American History

is that the Asian desk of the State Department was effectively hollowed out by the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

Those in the Department who had expertise in, for instance, Chinese politics and especially the realities of the Chinese Communist takeover were hounded out of government by all the "soft on Communism" and "I have a list of 50 card carrying Communists in the State Dept," BS. This was also true of anyone there with actual experience in Vietnam or "French Indochina."

Not that the expertise on Indochina was all that deep to begin with. Halberstam points out that when Kennedy took office there wasn't a single person in the State Department who could speak or read Vietnamese. But certainly anyone there who saw what was happening in Vietnam as a nationalist struggle against colonialism, as opposed to being a part of some vast "international Communist conspiracy," anyone who had a more nuanced view of the politics in the region was out on their ear by 1960.

As a result of all this, the highest levels of the Dept. were filled with the likes of Dean Rusk, hardly an original thinker and known for playing it safe when it came to the "Communist threat" in Asia.

All this contributed to the woefully flawed advice LBJ received from his aides.

I agree with your assessment of LBJ, by the way. I forget who said it, but someone at the time remarked that "Johnson's problem isn't that he's uneducated. It's that he thinks he's uneducated," or words to that effect.