The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

Toward the end of 1967, the Vietnam War had, by any reasonable standard of measurement, become stalemated. It is certainly clear in retrospect, as it was to many observers at the time, that the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were nowhere close to winning what had essentially become a guerrilla war, but neither were their adversaries—the North Vietnamese and the southern-based revolutionary insurgency, the National Liberation Front (NLF), or “Vietcong.” Two and a half years after the major U.S. troop buildup, insurgent forces still controlled substantial portions of the territory and population of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). In a report of January 1, 1968, Marine general John Chaisson, director of the Operations Center of the U.S. military command in Vietnam, estimated that “nearly 90% of the geographic areas of the RVN and over one-third of the population were under Communist influence.”¹ The NLF’s armed forces, in close coordination with those of North Vietnam, its patron and partner, had made the tactical adjustments needed to survive in the face of America’s vast superiority in firepower and technology. The leaders and people of North Vietnam had likewise adapted to the punishing U.S. bombing campaign that had commenced in early 1965, demonstrating firm resolve even in the face of a sustained aerial assault that they lacked the military means to counter.

Yet President Ho Chi Minh of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and his associates in the ruling Politburo, dedicated revolutionaries all, were sufficiently realistic to recognize that no matter how much territory south of the seventeenth parallel remained under the de facto control of Communist cadres, their forces could never hope to defeat the United States. Victory had appeared within their grasp in early 1965, only to be snatched away by the massive infusion of U.S. troops who had helped prop up the faltering Saigon regime. Now they planned for the long term; determination, patience, and time were the main allies of Hanoi and the NLF. The Communist revolutionaries, after all, did not need to defeat the American superpower; they simply needed to stay in the fight. By denying a victory to the Americans, and by controlling their own rate of casualties through avoidance of traditional military confrontations, they could wage a protracted war, inflict significant casualties on their adversaries, and simply wait for American public opinion to turn against a bloody, inconclusive war in a faraway place.

Much to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s consternation, ample evidence suggested that the American public was in fact conforming to the pattern Hanoi’s leaders had predicted. It was growing weary of and frustrated with a conflict whose cost in blood and treasure was becoming as worrisome as its inconclusiveness. A public-opinion poll conducted in October 1967 revealed that support for the war had dropped to a new low of just 58 percent. It had stood at 72 percent in June and 61 percent in late August. Also in October, polling data indicated that for the first time a plurality of Americans—by a margin of 46 percent to 44 percent—judged the initial decision to intervene in Vietnam to be a mistake. And just 34 percent of those sampled approved of President Johnson’s handling of the war.² The steady erosion of public support for the war was reflected in the growing number of newspapers—including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Los Angeles Times—that had recently shifted their editorial positions from moderate support for the war to serious misgivings about it. In the fall of 1967, Time and Life, two of the most widely read mass-circulation magazines in the country, expressed major doubts about the U.S. commitment, reversing earlier prowar stances. In so doing, they joined Newsweek, another popular weekly that had already moved into the ranks of the doubters. The three major television networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were also nudging closer to a more questioning and less supportive position on the war, a phenomenon reflected not just in the occasional editorial comment by a network anchorman, but in the type of coverage broadcast on the evening news.³

Doubts about the efficacy of the administration’s Vietnam policy were mounting steadily within Congress as well. The Christian Science Monitor reported in early October 1967 that its survey of 205 representatives revealed that 43 had, by their own admission, recently withdrawn their support for LBJ’s Vietnam policy. A few months earlier, an Associated Press analysis recorded that 44 senators supported that policy, but 40 opposed it.⁴ The swelling ranks of antiwar senators from within Johnson’s own Democratic Party both irked and pained him. Dissent was by no means a partisan matter at this time; Democrats, in fact, were more likely to criticize LBJ’s conduct of the war, if not the whole rationale for the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam, than were Republicans. This criticism created a historically unprecedented political situation. A chief executive who had won an overwhelming electoral mandate in November 1964 and whose party enjoyed sizable majorities in both houses of Congress found the most vocal and vociferous criticisms of his policy emanating not from the opposition, but from his own party.

For a president as notoriously attentive to swings in public opinion as Johnson and one who would soon be facing the voters once again, these trends bore ominous portents. On October 27, 1967, LBJ’s trusted domestic adviser Harry McPherson observed that many ordinary Americans “have grown increasingly edgy about the bombing program.” The special counsel called it “one of the main causes of disaffection with our Vietnam policy” and warned his boss that the United States looked to many like “a big mechanized white nation obliterating a small agricultural brown nation.”⁵ Significant, visible military progress was needed, Johnson was convinced, in order to turn public opinion in a more favorable direction—and thereby enhance his own reelection prospects.

Yet Johnson was receiving conflicting views about the current state of the war. Although most of his top military and diplomatic advisers—including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) General Earle G. Wheeler, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam General William C. Westmoreland, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker—insisted that the United States was making steady progress in Vietnam and that the enemy was reeling, not all senior officials and intelligence experts subscribed to so optimistic a view. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, long the most visible public spokesman for the war effort, was now the most important of the dissenters. On November 1, 1967, he sent the president a memorandum that set forth his highly pessimistic “personal views” about the course of the war and the direction of U.S. policy. The Pentagon chief warned that “continuing our present course of action will not bring us by the end of 1968 enough closer to success, in the eyes of the American public, to prevent the continued erosion of popular support for our involvement in Vietnam.” The coolly analytical McNamara, who had been Johnson’s most valued foreign and defense adviser for nearly all of his presidency, had come to see the Vietnam War as a morass, a virtually unwinnable struggle, for the United States. He told Johnson that the bombing campaign was failing. It had not succeeded in interrupting the flow of supplies and troops from the North to the South, in stabilizing the political situation in the South, or in breaking the enemy’s will. “Nothing can be expected to break this will other than the conviction that they cannot succeed,” he emphasized. “And the American public, frustrated by the slow rate of progress, fearing continued escalation, and doubting that all approaches to peace have been sincerely probed, does not give the appearance of having the will to persist.” McNamara, once the war’s principal architect, shockingly proposed that the United States shift to a policy of “stabilization” by capping U.S. troop levels at their present level (approximately 485,000 military personnel), permitting no further expansion of the air war against North Vietnam, and actively pursuing peace negotiations.⁶

Within his inner circle, however, Johnson found no support for McNamara’s assessment. Rusk, Bundy, Wheeler, Westmoreland, Bunker, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Richard Helms, and others categorically rejected both McNamara’s stalemate thesis and his stabilization proposal. Helms insisted that the “war is going in our favor,” and Rostow commented: “Statistics can’t give you everything 100%. But they can and do confirm progress.”⁷ Another important constituency took the same stance. On November 2, one day after receiving McNamara’s memorandum, Johnson convened a meeting of the “Wise Men.” The members of that group—and they all were men—included some of the most distinguished and experienced statesman of the early Cold War. The roster of luminaries featured, among others, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, former Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, former career diplomat Robert Murphy, attorney and old Washington hand Clark Clifford, associate Supreme Court justice and LBJ intimate Abe Fortas, and former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. After receiving intensive briefings from military officials, the Wise Men, to a person, counseled that the United States must persevere and ultimately prevail in Vietnam. They regarded the stakes there as extremely high, viewing Vietnam as a critical theater in the broader struggle to contain the expansion of Communism and seeing America’s credibility and deterrent power as being at risk. The president had to continue the war “because what we are doing is right,” said Clifford. “If we keep up the pressure on them, gradually the will of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese will wear down.” Acheson expressed similar sentiments, recording his appraisal that the war was “going well” for the United States. “When these fellows decide they can’t defeat the South, then they will give up,” the imperious Acheson proclaimed with characteristic confidence. “This is the way it was in Korea. This is the way the Communists operate.”⁸

Fortified by the Wise Men’s unanimous backing and determined to pierce the growing acceptance of a military stalemate, Johnson launched a major public-relations campaign. He aimed to persuade the American people not only that progress in Vietnam was steady, but that the prospects of victory were daily growing stronger. To that end, in mid-November he brought General Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker home to offer upbeat prognoses about the war effort. “We are making real progress,” Westmoreland confidently proclaimed upon his arrival. In a major address to the National Press Club, he put an even more positive spin on current conditions. “We have reached an important point,” the general insisted, “where the end begins to come into view.” The United States was “winning a war of attrition now,” Westmoreland insisted during a joint appearance with Bunker on NBC Television’s Meet the Press. He even forecast that within two years or less the enemy would be so weakened that the United States could begin to phase down its involvement and begin to withdraw some troops. Bunker, in each of his public appearances, echoed those rosy views. “Today the initiative is ours,” he assured the Overseas Press Club in New York, emphasizing not only that the military effort was succeeding, but that democracy was taking root in South Vietnam. Johnson and his top defense and political advisers were delighted with those hopeful pronouncements; they were buoyed especially by Westmoreland’s prediction that U.S. troop withdrawals could commence within the next two years.⁹

Much of this optimism rested, of course, on military and intelligence estimates about matters not susceptible to statistical precision. Westmoreland’s war-fighting strategy pivoted on an imagined “crossover point”: the juncture at which North Vietnamese and Vietcong losses began to exceed the Communist side’s ability to replace those losses. A careful accounting of enemy troop strength and casualty figures consequently formed essential requirements for tracking progress toward that elusive goal. During his Washington consultations, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam insisted that the crossover point was fast approaching; enemy troop strength, he asserted, had been progressively declining since mid-1967. Some top CIA experts disputed that view, however. They contended that Westmoreland’s intelligence officers were seriously undercounting total enemy troop strength because they excluded local defense units as well as significant numbers of some irregulars from overall order-of-battle estimates. The controversy that raged over how many insurgent fighters actually existed in South Vietnam bubbled just beneath the surface throughout the second half of 1967, prompting the occasional warning signal from those discomfited by administration forecasts of sure and steady progress toward an outright U.S. military victory. Army chief of staff General Harold K. Johnson spoke for more prudent insiders when he quipped: “The platform of false prophets is crowded!”¹⁰

LBJ himself harbored substantial private doubts about the course of the war even as he continued in public to project an image of the supremely confident commander in chief. On December 23, 1967, he met for two hours with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu. The conversation took place in Australia, where both leaders were attending the funeral of Prime Minister Harold Holt. Johnson urged Thieu to consider opening informal talks with NLF representatives. Seeing the NLF as an organization dedicated to the annihilation of his regime, Thieu refused. This exchange between the American and South Vietnamese chiefs of state is quite revealing. That Johnson visualized negotiations between the South Vietnamese government and its southern Communist rivals as a potentially fruitful first step toward an eventual peace settlement certainly belies his public stance of great confidence in the U.S. military effort. If the war was actually going as well as Westmoreland and Bunker said—and evidently believed—then why would LBJ even contemplate the initiation of talks with an enemy supposedly in rapid decline? After all, it bears remembering that when Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother appeared to be moving toward negotiations with the NLF in the fall of 1963, this move constituted a key factor in the U.S. decision to support the military coup that toppled the Diem regime. Now, with 500,000 U.S. troops in the field and a well-respected commander expressing certainty that everything was on target for an outright American military victory, the president was actively pressing for South Vietnamese–NLF peace talks. This demarche speaks volumes about LBJ’s inner doubts. So, too, does his subsequent meeting with Pope Paul VI. During their talk, held in the Vatican on Christmas Eve, Johnson implored the pontiff to use whatever influence he might have with fellow Catholic Thieu to encourage him to seek some form of a political reconciliation with the NLF. The pope agreed to make such an appeal.¹¹

In public, though, LBJ clung to a decidedly upbeat stance. Between his stops in Canberra and Rome, the president made whirlwind trips to Thailand and South Vietnam to rally U.S. troops. At the huge American military base at Cam Ranh Bay, he told an audience of enthusiastic military personnel that the enemy had “met his master in the field.” In his inimitable, folksy style, he intoned solemnly: “We’re not going to yield. And we’re not going to shimmy.”¹²

At that very time, North Vietnam and its Vietcong allies were in the final stages of operational planning for a dramatic, general offensive aimed at simultaneously puncturing such boastful claims, breaking the military stalemate, and hastening the demise of the Saigon regime. By July 1967, with the authorization of the DRV Politburo, top military commanders had begun formulating concrete plans for a bold series of strikes across the length and breadth of South Vietnam. Coordinated attacks on the South’s rapidly growing urban areas, they calculated, would bring the war to major population centers that had previously remained outside the main theaters of conflict. If successful, the attacks would inspire a popular uprising against what Hanoi’s rulers invariably denigrated as South Vietnam’s “puppet government,” thereby destroying its pretense to legitimacy and making it impossible politically for the United States to continue fighting. The commanders hoped that a negotiated settlement favorable to Hanoi and the NLF would follow, reasoning, as one Foreign Ministry official later put it, that “we can only win at the negotiating table what we have already won on the battlefield.”¹³ The military operation tactically called for diversionary attacks in remote, frontier areas to draw U.S. troops away from the urban centers, leaving them especially vulnerable. The timing of the offensive, at the start of a U.S. presidential election year, was hardly accidental. “At a time when the United States is about to elect a president,” one official argued, “we need to inflict a decisive blow, to win a great victory, creating a great leap forward in the strategic situation.”¹⁴

The diversionary attacks that began in late 1967, particularly the major one at Khe Sanh in the rugged mountains near Laos in South Vietnam’s northwestern corner, succeeded in drawing U.S. troops. Johnson became obsessed with the siege of the marine garrison at Khe Sanh, rushing reinforcements there for fear that it might become another Dienbienphu. Then, in the early-morning hours of January 31, 1968, the real offensive began. A combined force of approximately 84,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers launched a series of well-coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam. The offensive extended from the demilitarized zone in the northern end to the country’s southern tip and concentrated, as planned, on urban areas. The attackers struck at 5 of the 6 major cities of South Vietnam, 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district centers, and numerous smaller towns and hamlets. A focal point of the operation was the capital city of Saigon, where North Vietnamese analysts believed that the sudden assault on a number of strategic sites—including the U.S. Embassy, the presidential palace, Tan Son Nhut air base, South Vietnamese army headquarters, several government ministries, and the city’s principal radio station—would spark a popular uprising that would severely undercut and perhaps even topple the Thieu regime. The Saigon strikes unfolded largely as planned, spearheaded by crack Vietcong commandos who had earlier infiltrated into the city undetected by South Vietnamese and American authorities.

Particularly audacious was the Vietcong assault on the U.S. Embassy. In the heart of Saigon, the embassy served as the most potent symbol of the American presence in Vietnam. On January 31, 1968, several hours before dawn, a Vietcong sapper team blew a large hole in the wall surrounding the embassy, entered the compound’s courtyard, and over the next six hours exchanged heavy rocket and small-arms fire with U.S. military police and marines. Midafternoon on January 30, Washington time, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow left a Vietnam policy meeting with President Johnson and other senior advisers to take an urgent telephone call. He returned to inform the president that “we are being heavily mortared in Saigon.” According to a “flash” cable just received from the National Military Intelligence Coordination Center, the U.S. Embassy, the presidential palace, and the city of Saigon itself were under attack. “This could be very bad,” Johnson muttered.¹⁵

Initial administration assessments seemed to confirm the president’s snap reaction. In an intelligence memorandum circulated on January 31, the CIA soberly described the Tet Offensive as designed to demonstrate North Vietnamese and Vietcong strength and resiliency and at the same time deal a psychological blow to the United States and its South Vietnamese partners. Hanoi evidently sought “to convey the impression that despite VC [Vietcong] problems and despite half a million US troops the Communists are still powerful and capable of waging war.”¹⁶ George A. Carver, the CIA’s senior Vietnam analyst, added that no matter how effective U.S. and South Vietnamese forces ultimately proved in their counterattacks, the initial success of the commando operations would certainly provide a substantial boost to North Vietnamese and Vietcong morale. “Regardless of what happens tonight or during the next few days,” Carver predicted, “the degree of success already achieved in Saigon and around the country will adversely affect the image of the GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam] (and its powerful American allies as well) in the eyes of the people.”¹⁷ Early that same morning, McNamara told LBJ that, in his opinion, the carefully planned offensive showed that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong “have more power than some credit them with.” The defense secretary immediately grasped, as did Carver, the highly damaging psychological and public-relations effects that the attacks were sure to have. Although McNamara confidently anticipated that U.S. forces would inflict a “heavy defeat” on the attackers, he expected America’s adversaries to score a significant psychological victory. “I imagine our people across the country this morning will feel that [the North Vietnamese are] much stronger than they had previously anticipated they were,” he noted, “and in that sense I think [the North Vietnamese] gain.”¹⁸

McNamara proved remarkably prescient on both scores. The Communist military units, operating under the cover of the Tet lunar New Year celebrations and the accompanying cease-fire, achieved almost total strategic surprise. But they failed to establish strong defensive positions, received little support from the local population, and soon succumbed to the American and South Vietnamese defenders’ greater mobility and overwhelming firepower. In less than twenty-four hours, all nineteen commandos who had fought their way onto the U.S. Embassy grounds were killed in counterattacks mounted by American soldiers, airmen, and military police. A similar pattern obtained elsewhere in Saigon and throughout the country; within weeks, order had largely been restored. Only in Hue, the former imperial capital, was the fighting prolonged. Yet even there, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were ultimately routed, albeit at a frightful cost to that venerable city’s residents.

As McNamara, Carver, and others had forecast, the Tet Offensive did have powerful psychological and political repercussions that went well beyond its rather limited military accomplishments. More than anything else, it dealt a body blow to the Johnson administration’s credibility, making a mockery of the wildly optimistic statements that Westmoreland, Bunker, and Johnson himself had delivered so recently. The president and his chief aides publicly insisted that the attacks were not unexpected and that the U.S. and South Vietnamese defenders had inflicted a devastating defeat on the insurgents. Many top U.S. officials, however, privately confessed major misgivings about the meaning of the Tet attacks to the broader course of the war. On February 3, 1968, William J. Jorden, a staff member of the National Security Council, called the enemy’s offensive America’s “worst intelligence failure of the war.”¹⁹ Even the ever-optimistic Bunker conceded the point. “I think it’s fair to say that there was some failure of intelligence on our side,” he observed in a cable to Washington.²⁰ In another cable, he admitted that President Thieu considered the Tet fighting “a major psychological gain for the enemy.”²¹ In a report forwarded to the president, the CIA added: “There is no question but that the [RVN] government suffered a serious loss of prestige by its inability to defend its cities…. If not for the presence of U.S. forces, the VC flag would be flying over much of South Vietnam today.”²² Johnson himself certainly recognized the stark divide between recent administration statements about steady U.S. progress and the rather dramatically demonstrated capabilities of a still-formidable adversary. “From my station,” he quipped, “it looks as though we felt content with what was happening until the fire crackers started popping.”²³

Senior military and intelligence officers’ confidential assessments of the offensive’s impact, in contrast to the administration’s public claims of outright U.S. military victory, also struck a sober note. “From a realistic point of view,” Westmoreland cabled JCS chairman Wheeler on February 4, “we must accept the fact that the enemy has dealt the GVN a severe blow. He has brought the war to the towns and cities and has inflicted damage and casualties on the population.”²⁴ In subsequent messages, Westmoreland expressed particular concern about the parlous state of the South Vietnamese army in the wake of Tet, observing that the attacks had left it significantly weakened. “We are now in a new ball game where we face a determined, highly disciplined enemy, fully mobilized to achieve a quick victory,” the general emphasized in a cable of February 12 and declared: “He is in the process of throwing in all his ‘military chips to go for broke.’” In view of what Westmoreland described as “heightened risks,” particularly in the northern provinces and in the Saigon area, he requested the immediate dispatch of 25,000 combat-ready troops. The surge of troops, in his judgment, would ensure the protection of vulnerable areas while simultaneously enabling the U.S. military to seize the initiative elsewhere by capitalizing on recent enemy losses. “Exploiting this opportunity could materially shorten the war,” the general predicted.²⁵

Wheeler fully endorsed Westmoreland’s troop request, explaining in a series of meetings with Johnson and other senior policymakers that the reinforcements were needed to stave off a South Vietnamese collapse. In one of those meetings, secretary of defense designate Clark Clifford called attention to what seemed a “very strange contradiction” in what the administration was “saying and doing” in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. “I think we should give some very serious thought to how we explain saying on the one hand the enemy did not take a victory and yet we are in need of many more troops and possibly an emergency call up,” he remarked.²⁶

Important congressional and media voices reacted with even greater skepticism toward administration claims that Tet constituted an unequivocal military triumph for the United States. “These are not the deeds of an enemy whose fighting efficiency has ‘progressively declined’ and whose morale is ‘sinking fast,’ as the United States military officials put it in November,” sneered the New York Times.²⁷ The enemy offensive, declared the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, exposed not only “the hollowness of the Saigon government’s pretensions to sovereignty,” but “the fraud of our government’s claims of imminent victory, and the basic untenability of the American military position.”²⁸ Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, the country’s three leading weekly news magazines, characterized Tet as a major psychological setback for the United States.²⁹

When White House officials tried to convince Senator George Aiken that the enemy had just suffered a major reverse, the crusty Vermont Republican responded sarcastically, “If this is a failure, I hope the Viet Cong never have a major success.”³⁰ On February 8, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York weighed in with a major speech in which he pilloried administration policy. “Our enemy, savagely striking at will across all of South Vietnam, has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves,” declared the late president’s brother. Kennedy called for immediate negotiations aimed at a peaceful settlement because the United States appeared, in his words, “unable to defeat our enemy or break his will—at least without a huge, long and ever more costly effort.”³¹ Perhaps humorist Art Buchwald best captured the mounting skepticism about the rosy reports still flowing out of the White House and Pentagon. In his widely read syndicated column of February 6, apocryphally datelined “Little Big Horn, Dakota, June 27, 1876,” Buchwald reported on an exclusive interview he had just held with General George Armstrong Custer in which the U.S. cavalry commander assured him that “the battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Citing highly favorable “body counts” and characterizing the assault of his men by Chief Sitting Bull as “a desperation move” that constituted “his last death rattle,” Buchwald’s Custer confidently declared: “We have the Sioux on the run.”³²

The contradictions in the administration’s approach to the war, increasingly savaged by some of its most prominent critics, were brought to a head by the volatile troop-reinforcement issue. In order to acquire a firsthand account of conditions on the ground, LBJ dispatched Wheeler to South Vietnam for three intensive days of consultations with Westmoreland and other top U.S. and South Vietnamese officials, both military and civilian. Upon his return, the army’s senior general sent Johnson a report, dated February 27, that painted a bleak picture of the South Vietnamese army’s weakness and enemy strength. Wheeler said that Westmoreland’s troops were stretched thin. All senior U.S. officials in South Vietnam, moreover, believed that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, despite recent heavy losses, continued to maintain high morale and strong determination and were operating “with relative freedom in the countryside.” In a recommendation that, in Clifford’s subsequent depiction, “simply astonished Washington,” Wheeler transmitted and endorsed a request from Westmoreland that he be provided with 205,000 additional troops. Wheeler also strongly recommended the immediate mobilization of some 262,000 reservists to bolster the nation’s depleted strategic reserve force, long a major concern of senior officers.³³ During a high-level meeting the next day, JCS chairman Wheeler emphasized that the margin of victory during Tet had actually been very thin for Westmoreland’s forces; Tan Son Nhut air base had nearly been lost to the enemy, and U.S. defenders had experienced “another close call” around Danang. Wheeler worried that without the significant force augmentation that he and Westmoreland were recommending, the United States could lose control over two of South Vietnam’s northern provinces, thereby giving the North Vietnamese a strong hand in future negotiations and likely even precipitating a collapse of the South Vietnamese army.³⁴

Because so large a reinforcement request raised a host of complex and politically sensitive issues, Johnson directed Clark Clifford—his incoming defense secretary, slated to be sworn in officially on March 1—to head a task force that would examine the proposal in the context of a broader “A to Z” review of Vietnam policy. The president requested a report within the week. Clifford’s group, he stressed, should seek to develop recommendations that “reconcile the military, diplomatic, economic, Congressional, and public opinion problems involved.”³⁵

The tough-minded Clifford was determined to seize this timely opportunity to conduct a truly wide-ranging reassessment of Vietnam policy. And seize it he did. As a Johnson intimate, consummate Washington insider, and firm supporter of the war before the recent offensive, the politically savvy Clifford was unusually well positioned to do so. Not only had he first earned his political spurs back in the Truman White House, but as one of Washington’s most prominent attorneys he drew regularly from a wealth of important contacts in the worlds of business, finance, law, and the media. Those contacts gave him a reading of the public pulse substantially broader and more sophisticated than that taken by more insulated administration loyalists. From numerous conversations with friends and acquaintances, this newcomer to LBJ’s war council had become convinced that support for the Vietnam conflict, especially among elites, was rapidly eroding. Clifford accordingly made sure that probing questions about the likelihood and cost of a U.S. victory in Vietnam framed all of his task force’s briefings and deliberations. His skepticism deepened when he found that senior military planners could not answer satisfactorily his blunt question about how many troops it would take to defeat the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, nor could they pinpoint how long it would take. After several days of round-the-clock meetings, Clifford sent a memorandum to Johnson, dated March 4, advising that any decision about honoring the Westmoreland–Wheeler troop augmentation request be indefinitely delayed in light of his task force’s findings.³⁶

At a key meeting with Johnson and his principal advisers the same day, Clifford stressed that the request for 205,000 additional troops for service in Vietnam brought the president “to a clearly defined watershed.” The members of his task force shared a “deep-seated concern” about the value of such a large number of fresh military personnel to the ultimate achievement of the U.S. goal of a viable, self-sustaining South Vietnam. “We seem to have a sinkhole,” Clifford observed. “We put in more—they [the enemy] match. We put in more—they match it.” Doubting that the circumstances existed for the attainment of “a conventional military victory, as commonly defined,” he proposed that only 22,000 additional military personnel be dispatched to Vietnam—a bit more than 10 percent of what Westmoreland had requested. Those soldiers and marines, moreover, should be sent for the exclusive purpose of dealing with any sudden military emergencies that might crop up over the next three to four months. “This is as far as we are willing to go,” the new Pentagon chief said flatly. He added that the administration could not rely solely on the advice of its commander in the field, nor could it afford to focus just on the military dimensions of the conflict. “We must look at the overall impact on us,” Clifford insisted, “including the situation here in the United States. We must look at our economic stability, our other problems in the world, our other problems at home.”³⁷

Before the president could reach a final decision on Clifford’s recommendations, his administration’s secret internal deliberations suddenly became public knowledge. On March 10, the New York Times revealed that Westmoreland had requested more than 200,000 fresh soldiers and marines for service in Vietnam and detailed with remarkable accuracy the nature and the extent of the policy splits within the administration.³⁸ The Times bombshell, based on multiple leaks from within the government, inspired a new round of attacks on the Johnson administration’s credibility and competence. Senator Kennedy once more blasted Johnson, warning that it would be a mistake to commit any additional forces to Vietnam in the absence of firm congressional and public support. One of the Democratic Party’s other leading doves, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, struck a more melodramatic note. The president, he exclaimed, seemed “poised to plunge still deeper into Asia, where huge populations wait to engulf us and legions of young Americans are being beckoned to their graves.”³⁹ Two days after the story broke, New Hampshire voters went to the polls in the first presidential primary of the 1968 election. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, whose challenge to a sitting president seemed quixotic before Tet, stunned the experts by coming within a few hundred votes of defeating LBJ. A public-opinion poll released the day after the primary offered Johnson further troubling news: 69 percent of Americans now favored a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.⁴⁰

Then, on March 16, Kennedy threw his hat in the ring. With the announcement of this second—and much more formidable—challenge to his renomination, from a detested political enemy no less, Johnson found himself assailed from both wings of an increasingly fractured Democratic Party. Dominant nationally since the 1930s (except for the first two years of the Eisenhower administration), the party now seemed riven with the deepest of divisions: not just over the war in Vietnam, but over the liberal civil rights policies championed by LBJ as well. The presidential campaign of former Alabama governor and ardent segregationist George Wallace, announced the previous month, took direct aim at the latter vulnerability. Breaking away from the Democratic Party, Wallace formed a fledgling third-party movement that threatened to draw conservative Democrats away from the Johnson coalition at the same time that McCarthy and Kennedy were drawing away liberal, antiwar Democrats.

Roiling economic problems just deepened the crisis atmosphere in the Johnson White House. The Tet attacks broke at the very same time that the United States was facing a ballooning trade deficit, spiraling inflation, and a record run on its gold reserves. The Tet fallout exacerbated all three problems. The steadily escalating expenses of the Vietnam conflict, coupled with Johnson’s stubborn determination not to increase taxes or cut domestic spending to pay for the war, fueled inflation at home while worsening an already serious balance-of-payments deficit. International confidence in the value of the dollar, the pillar of the world’s economic system since the end of World War II, plummeted. As a result, investors abroad and at home began exchanging dollars for gold at unprecedented levels throughout late 1967 and early 1968. The Vietnam War alone had not caused the international monetary crisis, which in large part derived from the long-term structural weaknesses of a system based on stable exchange rates and a fixed relationship between the dollar and gold. Without question, however, it intensified the system’s weaknesses, a fact recognized on Wall Street as well as in Washington. In January 1968, Walter B. Wriston, president of First National City Bank (Citibank), had commented in a speech that the worrisome turmoil in global monetary markets might be stemmed without altering the relationship between the dollar and gold, but he also added that “the chances would be greater if the Vietnamese war ended.”⁴¹

The leaked news of the Westmoreland troop-reinforcement request thus poured fuel on an already raging fire. If Johnson were to deploy the troops his field commander desired and to order the JCS’s requested reserve call-up as well, his advisers estimated that the measures would add about $2.5 billion to the defense budget in fiscal year 1968 and $10 billion in fiscal year 1969. Those extra costs would jack up the war’s annual price tag by roughly 40 percent. Doing so, Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) cautioned LBJ in a private memorandum, would mean “more inflation, more balance of payments complications, and possibly financial panic and collapse.”⁴² On March 15, a day on which LBJ had managed in desperation to get the London gold market closed to avert any more losses for the United States, national security adviser and professional economist Walt Rostow wrote to his boss that the financial stakes for the United States and the world were enormous. A “misstep,” he emphasized, “could set in motion a financial and trade crisis which would undo much that we have achieved in these fields in the past twenty years and endanger the prosperity and security of the Western world.”⁴³

In mid-March, in a revealing, “eyes only” cable to Westmoreland and Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief, Pacific, Wheeler ruminated on the multiple, concurrent crises that were rattling the Johnson administration. As a result of leaks in Washington and Saigon, Wheeler informed them, the troop-augmentation request faced an uphill struggle in what had become “an extremely difficult political and public atmosphere.” Indeed, Wheeler emphasized that the supplementary military personnel issue, in conjunction with the ongoing monetary crisis, “has placed the government in as difficult a situation as I have seen in the past five years.” The monetary difficulties were so serious, in fact, that he thought they would almost certainly jeopardize congressional and public support for any additional military expenditures for Vietnam. Wheeler also called attention to the disturbing decline in public support for the war effort, referring specifically to the latest poll indicating that 69 percent of Americans now favored a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. Insisting on confidentiality, the general requested that his colleagues be careful not to reveal to anyone that the situation “is as serious as I believe it is.”⁴⁴

At this crucial juncture, Johnson decided to look outside the administration for advice—and, presumably, for support. In response to a suggestion by Secretary of Defense Clifford, the president reassembled the Wise Men, the group of confidential advisers he had met with in November 1967. A bipartisan group of mostly former government officials of wide experience, the Wise Men had at that time unanimously expressed support for the war. Now, in March 1968, the defense secretary suggested, rather disingenuously, that it would be “of considerable help” to the president to find out whether “the same men either affirmed their attitude or reached a change of attitude.” Rusk thought it an excellent idea and characterized these veteran policymakers as a “safe” group unlikely to rock the boat.⁴⁵ Yet Clifford almost certainly recognized, in view of the deep impact that Tet and the accompanying monetary turmoil had exerted within corporate and political circles, that these well-connected and highly experienced individuals would reflect at least some of the now widespread misgivings about current policy.

They did—with a vengeance. After receiving a series of candid briefings from leading military and civilian experts throughout the day on March 25 and into the next morning, the Wise Men met alone with LBJ on the afternoon of March 26. What ensued surely ranks among the more remarkable and candid conversations that a president has ever held with a collection of nongovernmental consultants on a matter of such enormous significance. “There is a very significant shift in our position,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy solemnly began. “When we last met we saw reasons for hope. We hoped then that there would be slow but steady progress. Last night and today the picture is not so hopeful particularly in the countryside.” Bundy continued that Dean Acheson had summed up the opinion of the majority of the group’s members when he said that “we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Only three of the Wise Men disagreed, two of whom were career military officers; they formed a minority that favored backing Westmoreland’s troop-reinforcement request, at least to a certain degree.

More typical were the comments of former ambassador Arthur Dean. “All of us got the impression that there is no military conclusion in sight,” he reported. “We felt time is running out.” C. Douglas Dillon, an influential banker, former ambassador, and former Treasury secretary, concurred. “The briefing last night led me to conclude that we cannot achieve a military victory,” he said. Dillon instead urged the president to begin moving “toward an eventual disengagement” and to send just the minimum number of additional troops now that were needed to protect those already stationed in South Vietnam. Dean Acheson, whose own doubts about the wisdom of current policy had mounted steadily after the outbreak of the Tet fighting and who had already informed Johnson of that fact during a private lunch and in a confidential, follow-up memorandum, was particularly forceful. He insisted that time was of the essence. “Time is limited by reactions in this country,” observed Truman’s secretary of state—arguably the most distinguished elder statesman in the assemblage. “We cannot build an independent South Vietnam,” Acheson concluded; “therefore, we should do something by no later than late summer to establish something different.” When Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas ventured that this was not the time for a bombing halt, Acheson disagreed sharply. “The issue is not that stated by Fortas,” he snapped. “The issue is can we do what we are trying to do in Vietnam. I do not think we can.”⁴⁶

The Wise Men’s firm support for a policy of disengagement clearly shook Johnson. Although he knew in advance of Acheson’s recent dovish turn, he had not expected so dramatic a switch in the views of so many experienced foreign-policy hands—and certainly not in so short a period of time. Reflecting decades later on this climactic meeting, Clifford captured well the wider significance of the Wise Men’s advice to LBJ. “The men who had helped lay down the basic line of resistance to the expansion of communism in the world, the statesmen of Berlin and Korea, had decided they had had enough in Vietnam,” he recalled. “The price was not commensurate with the goal.” He hastened to add, correctly, that the men who confronted Johnson in the White House on March 26 still supported the overall strategy of containing the Soviet Union and China. They were hardly signaling an abandonment of basic Cold War policies and commitments. Rather, their “opposition to the war was based solely on the belief that Vietnam was weakening us at home and in the rest of the world,” he noted. “And,” he added pointedly, “they were right.”⁴⁷

On March 31, the embattled Johnson responded to these cascading political, economic, and diplomatic pressures by pronouncing a major change in U.S. policy. In an address to a nationwide television audience, he announced that the United States was ceasing nearly all bombing raids against North Vietnam. He then invited Hanoi to enter into formal peace talks with American representatives. Johnson’s speech also made explicit and public the connection between the war and the nation’s intensifying financial crisis. The U.S. budget deficit, he lamented, would likely reach $20 billion for the second straight year, absent immediate congressional action to raise taxes. Asserting that a failure to act decisively would generate “very strong doubts” internationally “about America’s willingness to keep its financial house in order,” Johnson described the current situation as “the sharpest financial threat in the postwar era—a threat to the dollar’s role as the keystone of international trade and finance in the world.” After reemphasizing his deep commitment to the search for peace in Vietnam, Johnson warned against a continuation of the divisions that currently beset the country. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, he said that “as in times before, it is true that a house divided against itself … is a house that cannot stand.” Then, in a dramatic and wholly unexpected closing twist, LBJ shocked his audience by declaring that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s presidential nomination.⁴⁸ He had given hardly anyone advance notice of the speech’s surprise ending. Ambassador Bunker, who had joined a group of Saigon embassy staff members to listen to the president’s address via radio, wrote to his wife about their telling reaction. “A more stunned, incredible, unbelieving group, including myself, I have never seen,” Bunker recalled.⁴⁹

Johnson’s speech represented the culmination of an intense intra-administration struggle over the direction of U.S. policy, a struggle that at the highest levels pitted Clifford against long-serving hawks Rusk and Rostow. It was, in large part, a battle for Lyndon Johnson’s heart and mind. The speech signified a victory—however temporary—for Clifford and his allies. After much anguished deliberation, the president had rejected the Westmoreland–Wheeler appeal for additional troops and the thinking that lay behind it as politically and economically unworkable. He had instead reluctantly accepted McGeorge Bundy’s recent characterization of the war as a “bottomless pit.”⁵⁰ The American commitment in Vietnam was sucking up an alarming portion of the nation’s resources, LBJ now recognized; moreover, it was undermining America’s global leadership, undercutting the international economic system on which that leadership rested, and encouraging dissension and discord at home. Faced with a clear choice between ordering further escalation, a course of action almost certain to accentuate each of those critical problems, and limiting U.S. troop deployments while simultaneously seeking a negotiated settlement, Johnson in effect opted for the less risky path.

The North Vietnamese responded quickly to Johnson’s peace overture. On April 3, in a message broadcast over Radio Hanoi, they spouted the usual venom at the American imperialists, decrying especially Washington’s failure to cease all bombing attacks north of the seventeenth parallel. Yet the message ended on a surprisingly hopeful note, with an expressed willingness to accept Johnson’s invitation to open preliminary talks. Later that day, Johnson announced that, on the basis of this response, the United States would proceed immediately to establish contact with North Vietnamese diplomatic representatives. The March 31 speech offered Hanoi substantially less than it had for some time been demanding as a precondition for peace talks, so one must ask why it was willing to settle for less at this point. Was this willingness to talk a sign of weakness, an indication perhaps that Tet had truly been a major military defeat for the Communist forces? Or was it instead a sign of North Vietnamese strength and confidence, an indication that because the war had begun to turn in their favor, they could now advance their goals most fruitfully by pursuing a classic “fight-and-talk” strategy? American experts advanced each hypothesis as a possible explanation for the positive North Vietnamese response but confessed uncertainty about their adversary’s real motives.

Both hypotheses paradoxically contain more than a kernel of truth. The Tet Offensive of January–February 1968 and smaller attacks in March had clearly fallen well short of Hanoi’s expectations. The North Vietnamese leadership recognized that the offensive’s significant political and propaganda gains were mitigated by the tens of thousands of casualties inflicted on Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces, the decimation of the southern Communist infrastructure at the local level, and the disappointingly meager military achievements. General Tran Van Tra, one of the campaign’s architects, later admitted ruefully that “we suffered heavy losses of manpower and material, especially of cadres at various echelons, which caused a distinct decline in our strength.”⁵¹ Viewed against this backdrop, Johnson’s offer proved appealing because it allowed a respite from the relentless U.S. bombing campaign along with some time to recover fighting strength after the grueling human and material costs of the go-for-broke military offensive. At the same time, however, North Vietnamese strategists remained confident that they were inching ever closer to their long-standing political objective: the establishment of a unified, Communist Vietnam. Talking while still fighting now simply seemed a wise tactical adjustment. Hanoi could utilize an open negotiating forum to exploit the widening fissures between hawks and doves within the United States and simultaneously capitalize on the ebb and flow of an already hotly contested presidential race. America’s domestic unrest and political uncertainty, in other words, might enable the North Vietnamese to coax additional concessions from their enemies—without compromising any of their basic goals. Yet the military dimension of the struggle remained preeminent. “No agreement can be reached as long as we fail to win on the battlefield,” noted one North Vietnamese assessment. “We will discuss peace in our own way, that is, in the position of a winner, not as a loser.”⁵²

The South Vietnamese, for their part, reacted with alarm and dismay to the sudden U.S. decision to negotiate with their enemies. The U.S. demarche, it bears note, was made unilaterally; the Johnson administration neither consulted its allies in advance of the president’s peace overture nor deigned even to notify them of the impending policy shift prior to Johnson’s public announcement. President Thieu, in fact, found out the same way Bunker did: by listening to Johnson’s March 31 speech on the radio. Worried about the likely impact within South Vietnam of the partial U.S. bombing halt and simultaneous call for negotiations, the U.S. ambassador labored assiduously to help soothe Saigon’s fears of an imminent American sellout. Bunker gamely told Thieu that the new policies announced by LBJ did not depart from the long-standing U.S. position on the war. The politically astute Thieu’s fears could not so easily be assuaged, however. He privately voiced concern that his erstwhile allies could no longer be trusted. Indeed, apprehension, worry, and doubt soon became pervasive throughout South Vietnamese society. Bunker fretted that any further unilateral actions or statements by the United States would be “a sure way to destroy [South Vietnamese] morale.” Depicting the political climate in the country as “highly sensitive,” he reported that U.S. diplomats in Saigon had recently “been walking on a knife’s edge.”⁵³ A State Department intelligence report described the prevailing mood in South Vietnam as one of “quiet bitterness” rooted in the fear that Hanoi would use its newly acquired leverage to force the establishment of a coalition government in the South.⁵⁴

Curiously, few top U.S. officials seem to have fully grasped at this juncture either the significance or the inevitability of the coalition government dilemma. The difficulties of finding a mutually acceptable site for the formal negotiations—the two sides ultimately chose Paris as the least objectionable venue—delayed the opening of talks until May 13. Then they quickly bogged down on procedural issues and Hanoi’s adamant refusal to commence serious negotiations until Washington first halted all its bombing missions north of the seventeenth parallel. Johnson—to the great frustration of Clifford, chief negotiator W. Averell Harriman, and others—would not budge on the bombing issue. He feared that unless North Vietnam promised positive reciprocal actions, he would be jeopardizing the lives of American troops in the field for no appreciable movement toward peace. Yet the explosive issue of power sharing hovered in the background from the outset. The Second Indochina War, from its inception, was at its core a struggle over who would rule the southern half of Vietnam. A clear-cut military victory by either one of the principal contending parties, the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government or the North Vietnamese–backed NLF, could have settled the issue on the ground. That had not happened. The massive U.S. military intervention and Hanoi’s escalation of its direct military involvement in the South had created the present stalemate, which in turn had led to the U.S. embrace of negotiations as the only way out of an inconclusive, expensive, and increasingly unpopular commitment.

In a very general, if vague sense, the Johnson administration reasoned that negotiations with Hanoi could produce a cease-fire and set the stage for the mutual withdrawal of each nation’s troops. That would then impel the Thieu regime and its rivals in the NLF, according to this best-case scenario, to sit down and together determine the future political complexion of South Vietnam. On what basis other than some form of genuine power sharing, however, could a mutually acceptable compromise be worked out? The NLF was surely not going to settle for anything less than a meaningful role in the governance of South Vietnam. To expect the southern insurgency to do so in view of the enormous expanse of territory under its de facto control was laughable. Insurgencies, like nation-states, rarely surrender at the conference table what they have won on the battlefield. According to the CIA’s best estimate, Hanoi’s “immediate aim” in the forthcoming talks “would be to determine how far the US is prepared to go in accepting a new coalition government with Communist representation.”⁵⁵ Yet America’s South Vietnamese ally had no intention of permitting any kind of power-sharing arrangement with so hated an adversary. During a brief trip to Washington, just before the Paris talks commenced, Ambassador Bunker responded in the negative to a senior official’s query about the likelihood that Thieu and his associates would accept the NLF either as a governing partner or as a political party. “They realize [that the] NLF is highly organized and disciplined,” he explained, and consequently believe that a “coalition would lead to a takeover like Czechoslovakia.”⁵⁶

More immediate issues took center stage during the spring and summer of 1968, especially the continuation of U.S. aerial bombardment, the continuation of Communist attacks on Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities, and the question of what role, if any, the Thieu government would play in the Paris talks. North Vietnam persisted in setting the immediate and unconditional cessation of all U.S. bombing of its territory as a prerequisite for the beginning of substantive talks. Clifford and Harriman urged LBJ to order a complete bombing halt in the belief that such a move would demonstrate good faith to the North Vietnamese and thus help jump-start the stalled peace talks, which were fast becoming an object of derision for ordinary Americans. There was no other card for the United States to play, in Clifford and Harriman’s assessment. “We can only hope for success in Paris,” the defense secretary told LBJ. “We are in a war we cannot win.”⁵⁷ The president, in contrast, with strong backing from Rusk, Rostow, and the JCS, disagreed. He even weighed the option of intensified air and naval attacks on North Vietnam as a measure that might induce Hanoi to open serious negotiations.

Thieu, of course, urged Johnson to step up the military pressure against an enemy that continued to attack the South’s capital. In July, in an effort to reassure the South Vietnamese head of state, LBJ flew to meet him in Honolulu. During their two-hour meeting, Johnson insisted that the United States would not permit the establishment of a coalition government and that it would insist on Saigon’s participation in the peace talks. Thieu’s alarm was not assuaged; he remained wary of American intentions. Indeed, on September 8, in a revealing private conversation—reported to Johnson after the CIA secured a record of it—Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky speculated about the possibility that the United States might launch a coup against them before the election “so that Vice President Humphrey might win.”⁵⁸ Plainly, neither placed much stock in Johnson’s promises and pledges.

Meanwhile, the tumultuous domestic scene in the United States in 1968 enormously complicated the prospects for a resolution of the nettlesome issues blocking movement on the diplomatic front. The assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in April; the dozens of bloody and destructive race riots that followed, including a particularly ugly one in Washington itself, within blocks of the White House; the murder of Robert F. Kennedy two months later; the protests, street fighting, and heavy-handed police crackdown that accompanied the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August; the bitterly contested three-way election pitting Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey against Richard Nixon and George Wallace—all served to stymie any inclination North Vietnam might otherwise have had to compromise with a lame duck U.S. leader. LBJ’s final months in office were thus characterized by a bloody stalemate on the ground in Vietnam and a frustrating impasse around the conference table in Paris. In a last-ditch effort to break the diplomatic deadlock, Johnson approved a complex compromise with North Vietnam that allowed NLF and South Vietnamese participation in the Paris peace talks. Neither political entity, according to the “your side–our side” formula worked out by chief American negotiator, Harriman, and his opposite number Le Duc Tho, would need formally to recognize the legitimacy of the other. The seeming breakthrough was made possible only by Hanoi’s sudden abandonment of its long-standing opposition to the “puppet” Thieu regime’s participation in the negotiations, a sine qua non for Johnson and nearly all his top aides. The South Vietnamese balked nonetheless, Thieu charging that the compromise amounted to a “clear admission of defeat” by the United States.⁵⁹ At this juncture, the South Vietnamese president was quite obviously awaiting the outcome of the American election, calculating that he could cut a better deal with Republican nominee Nixon than with the White House’s current occupant. Representatives from inside Nixon’s campaign were in fact clandestinely conveying signals to that effect to Thieu’s representatives. Johnson learned—to his great fury and disgust—about these contacts via intercepts, telephone taps, and surveillance. He viewed them as treasonous but could do nothing about them because he had himself obtained knowledge of them through illegal means.⁶⁰

In a final attempt to end the deadlock, Johnson on October 31 announced a complete halt of all U.S. bombing operations against North Vietnam. The announcement proved too little, too late. Once again Thieu balked. A furious Clifford privately reviled the South Vietnamese leader for double-dealing and “treachery,” a view widely shared within Johnson’s inner circle.⁶¹ Only after another two weeks had elapsed did Thieu reluctantly agree to send a delegation to Paris. By that time, Nixon was the president-elect, having defeated Humphrey by a razor-thin margin. Whatever modest hopes Johnson might have nourished for a diplomatic breakthrough on his watch now vanished. Broken in spirit by a war that had wrecked his presidency, his reputation, and his health, LBJ prepared to depart Washington for the solace of his beloved Texas ranch. The next move on the negotiating front would be Nixon’s.

The year 1968 certainly deserves the distinction typically accorded it by Vietnam War historians as the conflict’s pivotal year. It was the year in which U.S. decision makers reluctantly accepted the fact that the war simply could not be won—at least not at an acceptable cost. The Tet Offensive thus exposed the fundamental contradictions of the Johnson–Westmoreland military strategy. It deepened public distrust, fostered an epic political battle within the Democratic Party, fueled antiwar activism, created dissenters out of formerly loyal Cold Warriors inside and outside the government, and contributed in significant ways to the gravest international monetary crisis since World War II.

The resulting pressures forced Lyndon Johnson to confront some of the hardest issues that any American president has ever faced. They led him, in the end, to choose the path of negotiation, de-escalation, and tentative disengagement as less dangerous to America’s domestic stability, economic health, and international stature than the highly uncertain path of more arms and more troops. Johnson, however, could never complete the policy reorientation he set in motion. The North Vietnamese, some of the toughest negotiators who ever sat across a conference table, offered one major obstacle. His strong-willed and distrustful South Vietnamese allies and the politically unscrupulous Nixon campaign, which conspired with them, posed another. But Johnson himself may have been the most formidable impediment. This proud politician, nearing the end of more than thirty years of public service, clung stubbornly to the illusion that he could still salvage an honorable settlement of the war that he knew would forever define his presidency. Johnson controlled every key detail of the policymaking process, on both diplomatic and military fronts, until the bitter end. Yet he could never bring himself to run any significant risks in his efforts to achieve his cherished goal, and he persisted in the fanciful belief that the sensitive negotiations in Paris could somehow be kept separate from the maelstrom of election-year politics at home. It was not to be.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 306.

2. Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1989), 86; David Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 53; Gallup Poll No. 753, October 27, 1967 to November 1, 1967, available at http://brain.gallup.com/documents/question.aspx?question, accessed March 16, 2006.

3. Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 552–53.

4. Ibid., 553.

5. Quoted in Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 91.

6. Draft memorandum, McNamara to Johnson, November 2, 1967, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), 943–50 (series hereafter cited as FRUS, with dates and volume titles).

7. Quoted in Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 111.

8. Both quoted in Jim Jones (assistant to the president) to Johnson, November 2, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967, 954–70.

9. Quoted in George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 146–48.

10. Quoted in Buzzanco, Masters of War, 306.

11. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967, 1120–23; Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 123–25, 137.

12. President’s Remarks at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, December 23, 1967, U.S. Department of State Bulletin 58 (January 15, 1968), 73–76.

13. Quoted in Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 362–63.

14. Quoted in Gerard J. DeGroot, “A Noble Cause?” America and the Vietnam War (Harlow.: Longman, 2000), 162. See also Military Institute of Vietnam, The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 207. On the internal deliberations and factionalism among Hanoi’s decision makers leading up to the offensive, see Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “The War Politburo: North Vietnam’s Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1–2 (2006): 4–58.

15. Notes of meeting, January 30, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), 81–82.

16. CIA, intelligence memorandum, “The Communist Tet Offensive,” January 31, 1968, in ibid., 92–94.

17. Memorandum, Carver to Rostow, January 31, 1968, in ibid., 89–91.

18. Quoted in editorial note, in ibid., 83–84.

19. Memorandum, Jorden to Rostow, February 3, 1968, in ibid., 111–12.

20. Bunker to the State Department, February 4, 1968, in ibid., 125.

21. Bunker to the State Department, February 2, 1968, in ibid., 102–3.

22. CIA, “Vietnam Situation Report,” February 12, 1968, in ibid., 199–204.

23. Notes of meeting, February 11, 1968, in ibid., 179.

24. Quoted in Buzzanco, Masters of War, 316.

25. Westmoreland to Wheeler and Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, February 12, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 183–85.

26. Notes of meeting, February 9, 1968, in ibid., 167.

27. Quoted in William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 112.

28. Quoted in James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–2004, 4th rev. ed. (Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine, 2004), 27.

29. Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 262.

30. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 57.

31. Quoted in Tom Wicker, “Kennedy Asserts U.S. Cannot Win,” New York Times, February 9, 1968.

32. Art Buchwald, “General Custer’s Last Press Conference,” Washington Post, February 6, 1968.

33. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 5 vols., Senator Gravel ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 4:546–47.

34. Notes of meeting, February 28, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 267–75.

35. Draft memorandum, Johnson to Rusk, McNamara, and Clifford, February 28, 1968, in ibid., 277–78.

36. Draft memorandum, Clifford Task Force to Johnson, March 4, 1968, in ibid., 314–16; Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 488–95.

37. Notes of meeting, March 4, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 316–27.

38. Hedrick Smith and Neil Sheehan, “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men; Stirring Debate in Administration,” New York Times, March 10, 1968.

39. Quoted in Hammond, Reporting Vietnam, 125.

40. Ibid.

41. Quoted in Robert Buzzanco, “The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1968: Capitalism, Communism, and Containment,” in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945, edited by Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 112.

42. Quoted in Robert M. Collins, “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century,’” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 415.

43. Quoted in ibid., 396.

44. Telegram, Wheeler to Westmoreland and Sharp, March 8, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 399–400.

45. Notes of meeting, March 19, 1968, in ibid., 413–15.

46. Notes of meeting, March 26, 1968, in ibid., 471–74.

47. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 518–19.

48. President’s Address to the Nation, March 31, 1968, U.S. Department of State Bulletin 58 (April 15, 1968), 483, 485–86.

49. Quoted in Howard Schaffer, Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 200.

50. Quoted in Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 192.

51. Quoted in William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986), 116.

52. Quoted in William Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 216.

53. Bunker to Johnson, April 4, 1968, in The Bunker Papers: Reports to the President from Vietnam, 1967–1973, 3 vols., edited by Douglas Pike (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1990), 2:403–6; Schaffer, Ellsworth Bunker, 200–201.

54. State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Intelligence Note 2983, April 17, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 570.

55. CIA, intelligence memorandum, “Hanoi’s Negotiating Position and Concept of Negotiations,” May 6, 1968, in Estimative Products on Vietnam, 1948–1975, edited by John K. Allen Jr., John Carver, and Tom Elmore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005), 459–70.

56. Notes of the president’s meeting at Camp David, April 9, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 6, Vietnam, January–August 1968, 558–59.

57. Notes of meeting, May 21, 1968, in ibid., 695–96.

58. CIA, intelligence report, September 16, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 7, Vietnam, September 1968–January 1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003), 43–44.

59. Quoted in George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 264.

60. Notes of president’s meeting, October 28, 1968; Rostow to Johnson, October 29, 1968; telephone conversation between Johnson and Nixon, November 3, 1968, all in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 7, Vietnam, September 1968–January 1969, 413–16, 423–24, 538–44.

61. Notes of meeting, November 5, 1968, in ibid., 565.