A Time for Change: Clark Clifford and the Struggle to End the War in Vietnam, 1965--1968

My dissertation uses former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford as a vehicle to explore how the Vietnam War turned in 1968. I employ government documents, personal papers, interviews, newspapers and the recently released Lyndon Johnson telephone recordings to assess Clifford's contribution to the war's de-escalation. My research was driven by four core questions. First, why was Vietnam an unnecessary war for Clifford in 1965? Second, why had Vietnam become an unwinnable war in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive? Third, how did Clifford contribute to Johnson's search for a peace with honor in 1968 and why did he fail? Finally, how essential was Clifford to the de-escalation process that began under Johnson in 1968?;As secretary of defense in 1968, Clifford concluded the war was unwinnable. Contrary to revisionist charges that the Tet Offensive shocked an inexperienced secretary of defense into abandoning the war, evidence suggests Tet only confirmed Clifford's long held private doubts. Contrary to Clifford's own claim to have turned against the war in the aftermath of the communist offensive, he in fact never abandoned his private reservations that drove his 1965 dissent. Instead, he accepted Johnson's nomination to lead the Pentagon secretly opposed to the war and intent on finding a way to disengage. The credibility crisis that overtook the administration after Tet added to Clifford's conviction that the war was unwinnable. The trouble, Clifford discovered, was that administration officials in Saigon were intensifying the credibility crisis itself, making governance difficult during an election year. Finally, during the Clifford Task Force sessions, military experts---both uniformed and civilian---reinforced the argument that the war was hopelessly stalemated and ultimately unwinnable.;Clifford's efforts to end the war through diplomacy came to nothing. He was, however, a far more successful diplomat than scholars allow. The president found his defense secretary's "step-by-step" peace framework with reciprocity as its core useful and had it inserted into the March 31, 1968 address. When talks in Paris stalemated in June, however, Clifford began pressing Johnson to take additional unilateral steps. Johnson refused, consumed with more personal concerns of legacy and fears of being diplomatically duped by the Vietnamese Communists.;Unable to convince Johnson to make further diplomatic concessions, Clifford turned to the media to help thwart further escalation. The cumulative effect of his three phased media campaign was to weaken the case for additional bombing, raise expectations that the war had turned a corner with the president's March 31 address, and helped make any future bombing decision difficult to reverse.;Clifford opposed the Americanization of the war in 1965 based upon the Truman administration's costly Korean War experience. Clifford did not frame his arguments against deeper America intervention by pointing to the internal difficulties in South Vietnam, as so many revisionists with military backgrounds have done. Instead, he reached back to Harry Truman's bitter experience waging Cold War in Asia---first in China, then later in Korea. He saw Vietnam as another such quagmire.;Unbeknown to Clifford, the president harnessed his persuasive skills in his bureaucratic war with the senior military leaders. Johnson used his defense secretary's arguments as a reasonable cause for turning down calls for additional bombing. Clifford's consensus-defeating dissent also sheltered the president from personally denying his generals their request for additional air strikes. Here, Clifford became a protective shield for Lyndon Johnson; an unknowing accomplice in the president's quiet moves to end the policy of gradual escalation. The move transformed the war in 1968 and changed the very nature of the conflict Nixon would inherit in 1969. Clifford mattered, then, just not as he intended.;Keywords: Clark Clifford, Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson, United States-South Vietnamese Relations, presidential decision-making, Pentagon, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1968, the Tet Offensive, U.S. foreign relations, Dean Rusk, White House, antiwar movement...