February 13, 1965: President Johnson authorizes Operation Rolling Thunder.
In late July 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson declared:
There are great stakes in the balance… If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection… We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.
President Johnson won his presidency by a landslide in 1964 on a platform that asserted “power exercised with restraint” and above all “the preservation of peace.” It was to this objective, to a “quick and honorable end,” that the Johnson administration terminated its policy of restricted overt American intervention and formulated a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder. For a virtually uninterrupted stretch between March 1965 and November 1968, Rolling Thunder dropped, by some estimates, nearly a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Contemporaries criticized the tepid rate of its escalation. And by some accounts the U.S. military theoretically pursued a policy of minimizing excessive collateral damage, yet this was a strategic bombing campaign, a tactic undergird by ravaging morale by ravaging populations. Ultimately, the bombardment inflicted some 72,000 civilian casualties.
"Its cornerstone," writes Robert Pape,"was to destroy industrial war potential so as to wreak havoc on the political and social fabric of North Vietnam." A gradually-escalated bombing campaign would hypothetically and through stranglehold force Hanoi to negotiate (that is, to end its support for any kind of guerrilla resistance in the south). The operation and the looming prospect of deepening intervention prompted criticism from Senator Frank Church, of the President’s own party. Within a week Church warned that in "newly emerging nations" such as Vietnam, which had only just liberated itself from France’s colonial grip, "the specter of Western imperialism is dreaded more than communism.”
In March 1965, 3,500 Marines arrived at Da Nang airbase. In July, President Johnson committed 125,000 U.S. troops, his “guardians at the gate,” to Vietnam.