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My evaluation is that his policy killed over 40,000 young men for nothing, due to his personal direction of the air war, during his time in office.

His goal was to get North Vietnam to quit fighting the war, not for us to win it!

He went from Kennedy's 16,000 troops to 550,000, and yet refused to let them try to win the war.

All the same time, the enemy had no qualms about fighting it and ultimately killed over 50,000, most of those during the Johnson Years.

Former Corporal Hitler decided that he knew better than his generals, time after time, and at several critical junctures he created disaster... he might have won WW-II if he had just sat back and left it to the German Generals.

Johnson essentially did the same thing, directing everybombing mission down to the fine details, during the 3 years of Operation Rolling Thunder.

He and Robert MacNamara personally chose the targets, the planes that would be used, what and how much ordnance would be dropped, date and time of the strike, and sometimes even the direction from which it would come.

But beyond all of that, wrong targets were DELIBERATELY chosen, as a matter of their strategy, called "gradualism".

Gradualism was where threatening destruction would serve as a more influential signal of "American determination" than destruction itself. It was better to hold important targets "hostage" by bombing trivial ones.

Military air fields, Haiphong Harbor, and various communication centers were off limits to our bombers, when they should have been the prime targets.

This wasn't from ignorance, it was part of a VERY bad strategy.

Johnson would have won Vietnam if he had just told the Joint Chiefs Of Staff "Go Win It", instead of bypassing The Pentagon to do things himself, continually.

My evaluation is that Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all ran the war in Vietnam, but Johnson's policy is what lost it.

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Q: What is your evaluation of Lyndon B. Johnson policy on Vietnam?
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