Accepting the Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the Vietnam War, and the Breakdown of the Cold War Consensus

This paper, based on extensive research in over thirty presidential and congressional archives, explores how the Cold War consensus–which relied on congenial executive-legislative relations for two decades–eroded during the Vietnam conflict and paved the way for a new paradigm in U.S. politics.  During the early years of the U.S. commitment to the Saigon regime, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon benefited from congressional malleability and complicity in foreign policy that was the hallmark of the consensus...in spite of the marked divide between hawks and doves in both parties.  Most members of Congress were more than happy to allow the administration to take the lead in Vietnam and thereby assume the lion’s share of the political risk.  Congress consistently voted for appropriations for the American forces on the grounds that to deprive the troops of supplies while in harm’s way would be unpatriotic.  Yet by supporting these spending bills, they implicitly ratified the policies pursued by three successive administrations.  Domestic political calculations drove this complicity.  Because they wanted to be reelected, members of Congress had a strong incentive to address salient political issues, but could not bring themselves to take the extra (and more dangerous) step of opposing funding of the war.  Yet as the Vietnam conflict evolved, growing concern about the war and the resulting congressional assertion of its foreign policy prerogatives helped to undermine the Cold War consensus.  Indeed, the conflict had positive ramifications for the executive-legislative relationship; Vietnam made it far less costly for Congress to challenge the president.  One need only recall that ten months after the Paris accords were signed Congress approved the War Powers Act over Nixon’s veto.  But, driven by the Cold War consensus, members of Congress failed in their constitutional, political, and moral obligations for much of the conflict.