Lyndon Johnson was a force of nature. He crafted his own style that fixated on politics, maximizing the acquisition of power, building consensus, and, in the end, persistently persuading others to bend to his will. He honed these techniques in the House, mastered them in the Senate, and employed them throughout his five-plus years as President of the United States. In his first couple of years in the White House after taking over for his slain predecessor, John Kennedy, Johnson was at the top of his game. He unified the nation in the wake of a national tragedy, led the passage of JFK’s highest priorities, including a landmark civil rights bill, and began a crusade to enact a program he called the “Great Society.” Johnson’s favorability in his first year in office never dropped below 70%. He won re-election in one of the greatest landslides of the 20th Century. Through the middle of 1965, Lyndon Johnson appeared to be well on his way to one of the greatest, most impactful presidencies in American history.

But Johnson’s tenure in the White House was a tale of two presidencies. As great as his domestic achievements were, his failures in foreign affairs may have even been more pronounced. Johnson inherited the American presence in Vietnam. He was determined to win, to stay true to American commitments and prevent a Communist takeover of the South. As more American soldiers were targeted by the enemy, Johnson approved requests from his military leaders to ramp up U.S. forces and initiate bombing raids against the North. Those requests for more troops never waned. When Johnson became President in 1963, there were 16,300 U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. Two years later, that number was 184,300. Two years after that, it was 485,600 (and still climbing). These forces were supported by nearly non-stop bombing campaigns that collectively had virtually no impact on the determination of the North Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh’s North suffered devastating losses, but their nationalist resolve to unify Vietnam under Communist rule never wavered. For several years, Johnson couldn’t even figure out a way to get the North to the negotiating table. His peerless powers of persuasion in Washington, D.C., completely failed in Southeast Asia.

Throughout this period, as the deaths mounted in the jungles 10,000 miles from home, Johnson lost the support of the American people. Things got so bad that the man who craved political power more than anything in life self-selected out of the political game by deciding not to run for one more term as President. And in the end, it was essentially all for naught, as the North eventually conquered South Vietnam, reuniting the country under a single-party Communist rule. Lyndon Johnson remained committed to the fight in Vietnam to the end, unable to see the futility of the effort. It was a catastrophic outcome, perhaps the worst foreign policy debacle in American history, much of which resulted directly from critical decisions made by President Lyndon Johnson. It was a painful ending for a man who had reached the very peak of the political world before this tragic fall, yielding a painful legacy for Johnson and the nation he led during the tumultuous 1960s.