Word: johnsons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...maneuvering really began in earnest last February, when General William C. Westmoreland, then the U.S. commander in Viet Nam and now Army Chief of Staff, appealed to the President for 206,000 more U.S. troops in the wake of the Communists' Tet offensive. Johnson rejected the request, though he did agree to a modest increase, and the ceiling on U.S. manpower now stands at 549,000. Then came Johnson's March 31 renunciation of a second term and his declaration of a partial bombing pause over the North. Six weeks after that, in mid-May, the Paris peace...
When the President met with Thieu in Honolulu in July for private talks, some officials insist, he was trying to persuade Viet Nam's President to accept a bombing halt. After the meeting, Johnson spoke in harsh terms of the fighting ahead, and the assumption was that he and Thieu had agreed on a new step-up in military activity. That assumption may well have been incorrect. Not long after the Honolulu meeting, a group of South Vietnamese senators passed through Paris en route home after a visit to Washington and told newsmen and diplomats there that a bombing...
Three Questions. Their comments were discounted at the time, but within a matter of weeks came Johnson's mes sage to Hanoi, transmitted through the Paris negotiators, that got the final phase under way. L.B.J. was swayed partly by the fighting lull, partly by word from Paris that Hanoi's men had given assurances that if Johnson grounded the bombers he would not have reason to regret it. In unusually gentle terms, he asked Hanoi to indicate what it would do, if the bombing ended, about...
...North Vietnamese did not reject Johnson's message out of hand. Instead, Politburo Member Le Due Tho, officially described as an "adviser" at the peace talks but actually Hanoi's principal overseer, hurried home via Moscow, where he conferred with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. Once he reached Hanoi, he found himself embroiled in a bitter debate between North Viet Nam's pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions. One or more messages were apparently sent seeking more information. The Administration noted simply that no "breakthrough" response had come from Hanoi. Some U.S. officials feared that the North Vietnamese...
...office; and the Eleven O'Clock Group, mostly lower-level officials assigned to draft the policymakers' decisions. Among all these officials, few supported the bombing of the North up to the end. The swing man, inclined first one way, then the other, was Lyndon B. Johnson...