US Presidents

by Augusta Dell’omo

Donald Trump responded to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House in a predictable way. The President launched an incoherent, childish tweetstorm, labeling Wolff “mentally deranged” and an agent of the “Fake News Media,” which, typically, drew even more attention to the book. Indeed, in the hours after the President’s tweets, Fire and Fury shot to the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list. In his alleged exposé of a scandal-ridden administration, Wolff promised to include everything in this new work, from insider’s knowledge of the frigid marriage between the President and First Lady, to Ivanka Trump’s mockery of “the Donald’s” hair. Fire and Fury proved almost instantly popular amongst an exasperated American electorate, regardless of methodological problems that dominate the work.

Does Wolff’s book merit serious consideration from scholars? Is it an historical account? Fire and Fury does not seem to fit the typical model of a presidential history. Wolff’s work seems most similar to political journalist Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. Unlike, say David McCullough’s John Adams and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, which rely on meticulous research to evaluate the President’s accomplishments throughout the course of a presidency, McGinnis and Wolff hone in on a few short months at the beginning of the president’s term. McGinniss followed the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, often seen as Trump’s closest historical parallel. Both McGinniss and Wolff benefit a great deal from their insider’s access and a sensationalist writing style in the midst of presidential scandal.

Even as a work of journalism, though, Fire and Fury defies convention. Wolff often inserts tawdry detail and gossip that would be incredibly difficult to substantiate. While this makes it problematic to verify, Fire and Fury does capture the flavor of White House operations in a way that traditional reporting does not. For instance, it may be hard to verify that Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell tried to convince Trump to take a “presidential stance” regarding human rights atrocities using a PowerPoint of graphic, violent imagery or that Trump then poured over for hours and showed to others, but the inclusion of this gossip gives the reader a window into the character of the President, even if it is based on rumor.

Campaigning in Arizona, October 2016 (via Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

Fire and Fury is especially useful in understanding the flawed cast of characters that vie for control over Trump and his “agenda,” (something Wolff doubts really exists). Traditional media coverage, understandably, focuses to such a degree on the President that his backdrop of enablers, at times, fades into the background. According to Wolff, the failures of the Trump administration can be tied directly to the mismanagement and political infighting of the fools surrounding him, including General H.R. McMasters and Reince Priebus. Throughout Fire and Fury, Wolff contends that the current state of the administration springs from a basic fact of the Trump administration: that the current POTUS never actually wanted to win the presidency. The Trump family, according to Wolff, saw the 2016 election as a grand moneymaking scheme, only seeking to elevate their national profile—and their brand revenues. After his surprise win, Wolff argues, Trump entered the White House particularly unmoored from reality, governed solely by personal impulse and self-gratification. The excesses and corruption of the current administration emerge in startling display and Wolff persuasively shows the collective inability of Washington’s establishment to curb the impulses of the White House.

Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks into the Oval Office as President Donald Trump reads over his notes, Friday, March 10, 2017, prior to meeting with the Healthcare Specific House Committee Leadership at the White House (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Wikipedia)

Wolff suspiciously manages to hit almost all of the mini-presidential scandals that seem to emerge almost daily with the current administration, an impressive feat. For instance, Wolff has a knack for bringing seemingly disparate political moments together. One chapter manages to connect Trump’s frustrations over the situation in Afghanistan and his issues with General H.R. McMasters to the decision to bring in Anthony Scaramucci. In doing so, Wolff creates the breakneck pace of news since Trump’s inauguration and brings the reader into the center of an ongoing crisis in which Trump’s lackeys try to use one crisis to resolve another. Unsettlingly, and predictably, Trump’s messengers seem as overwhelmed as the rest of the American populace.

Unfortunately, Fire and Fury is riddled with methodological problems. Wolff consistently fails to cite sources. Speculation is indistinguishable from on-the-record quotes throughout. Tracing Wolff’s line of argumentation is impossible, because he masks much of his evidence under the guise of protecting sources. Wolff uses this umbrella of protection even when using full quotations from figures like Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner—a highly unorthodox use of journalistic convention. Furthermore, Wolff uses Trump’s ill-preparedness for the highest office in the land as proof that Trump “never wanted to be President.” He ignores the fact that Trump has publicly flirted with the idea of running for president since the 1980s, even discussing it on national television with Oprah in 1988. Whether or not these were sincere ambitions, Trump clearly desired the power and influence that came with the presidency. Wolff’s shortcomings not only dilute his arguments, but bring the rest of his work into question.

Protest against Presidential Executive Order banning entry of citizens of Muslim-majority countries into the United States, in front of the White House, Washington, DC (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most glaring problem in Fire and Fury is Wolff’s treatment of the President’s connection to white supremacy. Throughout the book Wolff portrays Trump as an incompetent, narcissist, incapable of thinking outside the paradigm of personal vanity. However, Wolff ignores how Trump uses white supremacy to maintain a connection with his most ardent supporters. Look no further than the President’s disgusting comments regarding Haitian and African immigrants that he hoped would play well with his base. Yet, Wolff argues that not only are left-wing accusations of Trump’s racism “hysterical,” but also that white supremacists like Richard Spencer prove “pesky” for the White House. Wolff claims that he only criticized former National Football League quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick because Trump was annoyed that he wasn’t getting the attention he felt he deserved. Instead of acknowledging proof of the President’s calculated racism and his active connection with white supremacists, Wolff insists Trump merely “tolerates a race-tinged political view.” By hedging his discussion of the racism of the Trump administration, Wolff manages to create an image of the President as an almost entirely impulse driven figure without political calculation. Undoubtedly, impulse and narcissism govern the President. But to depict Trump like this ignores the President’s long history of racism going back to the 1970s, with notable examples including avoiding renting to African-Americans, taking out full page ads in New York newspapers urging for the death penalty of the Central Park Five in 1989, and calling his black casino employees “lazy.”

Wolff calls Fire and Fury “explosive,” but in reality, it validates much of the current speculation regarding the gross incompetence of the Trump administration. Readers should take caution, however, with Wolff’s portrayal of a child-like President. Throughout most of Fire and Fury, Wolff argues that Trump and his colleagues have no idea what they are doing. But, perhaps the exact opposite is true.

Also by Augusta Dell’omo on Not Even Past:

Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader by Matthew Qvortrup (2016)
History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone
Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (1992)

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The Impossible Presidency by Jeremi Suri
The Ideological Origins of a Cold War Warrior: John Foster Dulles and his Grandfather by Paula O’Donnell
Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra by Roy Doron

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Why did the United States choose to fight a major war in Vietnam? The question has bedeviled scholars almost since President Lyndon Johnson made the decision in 1965.

National Security Advisor and close Kennedy aide, McGeorge "Mac" Bundy, with President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, 1967.

The most common answer that historians have offered over the years suggests that LBJ believed he had no real option but to commit U.S. forces. In this view, the president understood that the government of South Vietnam, a strong ally of the United States, would inevitably collapse under the weight of a mounting communist insurgency if Washington did not send troops to help stave off the threat. The president believed, moreover, that such a collapse would amount to a major defeat for the United States in a key part of the world and would imperil U.S. security everywhere by calling into question Washington’s determination to help its allies around the globe. So momentous were the stakes, in short, that LBJ never seriously considered any alternative to escalation. But LBJ was, in this view, certain of another thing too: U.S. troops, once committed, would inevitably succeed in defeating the communist insurgency and bolstering South Vietnam as a pro-U.S. bastion. Johnson was convinced of the necessity of intervening in Vietnam and the certainty of success.

As historians have gained access to secret documentation, however, they have questioned this interpretation. Again and again, newly opened records from the National Archives in Maryland, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library at UT-Austin, and elsewhere have demonstrated that the president and his advisers recognized reasonable alternatives to intervention and foresaw the many problems that would beset U.S. forces when they were sent into Vietnam. The result of such discoveries has been to paint a new picture of LBJ’s decision-making in 1964 and 1965. Where scholars once saw certainty and confidence, they now see indecision and anxiety.

One of the best pieces of evidence for this newer view of U.S. decision-making is the recording of a conversation between LBJ and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, on May 27, 1964. This tape, released by the LBJ Library in 1997, is among the most spectacular of the telephone conversations recorded in the Oval Office during the Johnson presidency. Like other chief executives from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, LBJ frequently recorded conversations and meetings, most likely in order to have a record to refresh his memory but possibly also to help shape the historical record. Whatever the motive, the recordings unquestionably offer historians a remarkable new resource for appreciating the president’s personal opinions much more fully than ever before.

In his conversation with Bundy, LBJ expresses deep anxiety about what would happen if the United States failed to defend South Vietnam from communist takeover – evidence that bolsters the older, conventional view of U.S. motives for escalation. Fearing what historians would later dub the “domino effect,” Johnson suggests that the communist powers – the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China – would be emboldened by a communist victory in South Vietnam and might make trouble elsewhere. The communists, in fact, “may just chase you right into your own kitchen,” the president says in his typical down-home manner. LBJ also provides evidence for the older interpretation by breezily dismissing other powerful Americans who urged him to negotiate a settlement and withdraw U.S. power from South Vietnam. He shows special contempt for Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, charging that the Montana Democrat, a strong advocate of winding down the U.S. role in South Vietnam, had “no spine at all” and took a position that was “just milquetoast as it can be.”

In other parts of the conversation, however, LBJ heaps doubt on the idea that defending South Vietnam was crucial to U.S. security. “What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” he asks Bundy. “What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country?” Most chillingly, Johnson shows keen awareness that victory in Vietnam was anything but a sure thing. He worries that full-fledged U.S. intervention in Vietnam would trigger corresponding escalation by communist China, raising the horrifying specter of a direct superpower confrontation, as in Korea a few years earlier, between Chinese and U.S. forces. “I don’t think we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area,” LBJ asserts. Moreover, the United States, once committed to a war, might find it impossible to get out. “It’s damn easy to get into a war, but … it’s going to be awful hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in,” LBJ asserts with remarkable prescience.

Johnson also defies the older interpretation of his outlook by showing openness to a range of opinions about how to proceed in Vietnam. To be sure, he hardly expresses enthusiasm about the idea of cutting American losses and withdrawing from South Vietnam, as Mansfield and prominent journalist Walter Lippmann among others were urging at the time. Neither, however, does he dismiss the possibility out of hand when the subject comes up. On the contrary, he urges consideration of a wide range of opinions and expresses hope that Lippmann might sit down with the hawkish Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to discuss their differences.

Which is the “real” LBJ – the president who dismissed Mansfield as spineless or the president who questioned the real value of an independent, pro-American South Vietnam to the United States? At the end of the day, of course, it’s impossible to say. Both sets of ideas seem to have swirled simultaneously in LBJ’s head as he made fateful decisions. But one thing is certain: simple, rigid interpretations of Johnson’s attitudes to not hold up to the remarkable complexity of the emerging documentary record. To appreciate U.S. decision-making fully will require the release of further sources but also, almost certainly, a willingness to tolerate contradictions, nuance, and ambiguity.

Listen to the conversation (Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Anguish, May 27, 1964: Conversation with national security advisor McGeorge Bundy. 27 May 1964. History and Politics Out Loud. Ed. Jerry Goldman. 30 Sept. 1999. Northwestern University.)

Transcript of the conversation (Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) Washington, May 27, 1964, 11:24 a.m.. Source: U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-68, Volume XXVII, Mainland Southeast Asia: Regional Affairs, Washington, DC, Document Number 53. Original Source: Johnson Library, Recordings and Transcripts, Recording of a telephone conversation between the President and McGeorge Bundy, Tape 64.28 PNO 111. No classification marking. This transcript was prepared by the Office of the Historian specifically for this volume.)

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (2018)

LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

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