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Between Involvement and Detachment takes grasp with the Johnson administration's (1963-1969) perceptions of and responses to the Western European realignments. Arguing that the Johnson administration set out to maintain the American unilateralist position in the transatlantic relation, not just as a function of America's position as a superpower, but also as a function of certain historically based Euro-skepticism, the thesis suggests that America's Western European policy can be seen on a continuum of involvement and detachment. Based on archival research, the thesis concludes, that these policies, essentially, were detached as America rejected the European reason of state. The Western European realignments were recorded in the Johnson administration with de Gaulle's critique of US hegemony in Western Europe in the early 1960s. The thesis argues that the administration to a large extent had a traditional reading of de Gaulle's policies, and feared that if Gaullist thinking spread among the European allies, it would merit to a return to traditional European power politics. The analysis shows that, by 1964 the administration believed, according to this study, that NATO's principle of integration stood between the current 'balanced' Western Europe and the Europe of the pre-War period. In addition the administration held the opinion that the German problem and the Western European détente tampered with the US unilateralism in its relations with the Soviet Union, and its position as the leader of the Western world. De Gaulle's withdrawal from NATO's integrated command in 1966, and the subsequent British and Belgian calls for a reform of the alliance and a détente with East, contributed to the administration's fear of alliance disintegration and return to European power politics. The thesis argues that the Department of State attempted a 'political bargain', with which the allies would be given political consultation and a détente in return for re-commitment to integration, whereas the Acheson Committee proposed a détente and deterrence formula in NATO to the overcome this perceived alliance disintegration. Thus the US proposed the Harmel formula before Harmel. In general, the developments in Western Europe put the Johnson administration in a state of alarm, and the European allies therefore had a larger impact on America's policies, except in the essentially detached nuclear policy, which the administration maintained. Despite changed circumstances, the Nixon administration's relation with and perceptions of the European allies largely resemble the traditionalist view of the Johnson administration.

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This study examines the use of graduated escalation in Vietnam under the Administration of President Lyndon Johnson and attempts to discover the underlying causes that led to the enactment and the continuation of this policy throughout his administration.Factors studied include Johnson's perception of his place in history, his personal style of control, his dual loyalties to expanding "The Great Society" as well as stopping communism through military pressure, and his limited cultural understanding of the needs of the Vietnamese people and the intentions of their leaders.The conclusion is that, while Johnson was a canny politician in his own arena, his controlling personality probably prevented him from considering all of the options open to him in resolving the Vietnam problem and his simplistic, frontier type of diplomacy closed other doors and forced him along a path of frustration and defeat. / Department of Political Science

In the mid-1960's, the American people were gripped by a certain nameless fear brought on by America's military failure in Viet Nam, racial tension, student unrest, crumbling cities, and the nuclear arms race. This fear caused many to turn to a new conservatism, for the Democratic Party, symbolized by Lyndon Johnson, seemed to be the cause of many of these frightening problems. The Democrats were believed to be responsible for Viet Nam, for the growing racial confrontations, and for the overgrowing federal bureaucracy. This new conservatism benefited the Republican Party, and between 1964 and 1968, this party became ascendant. Throughout American history, a realignment of party identification has occurred every thirty to thirty-five years, and now the time was ripe. This thesis attempts to prove that there was a realignment in the partisan identifications of the electorate's support for the two parties, and that in the last half of the past decade realignment did take place.

On 23 April 1964, five months after assuming the office of President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson launched the "More Flags" program as United States policy. While the publicly stated purpose of.the "More Flags" program was to obtain as much non-military free world aid for the Republic of Vietnam as possible, the program's principle goal centered around Lyndon Johnson's desire to obtain an international consensus for America's policies toward Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The "More Flags" program continued to serve both goals for the remainder of Johnson's presidency. Although started with high expectations of success, the "More Flags" program never succeeded in achieving the levels of international cooperation Lyndon Johnson desired. In fact, the program's significant lack of success necessitated a number of changes, during the program's first year, in both its stated goals and in the methods used to prosecute it's implementation. The most important of these changes would be Washington's use of the program's beneficent objectives to mask it's use as the means through which the United States would purchase mercenary troops to fight in South Vietnam. "Mercenaries in Service to America: The 'More Flags' Foreign Policy of the United States," presents the available history of the "More Flags" program during the years of the Johnson Presidency, with an emphasis on the documentation of the program's use as a disguise for America's obtaining mercenary forces from the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. The non-mercenary troop contributions from Australia and New Zealand are likewise examined. The majority of documentary evidence comes from the original sources documents in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

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Much discussed and little understood, Richard Nixon's southern strategy demands scrutiny. A brief survey of the literature suggests that study on this controversial topic has reached an impasse. Southern historians keen to emphasise the importance of class in the region's partisan development over the last fifty years insist that any southern strategy predicated on racialised appeals to disaffected white conservatives was doomed to failure. Conversely, conventional accounts of the Nixon era remain wedded to the view that the southern strategy represented a successful devil's bargain whereby an avaricious Californian exchanged the promise of racial justice for black southerners in return for white Dixie's electoral votes. Most sobering of all are political scientists concerned with executive power, who evidence the limited discretion enjoyed by presidents to implement any agenda inimical to the corporate will of the federal bureaucracy. Since Nixon's executive departments were brimming with Democratic holdovers from the Kennedy and Johnson years, the question of whether or not the President demanded concessions to southern racists apparently becomes more or less irrelevant: the 'fourth branch' of the federal government inevitably ensured that a southern strategy was simply impossible to execute. In reality, much of this stalemate is the product of academic territorial warfare on the battleground of a subject wide open to multiple interpretations. A southern historian keen to showcase the importance of his local research is likely to show little interest in evidence that a President based in Washington D.C. could initiate social change in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Similarly, political scientists fighting an unrewarding battle to emphasise the autonomy of federal departments are naturally disinclined to highlight examples of presidential willpower altering bureaucratic culture. Nevertheless, an intriguing paradox remains in evidence. Despite leaning more towards the political philosophy of antediluvian white southerners than the demands of black Americans, Richard Nixon presided over a period of such fundamental social reconstruction below the Mason-Dixie line that he could legitimately claim to have desegregated more southern schools than any other President in history. Whilst a raft of excellent monologues demonstrating the impact of local movements down South on national politics have been published over the last decade, few have even attempted to explain this peculiar phenomenon. As Matthew Lassiter observed in a Journal of American History roundtable on American conservatism in December 2011, 'the recent pendulum swing has overstated the case for a rightward shift in American politics by focusing too narrowly on partisan narratives and specific election cycles rather than on the more complex dynamics of political culture, political economy, and public policy.' The purpose of this thesis is to explain how a President notorious for pursuing the votes of white segregationists rested at the head of a federal government that ruthlessly dismantled Jim Crow. By incorporating the range of methodologies elucidated above, it will identify exactly how much influence President Nixon and his executive officers exerted over civil rights policy. Was Nixon's reactionary agenda thwarted by over-mighty bureaucrats? Or did the President act more responsibly than the majority of commentators have admitted?