“To tell the story of the Vietnam War without the GOP,” the historian Andrew L. Johns insists, “would be like watching ‘Seinfeld’ without Kramer” (8). But unlike that iconic sitcom, which was a show about nothing, Vietnam's Second Front is a book about something important: the Republican Party's ideas, actions, and impact regarding the war in Indochina. Focusing on the years 1961 to 1973, Johns arrives at a sweeping, largely persuasive, conclusion: “The nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy defined the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam” (1).

Three themes emerge in Johns's study: convergence, complicity, and division. There was, according to the author, remarkable consistency in the way Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon approached the war in Vietnam. All three men feared a public debate on the war and right-wing attacks if they abandoned South Vietnam to the Communists. The result was plain: “Rather than taking decisive action, the Vietnam-era presidents would deal with problems incrementally and reactively” (23). JFK delayed making decisions on Vietnam until after the 1964 election, for fear of the fallout; as Kennedy told a friend: “I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me” (31). Johnson, we all know, ran as the peace candidate in 1964 only to become a war president in 1965. Here, too, politics defined LBJ's admixture of evasion and resolve: “The ‘who lost China debate’ and McCarthyism, Johnson believed, would be ‘chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam’” (45). Even Nixon, who had the luxury of attacking JFK and LBJ from the right throughout the 1960s, saw hawkish conservatives, such as Ronald Reagan in 1968 and Ohio Representative John Ashbrook in 1972, lurking over his shoulder. While Nixon never developed a comprehensive strategy for winning the war as the hawks wanted, neither did he join hands with the doves.

The Republican Party, as well as the Congress, thus bore some responsibility for US involvement in Vietnam. With almost no dissenting votes, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized Johnson to wage war in Indochina. Beyond that, such Republican hawks as Nixon (early on), Barry Goldwater, and Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to pummel LBJ if he failed to apply “overwhelming force” to defend South Vietnam's independence (89). Of these critics, the most vocal, opportunistic, and politically successful was Nixon. In the mid-1960s, the former vice president “never accused Johnson of doing too much” on the battlefield (90). And he declared that “there can be no substitute for victory” when the aim was defeating Communist aggression (101). But later on, as Americans tired of the war, Nixon soft-pedaled his rhetoric, “managed to combine a call for an honorable peace with his traditionally tough anti-Communist rhetoric,” and won his party's presidential nomination and the White House in 1968 (233). He thus came to reap what he, and his early stridency, had sown. “Vietnam,” Johns contends, “was not simply ‘Lyndon Johnson's War’” (338).

The most interesting—and valuable—parts of Vietnam's Second Front are the dissection of the debate within the Grand Old Party. Johns maintains that, on the war, Republicans fell into three main categories: doves, hawks, and those whose positions shifted. Among the earliest doves were Senators George Aiken of Vermont, John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, and Mark Hatfield of Oregon; California Representative Pete McCloskey, who challenged Nixon for the party's nomination in 1972, emerged a bit later. Those who changed their stance included Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, perhaps the most able of the Republicans; George W. Romney of Michigan, who was the frontrunner for the 1968 presidential nomination until he fumbled over Vietnam; and Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin who, as Nixon's secretary of defense, developed the plan to withdraw US troops from Vietnam. The largest faction in the party remained the hawks, of whom Eisenhower was the most influential. The former president and World War II general told LBJ: “We are not going to be run out of a free country that we helped establish” (93). Furthermore, he vowed to make his views public “if any Republican or Democrat suggests that we pull out of Vietnam and turn our backs on the more than thirteen thousand Americans who died in the cause of freedom there” (187). In contrast, the doves counted in their ranks Cooper, a respected former diplomat, and the charmingly plainspoken Aiken, who proposed that the United States “declare victory and go home” as a way of disengaging from Vietnam (125). But such leaders and their restraint proved no match for the hawkishness of “America's most respected and distinguished military leader” (187).

Overall, America's Second Front contains weaknesses as well as strengths. Johns's search for commonality in the ways Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon tackled Vietnam is sensible, albeit forced in places. JFK and LBJ were more vulnerable to right-wing attacks than Nixon would have been because both men were Democrats and because the early and middle-1960s were still a time when escalation in Vietnam—and its impact—remained an abstraction. During that period, Nixon, as a private citizen, could sound as hawkish as he wished, but by 1968, when Americans were turning against the war, Vietnam ceased to be an issue that the GOP could exploit easily. In fact, just a few years later, Republican Senator Hugh Scott said of his caucus: “You don't see any hawks around here. The hawks are all ex-hawks” (295). In the 1970s, then, right-wing criticism posed little threat to Nixon, especially since Reagan and Goldwater stayed loyal to the president while Ashbrook remained a marginal figure within the GOP. In a way, Johns may have overestimated the political vulnerability of these three presidents and underappreciated specific periods when they would have felt secure enough to make difficult decisions on foreign policy in general and Vietnam in particular: Kennedy after the Cuban missile crisis, Johnson following his landslide victory in 1964, and Nixon after his triumphant visit to China in 1972.

Such quibbles do not diminish the scale of Johns's achievement. Along with Julian Zelizer's more comprehensive study Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—from World War II to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010), Johns's book refines the concept of a bipartisan foreign policy during the Cold War. He also demonstrates that, regarding Vietnam, the Republican Party “experienced the same divisions and upheavals as the rest of the country” (3). And he deftly explains how Nixon mastered—and Romney mishandled—the war as a campaign issue. Prodigiously researched, convincingly argued, and engagingly written (with plenty of mythological allusions to please the classicists), Vietnam's Second Front will be of enormous interest to scholars of American politics, foreign policy, and the war in Indochina.