16
Gulliver's Troubles
Kennedy, Johnson, and the Limits of Power, 1961–1968

In his inaugural address, delivered on a blustery, bitterly cold day in January 1961, John F. Kennedy set forth in the starkest terms his nation's universalist approach to foreign policy in the heyday of the Cold War. The United States, he vowed, would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."¹ In practice, Kennedy found the world much less susceptible to U.S. influence than his soaring inaugural rhetoric proclaimed. By the time of his November 1963 assassination, he had begun to reassess some of the most basic Cold War assumptions. But it was his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who would confront head-on the limits of U.S. power in a changing international system. LBJ's drastic 1965 escalation of the war in Vietnam produced no more than a stalemate. His withdrawal from the presidential race on March 31, 1968, just seven years after Kennedy's inauguration, the product in large part of simultaneous foreign policy crises in North Korea, the world economy, and Vietnam, made clear the inability of the nation to bear the burden as Kennedy had pledged. March 1968, in the words of authors Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson, represented the "high-water mark of U.S. [postwar] hegemony."²

I

Kennedy was only forty-three years old when he assumed the presidency, and his accession marked the coming of age of the World War II generation. The son of a wealthy Boston Irish financier and former ambassador to England, the new president, a war hero himself, was strikingly handsome, bright, witty, charming, and ambitious. He attained no better than a lackluster record in the Senate and was looked upon—with good reason—as a playboy. Indeed, as president, he recklessly carried on dalliances with secretaries, movie stars, and even a Mafia moll. As a senator, he did acquire some foreign policy expertise, taking a special interest in decolonization. He consciously styled his presidency after his illustrious Democratic predecessors Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. At home he committed himself to an extension of FDR's New Deal, the New Frontier, he called it. Like many of his generation, he was certain that foreign policy was the most exciting and urgent challenge a president faced. "I mean who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25," he confided to kindred spirit (at least on that issue) Richard Nixon.3

In foreign policy, JFK sought to recapture the blend of idealism and pragmatism that had stamped FDR's leadership in World War II. He gathered about him a young, energetic corps of advisers from the top echelons of academia and business, self-confident, activist men—"action intellectuals," they were called—who shared his determination to "get the country moving again." The youthful and acerbic Harvard College dean and Henry Stimson protégé McGeorge Bundy was named national security adviser; World War II systems analysis "whiz kid" and Ford Motor Company boss Robert McNamara, secretary of defense. The president's younger brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, became his alter ego and closest adviser, even on foreign policy. In the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle, they would be labeled—with more than a touch of irony—the "best and the brightest."⁴

The dynamics of policymaking changed significantly. Appointment of the soft-spoken and retiring Georgian Dean Rusk as secretary of state suggested that the president, like FDR, planned to keep the reins of foreign policy tightly in his own hands. Kennedy quickly scrapped Eisenhower's formal, highly bureaucratized National Security Council structure in favor of a more freewheeling apparatus that left him at the center of decision-making and assured him the widest range of options. In the eyes of critics, the new system was disorderly, even chaotic, failed to ensure follow-up, and left major players uninformed. Under Bundy, an enlarged and reinvigorated NSC supplanted State as the key player in foreign affairs.⁵

The military's role became especially contentious. Civil-military relations deteriorated sharply in the Kennedy years, manifested in the popular culture through such films as Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove, which warned respectively of a military coup and a U.S.-initiated nuclear war brought about through a combination of military madness, standard operating procedures, and ingenuity. Youthful and insecure civilian leaders feared the growing power of the top brass, its ties to right-wing politicians, and its clout in Congress. They fretted about the Joint Chiefs' lack of political sophistication and their perceived eagerness to employ nuclear weapons. Military leaders such as the cigar-chomping Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay scarcely concealed their contempt for the inexperienced civilians in the White House, especially the Ivy League intellectuals—"the computer types," Gen. Thomas Powers snarled, who "don't know their ass from a hole in the ground."6 From the outset, Kennedy struggled to keep the military in line without provoking open rebellion.

The New Frontiersmen accepted without question the basic assumptions of the containment policy. They perceived the tensions between Moscow and Beijing, but they still viewed Communism as monolithic and a mortal threat to the United States. They also believed, as Kennedy put it, that they must "move forward to meet Communism, rather than waiting for it to come to us and then reacting to it."⁷ Coming of age during World War II, they feared another global conflagration. They were also exhilarated by the prospect of leading the nation through perilous times to the ultimate victory. They shared a Wilsonian view that destiny had singled out their nation and themselves to defend the democratic ideal. Reflecting the mood of the time, they believed they could do anything—hence the expansive rhetoric of Kennedy's inaugural address and his firm commitment to land an American on the moon. They also recognized the domestic political importance of foreign policy success. During the campaign, JFK had repeatedly charged the Republicans with indecisiveness and promised to regain the upper hand in the Cold War. Elected by a precariously narrow margin, he kept a wary eye on his domestic flank, ever sensitive to opposition charges of appeasement.

Like Eisenhower, Kennedy altered existing Cold War policies mainly in terms of the means to be employed. Although he quickly discovered that the missile gap actually favored the United States, JFK ordered an immediate and massive buildup of nuclear weapons, missile-firing submarines, and long-range missiles to establish clear superiority over the USSR. He also recognized that the frightful consequences of nuclear war limited the utility of nuclear weapons. Persuaded by Gen. Maxwell Taylor's book The Uncertain Trumpet that Eisenhower's reliance on nuclear weapons had left the United States muscle-bound in many Cold War situations, Kennedy expanded and modernized the nation's conventional forces to permit a "flexible response" to various kinds of threats. Certain that the emerging nations provided the principal battleground for Cold War competition, the administration sought ways to combat guerrilla warfare—"an international disease" the United States must learn to "destroy."8 The president pushed the military to study counterinsurgency methods and create elite units to employ them. He took particular pride in the green beret worn by the army's Special Forces. He also felt that America must strike at the source of the disease. He pushed for economic and technical assistance programs to eliminate the conditions in which Communism flourished and channel revolutionary forces along democratic paths.

Throughout the campaign, Kennedy had ominously warned of the perils the nation faced, but he himself appears to have been unprepared for the magnitude of the problems. Khrushchev's threat to resolve the status of divided Berlin on his own terms held out the possibility of superpower confrontation. In January 1961, the Soviet premier delivered a seemingly militant speech pledging support for wars of national liberation. In fact, the statement defied Kremlin hard-liners and the Chinese by renouncing nuclear and conventional war. It may even have been intended to reassure the West. To the untutored ears of a new administration, it appeared a virtual declaration of war, and stepped-up Soviet aid to Castro's Cuba and insurgents in the Congo and Laos seemed to confirm the danger.⁹ Such was the siege mentality that gripped the White House in early 1961 that the president on one occasion greeted his advisers by grimly asking, "What's gone against us today?"¹⁰

Cuba was the most vexing problem, and Kennedy early made a fateful decision. He had inherited CIA plans for a covert operation to overthrow Castro. Deferring to the presumed experts in the CIA and the military, the latter of whom had deep but unstated reservations about the workability of the plan, he did not closely scrutinize it. He and his advisers were not disposed to critique something that had been endorsed by one of the great military heroes of the century. The administration had dismantled an NSC organization that might have provided some institutional safeguards against harebrained plots. Rusk did not voice his grave doubts, and Kennedy rebuffed those advisers who expressed skepticism. Despite misgivings himself, he approved the plan in hopes of gaining a major victory in his first months and because not to do so would leave him vulnerable to Republican attacks. To conceal the U.S. role, he refused to provide air support.

Appropriately code-named Bumpy Road, the operation produced what has been aptly called the "perfect failure."11 Top CIA officials blamed JFK for the debacle for refusing to authorize air support, but the agency's own internal assessment, kept under tight wraps until 1998, told of a plan fatally flawed in conception and execution.¹² The CIA assumed, without any evidence, and incorrectly as it turned out, that a landing of Cuban exiles would trigger an internal insurgency that could topple Castro. Some CIA officials and the Joint Chiefs suppressed their reservations in the expectation that Kennedy, if things went badly, would do what was necessary to succeed, something he had no intention of doing. The plan quickly grew beyond the CIA's capacity to manage it, expanding from a small landing of guerrillas to a full-scale invasion force whose blown cover made plausible deniability an illusion. The exiles were poorly trained, disorganized, and divided among themselves. The air strikes that were to take out Castro's air force did not do so and tipped off the impending invasion. The site was shifted to the Bay of Pigs, an especially inhospitable spot for an amphibious landing. Without air support and asked to execute a withdrawal, the most difficult of military operations, the ragtag exile forces were sitting ducks for Castro's aircraft and well-prepared defenders. After three days of fighting, 140 were killed, 1,189 captured. The only answer to their final, tragic message—"We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help"—came in the form of rescue teams who managed to pick up twenty-six survivors.¹³

For the new president, the phrase "Bay of Pigs" became a haunting synonym for humiliation. Kennedy accepted full responsibility—"victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan," he publicly affirmed—and his approval ratings shot up immediately. But he was shattered by the debacle and furious at the military and CIA for misleading him. He felt personally responsible for the fate of the nearly 1,200 Cubans held by Castro. At home, liberals attacked him for intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and jeopardizing the goodwill of other Latin American nations. Conservatives charged him with spinelessness.14 The invasion took place on Khrushchev's birthday, provoking rage in the Kremlin. Anger changed to incredulity when Kennedy did not finish what he started—"Can he really be that indecisive?" the Soviet premier asked his son. Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak and could be pushed around.¹⁵ The president felt compelled to demonstrate his toughness.

The Bay of Pigs heightened the administration's determination to get rid of Castro. Fiercely competitive, the Kennedy brothers found defeat intolerable, especially at the hands of some one they viewed as a tinhorn dictator. They became obsessed with Castro, for them a cancer that had to be removed. Following the Bay of Pigs, they mounted a multifaceted effort to eliminate him that at times took the form of a personal vendetta. Since the revelation of these activities, attention has focused on the various, often bizarre plots to assassinate the Cuban leader (none apparently carried out) using such things as Mafia hit men, exploding cigars, or poison fountain pens. Such schemes are sensational and morally troubling, to be sure, but they represent a relatively small part of a much more comprehensive program. The United States tightened the economic screws by banning all Cuban imports and pushing its allies to do the same. It sought to isolate Cuba diplomatically within the hemisphere by securing its expulsion from the Organization of American States. Operation Mongoose, a covert operation aimed at Castro's removal was approved in November 1961, run out of the CIA, and monitored by a top-level group that included the attorney general. It developed into the agency's major covert operation; the CIA's Miami outpost, JMWAVE, became the largest in the world. Mongoose began slowly with contingency plans, intelligence gathering, and small-scale sabotage operations to destabilize Cuba. It intensified in the spring of 1962. The CIA and Pentagon concocted schemes for provoking U.S. military intervention, including the Maine-like explosion of a U.S. warship, the sinking of a boatload of refugees that could be blamed on Castro, and even holding Cuba responsible if a U.S. space mission failed. Mongoose proceeded in tandem with stepped-up planning for direct U.S. military intervention and massive spring 1962 military exercises in the South Atlantic and Caribbean involving some forty thousand troops and hundreds of ships and planes. There is no evidence that Kennedy had actually decided to intervene militarily in Cuba. Such an option was under consideration, however, and anti-Castro operations intensified in the fall of 1962 when the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba provoked a full-fledged crisis.16

After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy suffered further frustrations. Incredibly, Laos was second only to Cuba as a foreign policy problem in the administration's early days. In an impossibly complicated and often desultory civil war in that distant, landlocked nation, leftist insurgents backed by North Vietnam and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of toppling a U.S.-backed government. Upon leaving office, Eisenhower had privately warned his successor that Laos was the "cork in the bottle" of Southeast Asia.¹⁷ Kennedy initially took a tough stance. The Joint Chiefs proposed sending sixty thousand troops plus air cover and guaranteed victory if authorized to use nuclear weapons. Fearful of a replay of Korea in Laos, wary of military advice after the Bay of Pigs, and alarmed by the chiefs' seemingly casual attitude toward war with China and the use of nuclear weapons, Kennedy in late April rejected intervention. Concluding that a negotiated settlement was the best he could get, he agreed to participate in a conference at Geneva. The decision was eminently sensible. The significance of Laos was at best debatable; in any event, it was no place to fight. It was a logistical nightmare. In the eyes of Americans, its people appeared singularly unwarlike, "a bunch of homosexuals," Eisenhower sneered, a passive, indolent people, "a feeble lot," in the words of JFK's ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. Kennedy himself wondered how he could explain sending troops to faraway Laos and not to nearby Cuba.¹⁸ But the decision to negotiate after taking a firm position reinforced the appearance of weakness and left him vulnerable to hard-liners at home.

A stormy summit with Khrushchev at Vienna added to Kennedy's problems. Over the long term, the June discussions may have helped the two men understand each other, but the short-term results were disastrous. The president was in severe pain from various ailments and heavily medicated. Although he spent hours preparing, he was psychologically unready for the encounter. Ignoring the advice of experts, he engaged in fruitless ideological spats with Khrushchev. In substantive discussions, they agreed only on the need for peace in Laos, where neither had significant interests—or influence. They differed on terms for a nuclear test ban. Their discussions on the most pressing and dangerous issue, Berlin, were chilling. Certain that his younger and inexperienced adversary could be bullied, Khrushchev made clear that the status quo on Berlin was unacceptable. Kennedy insisted that the United States would not surrender its rights. Khrushchev renewed the six-month ultimatum and reiterated his threat of a separate peace. If the United States wanted war, he concluded, "let it begin now." "It will be a cold winter," a solemn president retorted.19

Kennedy came home severely shaken—Khrushchev "just beat hell out of me," he confided to a friend. Aides testified that for the next few months he was "imprisoned by Berlin." "If he thinks I'm inexperienced and have no guts . . . we won't get anywhere with him," the president said of Khrushchev.²⁰ Unlike the Bay of Pigs, this time he initiated a full-scale debate among his formal and informal advisers on what to do. Perhaps reliving 1948, hard-line former secretary of state Dean Acheson proposed a major military buildup, a declaration of national emergency, and, if the Soviets restricted access to West Berlin, an airlift and readiness to go to war. Cautious voices urged continued efforts to negotiate. As on so many issues, Kennedy came down in the middle. In a major speech on July 25, he hinted at a willingness to negotiate. But he also made clear U.S. determination to defend Western rights in Berlin and proposed a major military buildup. Stopping short of a declaration of national emergency, he announced another big jump in defense spending and an increase in draft calls, a reserve call-up, and extended enlistments to expand the armed forces. Most alarming, he pushed for a federal program to assist in the building of fallout shelters.

Kennedy's speech ratcheted up an already dangerous crisis by several notches. Khrushchev denounced it as a "preliminary declaration of war" and warned an American visitor with ties to the president that "we will meet war with war."²¹ To underscore the seriousness of the crisis, he decided to resume nuclear testing. His threats did nothing to resolve the immediate problem in East Berlin, where during July alone more than twenty-six thousand East Germans fled to the West. Picking up on discreet signals from Washington that the United States would not interfere in East Berlin, the Soviet Union and East Germany decided to stop the "hemorrhaging" by building a wall to seal off East Germany from West Berlin. Construction began without warning on Sunday, August 13, 1961, starting with barbed wire and then adding concrete blocks once it was clear the West would do nothing.

Ironically, what became one of the most conspicuous, ugly, and despised symbols of the Cold War was at first greeted by some Americans with a sense of relief. To be sure, some hotheads urged knocking the wall down before it was finished despite the obvious risk of war. In fact, few were willing to risk war and some actually accepted the wall as a way to ease tensions. Kremlinologists advised Kennedy that it was Khrushchev's way of defusing an increasingly explosive situation. Thus while dispatching Vice President Lyndon Johnson and former occupation commander Gen. Lucius Clay to West Berlin and sending troops through East Germany into the city to reaffirm the U.S. commitment, the administration acquiesced. "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war," Kennedy privately mused.22

Although it brought the superpowers back from the brink, the wall did not resolve the fundamental issues. Following the summer crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev initiated personal, backchannel communications—what presidential advisers dubbed a "Pen Pal Correspondence." Lower-level discussions on Berlin and other front-burner issues took place intermittently through the fall and into the winter of 1961–62. Khrushchev dropped his deadline; JFK made conciliatory public statements. As so often with the Cold War, however, hostility coexisted uneasily with conciliation. The Soviets conducted at least thirty atmospheric nuclear tests in the fall of 1961; the United States resumed underground testing. On one occasion in mid-October, U.S. and Soviet tanks faced off ominously at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Soviet aircraft periodically harassed American planes in German air corridors. At times, Americans got the impression that Moscow had put Berlin on the shelf; on other occasions, it appeared still a top priority. In fact, it converged with Cuba in October 1962 to assume a central role in the most menacing of Cold War crises.²³

II

Great-power conflict dominated the first year of Kennedy's presidency, but the Third World was never far from his mind. The 1960s in many ways was the decade of the Third World. From 1960 to 1963, twenty-four new nations joined an already long list. Their emergence brought about what historian Raymond Betts has called a triangulation of world politics, a "large base of 'underdeveloped' nations . . . over which was a divided apex made up of the 'developed' (highly industrial) nations either siding with the United States or the Soviet Union."24 The rise of the Third World dramatically changed the makeup of the United Nations and altered the balance of power in the General Assembly. In 1961, neutralist leaders Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana convened in Belgrade the first Conference of Non-Aligned Countries with the declared intention of limiting the effects of the Cold War on the rest of the world. Revolutionaries like Castro, his confidant Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba inspired oppressed people everywhere and even became romanticized heroes for leftists in developed nations. There was talk of an "Afro-Asian bloc." The possibility of Third World nations acquiring nuclear weapons was especially troubling. The emphasis placed on the Third World by Cold War combatants bespoke their conviction that the outcome of that conflict could be decided by what happened there.

Kennedy set out to win the allegiance of the new nations. As a senator, he had questioned Dulles's hostility toward neutralism and the denial of aid to countries who disagreed with U.S. policies. He protested the overemphasis on military hardware at the expense of economic development. He embraced the argument of William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's 1958 best seller The Ugly American that the United States was losing the Third World because it assigned to those countries diplomats who could not speak the languages and isolated themselves in neo-colonial style in posh embassies. As president, Kennedy sought to expand economic assistance and to appoint ambassadors with language skills and area expertise. Paraphrasing Wilson, he spoke eloquently of making the world safe for diversity. His self-interested idealism established him as a hero to many Third World peoples.

Programs like Food for Peace and the Peace Corps put on full display Kennedy's concern for the Third World. Under the enlightened management of World War II bomber pilot, former history professor, and South Dakota progressive George McGovern, Food for Peace provided cheap food and fiber from U.S. agricultural surpluses to be used as partial wages for workers building schools, hospitals, and roads in Third World countries. By 1963, it was feeding 92 million people per day, including 35 million children—"a twentieth century form of alchemy," Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey exulted.25 The more publicized Peace Corps provided a powerful and enduring example of Kennedy's practical idealism. During the 1960 campaign, he had taken up the idea of American youth going abroad to help other people. He named his dynamic brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, a business executive, to head the new program. More than forty-three nations requested volunteers the first four years; 2,816 American volunteered in the first year alone. The aim, obviously, was to win friends in Third World countries, a goal that served Cold War interests, but Shriver resisted State Department pressures to focus on trouble spots like Vietnam and went to great lengths to keep the CIA from using the Peace Corps to plant agents in other countries. The Peace Corps's impact on Third World development was negligible. Some volunteers lacked skills, others had little to do, and many ended up teaching English.²⁶ But its contributions in the realm of the spirit were enormous. It helped other peoples to understand the United States and Americans to understand them. It conveyed the hope and promise that represented the United States at its best. It confirmed the nation's values and traditional sense of mission.²⁷

Translating an appreciation for Third World nationalism into policies for specific countries and regions, on the other hand, posed numerous practical difficulties and forced awkward compromises. South Asia was a case in point. JFK respected Prime Minister Nehru. He feared that to "lose" leading neutrals like India might cause the balance of power to "swing against us."²⁸ Early in his administration, he authorized a "tilt" toward India in hopes that it could be accomplished without jeopardizing relations with Pakistan. As with Eisenhower, the ploy failed. The administration exaggerated Chinese aims in South Asia, overestimated its threat to India and Pakistan, and underestimated the intractability of regional hatreds. The president could not establish a close relationship with the aloof and imperious Nehru. A Chinese military incursion into a remote border region of India in October 1962 forced India and the United States into an uneasy embrace, but infusions of U.S. military aid in addition to the massive economic assistance already provided purchased precious little influence in New Delhi. Military aid from the United States to India provoked outrage in Pakistan; Washington's efforts to appease its ally with additional weapons further destabilized an already volatile region. Attempts to ease Indo-Pakistani tensions through mediation got nowhere. In a blatant display of realpolitik, Pakistan drifted toward China. "History can be idiotic," ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith confided to his diary. "A staunch American ally against communism is negotiating with the Chinese Communists to the discontent of an erstwhile neutral."29 At the time of Kennedy's death, his South Asian policy was in disarray.

Not surprisingly, the Middle East provided more difficult challenges and brought even more serious consequences. Kennedy sympathized with Arab nationalism. He respected and liked Dulles's nemesis, Nasser, and, as with Nehru, sought to seduce him through personal communication, development aid, and large quantities of desperately needed wheat. He hoped to convert the restless Egyptian to peaceful ways, ease Arab-Israeli tensions, and thereby minimize Soviet influence in a critical region. JFK's good intentions ran afoul of Nasser's regional ambitions, competing U.S. interests in the conservative Arab oil states, the power of the Israel lobby, and, of course, the Cold War. The president learned as others before him that, especially in the Middle East, it was impossible to have it both ways, much less all three.

A civil war in the obscure Red Sea kingdom of Yemen frustrated Kennedy's diplomacy. Angered by Syria's 1961 abandonment of the United Arab Republic, Nasser sent tanks, planes, and seventy thousand troops to support leftist rebels who had overthrown the Yemen monarchy. Fearful of Egyptian influence in a neighboring state, Saudi Arabia and Jordan backed conservative Arab counterrevolutionaries in what became a scaled-down, Middle East version of the Spanish Civil War. The United States initially recognized the Nasser-backed government, but the British expressed concern about their interests in nearby Aden. When Egypt threatened Saudi Arabia, U.S. oilmen dispatched dire warnings to Washington. Israel protested these new signs of Nasser's aggressiveness. After the Syrian and Iraqi governments were toppled in early 1963 by pro-Nasser forces and the Soviets sent modern tanks and bombers to Egypt, JFK backtracked. Carefully avoiding a complete break with Nasser, he threatened to cut off aid to Egypt, openly supported Jordan by dispatching the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, and ordered naval and air forces to Saudi Arabia. Nasser's intervention in Yemen undermined Kennedy's approach to Egypt, strengthened U.S. ties with the conservative Arab states, and opened the way for closer American-Israeli relations.30

Ironically, given the president's early efforts at evenhandedness, the modern U.S. alliance with Israel originated on his watch. The move toward Nasser provoked a powerful backlash from the Israel lobby and its congressional backers and a diplomatic blitz from Tel Aviv to secure from Washington state-of-the-art weapons and a security commitment. The State Department predictably opposed Israeli requests, and JFK was wary. But McNamara's Pentagon was a more powerful player in Kennedy's Washington than Rusk's State Department, and warnings that increased Soviet aid and West Germany's sale of missiles to Nasser had upset the Middle East arms balance brought the president around. In August 1962, he agreed to sell Israel Hawk surface-to-air missiles, a sharp departure from past U.S. policy that had banned sales of major weapons systems and a generally unrecognized landmark in the Israel–United States special relationship.³¹ Increasingly alarmed by the prospect of nuclear proliferation to Third World countries, JFK attached high priority to preventing Israel from converting to weapons production its nuclear project at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Shortly before his death, in response to rising tensions in the Middle East and in return for vague—and as it turned out duplicitous—Israeli assurances regarding Dimona, he promised to assist Israel militarily should it be the victim of aggression, a giant step toward the alliance he and his predecessors had resisted. Instead of accommodating Arab nationalism and taking a more balanced approach in the region, JFK established the basis for the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.³²

Kennedy made Africa a centerpiece of his anti-colonialism and gave that continent for the first time a high profile in U.S. foreign policy. He promoted African independence in numerous speeches. To get around the racism deeply entrenched in the U.S. government and the State Department's traditional European bias in dealing with Africa, he named former Michigan governor and civil rights activist G. Mennen Williams assistant secretary of state for African affairs and appointed ambassadors who knew the continent and sympathized with its people. He invited African leaders to the White House. Aware that segregation in the District of Columbia and surrounding states made Washington a hardship post for African diplomats, he pushed for desegregation along Route 40, a major east-west artery. His evolving stand in favor of civil rights for African Americans was influenced at least partly by a desire to show Third World leaders that U.S. freedom was color-blind.33 He focused special attention on Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, one of the most prominent African leaders, agreeing to fund a huge dam on the Volta River. Unlike Dulles with Nasser, he followed through on his commitment even after Nkrumah made anti-American speeches and sought aid from Moscow, although he did extract pledges that there would be no expropriation of U.S. property.³⁴

As with the Middle East, JFK's support for African nationalism had sharply defined limits. On the most complex, volatile, and ultimately tragic of African issues, the Congo, he pursued a notably cautious approach. Brutally exploited by Belgium for nearly a century, the Congo was given independence in 1960 without preparation and in the expectation that the former colonists would retain dominant influence. Taking office just as the strife-torn Congo assumed crisis proportions, Kennedy declined to support nationalist leader Lumumba, the eloquent and charismatic former postal worker and beer salesman whom many Americans considered pro-Communist. He did not call for Lumumba's release when he was imprisoned by rivals or praise him after his brutal assassination. The president did oppose the secession of mineral-rich Katanga Province and its leader Moise Tshombe, who was backed by Europeans and southern American segregationists, an act of some political courage. But he left responsibility for holding the Congo together to the United Nations and refused to commit U.S. troops to the peacekeeping mission. He did welcome the ultimate UN victory. To the disgruntlement of some southern congressmen, he denied Tshombe a visa to the United States.³⁵

Similar limits applied elsewhere in Africa. The administration spoke in favor of independence for the Portugese colony of Angola and provided limited aid to pro-Western factions among the rebels. Portugal also secured U.S. military aid through NATO, however, and its use of American-provided napalm to suppress the rebellion provoked worldwide outrage. When the U.S. stand in favor of Angolan independence threatened renewal of the lease for its critical Azores air base, a badly divided administration backed off.36 Similarly, while the United States verbally criticized South Africa's apartheid policies, it refused to support economic sanctions or an arms embargo. South Africa remained a major source of strategic minerals. Its gold helped stabilize the global economy. Its ports were important on the east-west passage, and the United States had just constructed a vital missile-tracking station near Pretoria. United States officials also feared destabilizing South Africa because the African National Congress (ANC) was allegedly controlled by Communists. The CIA appears to have played a role in helping the South African government locate and arrest ANC leader Nelson Mandela. When faced with what the State Department called "an embarrassing choice between security requirements and basic political principle," the United States opted for the former.³⁷

Kennedy devoted more attention to Latin America than any other postwar president. He deliberately set out to recapture the spirit of FDR's Good Neighbor policy. He also concluded after the rise of Castro that Latin America was "the most dangerous area of the world" and that to safeguard its own security the United States must address the poverty and oppression that seemed a fertile breeding ground for Communism.³⁸ As president, he visited Latin America three times, drawing a million people in a triumphal 1962 appearance in Mexico City. He entertained hemispheric chiefs of state and diplomats, unlike so many of his predecessors dealing with them as equals and enjoying their company. He understood that the United States had committed wrongs in the hemisphere in the past, and he identified with the Latin American people. Because of his empathy, his style and charisma, and the tragic circumstances of his death, he is still revered in the hemisphere.³⁹

Even before the Bay of Pigs, JFK demonstrated his commitment to Latin America. On March 13, 1961, with great fanfare, he announced the Alliance for Progress, the Marshall Plan–like aid program hemispheric leaders had been seeking since the 1940s, a "vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose," he proclaimed, "to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools."40 In August, the administration pledged $1 billion for the first year and $20 billion for the next decade. Political democracy and fundamental reforms were to accompany economic development. The Alliance excited great hope in the hemisphere and at home. Like the Peace Corps, it seemed to epitomize the idealism of New Frontier foreign policy.

In fact, the administration's actions often belied its idealistic rhetoric and undercut its goals. JFK's overriding concern, at times an obsession, was to prevent another Cuba in the hemisphere. To achieve that aim, he interfered in Latin American politics on a scale unmatched since Wilson. United States officials would have liked to get rid of Jean Claude "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Haiti's reprehensible dictator, but they could not identify an acceptable alternative and acquiesced in his rule. The clever Duvalier even manipulated Washington into a generous aid package in return for Haiti's crucial vote to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. The administration welcomed the assassination of the despicable Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in May 1961. But it viewed his eventual successor, the popularly elected Juan Bosch, as a fuzzy-headed intellectual, even what one diplomat called a "deep cover communist."⁴¹ "There are three possibilities in descending order of preference," JFK opined, "a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim for the first, but we can't really renounce the second until we are sure we can avoid the third."⁴² The United States thus stood by in September 1963 while Bosch was overthrown by the Dominican military.

The administration also undermined popularly elected leftist governments that did not follow its line on Cuba. Argentina and Brazil, the two largest hemispheric countries, struggled to pursue independent foreign policies, maintaining diplomatic relations and small trade with the Soviet Union while defying U.S. sanctions against Cuba. Even though Argentina's Arturo Frondizi enthusiastically backed the Alliance for Progress and actively cultivated U.S. support, the administration looked the other way when he was overthrown by the military in March 1962. Kennedy viewed Brazil's leftist leader João Goulart as unreliable. The CIA spent $5 million in a destabilization effort that helped lead to a military coup in 1964.⁴³ In Chile, it blatantly interfered in the electoral process, spending more than $2.5 million to replace the leftist Arturo Alessandri with the more moderate and presumably more reliable Eduardo Frei. Frei was the type of Latin American leader the administration preferred. After his election in 1964, he achieved modest results under the Alliance for Progress. But the Kennedy covert operation also initiated a pattern of interference in Chilean politics that would have tragic results.

The most blatant and dubious intervention was in tiny British Guiana (now Guyana), which, remarkably, during the Kennedy years—and to its own misfortune—came to be viewed as crucial to U.S. security. On the verge of independence from Britain, this impoverished northern Latin American colony adjacent to Venezuela was headed by elected prime minister Cheddi Jagan, a U.S.-trained dentist and avowed Marxist. Jagan assured Kennedy privately in October 1961 that he would not permit a Soviet base in British Guiana. Unpersuaded, the administration with British complicity carried out in early 1962 a covert operation that included fomenting demonstrations, riots, and a general strike. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy pressured British prime minister Harold Macmillan to delay independence. The British reluctantly went along, instituting a new electoral process that would eliminate Jagan from office in 1964.44 On November 18, 1963, four days before his assassination, JFK outlined what was to have been a Kennedy Doctrine, affirming that "every source at our command" must be used to "prevent the establishment of another Cuba in the hemisphere." It was a statement, McGeorge Bundy later conceded, that was "blanketed almost immediately by his death."⁴⁵

The greatest failure of JFK's Latin American policy came in the area of its most expansive hopes. The Alliance for Progress built roads, schools, hospitals, and low-cost housing in many Latin American countries. It achieved striking results in Venezuela. Overall, however, the growth rate fell far short of the targeted 2.5 percent. Nor did the aid program accomplish much in terms of democratization and economic reform. In Washington, it suffered from weak leadership, bureaucratic torpor, and mismanagement. The United States eventually contributed $18 billion, but 70 percent was in loans instead of grants. It did not extend major trade concessions, and a sharp decline in prices for Latin American exports offset the benefits of U.S. assistance. Economic progress was also nullified by runaway population growth, a problem the administration dared not tackle because of the explosive politico-religious ramifications at home. The United States did not push Latin American governments on the crucial issue of land reform for fear of antagonizing entrenched elites, destabilizing recipient countries, or provoking U.S. corporations. The alliance floundered mainly because it set unrealistic goals: a fundamental restructuring of Latin American economics and politics in only ten years. Based on the impressive results achieved by the Marshall Plan in Europe and upon then fashionable academic models of development drawn from the U.S. experience, it ignored the idiosyncrasies of Latin American history and political culture. Perhaps the best that can be said is that it delayed by two decades the economic disaster that struck much of the continent in the 1980s.46

U.S. military aid in some ways subverted the Alliance for Progress. Typical of its broader concerns, the Kennedy administration emphasized strengthening Latin American internal security forces and training them in counterguerrilla methods to root out Castro-like insurgencies. It also drew on then voguish academic theories holding that enlightened military officers could be agents of development and even democratization in premodern societies. United States officials hoped that closer ties would inculcate Latin American military officers with democratic values and bring increased United States influence. The Kennedy administration expanded military aid by more than 50 percent to $77 million per year. In 1962 alone, more than nine thousand Latin American military personnel trained in such educational institutions as the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. The results were not what had been hoped for. Between 1961 and 1963, military coups eliminated six elected governments. The U.S. aid program assisted the growth of military influence, and for the next two decades the military dominated hemispheric politics. Disillusioned with military aid, McNamara in 1965 recommended its termination. The State Department dissented, for fear, the secretary of defense reported without irony, of "alienating the military forces on whom the Alliance for Progress must depend to maintain stability in the area."⁴⁷ The program continued.

III

The most frightening of Cold War crises came in Latin America in October 1962. Khrushchev's reckless attempt to place offensive missiles in Cuba brought the United States and the USSR to the brink of war and the world to the edge of nuclear conflagration. It can never be known precisely what moved the Soviet premier to initiate such a dangerous undertaking. He later insisted that he was protecting his Cuban ally from U.S. invasion, a claim that gains greater credence in light of what is now known about Operation Mongoose. Cuba had become very important to the Soviet leadership, and the threat of a U.S. invasion must have seemed to Moscow very real. Still, it remains difficult to believe that Khrushchev would have assumed such risk exclusively for the sake of a small ally in the enemy's sphere of influence. By placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba, he could strike targets across the eastern and southern United States, and he certainly hoped to make up on the cheap the huge U.S. lead in long-range missiles. He may have hoped to use the Cuban missiles to force a favorable settlement on Berlin. His gambler's instinct likely tempted him to act, along with the lingering belief that Kennedy could be bullied. He wanted to show the United States how it felt to be surrounded by enemy missiles, to throw "a hedgehog at Uncle Sam's pants," as he put it. Thus in May 1962, he persuaded an understandably wary Castro to accept sixty medium- and intermediate-range missiles and a panoply of military equipment to support them. The missiles were carefully concealed on the decks of transport ships. The forty-two thousand troops sent to guard them—armed with tactical nuclear weapons—sweated out the long summer cruise below deck to avoid surveillance. In what proved a colossal miscalculation, Khrushchev persuaded himself that the weapons could be made operational before the United States detected them, forcing Kennedy to acquiesce.48

He was wrong on both counts. CIA analysts using information gleaned from the defector Col. Oleg Penkovsky and aerial photographs accurately identified the mysterious objects as medium- and intermediate-range missiles. McNamara may have been right in arguing that these weapons did not significantly alter the overall strategic balance. From Kennedy's standpoint this was irrelevant. Stunned by Khrushchev's bold ploy and boxed in by his own public statements that offensive weapons in Cuba were unacceptable, he feared that to do nothing in the face of this most blatant Soviet challenge would be political and diplomatic suicide. To fully assess his options, he formed an Executive Committee (ExComm) of top advisers that met regularly during the crisis. He never seriously considered negotiations to secure removal of the weapons. The Soviets had secretly placed them in Cuba and lied about what they were doing. To negotiate under such circumstances would be seen as weak. He also suspected that Moscow would drag out negotiations until the missiles were operational. The ornithological designations "hawk" and "dove" came into parlance during ExComm deliberations. Hawks such as the Joint Chiefs and Acheson pressed for air strikes against the missile sites followed by an invasion to make certain the weapons—and Castro—were removed. Doves questioned whether air strikes would destroy the sites, worried about the morality of a surprise attack against a small nation, rejected an invasion as too risky, and feared Soviet retaliation against Berlin. They urged a blockade of Cuba, to be called a quarantine, combined with pressures on Moscow to remove the missiles. Kennedy opted for this more cautious but still risky course. On Monday, October 22, he announced the quarantine and demanded removal of the missiles.49

His speech opened a week of harrowing moves and countermoves in this diplomatic chess game, played for the highest stakes. The United States went to the second highest state of defense readiness (DefCon 2) for the first time in the Cold War. The Strategic Air Command went to its highest alert, launching 550 B-52 bombers armed with nuclear warheads. Soviet technicians frantically worked on the missile sites, and by October 24 the medium-range weapons were near operational. United States warships took up station with standard operating procedures calling for firing a warning shot and, if that failed, disabling the rudder of the approaching ship. Soviet vessels with orders to return fire if fired upon moved ominously toward the quarantine line. Submarines from both sides silently plied the waters of the Caribbean. Harried officials worked under unimaginable pressures and went days without sleep; their nerves grew taut, their thought processes blurred. Attempting to micromanage the crisis to prevent a deadly mistake, even the famously detached Kennedy several times lost his cool. The first break occurred on October 24 when Soviet ships reversed course to avoid the quarantine. "We're eyeball to eyeball," the normally taciturn Rusk exclaimed, "and I think the other fella just blinked."⁵⁰

Not quite. Only after yet another frightful scare was a crude settlement arranged. Apparently convinced on the basis of flawed intelligence that war was imminent, Khrushchev on October 25 dispatched to Washington a personal and highly emotional message warning of the "calamity" of war and offering to remove the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. The next day, his fears eased, he sent another message that left U.S. officials shaking their heads in dismay.51 More measured in tone, it upped the ante by also demanding removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. These weapons were obsolete, but getting rid of them raised numerous complications.⁵² The anxiety level soared when a U-2 aircraft was shot down over Cuba. Kennedy's military advisers demanded retaliation. Preparations were being completed for an air strike to be followed by an invasion of Cuba. Unknown to the Americans, Castro was pushing Moscow to launch a first strike against the United States. On October 27, "Black Saturday," the administration shrewdly decided to ignore the second letter and accept the more favorable terms of the first. In the meantime, Robert Kennedy privately assured the Soviet ambassador that the Turkish missiles would be removed. Painfully aware of his military inferiority, Khrushchev, after hours of agonizing suspense, accepted the U.S. proposals.⁵³

The missile crisis was the defining moment of the Kennedy presidency, and many observers have given him high marks. He was firm but restrained in responding to this most critical challenge, it is argued. He sought advice from different quarters. He left Khrushchev room for retreat. He did not gloat in the apparent U.S. victory.⁵⁴ The October confrontation is also the most studied of Cold War crises, and as more has been learned, the praise for Kennedy has been tempered. To be sure, Khrushchev bears primary responsibility for the confrontation. He deluded himself into thinking that he could get away with an incredibly rash move. But Kennedy's obsession with Cuba and the hostile actions carried out in Mongoose provided the occasion and rationale for Khrushchev's actions, a connection totally lost on U.S. officials at the time. Even while he rejected the more risky alternatives, Kennedy's initial response pushed the two nations to the verge of war. He did hold the hawks at bay and displayed skill in crisis management. But he would have been the first to admit that luck and chance helped determine the outcome. The United States came within hours of an invasion that could have had horrific consequences. The number of Soviet troops in Cuba far exceeded U.S. estimates, and they were armed with tactical nuclear weapons. An invasion could have triggered nuclear war. "In the end," political scientist William Taubman concludes, Khrushchev and Kennedy "found the courage to pull back, leaving the other room to retreat . . . but not before the world came closer than it ever has to nuclear conflagration."55

The missile crisis had profound and in some ways paradoxical consequences. Kennedy's position at home was strengthened, at least for the short run. The Democrats bucked tradition by gaining seats in the Senate in the midterm elections. The president's personal popularity and approval rating soared. On the other side, Khrushchev's claims of victory rang hollow. Although he hung on for two more years, his power was reduced, his days numbered.⁵⁶

Following the missile crisis, Moscow and Washington took the first groping steps toward what would be called detente. The Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation had been highly personal, and the two leaders, after facing the nuclear abyss together, seem to have gained that empathy that comes from shared traumatic experience. In June 1963, they established a direct telegraphic link—the so-called hotline—to maintain close contact when required. The long-simmering Berlin problem began to lose its centrality. In one of his most noteworthy speeches, JFK at American University in June 1963 spoke the unspeakable, calling for a "genuine" peace, not a "Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," observing that "enmities between individuals, as between nations, do not last forever," and urging Americans to reassess their attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Khrushchev called it the best speech since FDR and helped disseminate it by stopping the jamming of VOA broadcasts.⁵⁷ The two nations subsequently agreed on a limited test ban treaty, a first, highly circumscribed, but still significant step toward controlling nuclear weapons. The real loser of the missile crisis, Castro was enraged at being sold out by Khrushchev—"no cojones," he thundered. Recognizing the opportunity, JFK over the next year quietly explored the possibility of accommodation with Cuba.⁵⁸

Kennedy's 1963 dovishness has fed speculation that had he lived he would have moved further to end the Cold War, but such arguments must be treated with caution. Old fears and suspicions died hard. If each side after October 1962 saw the urgency of change, each also felt limits to how far they could go. Hard-liners in each nation made deviation from Cold War certitudes risky, especially for Kennedy, who faced reelection in 1964. The one clear lesson many Soviet officials drew was not to get caught again in a position of military inferiority, and Moscow mounted a major effort to gain nuclear parity. Whether from politics or conviction, Kennedy's new dovishness only went so far. Shortly after American University, he made another speech, more publicized and better remembered, before shouting throngs in Berlin denouncing Communism and dismissing the idea of working with Communists. A speech to have been delivered in Dallas on November 22, 1963, bristled with boilerplate anti-Communism. While encouraging secret approaches toward Havana, he also publicly condemned Castro. In the spring of 1963, harassment of Cuba resumed. On the day of JFK's assassination, an agent delivered to a plant in the Havana regime a ballpoint pen with a hypodermic needle designed to poison the Cuban leader. Ever the political animal, Kennedy played both sides in the post-missile-crisis world, carefully keeping his options open.59

The major geopolitical result of the missile crisis was to accelerate the breakdown of bipolarity. By October 1962, the United States and its European allies were already sharply divided on economic and strategic issues. As the European economies recovered from World War II, the dollar gap that had plagued them in the era of the Marshall Plan gave way to a rising U.S. balance of payments deficit, a danger to the national security Kennedy considered second only to nuclear war. The president also feared that under the complex Bretton Woods arrangements to stabilize currencies with gold, the allies could employ their dollar surpluses to exhaust U.S. gold reserves. The Europeans increasingly doubted that the United States would use nuclear weapons to defend them and sought to acquire their own, a prospect that, especially in the case of West Germany, frightened Washington. Flexible response to them meant that the United States would defend Europe with conventional forces that they would provide. The Kennedy administration sought with little success to ease U.S. economic problems and resolve alliance differences by pushing tariff reduction, European unification, and such gimmicks as nuclear sharing through a Multilateral Force (MLF). It advanced the radical proposal of withdrawing large numbers of U.S. troops from Europe. It succeeded only in using the leverage provided by the 1961 Berlin crisis to persuade West Germany to purchase large quantities of U.S. military equipment to offset the spiraling cost of keeping American troops in Europe.60

The missile crisis widened and exposed these fissures. By first deciding what to do and then informing its allies, the United States confirmed European suspicions of how it would respond to a Soviet threat. France's Charles de Gaulle loyally supported Kennedy during the crisis, but he was more than ever persuaded that his nation must have its force de frappe. West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer fretted that Kennedy's post-missile-crisis moves toward the Soviet Union would mean the end of German unification. The Europeans soon took actions that shook the alliance to its core. De Gaulle vetoed British entry into the Common Market and rejected the MLF in favor of his own nuclear program. In a shocking reversal of long-standing trends, France signed a friendship treaty with West Germany, portending an independent European position in world affairs, even West German acquisition of nuclear weapons. With the U.S. balance of payments deficit soaring, Washington considered troop withdrawals. In late 1963, West Germany veered back toward the United States by continuing its offset purchases, but de Gaulle persisted in his independent path. He would soon challenge U.S. leadership in Europe and elsewhere.⁶¹

The myth of a Sino-Soviet "bloc" was also starkly exposed. The Chinese denounced Khrushchev's "adventurism" in provoking the missile crisis and "capitulationism" in ending it, and in late 1962 the long-hidden dispute between the two Communist powers burst out into the open. In time, the rift would open tempting opportunities for the United States, but at the outset Americans questioned how deep it ran and whether it was irreparable. Indeed, the growth of multipolarity after the missile crisis along with the first steps toward detente and growing nuclear proliferation made for a more complex and in some ways more dangerous world.

The major immediate effect was to heighten U.S.-Chinese tensions. In part because of its conflict with the USSR, Mao's regime seemed the more militant of the Communist powers, and its strident rhetoric bespoke an unbending commitment to world revolution. Indications that it would soon get the bomb heightened American fears, even leading to lower-level discussion in Washington and Moscow of a preemptive attack against China's nuclear facilities. United States officials took Beijing's rhetoric more seriously than they might have and exaggerated its ability to topple governments. For reasons of domestic politics as well as Cold War conviction, JFK never seriously considered changes in the U.S. policy of containing and isolating China. Demonization of China had the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Kennedy administration may also have used anti-Chinese rhetoric to cover its domestic flank while seeking improved relations with the USSR. Although ambassadorial talks would continue at Warsaw, China would be for Washington Cold War Enemy No. 1. The focal point of conflict would be Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular.62

Kennedy's handling of the last foreign policy crisis of his presidency reflected his post-missile-crisis ambivalence. By 1961, Eisenhower's nation-building experiment in Vietnam was in tatters. Frustrated by President Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal to hold the elections called for by the Geneva Accords, former Vietminh remaining in the South began to re-create in 1957 the revolutionary networks used against France. They effectively exploited the rising rural opposition to Diem's oppressive methods—the peasants were like a "mound of straw ready to be ignited," one insurgent recalled.⁶³ After months of hesitation, North Vietnam in 1959 firmly committed itself to the rebellion, sending men and supplies southward along what would be called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1960, the insurgents coalesced into the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) and shifted from hit-and-run attacks to full-scale military operations. By year's end, the U.S. ambassador warned Washington that unless Diem took prompt and drastic steps to win the war and broaden his popular support it should look for "alternative leadership."⁶⁴

Although preoccupied with other issues and concerned about the obvious deficiencies in Diem's leadership, JFK in late 1961 sharply escalated the U.S. commitment. Taking a cautious middle ground here as elsewhere, he rejected proposals to seek a negotiated settlement or to commit U.S. combat troops. After Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and Berlin, however, he felt compelled to do something, and he believed that the United States must show it could counter Communist-inspired wars of national liberation. He increased the number of U.S. advisers from nine hundred when he took office to more than eleven thousand by the end of 1962. The "advisers" took an active role in combat and suffered casualties. Military aid doubled and included such modern hardware as armored personnel carriers and aircraft. Although increasingly concerned about Diem's ability to defeat the insurgency, the administration rejected as too risky proposals to condition expanded U.S. aid on major reforms. "Diem is Diem and the best we've got," JFK ruefully admitted.65

Kennedy's escalation failed to blunt the insurgency. The South Vietnamese army could not gain the initiative. The elusive guerrillas were difficult to locate and fought only when they had the upper hand. Skillfully blending intimidation with inducements such as land reform, they expanded their control of the South Vietnamese countryside. Diem resisted reforms and refused to broaden his government. The more embattled he became, the more he isolated himself in the presidential palace. As the U.S. presence became more intrusive, tensions between Americans and South Vietnamese increased.⁶⁶

Vietnam became a full-fledged crisis in the summer of 1963 when the Catholic-dominated Saigon regime's harassment of South Vietnam's Buddhist majority provoked outright rebellion in the cities. The uprising drew international attention in June when an elderly monk immolated himself in front of large, shrieking crowds at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon. Pictures of the monk engulfed in flames appeared on television screens and in newspapers across the world. Diem's subsequent refusal to conciliate the Buddhists drove a bitterly divided administration to a fateful decision: He must go. With a green light from Washington, army generals on November 1, 1963, seized power. Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu fled to a Catholic church, where they were captured; they were later brutally murdered in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Kennedy found the murders especially distressing. More depressed than at any time since the Bay of Pigs, he realized that Vietnam had been his greatest foreign policy failure.⁶⁷

Just three weeks later, JFK himself was assassinated in Dallas, and his sudden and shocking death had an enormous international impact, a symbol of his own magnetic personality and America's global position. He and his stylish wife, Jacqueline, had assumed a position akin to international royalty. The president drew huge and enthusiastic crowds in state visits to Mexico, Colombia, and even Venezuela, where Nixon had been so rudely treated in 1958. A trip to Europe in the summer of 1963 established him as an extraordinarily popular figure who attracted strong support for himself and his country.68 Kennedy's assassination was perhaps "the first truly global instant of tragedy," historian Warren Bass has written.⁶⁹ Through the miracle of satellite transmission, the events of that awful weekend were beamed far and wide on television and evoked an outpouring of emotion. In the Middle East and Latin America, ordinary people stood in line for hours to sign condolence books at U.S. embassies. Europeans viewed him as their leader and felt a keen sense of personal loss. His life and the horror of his death symbolized for them what was good and bad about the United States.⁷⁰

JFK's handling of Vietnam reflects the ambiguous and uncertain legacy of his thousand days in office. Some of his advisers, later echoed by scholars, have claimed that he planned after reelection in 1964 to extricate the United States from what he had concluded was a quagmire. Americans find such arguments comforting, but they rest more on conjecture than on evidence.⁷¹ Kennedy had developed profound doubts about the prospects for success in South Vietnam. From the start of his presidency, he had adamantly opposed sending combat troops there. He had grown increasingly skeptical of his military advisers. On numerous issues, he had demonstrated flexibility. He had grown demonstrably in office. A good case can be made that when faced with the collapse of South Vietnam in 1964–65, he would have looked closely at diplomatic solutions.⁷² But there is no persuasive evidence that he was committed to withdrawal. He had resisted negotiations as firmly as he had opposed combat troops. At his direction, the Defense Department had developed a plan for the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by 1965, but it was contingent on progress in South Vietnam. In a speech to be given in Dallas on the day of his death, he conceded that Third World commitments could be "painful, risky, and costly," but, he added, "we dare not weary of the test."⁷³ As with Cuba and broader Cold War issues, JFK appears not to have decided which way to go on Vietnam. Apparently convinced that the military situation was not going badly, he clung to hope that the problem might still resolve itself without drastic U.S. action.

In Vietnam, as elsewhere, Kennedy must be judged on the basis of what he did during his brief tenure in office. He and most of his advisers uncritically accepted the assumption that a non-Communist South Vietnam was vital to America's global interests. Their rhetoric in fact strengthened the hold of that assumption. That he never devoted his full attention to Vietnam seems clear. He reacted to crises and improvised responses on a day-to-day basis, seldom examining the implications of his actions. Although apparently troubled by growing doubts, he refused, even after the problems with Diem had reached a crisis point, to face the hard questions. His cautious middle course significantly enlarged the U.S. role in Vietnam. With the coup, the United States assumed direct responsibility for the Saigon government. Whatever his misgivings and ultimate intentions, JFK bequeathed to his successor a problem eminently more dangerous than the one he had inherited.

IV

French president de Gaulle once remarked that Lyndon Johnson was "the very portrait of America. He reveals the country to us as it is, rough and raw."74 By any standard, LBJ was an extraordinary individual. A large man with oversize and eminently caricaturable features, he had ambitions the size of his native Texas, and insecurities to match. He was a driven man, single-minded, prodigiously energetic, at times overbearing, proud, and vain. In some ways, he fits political scientist Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonian diplomatic style, a product of the hinterland, parochial, strongly nationalistic, deeply concerned about honor and reputation, suspicious of other peoples and nations and especially of international institutions, committed to a strong national defense—particularly when it benefited Texas.⁷⁵ Like the Wilson of 1913, he would have preferred to focus on domestic reform. He lacked his predecessor's and successor's passion for foreign policy. He could be ill at ease with diplomacy and diplomats: "Foreigners are not like the folks I am used to," he once commented only half-jokingly.76 He had traveled abroad little before becoming vice president and was given to stereotyping other people. The Germans, he once said, were a "great people" but "stingy as hell."⁷⁷ He was capable of decidedly undiplomatic behavior, as when he plopped cowboy hats on visiting Japanese dignitaries or dressed down West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard in a way that appalled his aides. He was also extremely intelligent and knowledgeable about key issues. He had an uncanny ability to size up people. A strong streak of idealism drove him to do good in the world. Robert Kennedy, no shrinking violet himself, called his rival and sometimes bitter enemy "the most formidable human being I've ever met."⁷⁸

Sensitive to charges that he lacked experience in foreign policy and determined to maintain continuity with Kennedy's policies, LBJ retained and relied heavily on his predecessor's advisers. He established especially close ties with McNamara and Rusk. Like their boss, both were workaholics. At least in the beginning, the president stood in awe of McNamara's brains, energy, and drive. "He's like a jackhammer," an admiring LBJ remarked. "He drills through granite rock until he's there." Johnson and Rusk shared southern roots, and both had been outcasts in Kennedy's "Camelot." They drew much closer during an increasingly embattled presidency. "Hardworking, bright, and loyal as a beagle" is the way LBJ praised his stolid and utterly reliable secretary of state.⁷⁹ Bundy and Johnson were never personally close, but the national security adviser had reshaped the NSC into the focal point of decision-making and was thus indispensable. LBJ preferred a more formal, orderly style to JFK's freewheeling approach. Much of the work was done by the "principals" in small, intimate White House lunches, usually on Tuesday, more suitable for frank discussions and less susceptible to leaks (except for the leaker in chief, LBJ himself).⁸⁰

The Sino-Soviet split widened into an irreparable breach by the mid-1960s, solidifying the triangular nature of the Cold War. Like the United States, the USSR felt an urgent need to ease tensions and stabilize the great-power rivalry. The new collective leadership that sent Khrushchev into involuntary retirement in late 1964 also sought to appease an increasingly restless public with better living standards. Moscow thus toned down the rhetoric and opened itself to dialogue on some major issues. On the other hand, old shibboleths died hard, and segments of the Soviet bureaucracy were vested in the Cold War. The new leaders mounted a huge defense buildup. Divided among themselves, without foreign policy experience, they moved both ways at once, hesitating to veer too far in any direction.81

Seeking to break out of its isolation, China won major victories in 1964 when France extended diplomatic recognition and the annual controversial vote on its admission to the United Nations ended in a tie. Beijing also joined the nuclear club with a successful test in October 1964. The Chinese took the more radical position in supporting Third World revolutions, especially in Africa. But the dominant fact of Chinese life after 1965 was the Great Cultural Revolution launched by Chairman Mao himself to reaffirm his control of the party and secure his historical legacy. Using the threat of superpower encirclement, he set off a veritable revolution at home, purging the bureaucracy of "revisionists," fomenting his Red Guard followers' revolutionary zeal, and using brute force to impose ideological purity. As many as half a million people died in the carnage that followed. The Great Cultural Revolution pushed China to the brink of civil war and its relations with the USSR to the edge of military conflict.⁸²

LBJ and his advisers struggled to make sense of a sometimes baffling world. Following JFK's lead, they took further steps toward detente, seeking to "build bridges" to Eastern Europe by upgrading U.S. diplomatic representation, expanding trade, and developing cultural exchanges, partly in the hope that closer contact might undermine Communist ideology. In early 1967, LBJ even declared, in a not sufficiently recognized statement, that the U.S. goal was not to "continue the Cold War but to end it."⁸³ A bit of flexibility even crept into U.S. China policy. The administration used the Warsaw talks to make clear its limited goals in Vietnam as a way to avoid a repetition of China's entry into the Korean War. It stopped trying to block China's admission to the UN. Responding to popular pressures from intellectuals, business, and others urging diplomatic relations, it eased restrictions on trade and cultural exchanges and even authorized government officials to engage in informal contacts with the Chinese.

Old habits also died hard in Washington, however. LBJ saw his job mainly as following the policies he had inherited. In his first two years, he focused on getting elected in his own right and implementing Great Society reforms. His principal foreign policy concern was to avoid anything that smacked of weakness or defeat. He and his advisers believed that in an uncertain and still dangerous world it remained essential to display firmness and maintain U.S. credibility. China's nuclear test and its outright rejection of arms control talks seemed to underscore the threat it continued to pose. Its ostensible support for radical revolution confirmed the need to hold the line in Vietnam and elsewhere. In any event, the Cultural Revolution put on hold any movement toward rapprochement. U.S. leaders still believed that the nation must deter and contain its adversaries, uphold its commitments, and prove its reliability as world leader.84

In Latin America, the Cold War and especially its domestic political imperatives continued to dictate U.S. policies. LBJ shared in full measure Kennedy's obsession with Castro. He called off the assassination program and until early 1964 kept alive unofficial discussions of normalization. But he continued to fear a Castro threat to the hemisphere and especially worried about the domestic political consequences of another Cuba. In the summer of 1964, the administration pressured the OAS to isolate Cuba by cutting off trade and severing diplomatic ties. The specter of Cuba shaped U.S. policies on most hemispheric issues.⁸⁵

The fate of the Alliance for Progress hinted at the direction Latin American policies would take under Johnson. Kennedy's disciples have unfairly blamed LBJ for the demise of one of his predecessor's pet projects. In fact, the alliance was moribund by November 1963, and JFK himself was deeply concerned at the lack of economic progress and the reversion toward dictatorships. As a Texan, the new president thought himself simpatico with Latin America and pledged to support the alliance. But his heart lay with the domestic reforms of his Great Society, and he understandably hesitated to favor a program that bore Kennedy's personal imprint. Under his deeply conservative assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, fellow Texan Thomas Mann, the emphasis shifted toward self-help, private investment, and local control, which advantaged U.S. corporations and the entrenched local oligarchies the alliance had been aimed at. LBJ and his advisers generally preferred stability to the reform spirit of the early days of the Alliance for Progress.86 Mann inadvertently proclaimed this approach in an off-the-record March 1964 statement that U.S. recognition policy should be guided by practical rather than moral considerations. This so-called Mann Doctrine was widely interpreted to mean that the administration would not look unfavorably on military governments.⁸⁷

United States policy toward Brazil showcased the Mann Doctrine in action. Thanks in part to the CIA destabilization program launched under JFK, Brazil was in deep trouble economically by 1964. President Goulart appeared to be drifting further leftward, and U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon warned that this "incompetent, juvenile delinquent" might try to seize dictatorial powers which in turn could prompt a Communist takeover. Refusing to "stand around" and "watch Brazil dribble down the drain," U.S. officials informed dissident military officers they would not oppose a coup and if necessary would assist with military aid and a show of naval force.⁸⁸ When the insurrection began, however, Goulart fled to Venezuela, and the takeover, led by Gen. Humberto Castello Branco, proceeded smoothly. Acting Secretary of State George W. Ball at 3:00 A.M. on April 2 cabled the embassy effectively recognizing the new government. A "furious" LBJ subsequently chewed him out not for what he had done but for failing to inform the White House.⁸⁹ The administration rationalized that the Brazilian military had traditionally respected constitutional government. In fact, the new leaders promptly suspended basic rights. Brazil would remain under military government for ten years.

Johnson also faced a crisis in Panama in early 1964. It was a classic decolonization dispute, although most North Americans, blind to their colonial past, failed to see it that way. Panama had profited from the U.S.-built and -operated canal, but its people had long resented the 1903 treaty negotiated by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the total U.S. sovereignty in the Canal Zone, and the wealth and display of the expatriate "Zonians" who lived in that imperial enclave. At a time when colonialism was waning worldwide, they pressed for a new treaty. The 1964 crisis erupted when Zonians at a local high school defied an agreement requiring Panama's flag to be flown alongside that of the United States. This largely symbolic but to Panamanians significant incident sparked rioting and then street battles in which twenty-four Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers were killed. President Roberto Chiari demanded a "complete revision of all treaties with the United States" and broke relations.90

In an election year, LBJ felt compelled to establish his foreign policy credentials. He conceded some merit in Panama's demands. He and his advisers saw the omnipresent hand of Castro behind the tumult in Panama and recognized the need for concessions to prevent it drifting leftward. But he also understood the emotional attachment of his countrymen to what they considered, in the words of his close friend and mentor Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, American "property" built with "American ingenuity and blood, sweat and sacrifices."⁹¹ Viewing the crisis as a test of his personal strength as well as his diplomatic skills, Johnson feared any concessions that would make him appear weak. Over the next weeks, he put on full display the frenetic, consensus-seeking style that was his trademark. He parried U.S. senators on the left who sympathized with Panama and on the right who demanded toughness. He sent emissaries to calm the Zonians—and demand that they abide by the rules. Refusing to negotiate under threat, he rejected Chiari's demands for treaty revision. He also applied pressure—"squeeze their nuts just a little bit," as he crudely put it—by holding back economic aid and threatening to build a new sea-level canal elsewhere in Central America.⁹² At the same time, he publicly agreed to discuss all issues dividing the two countries and privately hinted that treaty revision might result.⁹³ The two countries soon began serious negotiations and by 1967 had drafted an agreement making major concessions to Panama while preserving U.S. control of the canal. The issues that had provoked it were not resolved, but the 1964 crisis marked a turning point in U.S. policy toward Panama.⁹⁴

Johnson's major Latin American challenge came in the Dominican Republic in the spring of 1965. United States officials had happily acquiesced in the overthrow of Juan Bosch and had been quite content with a reliable government headed by pro-U.S. businessman Donald Reid Cabral. But Reid Cabral had little popular support, and a clumsy attempt to shore up his power in early 1965 provoked outright rebellion. Military officers loyal to Bosch responded by seeking to topple the government, plunging the nation into an especially confusing and bloody civil war. In a desperate act of self-preservation, the government begged Washington to send troops.

LBJ responded decisively. Top U.S. officials staunchly opposed the return of Bosch, "an idealist floating around on Cloud 9 type," Mann labeled him, fearing that his political ineptitude would give the "Castro types" the opening they needed. "How can we send troops 10,000 miles away [to Vietnam]," the president asked, "and let Castro take over right under our nose?"95 At a crucial point in pushing key Great Society legislation through Congress, Johnson was not about to risk a foreign policy setback. Events in the Dominican Republic were truly bewildering. Bundy and McNamara repeatedly warned that the extent of Communist and Cuban influence could not be determined. Insisting that he had no choice and publicly justifying his actions in terms of saving American lives, the president on April 18 ordered the landing of five hundred marines from ships offshore. Within a week, more than twenty-three thousand U.S. troops were in the Dominican Republic.

As in Panama and Brazil, the United States achieved its immediate goal. American citizens were safely evacuated, U.S. forces restored order, and the diplomats eventually cobbled together an agreement providing for a provisional government and elections. There would be no Cuba in the Dominican Republic. Elected president in 1966, the authoritarian Joaquin Balaguer would dominate the country for the next twenty-five years. But LBJ paid a high price for his success. Complaining that the OAS was "taking a siesta" while the Dominican Republic was "on fire," he consulted it only to provide a veneer of legitimacy to his moves.⁹⁶ The essentially unilateral U.S. intervention awakened memories of gunboat diplomacy in the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson. Combined with growing problems in the Alliance for Progress, it undercut much of the goodwill in Latin America generated in the Kennedy years. At home, as was his wont, LBJ responded with hyperbole to charges that he had overreacted. His claims of the threat to American lives and a Communist takeover proved questionable at best, widening what had already been labeled his "credibility gap." The Dominican intervention opened fissures in the Cold War consensus that would grow into a canyon over the next three years and raised further questions about the president's ability to handle tough foreign policy issues.97

After the Dominican crisis, U.S. relations with Latin America moved off center stage. The assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1966 and the failure of the revolution he tried to instigate there seemed to ease the threat of another Cuba. As Johnson became more and more absorbed in Vietnam, his interest in the hemisphere waned. United States officials blamed worsening relations on Latin Americans' self-centeredness and irresponsibility; Latin Americans, on U.S. obsession with security at the expense of economic progress and social justice. In April 1967, LBJ made a last-ditch effort to mend fences by attending a hemispheric meeting at Punta del Este. Some minor agreements were reached, and he pushed his advisers to meet the commitments. But no crisis pushed Latin America back to the top of the priority list. What JFK had called "the most dangerous area of the world" receded to the relative unimportance it had held before Nixon's 1958 trip to Venezuela.⁹⁸

V

"I don't want to be known as a war president," LBJ insisted in the fateful summer of 1965, but the war in Vietnam that he launched with great reluctance and struggled to conclude would consume his presidency and define his historical reputation.⁹⁹ That "bitch of a war," as he called it, helped to destroy his Great Society, "the woman I really love."¹⁰⁰ It would dominate U.S. foreign policy into the next decade and shape attitudes toward military intervention abroad into the next century.

Johnson inherited a commitment already in peril. Kennedy and his advisers had hoped that Diem's overthrow would stabilize the Saigon government and invigorate the war against the insurgency. The opposite resulted. Buoyed by the coup, the NLF strengthened its hold in areas where it had a presence and expanded its influence into new parts of South Vietnam. Gambling that the United States would not intervene with full force, North Vietnam expanded the flow of men and supplies down the fabled Ho Chi Minh Trail, an elaborate, six-hundred-mile network of danger-filled roads and footpaths across the most difficult terrain.

In South Vietnam, Catholics and Buddhists struggled for power. One leader after another followed Diem—"government by turnstile," an LBJ adviser called it.101 None could solidify his own control, much less govern the country and fight the insurgency. Throughout 1964, the collapse of South Vietnam seemed possible if not indeed likely.

The president and his advisers refused to accept this result. The domino theory was no longer taken as gospel by most regional experts, but it continued to creep into official justifications for escalating the war. United States officials still firmly believed that inaction in Vietnam would discourage allies and embolden adversaries. Curiously, the prospect of detente in some ways reinforced traditional Cold War imperatives. The United States must uphold its commitments and demonstrate its ability to contain the presumably more militant China and keep the Soviet Union from reverting to adventurism. The specter of China loomed ominously over Southeast Asia. Turbulence in the Third World appeared to threaten international stability; firmness in Vietnam, it was reasoned, would demonstrate that violent challenges to the status quo could not succeed. Johnson often expressed premonitions of disaster from an expanded U.S. commitment in Vietnam. He still felt compelled to act. He vividly remembered the political price the Democrats had paid for the "loss" of China in 1949. The fall of South Vietnam, he later explained, would have set off a "mean and destructive debate that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."¹⁰² He was certain that conservatives would use any foreign policy failure to thwart his liberal domestic programs. "If I don't go in now and they show later that I should have," he predicted, "they'll push . . . Vietnam up my ass every time."¹⁰³

The president moved cautiously at first. Facing election in November 1964, he could not appear to do nothing, especially after Republicans nominated the hawkish Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. On the other hand, he could not alarm the electorate or jeopardize his domestic programs by taking drastic steps. He deflected proposals from the Joint Chiefs to bomb North Vietnam and even China and commit U.S. combat troops to the war. But he sent more aid and advisers. And when North Vietnamese gunboats on August 2 and 4 allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, he retaliated by bombing military installations across the seventeenth parallel. Claiming on August 4 an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in international waters, an assertion later disputed and now known to be false, he rushed through a compliant Congress with near unanimous consent a Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing him to use "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the United States and to prevent further aggression." The president's decisive action helped seal a landslide victory over Goldwater in November. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave him authority to expand the war. But when doubts were later raised about the August 4 attack, legislators cried deceit, widening LBJ's credibility gap.104

The election over, the president during the first seven months of 1965 incrementally and often after hours of agonizing internal deliberations committed the United States to war. Chaos continued to reign in Saigon, and North Vietnam sent regular army units into the south. With South Vietnam facing near certain defeat, LBJ in February responded to NLF attacks on U.S. forces at Pleiku by ordering more retaliatory bombing raids against North Vietnam. This time, they regularized into the Rolling Thunder campaign of systematic, gradually expanding attacks moving steadily northward. The next month, he dispatched U.S. Marines to guard air bases, the first combat forces sent to Vietnam. After South Vietnamese units were mauled in a series of spring and early summer battles, U.S. military commander Gen. William C. Westmoreland urgently requested large increments of American combat forces. Following a searching analysis of the options, most likely with his mind already made up, Johnson in late July ordered the immediate dispatch of 175,000 U.S. troops, making what amounted to an open-ended commitment to save South Vietnam. Still deeply concerned about the Great Society, he cleverly disguised the significance of what he was doing. He repeatedly insisted that he was not changing U.S. policy.¹⁰⁵

Over the next two years, LBJ steadily expanded the U.S. commitment. He rejected proposals to mobilize the reserves and rally public support for the war, fearing that such moves would threaten his domestic programs and take control of the war out of his hands. To avoid confrontation with the Soviet Union and especially China, he refused to authorize military operations outside of South Vietnam. He went out of his way to avoid Truman's mistakes in Korea by refusing to permit bombing near the Chinese border. Within those bounds, he drastically expanded American involvement—"all-out limited war," one official called it with no apparent sense of the paradox.106 The bombing of North Vietnam grew from 63,000 tons in 1965 to 226,000 in 1967, inflicting an estimated $600 million of damage on a still primitive economy. By mid-1967, the United States had nearly 500,000 troops in South Vietnam. Westmoreland launched aggressive "search and destroy" operations against North Vietnamese and NLF regulars.

The United States could gain no more than a stalemate. The bombing did not cripple the enemy's will to resist or its capacity to support the NLF. The North Vietnamese dispersed and concealed their most vital resources; the USSR and China helped make up losses. An increasingly deadly air defense system took a growing toll in U.S. planes and pilots. On the ground, when U.S. forces engaged the enemy they usually prevailed. But an elusive foe fought only when conditions were in its favor and replaced and to some extent controlled its losses by melting into sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia and across the 17th parallel.¹⁰⁷

The one part of the war that really excited Johnson was the "battle . . . of crops and hearts and caring," but Americanization of the struggle proved counterproductive in terms of building a stable government that could provide a better life for "Vietnamese plain people."¹⁰⁸ Relegated to the sidelines, the South Vietnamese army did not receive the training or experience to assume later the burden of the fighting. Massive U.S. firepower devastated the South Vietnamese countryside, making refugees of as much as one-third of the population. The infusion of thousands of Americans and billions of dollars into a small country had a profoundly destabilizing effect on a fragile society. Corruption became a way of life. Tensions between Americans and South Vietnamese grew.¹⁰⁹

As the war dragged on and its cost skyrocketed, opposition mounted at home. Frustrated with LBJ's limited war, conservative hawks demanded a knockout blow against North Vietnam to secure victory. On the other side, an extremely heterogeneous group of doves increasingly questioned the administration's policies. Radicals denounced the American ruling class's exploitation of helpless people to sustain a decadent capitalist system. Some anti-war liberals challenged the war's legality and morality. Others insisted that Vietnam was of no more than marginal significance to U.S. national security and was undermining relations with allies and holding back detente with the USSR. The liberal critique broadened into an indictment of U.S. "globalism." The Johnson administration, Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright charged, had fallen victim to the "arrogance of power," that "fatal . . . over-extension of power and mission, which brought ruin to ancient Athens, to Napoleonic France, and to Nazi Germany."110

Opposition to the war took varied forms. Activists conducted teach-ins on college campuses and organized mass demonstrations in Washington and other cities. They openly encouraged resistance to the draft and sought to disrupt the war effort. In October 1967, some fifty thousand protestors marched on the Pentagon. Thousands of young Americans exploited legal loopholes, even mutilated themselves to avoid the draft; an estimated thirty thousand fled to Canada. A handful adopted the method of protest of South Vietnam's Buddhists, publicly immolating themselves, one young Quaker below McNamara's Pentagon office window, an act the secretary later conceded "devastated" him.¹¹¹

The war's mounting costs were more important than the anti-war movement in generating public concern. Growing casualties, indications that more troops might be required, and LBJ's belated request for a tax increase combined in late 1967 to produce unmistakable signs of warweariness. Polls showed a sharp decline in support for the war and the president's handling of it. The press increasingly questioned U.S. goals and methods. Members of Congress from both parties began to challenge LBJ's policies. Doubts arose even among his inner circle. The secretary of defense had been so closely identified with Vietnam that it had once been called "McNamara's War." In 1967, a tormented McNamara unsuccessfully urged the president to stop the bombing of North Vietnam, put a ceiling on U.S. ground troops, scale back war aims, and seek a negotiated settlement. By the end of the year, for many observers, the war had become the most visible symbol of a malaise that afflicted American society. Rioting in the cities, a spiraling crime rate, and noisy street demonstrations suggested that violence abroad set off violence at home. Divided against itself, the nation appeared on the verge of an internal crisis as severe as the Great Depression.¹¹²

The United States' escalation of the war in Vietnam had a major impact on relations with adversaries and allies alike. It did not drive the Soviet Union and China back into each other's arms, as some pessimists had warned. Nor did it destroy detente. Negotiations with the USSR on such issues as arms control continued even as U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened. By keeping the war limited and repeatedly making clear its intentions to Moscow and Beijing, the administration helped avert a great-power confrontation.113 Still, the effects of escalation on relations with the Soviet Union were generally negative. Washington's naive hopes to exchange trade and improved relations for Soviet help in securing a favorable Vietnam peace settlement proved chimerical. Competing with China for leadership of the Communist world, Moscow could not appear indifferent to the fate of its ally, North Vietnam. In any event, having been sold out at Geneva in 1954, Hanoi was not about to entrust its fate to its allies. On the contrary, it brilliantly played them against each other to secure maximum aid while preserving its freedom of action. The USSR and China provided more than $2 billion in crucial supplies. Soviet bloc aid to North Vietnam in turn led Congress to reject Johnson's requests for most-favored-nation status for the USSR, an essential underpinning for detente.¹¹⁴

The first moves toward detente and expansion of the war in Vietnam also opened deep fissures in the Western alliance. Even as Soviet-American tensions eased, Johnson's advisers continued to view NATO as necessary to guarantee U.S. influence in Western Europe, especially with a recalcitrant France, and to keep West Germany "on a leash."¹¹⁵ Losing the alliance would also mean "the loss of our diplomatic cards in dealing with the Russians," Vice President Hubert Humphrey candidly admitted.¹¹⁶ The missile crisis had aroused European concerns about U.S. reliability. The easing of the Soviet threat seemed to reduce allied dependence on the United States. And the growing economic strength of Western Europe set off increased nationalism. At a minimum, the allies sought a partnership of equals. Determined to restore his nation to global prominence, de Gaulle entertained visions of a Europe closely tied to the USSR and free of the Anglo-Saxons. Heightened nationalism in Europe raised fears among nervous Americans of a revival of the forces that had provoked two world wars, making an alliance under U.S. control all the more important. Facing growing costs in Vietnam, Americans wanted the Europeans to pay more for their own defense.

The differences burst out into the open after 1963. The United States insisted that the defense of South Vietnam was essential to protect Western Europe. The Europeans were not persuaded, and in any event doubted U.S. ability to succeed there. Faced with growing anti-American protest among their own people, the allies staunchly resisted LBJ's appeals for troops, even, in the case of Britain, for the symbolic commitment of a "platoon of bagpipers."117 As it grew stronger, West Germany pressed harder on reunification and acquiring nuclear weapons, setting off anxiety across the continent. Not surprisingly, the major challenge continued to come from de Gaulle. In 1964, he recognized China and especially infuriated Johnson by pushing for the neutralization of Vietnam. In February 1966, he withdrew from NATO and asked that its troops and headquarters be moved from France. He followed with an independent approach to Moscow. European refusal to support the United States in Vietnam and de Gaulle's challenge provoked forty-four senators in August 1966 to propose major cuts in U.S. forces in Europe.

Johnson and his advisers handled the European crisis adeptly. U.S. officials deeply resented the allies' refusal to support the war in Vietnam. "When the Russians invade Sussex," Rusk snapped at a British journalist, "don't expect us to come and help you."¹¹⁸ But there was no retribution, and in 1966 LBJ provided crucial economic assistance to bolster the faltering pound sterling. Some U.S. officials privately railed at de Gaulle's "megalomania," but the president wisely refused to get into a "pissing match" with the French leader. "When a man asks you to leave his house, you don't argue," he remarked of the request to remove NATO troops, "you get your hat and go."¹¹⁹ He also held off congressional pressures to withdraw troops from Europe. The administration even attempted to use detente to keep the alliance intact—and the United States in control—by encouraging West German approaches to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.¹²⁰

The United States also narrowly averted—at least temporarily—a major crisis in the already shaky alliance. In early 1967, economically beleaguered Britain announced plans to reduce its overseas forces by one-third and threatened to remove its troops from Europe unless West Germany assumed the cost of supporting them. West Germany, in turn, threatened to curtail purchases of U.S. and British military equipment. After extended negotiations, Bonn consented to buy on a smaller scale. The United States and Britain agreed to "redeploy" troops from Germany to their home territories, keeping them under NATO command and ready to send back when needed. But Britain proceeded with cutbacks in July, and West Germany reduced its forces to 400,000 instead of building them up to 508,000 as originally planned.121 The Western alliance was substantially weakened by France's defection and surging economic pressures.

The price of hegemony was starkly manifest in Asia and the Pacific. Detente and the Vietnam War sometimes disturbed America's Asian allies, but they also provided leverage to extort concessions from Washington. The mere hint of a change in U.S. China policy, along with Beijing's 1964 diplomatic successes and especially its nuclear test, deeply alarmed Taiwan's leaders. The United States quickly rebuffed Chiang Kai-shek's offers to take out China's nuclear program and launch a military offensive in southern China—the "Gimo and Madame eat-sleep-love-dream 'counterattack,' " the U.S. ambassador mused.¹²² The administration also rejected his proposal for a regional military alliance and politely declined his offer of combat units for Vietnam. On the other hand, to palliate Chiang, the United States sent up-to-date military hardware, including fighter planes. The Nationalist leader skillfully exploited LBJ's absorption with Vietnam. Nationalist troops took part in CIA covert operations there. U.S. forces used Taiwan bases as staging areas for operations in Vietnam, and Taiwan earned huge profits from civilian contracts. The Vietnam War thus tightened U.S.-Taiwan ties.¹²³

The war produced major strains in America's relations with its major East Asian ally, Japan. Japanese continued to press for the reversion of Okinawa. Minimizing the threat in Vietnam, they generally opposed the war and especially feared they might be sucked into it. U.S. officials were reluctant to give up the "Keystone of the Pacific," especially with war raging in Southeast Asia. Americans resented that Japan took advantage of the U.S. defense "umbrella" while contributing only minimally to its own security. As Japan's economy grew by leaps and bounds and the balance of trade shifted heavily in its favor, Americans pushed for greater access to its markets.¹²⁴

LBJ's desperation for help in Vietnam forced repeated concessions to Japan. The son of a sake brewer and protégé of postwar leader Yoshida Shigeru, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato was a masterful politician and diplomat who adeptly maneuvered amidst a bewildering array of external and internal pressures. The two nations reached vague agreement on the reversion of Okinawa "within a few years," with the United States to retain basing rights.125 Japan opened the door slightly to U.S. imports. Sato provided token support in Vietnam, mainly medical supplies and ships flying the U.S. flag for coastal transport in South Vietnam. Japan furnished bases for U.S. air operations. In the meantime, as one Japanese journalist observed, Japan, "like a magician, satisfied both its conscience and its purse."¹²⁶ Sato tolerated popular protests against the war. Vietnam helped Japan surpass the United States as the major economic power in the region. Japanese sold the U.S. armed forces an estimated $1 billion per year in everything from beer to body bags. Southeast Asia nations used vast U.S. expenditures to purchase Japanese consumer goods. Japan indeed may have been the only winner of the war in Vietnam.¹²⁷

Other Pacific allies contributed troops for the war, but most drove a very hard bargain. Some shared with the United States concern about Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia. Some depended on U.S. security guarantees. Most seized the chance to extort concessions in return for modest numbers of troops. Only Australia provided sizeable forces at its own expense. New Zealand neatly balanced its concern not to offend the United States or inflame domestic critics of the war by sending a small artillery battery. South Korea provided about fifty thousand combat forces, but secured handsome subsidies, substantial additional military aid, and expanded security commitments. The Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos extracted maximum gain from a minimal investment. In addition to a small engineering unit, he offered to mobilize ten battalions of troops at U.S. expense, then kept them at home for his own self-protection. Recognizing that he had been had, LBJ warned an aide: "If you ever bring that man near me again, I'll have your head."¹²⁸

VI

Even more than in Asia, in the ever volatile Middle East, the Johnson administration was subject to manipulation by a close friend with a powerful constituency in the United States and an ambitious foreign policy agenda. Following JFK's lead, Johnson took steps to further what was now called the special relationship. Like many Americans, he had long admired Israel's plucky defense of its territory. As a senator, he had faithfully supported the new nation. He appreciated the importance of the Jewish vote to the Democratic Party and the clout of the Israel lobby. His close friends among American Jews included several of his White House advisers. Indeed, his aide Harry McPherson once speculated that "some place in Lyndon Johnson's blood" there were a "great many Jewish corpuscles."129

As president, Johnson expanded the flow of weapons to Israel. He recognized the importance of Arab oil, of course, and he was increasingly angered by the opposition of Jewish intellectuals to the war in Vietnam. Like Kennedy, he worried about Israel's nuclear ambitions, and he refused repeated requests for F-4 fighter-bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. He preferred that arms be provided through third parties like West Germany than directly from the United States. But he was usually there for Israel, whether it be A-4 Skyhawk fighters, the first commitment of combat aircraft for Israel, M-48 tanks, or M-113 armored personnel carriers. Such weapons were deemed essential to counter Soviet shipments to Arabs and to placate Israel when the United States supplied moderate Arab states such as Jordan. United States officials also indulged in the wishful thinking that satisfying Israel's demands on conventional arms would sway it from seeking nuclear weapons. The administration tried to hinge military assistance on the right to inspect Israel's nuclear facilities, but the Israeli tail often wagged the superpower dog, and Tel Aviv stubbornly and successfully resisted U.S. conditions.¹³⁰

The 1967 Middle East crisis, a classic example of the way escalation begets war, originated from the rekindling of the ever explosive Arab-Israeli dispute. Certain that Israel would soon acquire nuclear weapons, the radical Arabs stepped up their pressure. In February 1966, a Baathist regime seized power in Syria and, with Soviet backing, set out to "out-Nasir Nasir."¹³¹ Syria's move spurred the Egyptian leader back into action lest he lose his position among the more militant Arabs. Nasser promptly demanded removal of a UN peacekeeping force stationed in the Sinai as a buffer between Egypt and Israel. Surprised when the UN complied, he massed troops along the Israeli border and threatened to close the Gulf of Sidra, Israel's lifeline to the outside world. In the meantime, the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) mounted deadly terrorist attacks against Israel from bases in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Encircled and increasingly embattled, unsure of outside support, nervous Israelis feared for the existence of their state.

While frantically seeking to calm tensions on both sides, the United States appears to have given Israel the freedom to respond as it saw fit. United States officials recognized the perils of a Middle Eastern war, especially the possibility of a superpower confrontation at a time when they were bogged down in Vietnam. Even more, they feared further Soviet penetration of a vital region and a successful Arab war of liberation. Many openly sympathized with Israel. Choosing an analogy calculated to catch the president's ear, adviser John Roche referred to the "Israelis as Texas, and Nasser as Santa Ana."132 The administration proposed an international naval force—the so-called Red Sea Regatta—to break Nasser's blockade but gained little support from Congress or key allies. The president at first tried to discourage Israel from firing the first shot, admonishing repeatedly—and suggestively—that "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone." But he also promised to use force to open the straits and in time conveyed signals through crony Abe Fortas and others that seemed to give Israel a green light to launch a preemptive strike. In any event, threatened on two sides and from within, and certain that the best defense was a good offense, Israel would probably have started the war anyway. Sensing that the best way to maximize its security was to strike first, Israel on June 5, 1967, launched a short and entirely one-sided conflict with enormous implications for the future of the Middle East.¹³³

Israel's daring move paid huge military dividends. Striking without warning, U.S.-supplied Skyhawk jets bearing the Star of David insignia knocked out Egyptian and Jordanian air forces on the ground, destroying three hundred Egyptian planes in less than an hour and a half. Control of the air ensured smashing battlefield success. Using U.S.-provided tanks, Israel promptly seized Gaza, the Sinai, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The United States, privately pleased with the embarrassment suffered by Nasser and the USSR, firmly backed Israel. Mainly concerned with possible Soviet intervention, Washington sought to reassure Moscow that the United States had not been complicit in Israel's surprise attack. The Johnson administration also promoted a cease-fire in place, an arrangement that favored Israel.134

Israel's unprovoked and brutal attack on a U.S. Navy ship close to the Egyptian coast on the fourth day of the war made clear its willingness to defy its patron. The USS Liberty incident is still shrouded in mystery and has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories. It remains unclear exactly what the "ugliest, strangest looking ship in the U.S. Navy," as Adm. Thomas Moorer called it, was doing, why it was attacked, and who ordered the attack.¹³⁵ The slow-moving, unarmed, and unguarded electronic surveillance vessel was apparently not where it was supposed to be because of a communications foul-up. The Israelis may have tried to destroy it to prevent it from intercepting radio traffic reporting the massacre of Egyptian troops in the Sinai.¹³⁶ They may have been trying to hide from the prying ears of U.S. electronic espionage their preparations for attacking the Golan Heights.¹³⁷ On the afternoon of June 8, Israeli aircraft and then gunboats struck the Liberty with rockets, napalm, and torpedoes, killing 34 sailors, wounding 171. At first believing that Egypt or the Soviet Union was responsible, the United States dispatched aircraft from a nearby carrier. In the meantime, learning that Israel had attacked the ship and fearing escalation of the war, it recalled the planes. Israel naturally fell back on mistaken identity, a claim only the most gullible could believe. "Inconceivable," staunch friend of Israel Clark Clifford snorted. "Incomprehensible," Rusk concurred.¹³⁸ Israel apologized and paid an indemnity. United States officials accepted the apology without much further questioning.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Israeli forces attacked the Golan Heights and drove within forty miles of Damascus. They aimed, apparently, not only to strengthen their strategic position but also to eliminate the hostile Syrian government. The attack threatened the superpower confrontation U.S. officials most feared. Humiliated by the total defeat of two of its leading clients and ridiculed by the Chinese, Moscow promptly broke relations with Israel. Premier Alexei Kosygin warned LBJ in the first use of their hotline that unless Israel was stopped the USSR might take action "which may bring us into a clash, which will lead to catastrophe." During a tense top-level meeting marked by hushed voices, LBJ ordered the Sixth Fleet from Crete to the eastern Mediterranean close to Syria. Tired of coddling Israel and angered by the Liberty attack, U.S. officials also insisted that it accept a cease-fire without delay.139 The tough action—and Israel's achievement of its goals—produced results. The Soviet Union backed off, Israel backed down on June 11, and the crisis eased.

Israel's smashing victory had enormous consequences. In just 132 hours, it seized forty-two thousand square miles of territory, tripling the size of the country. Intoxicated with success, Israelis called it the Six-Day War, an unmistakable reference to the creation story in Genesis. Indeed, the war restored the dimensions of biblical Israel and soon led to occupation and settlement of the captured lands. For the Arabs, the war became known as the Disaster, a humiliation that made them even less inclined toward peace with Israel. Nasser's pan-Arab dreams were crushed. Arab nationalism would never recover from the debacle. Some Arab intellectuals turned to modernization and democracy; many others, to a revival of traditional Islam.¹⁴⁰ Although U.S. officials were pleased with Israel's success, the war caused major problems for them. The Israeli lobby now pressed for the full-fledged alliance that would further compromise America's position in a vital region. The Johnson administration feared that Israel's success would fuel its ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons and hang on to the conquered territories, moves that would further destabilize the Middle East. A humiliated USSR set out to rebuild its clients' shattered arsenals and recoup its influence. A Baathist coup by Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1968 raised the possibility of a new Soviet client in an oil-rich state. Armed with Soviet weapons, Palestinian radicals mounted deadly attacks on Israeli positions in the West Bank and Israel itself.¹⁴¹

An administration already bogged down in Vietnam struggled with these intractable and dangerous problems. United States officials ignored demands for an alliance while maintaining close ties with Israel. The United States joined Britain in sponsoring UN Resolution 242, calling on Israel to relinquish territory in exchange for Arab acceptance of its existence, the so-called land-for-peace formula. It pressed Israel to negotiate and also to refrain from settling the occupied regions. It persisted in trying to keep Israel from going nuclear. When Israel refused to give assurances

regarding nuclear weapons, LBJ rejected its requests for F-4 jets. The pattern of Israeli resistance to compromise was already set, however, and the president eventually gave in on the aircraft—a major escalation of the regional arms race—in return for meaningless assurances that Israel would not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.142

To protect its broader interests, the United States adopted a "three pillars" approach, adding Saudi Arabia and Iran as the other two bulwarks of its regional strategy. After the Six-Day War, it cemented long-standing ties with these two oil-rich kingdoms with arms deals and other inducements. LBJ cultivated the shah of Iran with special care. Scrapping Kennedy's efforts to push reforms on a key ally, the president responded to the shah's endless complaints about the paucity of U.S. aid and his only slightly veiled threats to lean toward the USSR by lavishing military aid on him through numerous hastily concocted deals.143 Such policies served U.S. short-term interests, but they did nothing to stanch Arab radicalism, and in Iran they would have fateful consequences.

VII

McNamara's replacement, Clark Clifford, remembered it as the most difficult year of his life, a year that seemed like five years; Rusk called it a "blur."¹⁴⁴ For the United States and the rest of the world, 1968 was a year quite unlike any other. In Western and Eastern Europe, loosely connected "networks of rebellion," composed mostly of young radicals inspired by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, mounted major protests against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, challenged their own governments, and sought an elusive third way between capitalism and Communism. The upheaval helped to bring down de Gaulle and provoke a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Americans, 1968 was a year of unparalleled tragedy, marked by the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy within months of each other. It was a year of turmoil, with riots in Washington and other cities following King's death, the takeover of Columbia University by student radicals in April, and in August during the Democratic convention warfare in the streets of Chicago between police and anti-war protestors. The Johnson administration faced major foreign policy crises with North Korea, Vietnam, world gold markets, and Czechoslovakia. For the United States and the world, this halfway point between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War was a watershed year.¹⁴⁵

The year of crisis began on January 23 when North Korea seized the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo in the Sea of Japan and imprisoned its officers and crew. In retrospect, the ill-fated voyage of the Pueblo seems a classic example of Murphy's Law in action. The ship was woefully prepared for a dangerous mission, its crew inexperienced and ill trained, its skipper, Captain Lloyd Bucher, a submariner assigned to a onetime cargo vessel. Navy brass shrugged off the risks of electronic espionage off the coast of North Korea. When the ship was attacked, Bucher did not try to escape or fight. The crew did not destroy highly classified documents or its electronic gear, providing the enemy an intelligence windfall. LBJ wisely resisted demands to retaliate militarily. Underestimating North Korea's independence, he first sought to retrieve the ship and crew through the USSR. In fact, it took eleven months of patient and sometimes excruciating negotiations and a skillfully crafted apology to retrieve the sailors without their ship.146

A week after the Pueblo incident, North Vietnam and the NLF launched the biggest offensive of the war. Striking at Tet, the beginning of the lunar new year and the most festive of Vietnamese holidays, they shifted their attacks from the countryside to the previously secure urban areas of South Vietnam. In Saigon, the center of U.S. power, they hit the airport, the presidential palace, and, most dramatically, the U.S. embassy. Although caught off guard, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces repulsed the initial assaults, inflicted huge casualties, and retook lost ground. But the suddenness and magnitude of the offensive had a huge impact in the United States. Observing the events on nightly television news, a public that had been told the United States was winning the war was shocked and profoundly disillusioned. An "air of gloom" hung over White House discussions, one LBJ adviser later recalled; another likened the mood to that in 1861 after the first Battle of Bull Run.¹⁴⁷

The choices open to policymakers all seemed bad. Top officials speculated that seizure of the Pueblo was part of a concerted Communist effort to open a "second front" to divert U.S. attention and resources from Vietnam. Some feared a second round of attacks in Vietnam or possibly even Berlin or the Middle East. Johnson's military advisers sought to use the crises to force mobilization of the reserves and a full military buildup. Their proposal to increase the armed forces by 206,000 troops especially alarmed civilian leaders. The estimated price tag of $10 billion imposed enormous economic and political burdens in an election year and when public anxiety about the war was already high.¹⁴⁸

An economic crisis, itself partly caused by the war, significantly influenced policy deliberations. The war added costs as high as $3.6 billion per year to an economy already strained by domestic spending, causing inflation and a growing balance of payments deficit that weakened the dollar in international markets and threatened the world monetary structure. A financial crisis in Britain, leading to devaluation of the pound, caused huge losses from the gold pool. In March 1968, pressure on the dollar mounted and gold purchases reached new highs. At Washington's urging, the London gold market closed on March 14. The request for more troops was increasingly linked to the nation's economic woes. "The town is in an atmosphere of crisis," Dean Acheson confided to a friend.149

At this crucial point, the architects of major U.S. Cold War policies concluded that the Vietnam War was destroying the nation's overall security position and pressed for disengagement. Acheson, NSC-68 author Paul Nitze, veteran diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and Clifford, all key Truman advisers, formed a sort of cabal with dovish White House advisers such as McPherson to persuade Johnson to change course. "Our leader ought to be more concerned with areas that count," the imperious former secretary of state and hard-core Atlanticist insisted.¹⁵⁰ Acheson took the lead in a crucial March 26–27 meeting of the Wise Men, a group of senior foreign policy experts, including a number of former Truman advisers, the president occasionally consulted. The Wise Men generally concurred that in Vietnam the United States could "no longer do the job we have set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage." "The establishment bastards have bailed out," a dispirited LBJ is said to have snarled after the meeting.¹⁵¹

The crisis of hegemony was "resolved" in a manner both inconclusive and anticlimactic. Governments rarely deal with complex issues head-on, democratic governments especially so. The administration thus improvised short-term expedients without really addressing the larger issues raised by Acheson and his cohort. Under U.S. leadership, an international bankers' meeting in Washington in late March approved stopgap measures to stabilize the gold market. On the most pressing issue, LBJ sought to quiet domestic unrest by deescalating the war without scaling back U.S. objectives or reassessing Vietnam's place among national priorities. He rejected the military's request for additional troops and began to shift more responsibility for the fighting to the South Vietnamese. In a dramatic, nationally televised address on March 31, 1968, he announced a major cutback of the bombing of North Vietnam and proclaimed his willingness to undertake peace negotiations. In an announcement that stunned the nation, he revealed he would not be a candidate for another term as president. A war originally undertaken to sustain U.S. hegemony over the postwar international order was scaled back to maintain an economic and military system on the verge of collapse.¹⁵²

Not surprisingly, Johnson's hopes for a late-term peace went unrealized. Hanoi accepted his invitation to talk, and negotiations began in Paris in May, but they quickly deadlocked over such issues as the bombing of North Vietnam and the makeup of a new South Vietnamese government. In the summer of 1968, the Soviets helped broker a deal to get the talks off dead center. On October 31, a reluctant LBJ finally agreed to the total bombing halt Hanoi had long demanded. But the president's last-ditch effort to salvage negotiations and perhaps the presidential candidacy of Vice President Humphrey ran up against formidable forces. Fearing a last-minute peace deal that would sabotage their candidate's hopes, Richard Nixon's campaign officials, working through Harvard professor, sometimes LBJ consultant, and Republican foreign policy adviser Henry A. Kissinger and go-between Anna Chennault, widow of World War II China theater air commander Gen. Claire Chennault, urged South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to block the rush toward peace. Thieu needed little persuading. Only after Nixon had been elected by a very thin margin and under enormous pressure from the Johnson administration did he agree to send delegates to Paris. Once there, the South Vietnamese raised procedural roadblocks that thwarted any remaining hope of a settlement.153

Frustrated in Vietnam, Johnson in his last months vigorously pursued detente with the USSR. He was deeply committed to arms control negotiations to ease the threat of nuclear war, redeem an administration tainted by Vietnam, and leave his mark on history. The process had begun with small but significant U.S.-Soviet agreements to reduce production of weapons-grade uranium (1964) and ban nuclear weapons in space (1966). Johnson's efforts to initiate negotiations on strategic arms limitations met a cautious response from Moscow. But France and China's emergence as nuclear powers and fears that West Germany might get nuclear weapons spurred serious non-proliferation negotiations. On July 1, 1968, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT); signatories who possessed nuclear weapons agreed not to help others acquire them, and those who did not have them agreed not to purchase or develop them. More than one hundred nations eventually signed the NPT. By forestalling West German acquisition of nuclear weapons, it helped promote European stability. But France refused to sign, while agreeing to abide by the terms. China and aspiring nuclear powers Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa rejected the treaty. Despite its obvious flaws, LBJ hailed the NPT as one of his most important achievements.154 The administration also seemed to achieve a breakthrough when the USSR in the summer of 1968 agreed to begin strategic arms negotiations. A Kosygin-Johnson summit was set for Leningrad in September.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August doomed the summit and arms control negotiations. Moscow had watched anxiously during the legendary Prague Spring of 1968 as Czech leaders responding to popular pressures promoted democratization while reiterating their fealty to the Warsaw Pact. Increasingly nervous about the spread of "anti-Soviet bacillus" into other Eastern bloc states and their own republics, and aware of the weakness of Czech troops along the German border, a reluctant Kremlin finally sent Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia.¹⁵⁵ Two weeks later, Brezhnev proclaimed a Soviet duty to intervene anywhere socialism was threatened, a statement Western journalists dubbed the Brezhnev Doctrine. The move caught Washington completely off guard. Vividly remembering Budapest in 1956 when the United States seemed to encourage revolt and then did nothing, U.S. officials went out of their way to avoid any appearance of interference, even to the point of toning down Radio Free Europe broadcasts. They continued naively to reckon that Moscow would not risk detente by intervening militarily. Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin was assigned the unwelcome task of explaining the invasion to the president. To his surprise, a completely unsuspecting LBJ insisted on talking about the summit and in a bizarre scene offered his startled—and much relieved—guest a whiskey while regaling him with tales of Texas.¹⁵⁶

When the harsh reality sank in, U.S. officials responded angrily. "The Cold War is not over," LBJ ruefully conceded, and Rusk complained of the Soviets "throwing a dead fish in the president's face."¹⁵⁷ Fearing that Moscow might also move against Romania or even Yugoslavia, the United States issued firm warnings. On the other hand, still eager for negotiations, it responded with no more than perfunctory protests and token retaliation. While canceling the summit, Johnson kept the door open for negotiations after a respectable interval, hoping, as he put it, that Soviet leaders might want to "take some of the polecat off them."¹⁵⁸ Indeed, until after he left office, he clung to hopes of a last-minute summit while demanding prior assurances of positive results on complex arms control issues. Moscow was understandably wary. President-elect Nixon made clear he would not honor the terms of an eleventh-hour deal.

Even without a summit, 1968 was a watershed year in the Cold War. The Czech crisis briefly set back superpower contacts, but it also furthered detente. The U.S. and USSR went to great lengths to avoid confrontation, even to the point of deploying forces along the Czech border in such a way as to minimize possibilities of a clash. At the "moment of truth," historian Vojtech Mastny concludes, both sides "showed a prudent disposition to underestimate their own strength and overestimate the strength of the adversary," making them less inclined to contemplate war. After 1968, neither side seriously considered war in Europe, thus stabilizing the region where the Cold War had begun and providing a solid basis for detente. Conservative American critics have grossly overestimated the impact of LBJ's inaction in the face of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It did uphold the fragile status quo in Eastern Europe, to be sure, but it did not resolve Moscow's huge problems within the Warsaw Pact. Nor did it lead to tighter Soviet control over bloc nations. More important, perhaps, it made clear to the Kremlin the high cost of such actions. The year 1968 was thus an important landmark on the road to the end of the Cold War.159

The "global disruption" of that year produced other changes that marked the end of the postwar era. The U.S. non-response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and its commitment to the NPT suggested to West German leaders that Washington would sacrifice German reunification to the interest of stability and order. Bonn thus embraced what would be called Ostpolitik, approaches to the USSR and Eastern Europe separate from the United States that provided an independent, European force for detente. Fearing that Moscow might intervene forcibly in East Asia, Chinese leaders clamped down on the Cultural Revolution and looked to the United States as a possible counter to the Soviet threat. When North Vietnam tilted toward the Soviet Union in 1968, China began to withdraw troops from Vietnam and invited Washington to reopen the Warsaw talks suspended the preceding year. These small steps opened the way for Nixon's dramatic moves toward normalization.¹⁶⁰

The year 1968 also marked the beginning of the end of the postwar economic boom. The economic crisis of 1967–68, the most serious since the Great Depression, set off a prolonged malaise among the industrialized nations. The stopgap measures taken to deal with the March gold crisis eased the immediate problems, but they weakened the U.S. commitment to the Bretton Woods system of currency stabilization. The costs of what Paul Kennedy has called "imperial overstretch" also afflicted the USSR, creating additional incentives for both sides to find common ground, encouraging still greater independence among allies on both sides, and enabling the losers of World War II, Germany and Japan, to emerge as major players in the world economy. In the world economy, as in geopolitics, 1968 was a year of dramatic changes.161

LYNDON JOHNSON REGISTERED IMPORTANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS in foreign as well as domestic policy. Especially on arms control issues, his administration took steps toward detente with the USSR, establishing the conceptual framework upon which his successor would build. He moved cautiously in the right direction in dealing with China and Panama. As part of the Great Society, he scrapped the ultra-nationalistic and racially based national-origins immigration legislation of 1924, a system that had favored Northern and Western Europeans and, along with legalized segregation, embarrassed the United States in dealing with the non-white world. Condemning that law as "alien to the American dream," he secured passage in October 1965 of legislation that favored refugees from Communist countries and the Middle East, immigrants with special skills, and people related to U.S. citizens or resident aliens.¹⁶² That landmark law opened the doors to a huge new influx of immigrants, the largest numbers from the Middle East, Asia, and especially Latin America, by century's end reconfiguring the nation's demographics.

Despite his achievements—and his wishes to the contrary—LBJ's presidency is still remembered mainly for Vietnam. A consummate pragmatist as a senator, in domestic politics, and on many foreign policy issues, he could not find in Vietnam that elusive middle ground that would have permitted disengagement without undermining his own and the nation's prestige. The war he took on with grave misgivings and struggled at great cost to end dominated his presidency and eventually drove him from office. It helped destroy the Great Society in which he had invested so much; it damaged the U.S. economy. In foreign policy, historian Nancy Tucker has written, "it intruded upon virtually every decision the administration made." It "strained friendships, aggravated animosities, and left a problematic legacy."163 A war fought to uphold the nation's world position made the United States an international whipping boy. Its repercussions would last into the next century.

Vietnam was symptomatic of the larger foreign policy conundrum of an embattled presidency. Following long-established Cold War dictates, LBJ was committed to upholding a worldwide status quo in a time of sweeping change and as U.S. power operated under growing constraints. When Thieu blocked the administration's last-minute peace ploy in late 1968, Harry McPherson moaned that the "American Gulliver is tied down by the South Vietnamese Lilliputians."¹⁶⁴ In fact, during the Johnson years, "the American Gulliver" faced upstart Lilliputians all over the world. Despite major challenges in Panama and the Dominican Republic, LBJ held the line in Latin America, but he did so at the cost of much of the goodwill the United States had earned early in Kennedy's presidency. He kept the Western alliance together, but the defection of France and the growing independence of West Germany made it more an association of equals than one dominated by the United States. He paid a high price to allies to secure minimal support for the war in Vietnam. In the Six-Day War, where headstrong proxy Israel furthered major U.S. aims, the result was closer entanglement with Israel, greater reliance on Iran and Saudi Arabia, and deeper Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Johnson's abdication in March 1968, according to historian H. W. Brands, represented a "defeat for the policy of global containment," an implicit concession that "the job was more than America could handle."¹⁶⁵ The most urgent task for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger would be to devise new strategies to adapt to America's changed position in the world.