linguistic:voice_change
Lyndon B. Johnson's role

Robert Dean says McNamara recognised that Johnson could have avoided war in his 1995 memoirs. Dean believes "the basic explanation McNamara offers is that the Kennedy and Johnson policy makers were blinded by their own rigid anti-communist ideology". Arnold R. Isaacs says that there was limited public pressure to escalate war whilst his political position was already safe because of an electoral vote of 486 in the 1964 presidential election. He further suggests escalation posed greater political risks to Johnson than disengagement, particularly due to the potential consequences on his domestic legislative priorities. Johnson feared that a prolonged and costly war would divert attention away from key social reforms and spark political debate. In early 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and several senior Democratic lawmakers, warned that military escalation could destabilise domestic policy, cutting into the Great Society funding. Despite these warnings, Johnson opted to escalate U.S. involvement without a formal declaration of war, pursuing what some critics described as a strategy of waging “war on the sly.” This approach allowed Johnson to avoid triggering a full-scale public debate. Analysts have argued that Johnson was aware of the fragile nature of domestic consensus on the war and feared that open debate might expose the extent of elite opposition and jeopardise the administration’s domestic policy. According to Isaacs, the view that Johnson was pushed into war by external factors like public pressure and political necessity can be hard to justify and was instead part of the masculine urge to solve international conflicts with war and "that if enough planes could drop enough bombs on a backward Asian country, victory must follow".