In contrast to The Rhetorical Presidency, I will prioritize the narrative phrasing of presidential rhetoric in order to critically evaluate the president’s remarks on their own terms, without expanding the scope of inquiry towards the policy-making process at large.

In applying this framework to the Johnson administration, I reflect

on the manner in which Johnson aligned welfare reform, the eradication of poverty, generational challenges of the 1960’s, civil rights legislation, and the escalation of the Vietnam War with contemporary American patriotic ideology. Literary scholar Sacvan Bercovich has traced the rhetoric of patriotism back to the days of Puritan New England, where rhetoric ‘joined lament and celebration in reaffirming America’s mission.’11 These speeches, described by Bercovitch as jeremiads, served to reconcile the reality of society with the fictions of communal myth, and provided audiences with assurances on how to incorporate ‘promise and condemnation’ in one fell swoop, effectively marrying national ideal with the ability to remedy societal flaws. But because these jeremiads sought to reaffirm existing notions of American patriotism, Bercovitch interprets them as instruments precluding ‘the possibility of fundamental change’ in American society, in effect transforming ‘what might have been a search for moral or social alternatives into a call for cultural revitalization.’12

If Tulis is too constrained by his focus on the political applications of

presidential rhetoric, Bercovtich fails to properly appreciate the political implications of the patriotic discourse he identifies. His The American Jeremiad may help historians understand the cultural forces shaping American society on a structural basis, but Bercovitch’s study offers no clear pathway on how to think about politicized strains of patriotic ideology. According to the Bercovtich depiction, political rhetoric is best understood as a literary genre expressing American cultural values, rather than offering meaningful clues about a given politician’s political strategy.

11 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison 1978), 10-11.

12 Ibidem, 16-17 and 178-179.

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The theoretical framework of this thesis is designed to offer a middle ground between Bercovitch and Tulis in three ways. Firstly, I follow both authors in recognizing the notion that rhetoric is intimately linked with a country’s legitimizing discourse, using the body of President Johnson’s speeches to affirm the importance of patriotic tendencies in political speechmaking.

Secondly, I accept Tulis’ notion that rhetoric is inherently linked with political strategy. Thirdly, I take Bercovitch’s concept of the jeremiad, which I define as a rhetorical genre calling for the revitalization of communal values in response to a perceived crisis, and deploy said concept in the context of Johnson’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech. I do so with the intent to problematize Bercovitch’s assertion on the conservative dynamic of American discourse, and seek to operationalize the jeremiad in a progressive context.

When interpreting American political rhetoric, one is well-served to

consider the broader context of the patriotic ideology shaping it. As the historian George McKenna has noted, American patriotism differs from its European counterparts in the way it is expressed through adherence to the broad ‘principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other founding documents,’ rather than observance of any set national ‘type’ or ‘character.’13 In more concrete terms, such language implies that in the United States, patriotism is conveyed through any range of symbols, ideas, phrases, persons, acts, and texts that can be aligned with a perceived sense of ‘being American.’

Consequently, speakers ranging from Martin Luther King to George

Wallace, and from Donald Trump to Barack Obama, can evoke a particular meaning of ‘America’ to defend fundamentally different causes as being inherently American all the same. Most relevant to this study, however, is the observation that such was the discourse empowering Lyndon Johnson to legitimize his calls for far-reaching Great Society reforms, sponsor legislation aimed at striking down the long-standing tradition of racial segregation in the South, and deploy American forces for the ‘defense’ of South Vietnam.

13 George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven 2007), 5.

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Historical Context Johnson’s Great Society rhetoric was shaped by a variety of factors contributing to its upbeat tone. The success of the New Deal, victory in World War II, and the relative wealth of the post-war era gave way to mainstream optimism about American power and the potential it held to change the world. Whether it drew on the successful experience of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency in utilizing governmental bureaucracies to bring about socio-economic reform, or took inspiration from the nation’s triumphant war effort, the Johnson administration’s optimism gave political expression to Henry Luce’s 1941 assessment of America as ‘the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice’ that undergirded the ‘American Century.’14 In addition, the political reality of the Cold War positioned the United States as the world’s sole free market superpower, further boosting the nation’s long-held belief in its own benevolence.

In terms of patriotic discourse, geopolitical bipolarism consolidated

into mainstream consensus on the alignment of both the United States and the Soviet Union, placing each on one end of the moral spectrum. In the typical worldview thereafter sketched by Cold War presidents, Washington came to represent altruistic benevolence, righteousness and freedom vis-à-vis the imperialism, oppression, and enslavement embodied

by Moscow.15 In this sense, the contemporary distribution of global power served to affirm existing notions of exceptionalism, which, in turn, fueled rhetoric underpinning domestic reform; and inherently justifying a sustained commitment to safeguarding South Vietnamese sovereignty against North Vietnamese ‘aggression’ supported by the communist bloc.

The imperative of a Vietnam policy sprang from the continued American

involvement in former Indochina ever since French colonial rule ended by 1954. That year, the Geneva Accords were signed, temporarily dividing Vietnam into Northern and Southern states along the seventeenth parallel, with ultimate unification to be settled by the result of nationwide elections held at a later date. For the time being, South Vietnam was to be ruled by a government led by Ngo Dinh Diem from Saigon, while North Vietnam became a communist 14 Henry Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life Magazine, February 17, 1941, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/ discussions261/luce.pdf (accessed: March 21, 2017).

15 Robert D. Schulzinger, ‘Cementing and Dissolving Consensus. Presidential Rhetoric during the Cold War, 19471969,’ in: Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank eds., Selling War in a Media Age. The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville 2010) 93-112, see 94-95.

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state led by Ho Chi Minh’s administration in Hanoi. The nationwide elections never took place: the Diem regime - backed by the United States as part of its anti-communist strategy of containment - repeatedly refused to participate, prompting regional tensions to gradually build up to the point of civil war.

Thus, Washington was presented with a dilemma: either it would contin-

ue to provide South Vietnam with military assistance, even though its government was run as a dictatorship void of popular support, or it had to face international embarrassment by surrendering its interests to the communists in the North. The latter was considered to be a worst-case scenario, since American policymakers adhered to a foreign policy doctrine commonly known as the domino theory, entailing the shared belief among government officials that the fall of any one non-communist nation to the socialist bloc could, in the long run, trigger the gradual demise of Southeast Asia as a whole.

In other words: should the United States fail to protect South Vietnam,

it had to face the possibility that communist forces would eventually invade all American allies in the region - a predicament Johnson himself described at Johns Hopkins by pondering whether withdrawal ‘from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.’16 Ultimately, the White House deemed this prospective domino scenario to be geopolitically unacceptable, opting in late 1964 and the first half of 1965 for military escalation over retreat, and sparking Washington’s direct involvement in what commentators have come to identify as the Vietnam War.

16 President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

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I: The Rhetoric of the Great Society For all intents and purposes, the Great Society was Lyndon Johnson’s

intended

legislative

legacy.

Devoting

significant

govern-

ment funds to improving education, natural preservation, welfare, and the eradication of domestic poverty, Johnson’s reform agenda thrust the United States, in the words of the historian Irving Bernstein, ‘a giant step forward in the direction of democratization.’17

In order to scrutinize what role the Great Society played in the larger

context of Johnson’s rhetoric, it is imperative to bring into view a variety of speeches touching on different aspects of the Great Society. In this chapter, I set out to do so. More specifically, I analyze two key speeches of the Johnson presidency: the president’s May 1964 ‘Great Society’ speech, and Johnson’s January 1965 inaugural address. In terms of substance, this first chapter demonstrates that Johnson positioned his domestic reform as an instrument to improve the immaterial welfare of the American nation first and foremost, and presented his agenda as part of the natural progression of American society towards fulfilling the millennialist promise first envisioned by its founders.

17 Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter. The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York 1996), 530.

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The ‘Great Society’ Speech Although Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ speech of May 22, 1964 was not the first time the president publicly used the term, his remarks at the University of Michigan served to detail Johnson’s legislative agenda - and, by extension, the overarching vision of the Great Society - comprehensively in the context of that year’s presidential election. Thus, the speech served as the public’s de facto introduction to Johnson’s program of domestic reform, and is therefore scrutinized here as the proposed mission statement of the Great Society.

The president, in his opening remarks, declared that ‘the purpose of pro-

tecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people.’18 Thematically, this statement foreshadowed the way in which Great Society rhetoric hoped to elevate the purpose of government, imbuing the constitutional goals of providing for the common defense and securing the blessings of liberty with a higher calling; eschewing an exclusively material justification of government in favor of an immaterial one.

It proved to be a sentiment echoed in Johnson’s closing remarks, when

he called on his student audience to embrace social action, asking for their help in building ‘a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.’ This immaterial conception of wealth is finally expressed in what Johnson considered the historical trajectory of the American nation, which in the nineteenth century encompassed labor to ‘settle and to subdue a continent.’ Over the next fifty years, the thirty-sixth president explained, America ‘called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.’ But the challenge would be different in the coming five decades, entailing the use of ‘wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization. (...) For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.’19

The distinction is an important one. The rich society is a place that

serves ‘the needs of the body and the demands of commerce’, but is condemned to ‘soulless wealth’ - that is, the collective fixation of material gain over immaterial fulfilment. The powerful society is defined in political terms: its success is expressed through its relative ability to project 18 President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

19 President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

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material power abroad. But Johnson’s rhetorical conception of the Great Society attempted to move beyond both, aspiring to be ‘a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods,’ the realization of which was to be ‘a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.’ The end result would be a society where ‘the demands of morality and the needs of the spirit’ would be realized in tandem with material desires. And ultimately, this Great Society would lead to the fulfilment of the country’s founding vision, which entailed ‘more than just a new country.’ Rather, it ‘sought a new world.’20

Johnson’s rhetoric aligns with McKenna’s account of the long-term

influence of Puritan thought in American patriotic ideology, which framed American history as a ‘millennial crusade,’ entwining the definition of America ‘with the biblical paradigm of a people (...) given a holy mission in a new land.’21 Johnson’s Great Society speech crafted its rhetoric along these traditional lines, positioning progressive reform as to fulfill the imagined potential of the American nation as the harbinger to a new, Great Society.

The patriotic appeal was twofold. First, Johnson’s hopeful and ambitious

narrative was bolstered by the relative wealth and position of global power enjoyed by the United States in the 1940’s, 1950’s and early 1960’s. And second, as an entry into the canon of Cold War era patriotism, the address built on the implicit distinction with the secular and material world of communism. For instead of building a communist-connoted society where ‘progress is the servant to our needs,’ the United States would move upward towards the spiritually rich Great Society, and distinguish itself from the ‘godless’ Soviet Union.

Even though Johnson’s speech only explicitly mentioned God once in

passing, the decades in the immediate wake of World War II featured a strong surge in the expression of religious identity throughout American society, the sum of which constituted a nationwide cultural effort underlining the difference between the ‘secular’ Soviet Union, and the ‘religious’ United States. During the early Cold War, religious fervor was far-reaching to the extent that the Eisenhower administration found itself willing to take the step of adopting ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto, compromising the constitutional barrier between church and state in an attempt to Christian20 Ibidem.

21 McKenna, ‘Purtian Origins,’ 7.

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ize the American government vis-à-vis Moscow’s state-sponsored atheism.

When such a broad temporal context is taken into consideration, Johnson’s emphasis on spiritual progress was a natural fit with the Christian-flavored patriotism that dominated the opening decades of the Cold War, as its motifs would have resonated across a broad range of contemporary voting demographics – explaining its inclusion in Johnson’s campaign rhetoric.

Johnson’s Inaugural Address Johnson’s rhetorical strategy also incorporated the theme of a generational destiny. The president’s inaugural address of January 1965, for example, revolved around the notion that the generation of the 1960’s was gifted with the unprecedented opportunity to shape America’s future. ‘For every generation there is a destiny,’ Johnson argued, and while ‘history decides’ for some, ‘For this generation the choice must be our own.’ The Texan went on to embrace his term as a ‘time of change - rapid and fantastic change,’ in pointing to the contemporary processes of decolonization and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. In terms of structure, the speech was organized around what Johnson considered to be the American ‘Covenant with this land,’ entailing a pledge ‘conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union,’ meant to ‘one day inspire the hopes of all mankind.’22

Johnson utilized these three elements underpinning his understanding

of the American covenant to relate his major domestic and foreign policies to existing notions of American history. He did so by linking the virtue of justice to his Great Society reform agenda, defining the concept in the context of the Pilgrim Fathers as ‘the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land,’ thereby extrapolating his contemporary social justice reforms from existing traditions in order to establish historical legitimacy.23

In a similar vein, Johnson implicitly defended his administration’s Viet-

nam policy at Johns Hopkins by proclaiming that ‘If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries that we barely know, then that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.’ Thus, the president’s policy in Vietnam was to be considered part of the American mission to ‘help show the way for the liberation of man.’

22 President Johnson, Inaugural Address, delivered on January 20, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=26985 (accessed: January 23, 2017).

23 Ibidem.

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Finally, Johnson’s inaugural framed the concept of unity as a traditional

American value, by holding that ‘To those who were small and few against the wilderness, the success of liberty demanded the strength of union.’

Noticing how ‘Two centuries of change have made this true again,’ Johnson invoked this belief to encourage working ‘shoulder to shoulder together’ in order to ‘increase the bounty for all’ - opening up another thematic link to the proposed socio-economic reform of his Great Society agenda.24

In this fashion, Johnson’s inaugural address positioned the generation

of the 1960’s as the heirs to a time-honored tradition of change in American society, and contextualized Great Society policy as part of the natural social progression enjoyed in Johnson’s dynamic perception of the American nation. ‘For this is what America is all about,’ the president held, ‘It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it in the hopes of man.’25 And in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, President Johnson recalled how ‘The Founding Fathers dreamed America before it was,’ and reminisced about the ways in which settlers of the Western frontier ‘dreamed of great cities on the wilderness that they crossed.’26

Proclaiming such views implied rhetorical adherence to a brand of

patriotism that not only legitimized progressive reforms, but sanctified and demanded forward-thinking policy proposals cast in the mold of the Great Society, and framed progressivism as the political ideology befitting the promise of American history. In his May 1964 speech at Ann Arbor, Johnson defined this promise as ‘the wisdom to use (...) wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.’27

Lyndon Johnson’s Exceptionalism Other speeches also underline Johnson’s rhetorical theme of generational appointment, while exploring its relationship with exceptionalist discourse.

President Johnson’s Ann Arbor address emphasized how his audience had

24 Ibidem.

25 President Johnson, Inaugural Address, delivered on January 20, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=26985 (accessed: January 23, 2017).

26 President Johnson, ‘Acceptance Speech’, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, delivered on August 27, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26467 (accessed: 30 January, 2017).

27 President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

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been ‘appointed by history’ to ‘the chance never before afforded to any people in any age,’ stressing that ‘We have the power to shape the civilization that we want’ as he called for the creation of ‘a new world.’28 And in his January 1965 State of the Union address, Johnson explained America’s purpose as ‘to help strike away the chains of ignorance and misery and tyranny wherever they keep man less than God means him to be,’ and claimed that ‘We are moving toward that destiny, never more rapidly than we have moved in the last 4 years,’ while adding that ‘history is ours to make.’29

Furthermore, in his April 1965 Baltimore address defending American

escalation of the Vietnam War, Johnson announced that ‘this generation of the world must choose: destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand. We can do all these things on a scale never dreamed of before.’ Asserting how his generation would ‘choose life,’ the Texan predicted how his contemporaries would ‘prevail over the enemies within man, and over the natural enemies of all mankind.’ At Johns Hopkins, the president also emphasized that his generation ‘had a dream’ of ‘a world where disputes are settled by law and reason,’ and dreamt of ‘an end to war.’30 Additionally, in his speech at the twentieth anniversary of the United States Charter in San Francisco, Johnson held that ‘the world must finish once and for all the myth of inequality of races and peoples, with the scandal of discrimination, with the shocking violation of human rights and the cynical violation of political rights.’ Describing how ‘Generations have come and gone, and generations have tried and failed,’ the president announced his hope that ‘this is the age, and we are the men (...) to give reality to our commitments.’31

Johnson’s rhetoric of a generational destiny was enabled by exception-

alist assumptions embedded in American patriotic ideology. In the context of this study, exceptionalism refers to the belief that the United States, as the world’s first and most accomplished democracy, occupies a uniquely benevolent position on the world stage, and must therefore shoulder the responsibility of ‘prevailing over the natural enemies of all mankind.’ I have already demonstrated how Johnson sought to harness this sense of mission

28 Ibidem.

29 President Johnson, State of the Union, as delivered on January 4, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=26907 (accessed: 25 January, 2017).

30 President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

31 President Johnson, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the U.N. Charter, June 25, 1965, http://millercenter.org/ president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-5664 (accessed: 14 December, 2016).

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in defending Great Society reforms, and the example of his generational rhetoric highlights another application of the same underlying principles.

Hence, exceptionalist notions not only legitimized American initiatives to ‘uplift’ mankind, but also justified the president in demanding the sort of behavioral changes he requested from the international community at Johns Hopkins and the United Nations. As such, Johnson used notions of American national identity to both explain domestic reform, and to justify the White House’s assertive stance on the international podium.

The Narrative of the Great Society According to Johnson’s narrative, the Great Society resulted from decades of progress in the history of American civilization. As such, the White House did not present the president’s agenda as being necessarily reformist. Rather, Johnson’s speechwriters framed the Great Society in teleological fashion, incorporating the narrative that the president’s focus on improving immaterial welfare was in line with the millenialist promise envisioned by the nation’s founding fathers.

Such a strategy allowed Johnson to harness the prestige of his office in

staking a claim on the particular interpretation of American history that suited his legislative agenda, advocated the Democratic ticket, galvanized his base, and forced conservatives to explain why they opposed a great society that aligned seamlessly with historical precedent. In this manner, the president’s shrewd application of rhetoric was able to serve multiple domestic interests at once. As the remainder of this thesis demonstrates, such storied delivery emerges as a constant in the analysis of the thirty-sixth president’s rhetorical strategy.

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II: Civil Rights, the Great Society, and the Progressive Jeremiad Lyndon Johnson sought to identify his presidency with the contemporary Civil Rights Movement. Hoping to tie civil rights legislation with Great Society reform, Johnson aimed to portray equal rights as inseparably linked to the issue of social justice. In this second chapter, I explore the way in which the president framed civil rights reform as part of the Great Society.

I primarily do so through the analysis of Johnson’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech of March 1965. Delivered during a joint session of Congress called in response to the violent suppression of the 1965 Selma marches for voting rights, Johnson’s address touched on the difficult relationship between American core values and the segregated reality of the Jim Crow South.

Over the course of this chapter, I argue that the ‘We Shall Overcome’

address can be read as a prime example of a jeremiad-style speech, in the sense that Johnson’s narrative positioned segregation as both a denial and threat to the fulfillment of the nation’s ‘intended’ mission, while presenting his proposed Voting Rights Act as the key to resolving the conflict. In doing so, I demonstrate that Bercovitch’s concept of the jeremiad not only holds potential to imbue conservative causes with the power of patriotism, but can be utilized as a tool to empower progressive narratives in equal measure.

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The ‘We Shall Overcome’ Speech ‘There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma,’ Johnson urged Congress in March 1965. Reminding his audience of the ‘long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans,’ the president invoked what he considered to be America’s mission: ‘to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.’32 He then used this national mission statement to convict the framework of Jim Crow as anti-American: Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values, and the purposes, and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.33 Adding that ‘There is no Negro problem’, nor a ‘Southern problem,’ or a ‘Northern problem,’ but only an ‘American problem,’ the former Texas senator made clear that in his mind, the United States would not ascend towards the Great Society without resolution to the lingering issue of formal racial inequality - a problem he believed the nation ‘shall overcome.’ And stressing how the dawning of social justice would ‘brighten the lives of every American,’ Johnson informed Congress that African-Americans were ‘not the only victims’ of society’s flaws. ‘How many white children have gone uneducated,’ he asked, and ‘How many white families have lived in stark poverty?’ The answers to these rhetorical questions led the president to condemn poverty, ignorance and disease as ‘our enemies (...) And these enemies too - poverty, disease, and ignorance: we shall overcome.’34

The opening paragraphs of this thesis demonstrated how President John-

son explained his Vietnam policy by emphasizing the poor working-class conditions of his Texas youth. Just like he did at Johns Hopkins, Johnson utilized a similar rhetorical approach in his Voting Rights speech, by linking proposed legislation to a recollection of his experience as a Hill Country teacher: ‘My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. (...) My students were poor and 32 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’, joint session of Congress, March 15, 1965, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm (accessed: February 21, 2017).

33 Ibidem.

34 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’, joint session of Congress, March 15, 1965, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm (accessed: February 21, 2017).

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they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. (...) They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes.’35 Describing how he ‘often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do,’ Johnson told how he had never forgotten ‘what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.’36

The Texan went on to remember how ‘It never even occurred to me in my

fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance - and I’ll let you in on a secret - I mean to use it.’ In this fashion, Johnson incorporated personal memories into his speeches both in order to emotionally engage his audiences, and to convince his attendance of the imperative to have a president helping ‘the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election’ - improving Johnson’s personal likability and advancing his domestic agenda at once.37

President Johnson also drew on exceptionalist language to justify his pro-

posed Voting Rights Act. ‘This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,’ Johnson explained, and ‘the great phrases of that purpose,’ such as ‘all men are created equal,’ ‘government by consent of the governed,’ and ‘give me liberty or give me death,’ continued to ‘sound in every American heart.’ Yet, Johnson described how ‘in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes,’ a reality sustained by ‘every device of which human ingenuity is capable,’ erecting barriers only passable by ‘showing a white skin.’ These ‘denials of America’ prompted Johnson to carry out the ‘command of the Constitution,’ and propose the bill that would eventually be known as the Voting Rights Act of 1965; an Act described by the president as not merely concerning ‘States’ national rights,’ but the ‘struggle for human rights’ in its entire breadth and scope.38

35 Ibidem.

36 Ibidem.

37 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’, joint session of Congress, March 15, 1965, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm (accessed: February 21, 2017).

38 Ibidem.

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The Progressive Jeremiad Johnson’s March 1965 address to Congress thus adhered to a particular structure: first, it established perceived core values of the American nation; second, the speech described an issue that was at odds with those values; and third, the president stressed how renewed observance of American core values would resolve the conflict, emphasizing how the nation ‘shall overcome’ by staying true to the promise of America. Such was the structure identified by Sacvan Bercovitch as the American jeremiad, and such was the rhetorical genre that he considered to be prohibitive to ‘the possibility of fundamental change’ in American society.39

Yet, such a conservative interpretation only partially covers Johnson’s

March 1965 speech. As Ira Katznelson has argued in her historical study on the political and social forces that helped shape the New Deal, the positions of power held by southern politicians, both within the Democratic Party and Congress at large, prevented the New Deal from challenging the institutions governing the South’s exclusionary and hierarchical racial order.40 This ‘Southern Cage’ had managed to curtail the scope of New Deal reform to such an extent, that by the time Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office in November 1963, Jim Crow was as much an unquestioned part of southern life as it had been when the Supreme Court first approved segregation in 1896; its framework of white supremacy having survived the progressive policy of the Roosevelt and Truman years virtually unscathed.

The relevance of racist ideology in the 1960’s South can be demon-

strated by a reading of Alabama Governor George Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address. Best known for its explosive Southland wail defending ‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,’ and delivered a mere two years prior to Johnson’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech, Wallace’s address admitted the founding fathers’ belief in universal voting rights, but also emphasized how the constitution’s writers only endowed privileges upon those capable of bearing ‘spiritual responsibilities.’41 Even though Wallace’s remarks - whose revitalizing tendencies hint at the structure of a jeremiad in their own right - never explicated who the newly sworn-in governor would have considered eligible to vote, the 39 Bercovitch, ‘American Jeremiad,’ 178-179.

40 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York 2013), 20-25.

41 Inaugural address of Alabama Governor George Wallace, delivered on January 14, 1963, http://web.utk. edu/~mfitzge1/docs/374/wallace_seg63.pdf (accessed: February 23, 2017).

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staunch segregationist perspective of his speech leaves little doubt on the racist undertones his interpretation to constitutional rights implied.

The example of George Wallace demonstrates the wildly different

approaches to voting rights taken by Johnson and the Alabama governor.

One, speaking as a champion of contemporary progressivism, sought to cast patriotic ideology in a forward-thinking light, invoking America’s promise of ‘more perfect union’ to condemn existing practice; the other, addressing Deep South whites as a leading figure among 1960’s Dixiecrats, lamented racial progress as the only true ‘denial of America.’ This contrast, in turn, underscores the diffuse potential of both the jeremiad and American patriotism at large, leading McKenna to characterize the theater of American rhetorical tradition as ‘a house with many mansions’: a term better acknowledging the differing applications of patriotic language than Bercovitch’s reactionary interpretation of the parlance.42

Both the contemporary relevance and progressive potential of the jer-

emiad are further exemplified by President Obama’s 2015 Selma speech. In the address commemorating the same marches that prompted Johnson’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech fifty years earlier, Obama described the riots as ‘not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America,’ with ‘the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America and a generous America’ ultimately triumphing over ‘the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow.’43 He then praised the marchers by posing two rhetorical questions to his audience: What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this? What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this Nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?44 In

Obama’s

narrative,

the

Selma

marches

culminated

in

the

Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the president described as 42 McKenna, ‘Puritan Origins,’ xii.

43 President Obama, remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=109728&st=Selma&st1= (accessed: February 14, 2017).

44 Ibidem.

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one of ‘the crowning achievements of our democracy.’45

Yet, the former Illinois senator worried that the Voting Rights Act stood

‘weakened’ as a result of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County ruling, and criticized Americans for having ‘one of the lowest voting rates among free peoples,’ a process in which ‘we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future.’ In his closing remarks, Obama called upon ‘the young people here today and listening all across the country’ to remind themselves that they embodied ‘America, unconstrained by habit and convention, unencumbered by what is, (...) ready to seize what ought to be.’46 And in calling for future generations to cure the ailments of voting rights in the twenty-first century, the forty-fourth president legitimized direct action protest by holding that: Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person.

Because the single most powerful word in our democracy is the word “we.” “We the People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes, We Can.” That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great Nation of ours.47

In these lines, Obama drew an historical line between the found-

ing fathers, Johnson’s civil rights legislation, and his own progressive presidency. Additionally, the attempted Americanization of the Civil Rights Movement, and the framing of the Shelby County ruling as being anathema to the values it represented, are prime indicators of a jeremiad-style address; underlining that the Selma speech further demonstrates how the structure of the jeremiad may sanctify progressive ends within the framework of established patriotic ideology.

The substantive similarities between Obama’s and Johnson’s rhetoric - in

the way they frame civil rights issues as being tied to national identity, but also in the manner in which they emphasize generational agency - underscore the extent to which Johnson’s patriotic style remained relevant up until the days of the Obama White House. This relevance can be explained by 45 Ibidem.

46 Ibidem.

47 President Obama, remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=109728&st=Selma&st1= (accessed: February 14, 2017).

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pointing to the progressivist narrative inherent to the jeremiad. As a feature of the genre, any speaker propagating a jeremiad promises their audience fulfillment of national ideals as long as the community in question sticks to the ‘true’ ideals of the nation, a rhetorical process harboring implicit notions of progress towards reaching those goals. As such, the rhetorical similarities between Johnson and Obama are not necessarily the product of direct inspiration or influence; rather, they give expression to the incentive built into the fabric of American political discourse to contextualize policy within the confines of existing patriotic ideology and precedent, and utilize similar argumentative structures in doing so.

The Great Society and Voting Rights According to the logic of President Johnson’s rhetoric, there could be no Great Society without passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson’s narrative antagonized the injustice of Jim Crow as much as it declared war on the degrading condition of poverty, and derided the official segregation of southern life as being fundamentally incompatible with the constitutional demands of American democracy.

To communicate this message, Johnson’s staff crafted the ‘We Shall

Overcome’ speech in such a way as not only to vilify state-sanctioned racism, but to discard it as being at odds with the core values of the American nation.

In an attempt to resolve the conflict of existing race inequality, the president’s jeremiad-style address sought to introduce legislation that ‘restored’ national ideals as part of Johnson’s larger effort to uplift American society.

In this way, the president incorporated civil rights reform into the platform of the Great Society. But as the next chapter shows, the White House’s escalating intervention in Vietnam presented presidential speechwriters with the opportunity to frame Johnson’s policies as more than merely an agenda of domestic reform, and position the president’s priorities as an expression of internationalist altruism.

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III: The Rhetoric of Vietnam The Great Society provided the overarching rhetorical themes of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. Far from being detached from domestic considerations, the realm of foreign policy was fully integrated in this rhetorical profile. In this chapter, I demonstrate that Johnson’s Vietnam War rhetoric incorporated themes of Great Society reform. In order to do so, I interpret the president’s ‘Peace Without Conquest’ speech of April 7, 1965. Additionally, I highlight how the government’s failure to secure victory in Vietnam sparked dissent from the contemporary Cold War consensus, and demonstrate how this discourse shift was reflected in the sober presidential rhetoric at the close of the Johnson administration.

As the historian Mitchell Lerner has noted, Johnson already signaled

his commitment to defeating global poverty during 1961 vice presidential trips to Third World countries. According to Lerner, Vice President Johnson seized ‘every chance to reach out to the common people,’ contacting them ‘on their terms and in their settings,’ shaking hands, and stopping his cavalcade to meet with poor local residents. However, Lerner notes how President Johnson ‘quickly abandoned such efforts and instead embraced a traditional Cold War approach that showed little concern with Third World values.’ In the composition of his contribution, Lerner awards little historiographical relevance to the substance of Johnson’s Vietnam War rhetoric.48 In this final chapter, I depart from Lerner by arguing that the incorporation of the social 48 Mitchell Lerner, ‘Conquering the Hearts of the People: Lyndon Johnson, C. Vann Woodward, and “The Irony of Southern History”’ Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 115 No. 2 (October 2011) 154-171, see 157-159, 168.

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consequences of global poverty as a theme in Johnson’s Vietnam War rhetoric demonstrates the intertwined nature of the president’s Vietnam and Great Society policy interests.

The ‘Peace Without Conquest’ Speech President Johnson’s ‘Peace Without Conquest’ speech was delivered at the onset of the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and was designed to quell contemporary criticism by speaking directly to the American people.49 While the Johns Hopkins University address touched on a variety of themes, ranging from the application of Wilsonian language to the evocation of Cold War consensus, an important part of the president’s rhetoric focused on justifying American involvement in terms strikingly similar to those of his Great Society speeches, calling for regional development to uplift South and North Vietnam alike.

‘These countries of southeast Asia are homes for millions of impover-

ished people,’ President Johnson assessed the social situation in the Pacific.

Hoping to remind the millions of Americans watching his address of Asia’s plight, the president described how numerous Asians ‘rise at dawn and struggle through until the night’; their lives ‘wracked by disease’ and ‘plagued by hunger,’ before finally meeting death ‘at the early age of 40.’ In such a land, Johnson held, ‘Stability and peace do not come easily.’ For ‘Neither independence nor human dignity will ever be won (...) by arms alone.’50

Rather, it required ‘the work of peace.’ Evoking the positive connotation

of the Marshall Plan, the president stressed how ‘The American people have helped generously in times past’ in providing foreign aid to allied nations, a project that now needed to be repeated on a ‘much more massive’ scale to ‘improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world.’ Sketching out the task before the American nation as an errand ‘to enrich the hopes and the existence of more than a hundred million people,’ Johnson informed his audience of the Mekong River’s potential to provide ‘food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own [Tennessee Valley Authority].’

And this job, the fulfilment of which ‘cannot and must not wait for peace,’ would be ‘within the reach of a cooperative and determined effort.’51 49 Dror Yuravlivker, ‘Peace Without Conquest: Lyndon Johnson’s Speech of April 7, 1965’ Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 3 (September 2006) 457-481, see 467-469.

50 President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

51 Ibidem.

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The popular appeal of Johnson’s call for regional development is best

understood through the lens of the contemporary American self-image.

During the opening decades of the Cold War, mainstream American culture was defined by what commentators typically describe as a form of Cold War consensus. Above all else, it involved the belief that the United States was involved in an existential struggle with the Soviet Union, and that Washington represented the side of altruistic benevolence, righteousness and freedom against the imperialism, oppression and enslavement embodied by Moscow. Thus, when Johnson announced an effort to improve Asian lives by providing development aid to South Vietnam, most Americans were likely to interpret his words as confirmation of U.S. altruism abroad, making for an appealing policy pitch, and providing the White House with an effective frame to justify American presence in the region at home and abroad.

A Great Society at Home and Abroad By incorporating the War on Poverty in foreign policy rhetoric, Johnson not only further normalized his reforms through the medium of the presidential speech, but also exported its goals to the world at large.

This was not merely a political ploy: it underlined the exceptionalist notions implicit to contemporary perceptions of moral Cold War bipolarism - translating abstract benevolent values into concrete policy proposals, all while projecting the Great Society onto the American self-image. In this fashion, the Baltimore address was not ‘just’ a foreign policy speech - rather, it was a piece of rhetoric designed to merge the realms of foreign and domestic policy, seeking to justify agendas in both fields.

Kaiser and VanDeMark have duly noted how Johnson’s Baltimore remarks exemplify the GI generation’s collective faith in the potential of American policy to improve the quality of life for millions of people - the lessons of the triumphant Second World War and New Deal experiences indicating that for America, ‘nothing was impossible.’52

Moreover, as Tulis has pointed out, the domestic usage of the rhetor-

ical War on Poverty metaphor implicitly positioned political opponents on the wrong side of the war effort, allowing Democrats to put ‘doubters under the suspicion of being unpatriotic, immoral, or both.’53 Such reason52 Kaiser, ‘American Tragedy,’ 425; VanDeMark, ‘Into the Quagmire,’ 123.

53 Tulis, ‘Rhetorical Presidency,’ 164-165 and 171.

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ing positioned the White House on the right side of the moral equation, and, as the party having declared war, permitted the administration to occupy the driver’s seat in determining strategy for the ongoing struggle.

Johnson’s speechwriters applied similar tactics to Vietnam rhetoric.

At Johns Hopkins, Johnson announced the government’s intention to

‘not seek’ any territory in Vietnam, rather choosing to fight to secure a world ‘where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.’54 Just like the term War on Poverty tied welfare policy to the Democratic Party, statements like these articulated generic Wilsonian ambitions to which large segments of the electorate subscribed, and proceeded to identify their substance with the Johnson White House.

In addition, Johnson hoped to merge Vietnam rhetoric with his civil

rights policy. In his ‘Peace Without Conquest’ speech, the president proclaimed that his generation ‘had a dream.’55 Even though Johnson utilized this phrase to refer to the Wilsonian conception of the international community his administration intended to bring about, one cannot fail to notice the linguistic similarities to Martin Luther King’s well-known 1963 address.

This would hardly be coincidental in any post-Civil Rights Movement presidential address, let alone in the case of the president who shared his era with the civil rights leader, and who politically appropriated the Movement’s key achievement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A close reading of this passage thus demonstrates that Johnson not only identified his administration with the Civil Rights Movement domestically, but equally sought to harness its moral authority in the context of the Vietnam War.

The Rhetoric of Dissent Ironically, Martin Luther King proved to be among Johnson’s most high-profile critics on the issue of Vietnam. Two years after the president spoke at Johns Hopkins, the civil rights leader delivered an address at New York’s Riverside Church, in which he derided the American government for being ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’, and characterized the ongoing military effort as an ‘idle political plaything of a society gone

54 Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

55 Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

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mad on war.’56 The civil rights leader castigated the Johnson administration for sending ‘black young men who had been crippled by our society’ to secure ‘liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,’ as Washtington forced black conscripts to contribute to the destruction of the ‘deepest hopes of men the world over.’57

In addition, King presented his own narrative explaining the American

rationale for escalation. He argued that even though ‘The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954’ by quoting ‘the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom,’ Washington ‘refused to recognize them.’ After France was forced to recognize Vietnamese sovereignty in the wake of the battle of Dien Bien Phu that year, King remarked how ‘it looked as if independence and land reform would come (...) But instead there came the United States.’ Guided by the strategy of containment, the American government decided that ‘Ho [Chi Minh] should not unify the temporarily divided nation,’ leaving Vietnamese peasants to watch ‘as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem.’58

King also challenged his New York attendance to consider Vietnamese

perspectives on American involvement in the country. He rhetorically asked: What must [Vietnam’s National Liberation Front] think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war?59 In the context of this study, the significance of the Riverside Church Speech is expressed through its relationship with existing notions of domestic consensus. I have already explicated how Cold War era national consensus 56 Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’. delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm, (accessed: December 4, 2016).

57 Ibidem.

58 Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’. delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm, (accessed: December 4, 2016).

59 Ibidem.

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incorporated the notion of American benevolence: a concept which was extensively deconstructed in King’s New York address. Positioning the United States as the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’ was a far cry from the altruistic ideals expressed by Johnson at Johns Hopkins; the civil rights leader’s assessment of Vietnam policy as being anathema to the fortunes and sovereignty of Vietnamese civilians a damning indictment of Johnson’s pledge to ‘enrich the hopes and the existence of more than a hundred million people.’60 In this fashion, King explicitly questioned given government rationale for deploying American forces in what the civil rights leader considered to be a colonialist, anti-revolutionary, anti-democratic, and anti-American intervention.

The Rhetoric of Johnson’s Decline Over the course of the Vietnam War, King’s dissent hardly proved to be an isolated incident. As the historian Kendrick Oliver has noted, both the eventual defeat of American forces and the revelation of military atrocities like the My Lai massacre posed an existential challenge to the notions of Cold War era exceptionalism.61 Needless to say, the Vietnam War did little to sustain contemporary consensus. Perceived American benevolence - the core component of said consensus - came under siege as a consequence of the mounting death tolls, ever-rising costs, accounts of brutalities, and lack of success that reached American shores.

The outcome of this process was a shattered Cold War consensus, and

eventually produced the sort of international embarrassment officials in the Johnson administration hoped to avoid by escalating the war effort in the first place. Yet, one is well-served to consider that such conclusions were hardly reflective of the national mood when Johnson addressed the audience gathered at Johns Hopkins’ Shriver Hall in April 1965. In the speech, Johnson invoked existing consensus to sell war on terms recognizable to contemporary Americans, who were not tainted by the cynical interpretations that characterize popular recollections of ‘Vietnam’ in the twenty-first century.

As such, the ‘Peace Without Conquest’ address holds historical significance for its account of justifying escalation within the confines of mainstream consensus at the time.

60 Ibidem; President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

61 Kendrick Oliver, ‘Atrocity, Authenticity and American Exceptionalism: (Ir)rationalising the Massacre at My Lai’ Journal of American Studies Vol. 37 No. 2 (2003), 247-268, see 252-255.

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While the president still embellished a July 1965 announcement of a raise in U.S. fighting strength with the promise of moving Asians towards ‘a life of fruitful and rewarding toil,’62 Johnson’s rhetoric of late March 1968 is remarkable for its relatively dressed-down presentation of American strategy. In a televised address from the White House, Johnson reported the need for Congress to consider ‘reductions in the budget’ submitted by the administration, and the imperative that ‘our deficit just must be reduced.’ Failure to do so, the president warned, ‘could bring on conditions that would strike hardest at those people that all of us are trying so hard to help.’63

Additionally, Johnson paid tribute ‘once again tonight to the great

courage and endurance’ of the people of South Vietnam, whose armed forces of ‘almost 700,000 men’ - the equivalent of ‘more than 10 million in our own population’ - maintained their ‘firm determination to be free of domination by the North.’ Johnson also described how South Vietnam had made ‘substantial progress’ in ‘building a durable government during these last 3 years,’ as ‘The South Vietnam of 1965 could not have survived the enemy’s Tet offensive of 1968. The elected government of South Vietnam survived that attack—and is rapidly repairing the devastation that it wrought.’ And the president, in stating administration goals for settling the conflict, noted how any settlement should allow the United States to ‘permit us to turn more fully to our own tasks here at home.’64

These remarks touched on such matters as the financial costs of the war,

South Vietnam’s progress on addressing internal issues, and the need for politically settling the by-then highly controversial war, rather than focusing on the ambitious promise of uplifting Vietnamese society and the altruistic imperative of investing in regional welfare. This shift of tone is indicative of the American war experience over the course of the 1960’s. Because speeches like the ‘Peace Without Conquest’ address were able to tap into the assertiveness that accompanied Cold War consensus, presidential rhetoric in the early phases of escalation managed to deliver the government’s message without inciting cynicism or distrust in intended audiences.

But as material costs spun out of control, casualty figures rose, military

62 President Johnson, White House Press Conference, July 28, 1965, http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/ speeches/speech-5910 (accessed: 25 November, 2016).

63 President Johnson, ‘Resignation Speech’, delivered on March 31, 1968, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/ presidential-speeches/march-31-1968-remarks-decision-not-seek-re-election (accessed: 4 April, 2017).

64 Ibidem.

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progress stalled, and reporters broke stories of brutality of American forces in the field, public confidence eroded as a consequence of the failed attempts to secure outright victory. In terms of public remarks, ongoing failure in Vietnam prevented Johnson from sustaining the hopeful tone of his earlier rhetoric, and forced the president to turn to the soberer explanations of administration policy as seen in Johnson’s speech of March 1968.

Intertwining the Vietnam War with the Great Society Lyndon Johnson’s early Vietnam War rhetoric sought to harness the optimism of 1960’s progressivism. In justifying escalation, his team of speechwriters emphasized developmental aid over geopolitics, altruism over pragmatism, and universalism over nationalism. Remarkably, such a strategy resulted in the incorporation of Great Society themes into the president’s foreign affairs speeches. The rhetorical effect was not just limited to sanctifying foreign affairs. Rather, Johnson’s remarks underlined the universalism embedded in Great Society reform, and extrapolated the Democratic platform towards a global context - justifying Johnson’s agenda in both the foreign and domestic contexts, and intertwining the administration’s Vietnam priorities with the themes of the Great Society.

But over the course of the war, Washington’s failure in Vietnam not

only gradually eroded public trust in Johnson’s presidential leadership, but also caused the crumbling of the core beliefs underpinning contemporary confidence in American goodwill. This process was reflected in the sober presidential rhetoric at the close of the administration, and would ultimately pave the way for the collapse of the country’s war effort, the Great Society, and in the end, the Johnson White House itself.

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Closing Remarks How did Lyndon Johnson incorporate the themes of Great Society reform into his early Vietnam War rhetoric? He did so by framing the goals of his administration’s policy in Vietnam in such a way as to constitute an internationalist extension of his domestic reform agenda. Hence, President Johnson’s policy speeches on Vietnam featured a conception of social justice that emphasized the importance of defeating regional poverty, and was characterized by a major focus on the importance of development aid for the troubled countries of North and South Vietnam.

In this thesis, I have challenged the historiographical dichotomy

between the realms of Johnson’s foreign and domestic politics. I did so by arguing that the thematic consistencies between the president’s Vietnam and Great Society rhetoric blurred the distinction between the two policy areas. I added to existing scholarship of the escalation of the Vietnam War by focusing on Johnson’s use of rhetoric, and by incorporating both the Vietnam War and Great Society agenda into my narrative. In the final analysis, I argued that the historiographical dichotomy between Johnson’s Vietnam War and Great Society priorities was hardly reflected in the way Johnson chose to portray his own presidential leadership.

In the remainder of this conclusory section, I provide a brief summary of

my findings, and highlight the key arguments made in the three preceding chapters. Finally, I conclude by offering a short reflection on the historical significance of President Johnson’s Vietnam War rhetoric.

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The Rhetoric of the Great Society Just like its Vietnam War counterpart, the rhetoric of the Great Society was steeped in the zeitgeist of the American 1960’s. Hoping to evoke the ‘happy days’ of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, President Johnson’s Great Society sought to emulate and transcend the achievements of the New Deal that had so thoroughly shaped Johnson’s generation of Americans. The reform he presented to the public was underpinned by contemporary notions of confidence in the nation’s course: confidence in America’s potential to be a force of good on the global stage, but also confidence in the government’s ability to improve the quality of lives through centralized reform programs.

Such was the spirit of the times that prompted Johnson’s upbeat rhetoric on the issue of reform, and its optimism empowered his White House to proclaim a new chapter in the tale of American civilization, to be named after the goal it intended to pursue: that of creating a ‘Great Society.’

In an attempt to build this narrative, Lyndon Johnson’s ‘The Great

Society’ speech positioned the president’s reforms as part of the natural progression of American society. Rather than focusing on material progress, Johnson’s address sought to move the United States ‘upward to the Great Society,’ and hoped to prioritize ‘the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit’ in doing so.65 It is important to note that any such assessment should be considered within the context of Cold War era patriotism. Hoping to distinguish itself from the ‘godless’ Soviet Union, the United States adopted a fervently religious identity in the decades after World War II - a process best exemplified by the adoption of ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto in 1956. As such, Johnson’s spiritual conception of progress fits in with contemporary notions of American identity, and highlighted the way in which it not only differed from, but surpassed the Soviet Union’s stunted centrally-planned economic potential.

‘For every generation there is a destiny,’ Lyndon Johnson stated immedi-

ately after being sworn in. And while ‘history decides’ for some, ‘for this generation the choice must be our own.’66 In comparable fashion to the ambition of the Great Society, this statement depicts the sense of generational appointment echoed throughout Johnson’s presidential rhetoric. It is not, however, a brand of assertiveness merely inherent to the Johnson administration. Ever 65 President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

66 President Johnson, Inaugural Address.

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since the days of Puritan New England, patriotic writers and speakers have proclaimed America’s divine providence in carrying out the national mission - a sentiment shared in Johnson’s Great Society rhetoric. This is no insignificant observation, for it helps explain the president’s patriotic appeal: drawing a thematic line between historical identity and contemporary national self-image in the face of far-reaching reform. But Johnson’s remarks went beyond the mere recitation of patriotic themes and motifs, and attempted to harness the potential of patriotic ideology to sanctify administration policy.

‘The Founding Fathers dreamed America before it was,’ Johnson

asserted during his acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, hinting to his base that the task of progressive reform had been ordained ever since the dawn of the American republic.67 ‘For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground,’ Johnson proclaimed in his inaugural address, further signaling that according to the president, his Great Society agenda was perfectly compatible with the precedent of American history.68 His speechwriters went one step further, by not only proclaiming Democratic reform as being compatible with patriotic ideology, but by framing administration policy as part of the natural progression of American society towards creating a more perfect union over the course of its existence.

In this fashion, the president’s policy speeches sought to grant the legiti-

macy of patriotism to Johnson’s agenda on the one hand, while denying conservatives the opportunity to stake a similar claim on the other. Underlining a perceived current of progressive achievements throughout U.S. history also had the effect of emphasizing the agency enjoyed by contemporary Americans, which further fueled the confident mood of the early 1960’s, and served to tie the upbeat zeitgeist to the Democratic Party of 1964.

The Rhetoric of Voting Rights But despite the Democratic Party’s landslide victory in both the 1964 congressional and presidential elections, Johnson’s image of the American self was not universally accepted as part of contemporary public discourse. Even though the president considered Jim Crow to be an ‘Ameri67 President Johnson, ‘Acceptance Speech’.

68 President Johnson, Inaugural Address.

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can problem’ in March 1965, such a view was hardly representative of the broader arena of public opinion.69 Perhaps no single politician is better suited to illustrating this point than Lyndon Johnson himself: as biographer Robert Caro has noted in his account of Johnson’s tenure as a Texas senator, Johnson’s March 1949 maiden speech on the Senate floor was a ‘ringing defense’ of the South’s right to segregate; just like newly-elected Alabama Governor George Wallace had defended ‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’ as late as January 1963.70

This background is important, for it helps to properly contextualize

President Johnson’s pro-civil rights rhetoric, and highlights the contemporary conservative alternatives to his administration’s brand of progressivism. In focusing on said background, it is also relevant to discuss the manner in which politicians delivered their jeremiads: depicting a sense of profound moral crisis and offering a pathway towards renewed observance of perceived national values, advocates on both sides of the civil rights debate presented themselves as the heirs to American history.

In the case of President Johnson, such a strategy meant deriding Jim

Crow as a ‘betrayal to America,’ and emphasizing the constitutional ban on racial discrimination in public life and the voting booth alike. In his narrative, the ‘command of the constitution’ ordered the president towards sponsoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and demanding the vote for citizens of all races, even as George Wallace was able to use a mythicized conception of America’s past as a segregated nation to prove that African-Americans were to be denied that very privilege.71

The Rhetoric of Patriotism Throughout the progressive narratives on the Great Society, the generational sense of mission, and Civil Rights legislation, exceptionalist roots ran deep and wide. ‘This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,’ Johnson proclaimed in a March 1965 address to a joint session of Congress, and that purpose included a mission ‘to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man’ - which, in this case, translated into support for the legal protection of voting rights, regardless of color.72 But the president’s millennialist 69 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’.

70 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Master of the Senate (New York 2002), xv and 212-215; Governor Wallace, Inaugural Address.

71 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’; Governor Wallace, Inaugural Address.

72 President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’.

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depiction of ‘moving upwards to the Great Society’ was equally exceptionalist in nature, building on the Puritan promise of America as the founding stone of a renewed civilization: a society whose leaders considered it as revolutionary as it was great.73 Such was also the pledged goal of President Johnson’s Ann Arbor address, in which the former Senate majority leader vowed to realize the nation’s initial vision, which was to transcend the mere result of ‘just a new country.’ Rather, his platform reached towards ‘a new world’ altogether.74

Likewise, Johnson’s talk of an ‘appointed generation’ tapped into a sim-

ilar vein: evoking America’s imagined divine providence to spur supporters into action. The assertive tone of Johnson’s remarks thus underlines the way his administration politicized patriotic ideology so as to serve liberal causes, showcasing the usage of the presidential address as part of the powers vested in the executive branch of the federal government.

The Rhetoric of Vietnam Playing off the providential American mission - ‘to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man’75 - Johnson presented his Vietnam intervention as part of an international War on Poverty; a struggle which was to be fought with a sword in one hand, but with funds for developmental aid in the other. ‘The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own [Tennessee Valley Authority],’ Johnson held during a televised speech at Johns Hopkins University of April 1965, informing his audience of the United States’ benevolent intentions in Vietnam.76 Apart from explicitly identifying his White House with New Deal policies, this statement demonstrated how Johnson and his speechwriters sought to infuse foreign affairs with domestic Great Society ambitions - extending the scope of administration policy far beyond America’s shores, and into the lush jungles and deltas of Vietnam. This strategy not only justified aggressive interventionism in South Vietnam, but also imbued the Great Society with America’s universalist ambition: legitimizing two policy priorities in one rhetorical move.

Modern commentators may be inclined to notice the strands of Ameri-

centrism running throughout the Baltimore speech, as the president mistook South Vietnam’s challenges for problems relatable to Johnson’s generation 73 74 75 76

President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

President Johnson, ‘Great Society’.

President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’.

President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’.

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of Americans. As such, his administration failed to effectively gauge the Vietcong pitch to impoverished Vietnamese peasants, and assumed that New Deal-esque solutions would serve as a panacea for Vietnamese ills. Viewed in such a light, the Johns Hopkins address is remarkably exemplary for the strategic misgivings of Washington’s Vietnam policy.

The Rhetoric of President Johnson It is hard to escape the pang of cynicism when discussing the rhetoric of the Vietnam War. For as the historians Dror Yuravlivker and Mitchell Lerner have pointed out, Johnson’s hopeful talk of postwar development evaporated as soon as Washington gradually deepened its military involvement in former Indochina.77 To a certain extent, such a cynical perspective is therefore warranted: despite all the promises of a globalized War on Poverty and Wilsonian connotations of the enterprise, the Vietnam experience quickly devolved into a violent trauma, clad in crimson with the blood of Americans boys and Vietnamese girls alike.

Critics could also emphasize that any efforts towards rhyming the Viet-

nam War with the Great Society were merely a propaganda ploy aimed at selling a morally destitute war to the American public, sugarcoating the horrors of armed conflict in order to secure popular assent. And if one chooses to perceive the Vietnam War through a policy-focused lens, these readings are hardly refutable: in this narrative, the ‘Peace Without Conquest’ address can easily be regarded as being comparable to the governmental deceit surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the My Lai massacre. In such a sense, Johnson did lie at Johns Hopkins about the altruistic goals of his Vietnam policy.

But the history of politics is not necessarily the history of policy. If

anything, the president’s Johns Hopkins remarks demonstrated the extent to which his White House sought to identify as a progressive administration, and reveal how the president hoped his government’s Vietnam intervention was to remembered. In terms of understanding Johnson’s presidency, such an observation gives weight to the notion that the outbreak of war was not the desired outcome among Washington’s policymakers, and that the White House rather shifted public attention towards its domestic reform agenda. Johnson’s rhetorical strategy also indicates

77 Yuravlivker, ‘Lyndon Johnson’s Speech,’ 458; Lerner, ‘The Hearts of the People,’ 168.

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that foreign policy and domestic affairs are not, as far as the front end of public relations is concerned, separate spheres by definition. As has been documented in this study, domestic priorities were inseparably tied up with the Vietnam narrative, underscoring the rhetorical grey areas navigated by Lyndon Johnson in his Johns Hopkins speech, and suggesting that the political boundaries of foreign and domestic affairs are not always as clearly demarcated as the historiographical dichotomy implies.

Three years after speaking in the Johns Hopkins auditorium, Presi-

dent Johnson delivered another televised address to the nation. ‘At Johns Hopkins University’, he recalled, ‘I announced that the United States would take part in the great work of developing Southeast Asia, including the Mekong Valley, for all the people of that region.’78 And indeed, at that point, it was a speech whose optimism the now grey-haired president could only recall, rather than evoke once more. Perhaps, if for a fraction of a second only, his mind rewound to that more hopeful time, when his rhetoric was still draped in the ambition of great societies, and emblazoned with the dream of equal rights for citizens of all races.

He had good reason to, for in the years between those two speech-

es, thousands of American soldiers had been slain in the swampy mud of Vietnam’s emerald battlefields, their lives having been devoured by the conflict whose material costs had spiraled out of control in tandem with the ever-rising price paid in blood. And on that late March 1968 day, in a mere moment’s time, Johnson’s presidency would become yet another casualty of the Vietnam War. ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept,’ the besieged president announced solemnly, hands folded on the Oval Office desk in front of him, ‘the nomination of my party for another term as your President.’79 So ended the political career of Lyndon Baines Johnson: a triumphant ally of civil rights marchers, villain to peace protesters the world over, and tragic victim of his own failed Vietnam policy.

Yet, that summation of the Johnson White House leads back to the same

observation laid out at the very start of this thesis. For just like the words of his rhetoric, President Johnson was a politician that had managed to blur the line between the soaring highs of domestic success, and bleak lows of foreign policy failure.

78 President Johnson, ‘Resignation Speech’.

79 Ibidem.

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SOURCES USED Henry Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life Magazine, February 17, 1941, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/discussions261/luce.pdf.

Inaugural address of Governor George Wallace, delivered on January 14, 1963, http://web.utk.edu/~mfitzge1/docs/374/wallace_seg63.pdf.

Inaugural address of Lyndon Baines Johnson, delivered on January 20, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26985.

Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’, delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

President Johnson, ‘Acceptance Speech’, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, delivered on August 27, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=26467.

President Johnson, ‘Peace Without Conquest’, delivered at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, April 7, 1965, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/exhibits/the-presidents-address-at-johns-hopkins-university-peace-without-conquest.

President Johnson, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the U.N. Charter, June 25, 1965, http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-5664.

President Johnson, ‘Resignation Speech’, delivered on March 31, 1968, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-31-1968remarks-decision-not-seek-re-election.

President Johnson, State of the Union, as delivered on January 4, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26907.

President Johnson, ‘The Great Society’, delivered on May 22, 1965, Ann Arbor, Michigan, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjthegreatsociety.htm.

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President Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’, Joint Session of Congress, March 15, 1965, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm.

President Johnson, White House press conference, July 28, 1965, http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-5910.

President Obama, remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=109728&st=Selma&st1=.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison 1978).

Bernstein, Irving, Guns or Butter. The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York 1996).

Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Master of the Senate (New York 2002).

John, Andrew L., Vietnam’s Second Front. Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington 2010).

Kaiser, David, American Tragedy. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge 2000).

Katznelson, Ira, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York 2013).

Lerner, Mitchell, ‘Conquering the Hearts of the People: Lyndon Johnson, C. Vann Woodward, and “The Irony of Southern History” ’ Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 115 No. 2 (October 2011) 154-171.

Logevall, Fredrik, Choosing War. The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley 1999).

McKenna, George, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven 2007).

Neustadt, Richard E., Presidential Power. The Politics of Leadership from FDR to Carter (New York 1980).

Oliver, Kendrick, ‘Atrocity, Authenticity and American Exceptionalism: (Ir)rationalising the Massacre at My Lai’ Journal of American Studies Vol. 37 No. 2 (2003).

Schulzinger, Robert D., ‘Cementing and Dissolving Consensus. Presidential Rhetroicduring the Cold War, 1947-1969,’ in: Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank eds., Selling War in a Media Age. The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville 2010) 93-112.

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Tulis, Jeffrey K., The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton 1987).

VanDeMark, Brian, Into the Quagmire. Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York 1991).

Yuravlivker, Dror, ‘Peace Without Conquest: Lyndon Johnson’s Speech of April 7, 1965’ Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 3 (September 2006) 457-481.

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