Yawing Toward Charybdis: Intelligence Influence on Johnson Administration Cold War Policy in 1964-5

Abstract

This work analyzes the Johnson Administration’s decision-making in U.S.-Soviet relations during 1964 and 1965—specifically the period between the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incident and Premier Aleksei Kosygin’s visit to Hanoi in February of 1965. Following relatively closely behind both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and within the context of a burgeoning U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia, this period was perilous, making the administration’s decision process regarding its principal Cold War adversary worthy of analysis. However, instead of employing the world’s most robust intelligence apparatus to inform its decision making, the Johnson White House used it to justify policy choices it had made. To explore this phenomenon, there are two important questions that this work seeks to address. First, were senior decision-makers at the National Security Council (NSC) receiving accurate intelligence on Soviet attitudes toward these major events? Second, did it undergo alteration before these decision-makers pondered available courses of action? The findings will allow an investigation of the Johnson administration’s decision process and the influence that observations from both information collectors and analysts had on that process. While much analysis has occurred regarding the Intelligence Cycle, as well as intelligence’s influence on foreign policy, this study will, by parsing the model into its components, derive where the cycle succeeded or failed to influence policymaking during three crises in 1964 and 1965 that shaped U.S.-Soviet relations and the Johnson Administration’s decision to begin a full-scale intervention in South Vietnam. In these three crises, U.S. policymakers succeeded in preventing a direct conflict with the Soviet Union and/or the People’s Republic of China, which was important. However, in Vietnam, as these chapters will elucidate, the Intelligence Cycle failed to influence policy: the policy was already in place, and the Intelligence Cycle was disregarded if its products failed to support the policy; or it was twisted to provide narrow results that validated predetermined policies. At the strategic level, the United States possessed excellent intelligence, and policy-makers accepted and acted upon it, as this work will elucidate in its narrative on the U.S.-Soviet bilateral relationship during this period. Simultaneously, however, in its policy toward Vietnam, the administration focused its attention on tactical over operational intelligence products; the intelligence apparatus—beginning at the Tonkin Gulf Incident—served more as a cheerleader for the policy in place, and not to provide guidance to American policy-makers. The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations’ Basic National Security Policy (BNSP), drawn up by Walt Rostow, provided the broad outline for the administrations’ perception of the Soviet Union, as well as the doctrine for coping with it. Rostow’s document offers a guide for how the United States government intended to respond to difficult Cold War questions, including: How the U.S. should answer Soviet attempts to influence formerly colonized states; how to deal with growing tensions between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the USSR; and under what circumstances the government would risk American troops in another land war inside Asia. Understanding the BNSP that the Johnson administration inherited and preserved is critical to deriving the influence of available intelligence reporting and analysis on the actions that occurred within the scope of this work.