Andrew Payne's "War on the Ballot"

Andrew Payne is a departmental lecturer in international relations at the University of Oxford, where he was previously the Hedley Bull Research Fellow in International Relations and a William Golding Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. He serves on the board of Chatham House in London.

Payne applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes the reader into a case study of Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the war in Vietnam. It examines an argument some scholars have made in explaining why the president clung to a path of escalation with which he was uncomfortable: that Johnson’s advisory system was organized in a way that stifled debate and promoted hawkish perspectives.

Readers will find qualified support for this claim on this page. It is true that skeptics within the administration, like George Ball, were reduced to playing the role of a “devil’s advocate.” And McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, did control the flow of information to the president in a way that marginalized dissent. But if the president was poorly served by his advisory system, he was also largely responsible for cultivating a bureaucratic environment in which loyalty and a conformity of views were so highly prized.

To illustrate the point, the book recounts an anecdote Ball shares in his memoir in which Johnson teased him about his subordinate role in decision-making process.

“You’re like the school teacher looking for a job with a small school district in Texas,” Johnson said to Ball. “When asked by the school board whether he believed that the world was flat or round, he replied, ‘Oh, I can teach it either way.’”

“That’s you,” Johnson continued, “You can argue like hell with me against a position, but I know outside this room you’re going to support me. You can teach it flat or round.”

Even Bundy, the advisor many charge with culpability for filtering out meaningful challenge, understood that getting your views in front of a president was only half the battle.

“You can’t organize against Lyndon Johnson without getting bombed before breakfast, because in his view that’s the final and ultimate conspiracy.”

The Page 99 Test offers a mixed account of the book as a whole, revealing more about its style than the substance of the overall argument it makes.

On the one hand, it offers a representative sample of the kinds of evidence deployed in the book. In addition to the voluminous secondary record, War on the Ballot draws on thousands of declassified documents, presidential tape recordings and original interviews with senior administration officials to build an empirically rich narrative of decision-making in the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. These sources provide readers with an unprecedented account of what really went on behind closed doors during these historically significant conflicts, unfiltered by spin doctors and stenographers.

Johnson’s penchant for parables and crude analogies, for example, is accurately reflected on page 99. Elsewhere in this chapter we find the president characterizing the war as a football game, comparing peace negotiations to the sale of a house, and sarcastically referring to the ambassador to South Vietnam – a person he considered incompetent and unable to work with anyone – as “Mister God.” Indeed, the president routinely referred to his rivals and opponents as idiots, cry-babies, and much, much worse.

On the other hand, page 99 tells us very little about the central argument the book advances about the role of the electoral cycle in shaping presidential decision-making in war. The way in which the domestic political calendar systematically pulls presidents away from courses of action they deem to be in the national interest is addressed only indirectly here.

Elsewhere in this chapter, though, readers will find plenty of evidence that Johnson’s decisions relating to the “Americanization” of the war were profoundly shaped by electoral constraints. Often, Johnson tells us as much in own words. “I’ve got to win an election,” he told Bundy after one meeting in March 1964 in which escalatory plans were debated, “and then you can make a decision.” As Bundy later recalled, Johnson’s “pre-emptive concern” was to “win, win, win the election, not the war.”

Such evidence of the nakedly political origins of wartime decision-making raises serious questions about the normative implications of electoral accountability and foreign policy. War on the Ballot definitely shows that electoral politics matters, then, but whether it should do so is left for readers to decide.

Learn more about War on the Ballot at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue