Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson and the Vietnam War: a Not So Special Relationship?

Abstract

The Vietnam war dominated United States foreign policy during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, and yet the international dimensions of the conflict are only now being explored in any depth by historians. George Ball, US Under-Secretary of State, famously admitted that Vietnam ‘made it very hard to get attention on anything else, that judgements tended to be colored by the Vietnamese situation … we were getting things totally distorted…. In fact, I once drew a map for Dean Rusk [Secretary of State] and said, “this is your map of the world”. I had a tiny United States with an enormous Vietnam lying right off the coast.’ As an example of this Ball mentioned that the Johnson administration ‘pressed the British … hard to stay in line on Vietnam’.¹ This comment reveals just how important allied support and cooperation was to the Johnson administration. With only five other countries fighting alongside them — Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Thailand and the Philippines — the diplomatic support of other key allies was crucial to America’s propaganda war. No country’s verbal support was more important than the United Kingdom’s. Not only was Britain the US’s closest ally, nominally at least, it was also a leading social democratic nation whose example was important, not least to the Commonwealth nations and in American liberal circles.