President Johnson With Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor

President Lyndon Johnson meeting at the White House with top foreign policy and defense advisers on the situation in South Vietnam. Shown from left are: President Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Maxwell D. Taylor, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam.

President Lyndon B. Johnson confers with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on Dec. 1, 1964. They were reluctant to bomb SAM sites near Hanoi fearing it would be an escalation of the war that would draw in China or the Soviet Union. (Getty Images)

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