Senator Mike Mansfield and also served as an advance man for presidential contender Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960. Dr. Gibbons ran for Congress from the Western District of Virginia, which covered his hometown of Harrisonburg but was defeated. He then returned to Washington to work in Congressional Relations at the State Department.

At the beginning of the Nixon Administration, William Gibbons left Washington to set up and head the political science department at Texas A&M University. He went on to be a visiting professor at Wellesley College and worked briefly on the Bicentennial Commission before becoming a senior analyst for the Foreign Affairs Division (“FAND”) of the Library of Congress, where he stayed for twenty years. It was as a senior analyst at FAND that he authored the definitive five-volume set entitled “The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War.”

The series has been described by historians and journalists as: “By far the best books on the subject” (William Bundy), “The master of Vietnam research” (David Maraniss), “Magisterial” (Brian VanDeMark), “Bill is an overlooked hero…for people like myself, well, just watch how much his name comes up in the footnotes” (Paul Hendrickson), “One of the most valuable studies of the formulation of Vietnam policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations” (Stanley Karnow). This series was also a major resource for Robert S. McNamara’s book “In Retrospect” and for Stanley Karnow’s book, “Vietnam, A History” and his 26-part PBS series of the same name. “Senator Mansfield” and “TET”, both written by Don Oberdorfer, were also greatly aided by the research from the Vietnam series by Gibbons.