NEW YORK — William Conrad Gibbons, a foreign policy expert at the Library of Congress whose multivolume account of the relationship between Congress and the executive branch during the Vietnam War has served as a cornerstone of historical writing on the war since its first volume was published in 1984, died July 4 at his farm in Monroe, Va. He was 88.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Patricia McAdams Gibbons. He had nearly completed the fifth and final volume when he died.
In the late 1970s, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeking to map the road that had led to the morass of the Vietnam War, directed the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress to prepare a dispassionate, purely factual account of the period from 1945 to 1975.
“Only by examining those decisions can we gain from this bitter experience the full understanding needed to act more wisely in the future,” Senator Charles H. Percy, an Illinois Republican, wrote in the foreword to the first volume of the work, “The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships,” published by the Government Printing Office.
The task fell to Dr. Gibbons, a historian by training who in 1972 had begun working as a senior analyst for the foreign affairs division at the library.
With one full-time assistant, Patricia McAdams, whom he later married, he set about analyzing and organizing a mass of material, not just information on the record but also histories of the war; documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; newly declassified material at the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries; the notes of congressional committees and subcommittees; and the spoken testimony of 137 interview subjects from General William C. Westmoreland to congressional staff members. He himself had been a staff assistant to two Democratic majority leaders in the Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson and Mike Mansfield.
The resulting four volumes, more than 2,000 pages, were immediately recognized as indispensable, providing an almost day-by-day account, lavishly footnoted, of the myriad steps and countless decisions involved in a conflict whose consequences dismayed and mystified politicians and the public alike.
In keeping with its mandate, the work was descriptive and analytical. “It does not seek to judge or to assess responsibility, but it does attempt to locate responsibility, to describe roles, and to indicate why and how decisions were made,” the preface to the first volume stated.
Dr. Gibbons’s magnum opus was seized on by historians such as authors Stanley Karnow (“Vietnam: A History”), Don Oberdorfer (“Senator Mansfield”) and Robert Dallek (“Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973”).
William Conrad Gibbons was born in 1926, in Harrisonburg, Va. He served in the Army at the end of World War II before earning a bachelor’s degree in history and government from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., and a doctorate in politics from Princeton.
After working as a congressional staffer, Dr. Gibbons made an unsuccessful run in 1962 for the House of Representatives from the western Virginia district that included his hometown. Returning to Washington, he served with the US Agency for International Development, first as its deputy director for congressional liaison and then, from 1965 to 1968, as director.
He was hired by Texas A&M University to be the founding chairman of its political science department and later taught as a visiting professor at Wellesley College before joining the Library of Congress. In 1980, he became a visiting professor at George Mason University. He retired from the Library of Congress in 1989 but continued writing “The US Government and the Vietnam War.”
The second volume appeared in 1985, the third in 1988, and the fourth volume, covering July 1965 to January 1968, in 1995.
The final volume, which Dr. Gibbons left as a 747-page typed manuscript, ends at June 1971.
His wife said he had planned to continue the narrative to the end of 1971 and then write, as a kind of postscript, a slim one-volume account covering the period from 1972, when Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, began conducting peace talks openly with the North Vietnamese, to the end of the war in 1975.