If you found yourself in the position of final decision maker, what the heck would you do? It seems to me that Lyndon Johnson did what good managers get big bucks for; delegate, discuss, listen to your best men.
All of the stakeholders, in Harvard-Speak, all coming up with key deliverables...... and yet each major decision makes it worse.
All of those guys from think tanks with names like "The Center for Strategic Studies" or "Far Eastern Global Security", (pick any fancy name you like) got it absolutely wrong.
Throw enough men and bombs at them and they'll give up.
Just shows you a big flaw in a Government system where the advisors were picking spuds in Idaho only a matter of months before they got the job!
Meanwhile in places like China, Russia , India ... I could go on , they won't let you near the big desks until you've proved yourself in the art of controlling fractious citizenry in some far off Province or satellite. Here you can have somebody taking their kids to school one day in Alaska and the next week being only a breath away from the Presidency.
Talking about breath , it's breathtaking to learn from this documentary that there were voices of reason sitting at the shoulder of President Johnson in key meetings, telling him repeatedly and forcefully that the war was unwinnable. But he wouldn't listen!
Subsequent world events have shown us that communication and negotiation could have worked. Needless to say that the belligerent, win at all costs, attitude of the Americans, combined with their ignorance of Vietnamese aims, scotched any chance of peace that way.
So as a result, hundreds of thousands died, families devastated on both sides, villages and crops destroyed.
For what?
I'd like to think that most of us would have said "get out, never mind the face saving and we'll see if the domino effect is real or if it's a chimera dreamed up by the press."
Now Vietnam is thriving under a technically Communist government, as is China...... and guess what? We can do business with them easier than we can with most other nations... go figure.
Another super episode that should be required viewing for every single decision maker in the U.S. Government.