A few years following his voluntary departure from government, James Thomson, a frustrated mid-level China hand who had served in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, speculated that the 1960s would be remembered as “a period of drearily sustained deadlock” between Washington and Beijing. Notwithstanding his own misgivings over the priorities and leanings of his superiors, Thomson noted with bittersweet pride that some of the seeds of the thaw that unfolded during the Nixon years had been planted in the preceding decade, thus warranting this period “a chapter, or at least an extended footnote, in the history of the Sino-American...

The logical starting point for an examination of Lyndon Johnson’s encounter with the PRC is January 1961, when John F. Kennedy assumed control of the White House after eight years of Republican rule. The significance of Kennedy’s China record for our discussion is twofold. First, Johnson’s self-image as the custodian of JFK’s legacy at home and abroad and his considerable regard for the views of the slain President’s staff warrants a more than cursory glance at Camelot’s approach to China; the overlap in senior national security personnel and their perceptions between the Democratic administrations of the 1960s was truly unique....

Mounting dismay abroad over the PRC’s continued exclusion from the international community and high-level alarm over the mainland’s nuclear progress all but ensured that China would figure prominently among the several foreign policy items vying for the attention of Kennedy’s successor. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson’s first year in power coincided with a dramatic change in China’s international relationships. Both French recognition of Beijing and China’s explosion of a nuclear device exposed the surreality of ostracizing the world’s most populous nation, triggering a torrent of calls from home and abroad for the new administration to reappraise America’s traditional approach to the communist...

On the surface, developments in the early stages of the Johnson presidency created an auspicious setting for at least a minor departure in China policy. The positive press reviews of Roger Hilsman’s December 1963 address and the muted reaction from a weakened China Lobby indicated a relaxed political climate, while LBJ’s sweeping victory in the 1964 election afforded an ideal opportunity for providing substance to Hilsman’s words.¹ As Johnson committed his nation to war in Vietnam in July 1965, however, the line of containment and isolation bequeathed by his predecessors remained firmly intact. This chapter links this policy paralysis to...

The conventional view of Sino-American relations during the Johnson years holds that Washington’s tendency to view China through the prism of Vietnam precluded any policy innovation or movement toward normalization with the mainland.¹ Vietnam did in fact remain a constant determinant of the administration’s stance toward Beijing, yet its impact on China policy deliberations changed as conditions on the ground in that war evolved. Indeed, one of the unexamined ironies of Vietnam, a war undertaken in part to check Chinese expansionism, is that it created pressures for an accommodation of sorts with the PRC and encouraged US decision-makers who might...

Since the early 1960s, China watchers both inside and outside government had urged that US policy toward the mainland be tailored in such a way as to exploit the apparent differences in perspective between the rigid ideologues ruling the country and the younger, presumably more pragmatic leadership-in-waiting. According to this logic, a more accommodating approach would compel Mao Zedong’s potential successors to reconsider their preconception of US hostility, an image inculcated by Maoist dogma and reinforced by America’s own obstinacy, and encourage them to concentrate their energies on domestic concerns once the Chairman had departed from the stage. The broad...

As the Johnson administration entered what would be its final year in office, its brief flirtation with policy experimentation had given way to a mostly reactive posture, as both the timing and nature of new approaches to the PRC awaited the outcome of the Cultural Revolution. While it challenged long-held assumptions about the mainland’s domestic and foreign politics, the onset of this turmoil in 1966 dislodged China policy from the President’s crowded agenda. LBJ was kept fully apprised of mainland developments, yet various trade and travel initiatives that had piqued the interest of the White House were shelved indefinitely. As...

The implications of this study for the historiography of both Sino-American relations and the foreign policies of the Johnson administration are far-reaching. Recapitulating the book’s central themes and findings, this conclusion accounts for the factors underlying the relaxation of US attitudes toward China in the 1960s, assesses the importance of the Johnson team’s tentative bridge-building, identifies points of departure between Johnson’s and Nixon’s respective approaches to the PRC, and highlights LBJ’s strengths and weaknesses as a foreign policy leader within the context of his dealings with Beijing.

By November 1963, US policy toward China had changed very little since the...