BY THE CLOSE OF 1967, LYNDON JOHNSON’S OFFICIAL LIFE WAS BEING consumed by insurgencies at home and abroad. There was the revolt of the nation’s ghetto dwellers against a political and economic system that seemed to have no place for them. There was the rebellion of the New Left against liberalism itself. The antiwar movement had spread beyond the student protest movement to include civil rights leaders and establishment figures such as J. William Fulbright. Black power activists had declared war on traditionalists within the civil rights movement. Then, of course, there was the ongoing communist-led insurgency in South Vietnam.
For Johnson, there was no answer to those in the New Left and antiwar movements who blamed the nation’s and the world’s ills on liberalism. There was to his mind no alternative to liberal capitalism and constitutional democracy. The administration’s strategy at home and abroad had to be counterinsurgency and pacification. It could be argued that, like the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) programs in Vietnam designed to win hearts and minds, the various components of the War on Poverty, Model Cites, and HUD were initiatives to pacify America’s have-nots.
By the late 1960s, even some workers in the Great Society vineyard were coming to that conclusion. In Regulating the Poor (1971), Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two of the architects of the War on Poverty, contended that, historically, “relief-giving” was deployed as a means for regulating the supply of cheap labor and, most important, given gathering momentum of the black freedom struggle in the 1960s, social control. The northern urban focus of community action was thus less about a unique extension of participatory democracy than about “absorbing and directing many of the agitational elements of the black population.” Social science planners provided “an aura of scientific authority” that minimized white opposition to what really was a program designed to appease African Americans.1 That was certainly the refrain emanating from the civil rights leadership by 1967 as they insisted that Congress and the administration adopt A. Phillip Randolph’s “freedom budget” of at least $30 billion as a means to rehabilitate the nation’s ghettoes.
In Vietnam, the communist insurgency relied not only on promises of economic and social justice but also on organized and widespread terror campaigns to gain control of the countryside. Counterinsurgency involved military action to secure South Vietnam’s villages and hamlets and, in the Phoenix program, tit-for-tat terrorist operations. There were in the United States calls for a coercive response to the ghetto riots and violent antiwar demonstrations. Law-and-order advocates from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan demanded that federal, state, and local authorities respond to civil disruptions with the strongest possible show of force. Not only were there parallels between the insurgencies in the United States and in South Vietnam, they argued, there was an organic connection. Wallace, Reagan, and J. Edgar Hoover depicted the civil rights movement, black power, urban unrest, and the antiwar movement as communist inspired if not communist dominated.
By the fall of 1967, Lyndon Johnson was coming to the conclusion that he and the Great Society had done about all they could do to enhance social and economic justice in the United States and in Vietnam. Mechanisms were in place, people empowered; the rest was up to them. If Americans were fed up with liberalism, and the South Vietnamese preferred Marxism-Leninism, so be it. In truth, by 1967 LBJ was willing to accept the communization of Indochina by peaceful means. “He is prepared for a cease fire and phased withdrawal of all combatants in Vietnam,” New York Times columnist James Reston reported. “He is willing to dismantle American bases in that peninsula; he is in favor of neutralization of all Southeast Asia, and he is prepared to let the peoples of South and North Vietnam decide their own political future even if this means a coalition with the Communists.”2 What Johnson could not permit, under any circumstances, was the overthrow of the Saigon regime by force of arms. To do so would threaten the entire containment regime built so painstakingly since World War II.
While the antiwar movement itself was becoming more mainstream, its leading edge—the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), New Left, and black revolutionaries—seemed to be descending into nihilism. On Labor Day weekend some three thousand delegates from 372 organizations gathered at the Palmer House in Chicago to attend the first convention of the National Conference for a New Politics. No one knew what the “new politics” was, exactly, and the proceedings quickly degenerated into a scene, as one observer put it, “worthy of Genet or Pirandello, with whites masquerading as either poor or black, blacks posing as revolutionaries or as arrogant whites, conservatives pretending to be communists, women feigning to be the oppressed, and liberals pretending not to be there at all.”3 A 150-member black delegation demanded that the gathering pass a resolution denouncing Zionism and calling for immediate reparations payments to all African Americans. Shortly thereafter, forty antiwar radicals met with North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) representatives in Czechoslovakia. SDS leader Tom Hayden attended and was quoted afterward: “Now we’re all Viet Cong.”4
Up to this point, aside from an occasional rhetorical outburst, the president had weathered the domestic storm over the war, generally avoiding the temptation to succumb to Hoover’s siren song (with the exception of Martin Luther King).5 But the antics of would-be revolutionaries, especially in Washington, DC, a city he loved, threatened to push him over the edge. A week after fifty thousand protesters tried to shut down the Pentagon in the fall of 1967, he burst out, “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now.” He told his advisers that he had been protecting civil liberties “since he was nine years old,” but “I told the Attorney General that I am not going to let two-hundred-thousand of these people ruin everything for the 200 million Americans. I’ve got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country.”6 Johnson instructed the CIA to place under surveillance leaders of the SDS, SANE, and Yippies (Youth International Party), Mothers against the War, and other antiwar groups and to do everything possible to gather evidence that they were communist-controlled, even operating on orders from foreign governments. This program, later institutionalized as Operation CHAOS, violated the CIA’s charter, which prohibited domestic spying.
The war against the peace movement soon shifted from surveillance to harassment and disruption. Dr. Benjamin Spock, an American pediatrician and antiwar advocate, among others, was indicted for counseling draft resistance. Agents provocateur penetrated various organizations, encouraging division, sabotaging demonstrations, and gathering evidence of illegal activities. Not surprisingly, the FBI got into the act. Shortly after Vietnam Veterans against the War was formed in April 1967, Hoover’s men infiltrated the organization, encouraging activities that they hoped would discredit the movement.7
VIRTUALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD ASSUMED THAT LYNDON JOHNSON would run for another full term as president in 1968. The president’s chief political advisers—Arthur Krim, Abe Fortas, James Rowe, and Clark Clifford—urged LBJ to employ a strategy similar to that used by Harry Truman in 1948. LBJ’s campaign advisers assigned the task of playing J. Strom Thurmond—the 1948 Dixiecrat nominee—to Alabama governor George Wallace. Unlike Thurmond, however, the Johnson campaign team expected Wallace to attract much more media attention and perform better in nonsouthern states, especially in midwestern industrial areas. The LBJ camp anticipated that an antiwar presidential candidate on the left—analogous to Henry Wallace in 1948—would challenge him for the Democratic nomination and, perhaps like Wallace, form a third party. Bobby Kennedy’s announcement at a Democratic dinner in 1967 that he supported LBJ for reelection in 1968 reassured Johnson’s advisers that Kennedy had decided to wait until 1972. “Forget (not forgive) the whole Kennedy caper,” White House aide John Roche advised the president. “The point has been made to Bobby that if we go down, he goes with us. . . . He has nowhere else to go and your victory is imperative to his plans for 1972.”8
Voters had been decidedly unenthusiastic about Truman in 1948, but they had voted for him as a means to avoid the extremism of both Left and Right. The Johnson camp assumed that the same would be true for their man in 1968. Fred Panzer, a White House aide influenced by several Lou Harris polls, told the president, “Your greatest strength is to overtly run against Wallace in the South and the peace party in the North. . . . It would also insure national coverage so that Negroes in the North would know of your attacks on George Wallace, and farmers, small towners, and southerners would know of your attacks on the peace wing.”9 No matter who the GOP nominated—Nixon, Rockefeller, or Romney—Johnson’s centrism would force the GOP to embrace either the Wallaceites or the peaceniks—or if they avoided this, to conduct an empty campaign. Among other things, this analysis underestimated the degree to which the antiwar movement and the white backlash had come to include the “Vital Center” Arthur Schlesinger had identified as crucial to any Democratic presidential victory.
RFK’s disavowals notwithstanding, an organization calling itself Citizens for Kennedy/Fulbright began soliciting pledges of support in the fall of 1967. Most outspoken of the dissidents was Allard Lowenstein, who seemed determined to merge the Democratic Party with the New Left. In October he announced a conference for all those interested in dumping LBJ.10 But taking on an incumbent president, especially if that incumbent was Lyndon Johnson, was a daunting prospect, and Bobby refused to throw his hat in the ring. Desperate for a rallying point for the Stop LBJ movement, dissident Democrats persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, to make himself available. Best known for his eloquent speech nominating Adlai Stevenson at the Democratic convention in 1960, McCarthy was described by Newsweek as “a scholarly, witty, somewhat lazy man who writes books, reads poetry and laces his lectures with dollops of theology.”11
It was clear that George Wallace was going to make another run for the presidency, if not as a Democrat then as an Independent. But Johnson’s advisers were divided as to whether the Wallace candidacy would hurt or help. If the Republicans nominated a neo-Goldwaterite like Governor Ronald Reagan of California, Wallace would drain away from the GOP segregationist and superhawk votes in the South and the working-class neighborhoods of the North, but if the Republicans nominated a moderate like Romney, the Wallace challenge would hurt the Democrats.12
In November, LBJ briefly hit the campaign trail and delivered a series of speeches lauding the accomplishments of the Great Society and the bravery of America’s fighting men. At a White House press conference, he lambasted the Vietnam naysayers in Congress. To a pro-union crowd he called for passage of the tax surcharge. In a ceremony swearing in newly elected members of the Washington, DC, city council, he declared war on “crime in the streets.” He denounced the GOP for its social irresponsibility. “Some have called the passage of this act [an appropriations bill for HUD] a legislative victory,” he remarked at the signing ceremony. “It might better be called a legislative miracle.” He added, “Ninety-three percent of the House Republicans voted to recommit and kill rent supplements. Eighty percent voted to . . . delete all funds for model cities.”13 In December, he flew to Bar Harbor, Florida, to address the twelve hundred delegates to the AFL-CIO Convention, which had just voted to endorse him.
When LBJ had lashed his aides and congressional allies mercilessly in 1965, saying, “We have so little time, we have so little time,” they had wondered why.14 He had won in a landslide. Liberal majorities in both houses waited to do his bidding; the country was then in the midst of an incredible economic boom. But Johnson had been right. Reform is rare and difficult in the United States, a deeply conservative country. And political unity is not its natural state. Now, as the calendar turned to 1968, time was almost up. Dissension was high. Urban riots, the white backlash, and the black power movement were whipsawing the country. The Vietnam conflict was corroding the public spirit.
Yet Johnson would not give up. He wanted to raise taxes and to spend more money, not just to fight crime but to build affordable housing and to fund jobs. As he prepared for the 1968 State of the Union address, he took John Roche and Harry McPherson’s advice to heart: “We have to utilize ‘conservative’ tactics to protect the substance of liberalism—‘liberalism’, as enacted over the past three years, has to become the status quo.”15 Standing before Congress, the president spoke quietly, conversationally. He renewed his request for a 10 percent income tax surcharge and presented a $186 billion budget, an increase of $10 billion over the previous fiscal year.
Joe Califano had wanted the president to go at Wilbur Mills head-on. The Arkansan, he told his boss, “wants either (or both) (1) to force . . . you to your knees or (2) to dismantle great hunks of the Great Society.”16 Johnson agreed. “I warn the Congress and the Nation tonight that this failure to act on the tax bill will sweep us into an accelerating spiral of price increases, a slump in homebuilding, and a continuing erosion of the American dollar,” he said. He asked Congress for $455 million in new job program funds, most of it to initiate a public-private three-year plan to train and employ five hundred thousand of the least qualified jobless. He proposed $1 billion for Model Cities and $2.2 billion for the War on Poverty. To rousing applause, LBJ told the joint session that in his safe streets and crime control bill, he was doubling the money he had originally asked for, but he also renewed his call for gun control: “Those who preach disorder and those who preach violence must know that local authorities are able to resist them swiftly, to resist them sternly, and to resist them decisively.”17
AS 1968 OPENED, LYNDON JOHNSON WAS MORE WORRIED ABOUT THE prospect of a race war in the United States than he was about losing the war in Vietnam. In the fall of 1967, novelist William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner had been published. The book, an immediate best seller, was a fictionalized account of a black slave revolt that took place in the tidewater country of southern Virginia in 1831. An educated black slave and preacher with apocalyptic vision, Nat Turner had led the uprising. For two days, Turner’s band of seventy-five runaways rampaged through the countryside, slaughtering fifty-five white men, women, and children before being overcome by a hastily formed white militia. Those slaves who were not killed immediately were summarily executed. James Baldwin, who read the book in manuscript, declared it historically accurate and socially relevant. Less sympathetic observers also drew contemporary parallels. Throughout 1967 and 1968, as riots erupted in Detroit; Washington, DC; Newark; and Memphis, the white backlash continued to gain momentum, especially north of the Mason-Dixon line. In primarily Catholic, blue-collar, white south Boston, segregationist Louise Day Hicks declared her candidacy for mayor.18
As his and the nation’s troubles mounted, the president spent what little spare time he had reading the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. He ran across an antislavery address that his predecessor had delivered at Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1858. “Now when by all these means,” Lincoln had said to the nation in the wake of the Dred Scott decision (in which the Supreme Court ruled that whether slave or free, African Americans could not be US citizens), “you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?”19
Johnson’s strategy through early 1968 was to try to placate blacks by distancing the administration from the Moynihan report and by focusing on jobs and housing, while trying to appease whites with tough law-and-order rhetoric.20 The White House reintroduced legislation outlawing discrimination in the sale, renting, and leasing of housing, the touchiest of all subjects among white urban dwellers. Opposition to a similar bill had helped Ronald Reagan defeat California governor Pat Brown in 1966. Yet Johnson was determined.
The second order of business was jobs. Sargent Shriver suggested public works, but Johnson felt they would take too long and were unaffordable. The key was the private sector. LBJ wanted to “get some ghetto grime under those highly polished executive fingernails.”21 He succeeded in enlisting Henry Ford to chair the National Alliance of Businessmen (NAB), a voluntary organization committed to persuading the nation’s corporations to hire and train the chronically unemployed. The federal government would pay for most of the training, including health care and literacy instruction. On January 27, LBJ hosted the first executive committee meeting of the NAB. In addition to Ford, the chief executive officers of Mobil Oil, Safeway Stores, ITT, and Alcoa were in attendance. “We’re faced with the hardcore unemployed,” Johnson told them. “You all are going to have to teach them how to wash and stay clean, how to read, how to write. All the things everyone around this table got from their mommies and daddies. Only these people don’t have mommies and daddies who give a damn about them. Or if they do, those mommies and daddies can’t read or don’t know how to help them.” One of the executives said, “This is a tough job, Mr. President.” LBJ turned to him and said, “I didn’t invite you here to tell me how tough a job this is. I invited you here to get the job done. . . . This economy has been so good to you that you can afford to give a little back.”22 In late January LBJ sent a special message to Congress entitled “To Earn a Living: The Right of Every American.” Among other things he asked the House and Senate to fund a $2.1 billion manpower-training program.23 By the end of 1968, the NAB had succeeded in seeing a hundred thousand of the poorest, most disadvantaged Americans trained and put to work. The subsequent retention rate was almost 75 percent.24
With the law-and-order forces demanding raw meat, Johnson saw no reason why Stokely Carmichael should not be offered up. Had he not, after all, preached violent resistance to authority, particularly to the draft, using Havana as his pulpit, no less? LBJ and the White House wanted the black power advocate prosecuted under the Logan Act, an eighteenth-century statute prohibiting private citizens from attempting to influence diplomatic relations between the United States and a foreign government. The problem was, Attorney General Ramsey Clark pointed out, most of the evidence against alleged subversives like Carmichael had been gathered by illegal wiretap.25 The Justice Department had a better chance of making a case against George Romney than Stokely Carmichael, he told presidential aide Larry Temple. Clark was much more interested in going after the South Carolina State Police after they fired shotgun blasts into the ranks of peaceful protestors at the all-black State College at Orangeburg. Three were killed and thirty wounded.26 Johnson made no secret of his irritation with his attorney general. He ranted to Senators Russell and Dirksen, denouncing Clark in their private conversations, but in the end, typically, he listened to reason. As Clark pointed out, what the vast majority of urban-dwelling blacks wanted was law and order, protection from looting and violence, safety for their children. To stretch or even violate the law to satisfy vigilante groups was to start down a dangerous, slippery slope. Moreover, as Clark argued, “I think that the notion that you can control dissent by convicting a few of the most outspoken radicals is absurdly naïve. If there’s nothing to it but the charisma of a few leaders fanning flames, why, it’s not a very serious problem.”27
In mid-March the Kerner Commission announced that the riots of 1967 had social and not conspiratorial roots. The commission’s report emphasized the existence of a pervasive white racism and warned that more violence would ensue if cities, states, and the federal government did not move massively and rapidly to improve living conditions in urban ghettoes. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” declared the introduction. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”28 The Kerner report in essence endorsed the notion of a Marshall Plan for the poor; increased taxes and economic growth would, it claimed, provide $30 billion for the creation of one million new jobs in the public sector, the construction of six hundred thousand low- and moderate-income housing units in the next year (part of six million new units over the next five years), the extension of welfare assistance, and the expansion of the Model Cities program.29 Ramsey Clark was delighted with the report. The selection of Kerner was, he would claim, one of “my recommendations, my rather ardent recommendations.”30 Conservatives were predictably outraged. Presidential candidate Richard Nixon condemned the report because it “in effect blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators.”31 Law-and-order advocates declared it to be another blueprint for rewarding rioters. Wilbur Mills and his ilk decried the Kerner recommendations as a permanent path to an unbalanced budget.
“To me,” Joseph Califano would later write, “the commission had the potential to be a political Frankenstein’s monster and it was almost inevitable that Lyndon Johnson would sour on his hasty creation.”32 Indeed, for six agonizing days the president kept silent on the report. What chance was there now to keep working- and middle-class whites on board the ship of reform? Couldn’t Kerner and his colleagues read? He was calling for a tax surcharge, and Congress was calling for deep budget cuts. This was clearly the work of Bobby Kennedy and the ongoing need of liberals to make a statement rather than a record. The president found himself in the end—as Califano had feared—in the worst of all possible political worlds, taking blame from conservatives for proposing the commission and from liberals for not endorsing its conclusions. Warning that the report was becoming the “Bible of the liberals,” Harry McPherson advised the president that his continued hostility would “turn the politics of long-term riot prevention over to Bobby Kennedy as a ‘responsible politician who cares,’ one who is ‘willing to carry out the Kerner Commission’s recommendations to save our cities.’”33 Eventually, LBJ relented, telling a group of black newspaper editors the Kerner report was “the most important report made to me since I have been President.” He asked all cabinet officers to come up with plans to remedy the inequities identified.34 Harry McPherson later explained why Johnson was so conflicted about the commission’s findings:
The only thing that held any hope for the Negro was the continuation of the coalition between labor, Negroes, intellectuals, . . . big city bosses and political machines, and some of the white urban poor. . . . In other words it required keeping the Polacks who work on the line at River Rouge [Ford Auto Plant in Michigan] in the ball park and supporting Walter Reuther and the government as they try to spend a lot of money for the blacks. That’s the only way they’ll ever make it, because the people [in office buildings] don’t give a damn about them. They’re scared of them, always have been; they’re middle-class whites. . . . Then a presidential commission is formed and goes out and comes back and what does it say? Who’s responsible for the riots? “The other members of the coalition. They did it. Those racists.” And thereupon the coalition says, you know, a four-letter word, and “we’ll go find ourselves a guy like George Wallace, or Richard Nixon.”35
In early February 1968, with Ralph Nader’s image splashed across the front pages of America’s newspapers and magazines, LBJ sent to Congress another special message entitled “To Protect the Consumer Interest.” It called for sweeping new legislation to outlaw deceptive advertising, investigate the auto insurance industry, ensure quality control in fish and poultry processing, strengthen auto safety standards, and appoint a government ombudsman to represent the consuming public. Nader, a lanky, sallow-faced young lawyer, had converted a one-man crusade for consumer protection into a national movement. Working eighteen-hour days, he had directed his controlled outrage at the likes of Henry Ford II and Harvey Firestone over auto safety issues, and then spread out to diseased fish, unnecessary dental X-rays, and deceptive labeling. Public opinion polls indicated that federal action in these areas had almost universal approval.36 Finally, proclaiming education to be “the Fifth Freedom,” Johnson asked Congress to increase annual appropriations for the Head Start program from $340 million to $380 million, for a new Stay in School program at $30 million, and for adult education at $50 million.37
THROUGHOUT LATE 1967 AND EARLY 1968, JOHNSON’S POLITICAL advisers had urged him to commit to the upcoming presidential campaign. They noted that he responded with avoidance behavior or intense anxiety. “The president is a tortured and confused man,” Senator George McGovern (D-SD) noted following a stag dinner for Democratic leaders. “He seemed to be almost begging for political advice; yet, when we would try to interject, he would immediately break in [on an unrelated matter]. I think one time . . . he went on for 45 minutes without interruption. You almost want to put your hand on his shoulder and say, ‘Now Lyndon, calm down, back away a little and take a cooler look.’”38 Harry McPherson, LBJ’s friend and adviser, wanted him to run but could not lie to him. Circumstances were forcing Johnson, reformer extraordinaire, to pose as a preserver of the status quo, a status quo with which an increasing number of Americans were extremely dissatisfied:
You represent things as they are—the course we are following, the policies and programs we have chosen. Therefore you are the most conservative [candidate} . . . the man who is not calling for change but resisting it. That is a tough position today. When you say, “stick with it in Vietnam”, i.e., stick with the policy of the past three years . . . you are saying, stick with a rough situation that shows signs of growing worse. When you say, “persevere at home,” you are saying keep the HEW appropriations growing and the new programs proliferating, although the Negros, for whom we adopted these programs, rioted last summer and will probably riot again. When you say, “prepare for austerity,” you are saying to the businessman and taxpayer, “get set for a shock; meanwhile, I’m going to continue the programs—particularly Vietnam—that cause the shock.”39
As 1967 turned into 1968, Johnson was increasingly inclined toward not running for another term. In early January, he asked Horace Busby to draft a withdrawal statement. John Connally, who was privy to the decision, had suggested that the State of the Union address would be an excellent venue for the sure-to-be-dramatic announcement. “The longer he waited,” Connally observed, the more it would help Bobby Kennedy, who “was free to operate while others were not.”40 But Johnson decided that the time was not right. It was too soon. He still had some blows to strike, and he did not want to become a lame duck yet. And, in truth, he was still on the fence.41
In January and February, the president had several remarkable conversations with HEW secretary John Gardner. As Gardner later recalled:
I had become increasingly concerned about the state of the country, about the war, about the riots, about the course of events as I saw them. . . . We were discussing what could be done to ensure the reelection of President Johnson. . . . And I found to my consternation sometime in early January that I did not think that the president should run for reelection. . . . I wrote a letter of resignation [to Johnson], took it in and handed it to him, and he read it and laid it on the table and asked me why I did it. . . . And I said, “Well, I just don’t believe that you can unite the country. I just think that we’re in a terrible passage in our history and that you cannot do what needs to be done, with the best will in the world. I just think that is not in the cards for you. . . . ” And he said, “Well I’ve had the same thought myself many times.”42
March 1968 proved one of the most tumultuous months in American political history. As the spring primary season approached, LBJ’s political advisers again urged him to give some attention to the forthcoming campaign. Polls showed Eugene McCarthy lagging far behind the president, but Bobby was waiting in the wings. “I am sure that B K is sponsoring a ‘War of Liberation’ against you and your administration,” John Roche observed to LBJ.43 Orville Freeman and other party luminaries had pressed Johnson to give them the go-ahead to organize the reelection campaign. In early January, he had, but in an almost off-handed way, and with a few exceptions, turned away requests to meet with party leaders. Jim Rowe agreed to head a volunteer effort to generate grassroots support, but LBJ took little notice.44 Intimates and close observers murmured that electoral politics seemed to have lost its interest for the president.
Defections from the ranks of Johnson’s Democratic supporters became a weekly and even daily affair. Jesse Unruh, the powerful speaker of the California Assembly, was reportedly ready to jump ship, as was Walter Reuther. From every corner of the country, Democratic governors warned the president’s men that if matters did not take a dramatic new course in Vietnam, they would all go down to defeat in November.45
By 1968 liberals had divided into a pro-war faction typified by Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey and an antiwar segment led by Bobby Kennedy, Frank Church, and George McGovern. To the delight of conservatives, antiwar liberals seemed to be willing to go to any lengths to stop the war and get rid of LBJ, even to the point of sacrificing Democratic rule. With another wave of rioting looming as summer approached, urban ethnic Democrats were rallying to Wallace, a southerner, a populist, and a law-and-order segregationist. Southern Democrats were breaking away from the Great Society consensus and joining with the GOP to block further initiatives in the areas of health, civil rights, public works, and social security. This, in turn, would further embitter the disadvantaged, and the country would be plunged into an endless cycle of black rage and white reaction.
Perhaps, LBJ believed, if he could remove himself from the picture, this disaster could be avoided. Perhaps the fanaticism of the anti-Johnson liberals would cool, and the New South could once again join hands with the northern liberal-labor coalition. Moreover, out of contention, the president could work for an “honorable peace” in Vietnam. It was a long shot, but worth a try. Thus, though he was at times ambivalent, reluctant to give up, hungering for more approval at the polls, desirous of revenge against his enemies, LBJ was tempted not to run for the very reasons John Gardner had laid out. He could do more for his country—and his reputation—politically dead than alive. Johnson ordered his speechwriters to prepare a major address on Vietnam to be delivered the evening of March 31.
On March 12 Eugene McCarthy and his “Children’s Campaign” shocked the nation. Predicted to win no more than 11 or 12 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, the Minnesotan captured 42.4 percent compared to LBJ’s 49.5 percent (the president, who was technically still exploring his candidacy, was on the ballot as a write-in candidate). “Dove bites Hawk,” a journalist quipped. Exit polls indicated that most of McCarthy’s support came from those disenchanted with the war, both hawks and doves. With the exception of speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had left the Johnson White House over the war and other issues, students directed the entire McCarthy effort. McCarthy’s success, and Johnson’s distress, were more than Robert Kennedy could bear. On March 14, using Clark Clifford as an intermediary, Bobby proposed a deal to the White House. If LBJ would appoint a national commission to investigate the war effort in Vietnam, headed presumably by him or brother Ted, and to make recommendations, presumably binding, he would not jump into the race. All he wanted, Bobby said, was peace in Vietnam.46 LBJ told Clifford to tell RFK that he and his views on Vietnam were always welcome at the White House, but that the deal being proposed would alienate everyone if it became public knowledge, which it surely would.47 Two days later, RFK threw his hat into the ring.
Johnson hardly seemed devastated by McCarthy’s showing. Speaking to a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) group the night of the New Hampshire primary, he observed that he had had an early report on the voting—of the first twenty-five votes cast, he had not received one. “I said to Mrs. Johnson, ‘What do you think about that?’ She had answered, ‘I think the day is bound to get better, Lyndon.’”48
A few days after Kennedy’s announcement, Orville Freeman saw the president during a cabinet meeting. “As usual he was a half hour late. . . . Finally about 8:00 he drifted in, in an exceptionally good humor. It was really quite impressive. Actually, I don’t think he could have put it on.”49 But Freeman found the president’s nonchalance unsettling. “Mr. President,” he said, “what we really need now is someone that’s calling the signals on this [campaign].” Johnson remarked that he thought Georgia governor Terry Sanford was coming in to do that. “All in all,” Freeman observed, “what comes through loud and clear is at this point, this is almost like a big ship without a rudder.”50
ALL OF THIS TRANSPIRED IN THE MIDST OF THE TET OFFENSIVE, IN which the Vietcong, supported by elements of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), attacked 36 of 64 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 major cities, 64 district capitals, and 50 hamlets. Initially caught off guard, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) and US forces quickly recovered and took the initiative. Seeing the opportunity for a knockout blow, General Westmoreland had asked for an additional 205,000 troops and permission to strike across the demilitarized zone into North Vietnam and at communist sanctuaries in neighboring Cambodia.
On March 22, LBJ formally rejected Westmoreland’s massive troop request. He then summoned a group of so-called Wise Men to a meeting at the White House on March 26. Prior to the gathering, the commander in chief had his briefers paint as bleak a picture of the military and fiscal situation as possible. The contingent—former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, former Undersecretary of State George Ball, former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, former National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Army Generals Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor, former Ambassadors Robert Murphy and Henry Cabot Lodge, Abe Fortas, and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg—were appropriately gloomy. A minority advocated holding the line and even widening the war if necessary, but the majority favored immediate steps to deescalate. Acheson spoke for all when he said that “the United States could 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.”
Johnson was reportedly furious: “The establishment bastards have bailed out,” he is said to have remarked after the meeting.51 He was playing to the galleries. The “establishment bastards” were doing just what he wanted them to do. Indeed, that same day, in a tense meeting with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Earl Wheeler and General Creighton Abrams, who had been tapped to become Westmoreland’s successor, Johnson pled with the military to support his peace overtures, which consisted primarily of feelers extended to the North Vietnamese through third parties. He lamented the deteriorating fiscal situation, divisions at home, and his own “overwhelming disapproval” in the press.52
On March 28, LBJ met with Califano and McPherson over lunch to discuss his forthcoming speech on Vietnam. They mulled over the bombing pause and tax surcharge, and then the president suddenly asked, “What do you think about my not running for reelection?” McPherson said that, personally, he would not run if he were the president, but both he and Califano insisted that Johnson had to win another term. Otherwise, the country would become hopelessly deadlocked. It is already deadlocked, Johnson observed. “Others can get things done,” he said. “The Congress and I are like an old married couple. We’ve lived together so long and we’ve been rubbing against each other night after night so often and we’ve asked so much of each other over the years we’re tired of each other.”53 Later, alone with Califano, LBJ asked, “If I don’t run, who do you think will get the nomination?” Bobby Kennedy, Califano said.
“What about Hubert?”
“I don’t think he can beat Kennedy.”
“What’s wrong with Bobby?” Johnson replied. “He’s made some nasty speeches about me, but he’s never had to sit here. . . . Bobby would keep fighting for the Great Society programs. And when he sat in this chair he might have a different view on the war. His major problem would be with appropriations. He doesn’t know how to deal with people on the Hill and a lot of them don’t like him. But he’ll try. . . . Whether Kennedy or Nixon won, at least the leadership would support them in the first year or so. . . . And that might provide the necessary time to heal the wounds now separating the country.”54
Meanwhile, Horace Busby had been working secretly on an addendum to the March 31 “peace with honor” speech on Vietnam.55 Early Sunday morning, the 31st, found the president surrounded by his staff, fine-tuning the text of his address scheduled for that night. Only Busby had the addendum paragraphs, and he kept them close to his chest. Lady Bird was allowed to see the portions on Vietnam, of which she very much approved, but not the abdication material.
At seven o’clock the Johnsons’ daughter Lynda had returned from California, where she had said goodbye to her husband, Marine Captain Charles Robb, at Camp Pendleton. He would leave in a fortnight for his thirteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam. She was pregnant with her first child. Lady Bird recalled being stunned by her appearance. Looking like a “wraith from another world,” Lynda stared directly at her father and asked, “Why do we have to go to Vietnam?” Her father just stared at her, and Lady Bird later wrote that she had not seen such pain in his eyes since his mother had died.56
Around ten o’clock in the morning, LBJ gathered up aide Jim Jones and his other daughter Luci and drove to Saint Dominic’s, a Catholic chapel in suburban Washington, to attend mass. During the service, he instructed Jones to get the Secret Service to fetch the draft of the speech, including the Busby material, from his bedroom and to call Vice President Humphrey and tell him that they were coming over. When the speech and LBJ arrived at the Humphreys’ apartment, the second couple was preparing to fly to Mexico City for a state visit. “At the Vice President’s apartment in southwestern Washington,” Jones later wrote, “Mrs. Humphrey and Luci visited while the President gave Humphrey the speech. When he got to the final paragraph, the Vice President’s face flushed, his eyes watered and he protested that Mr. Johnson could not step down. ‘Don’t mention this to anyone until Jim calls you in Mexico tonight. But you’d better start now planning your campaign for President.’ Humphrey’s face went slack, his shoulder hunched. ‘There’s no way I can beat the Kennedys,’ he said.”57
Back at the White House, the president continued to fiddle with the wording of the Vietnam sections of the speech. He glanced at the newspapers, which included a just-released Gallup poll showing his approval ratings at an all-time low: only 36 percent endorsed his overall job performance, and 26 percent his handling of the war in Vietnam.58 Late in the afternoon, LBJ had his press secretary, George Christian, call John Connally and ask him if he thought withdrawal was the right thing to do. Connally said yes. The president should have done it in the State of the Union, and if he was going to step down, he must wait no longer. He owed it to the party and to the country.59
Just after six o’clock Johnson met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and told him he was going to send an additional 13,500 troops to Vietnam but that he would couple it with an announcement that the United States would cease bombing above the twentieth parallel for an indefinite period. Washington was prepared to go 90 percent of the way toward peace; now it was time for Moscow to get the North Vietnamese to go the remaining 10 percent of the way. It was up to the United States and the USSR to end the war soon and prevent hostilities from spreading.60
The address was scheduled for nine fifteen in the evening. At eight fifteen, Jim Jones took the last two pages over and had them put on the teleprompter. The president rattled off a series of names of people that Jones and Christian should call—cabinet members, party leaders, and lifelong friends—once the speech had started to give them advance warning about its punch line. Both Lynda and Luci were in tears. Lynda was particularly distraught. How could her father think of not running? What would happen to Chuck and the other soldiers in Vietnam? “Now I’ll be free to work for them full time,” her father told her.61
A somber, somewhat haggard president went on national television to announce that henceforward the bombing of North Vietnam would be limited to the area just north of the demilitarized zone below the twentieth parallel. The United States, he declared, was ready for comprehensive peace talks anywhere, anytime, and he announced that veteran diplomat W. Averill Harriman would represent the administration should such talks materialize. The nation, he said, had done its very best to keep faith with the words spoken by John F. Kennedy, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But without “the unity of our people,” the United States could do nothing. “There is division in the American house now. There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospect of peace for all peoples.”62
Lyndon Johnson and the republic to which he was committed had come to a crossroads. They had embarked on their nation-building enterprise believing that freedom was indivisible, that historically, intellectually, and morally the United States was bound to combat communist totalitarianism on every front. But they had discovered that there were limits to American power, that in its pursuit of liberty for the Vietnamese the nation was verging on forfeiting its own freedoms. The moral imperatives that Lyndon Johnson invoked to justify the Second Reconstruction and the conflict in Southeast Asia were not equivalent. The sins of racial injustice were America’s own; the sins of communist totalitarianism, of Sino-Soviet imperialism belonged to others. For the first, the nation could and should risk self-immolation, but not for the second. The most America could do in a dangerous world was protect itself and protect only those others who were vital to the nation’s survival. For a variety of reasons, Johnson could not simply withdraw from Vietnam. Historical errors are not that easily corrected. But he could sacrifice himself. The Texan then dropped his bombshell. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president,” he told a stunned nation.63
In the wake of the dramatic announcement, friends and cabinet members gathered in the West Wing. LBJ appeared relaxed, increasingly confident that he had done the right thing. Johnson loved surprises. And he had just pulled off one of the great surprises of twentieth-century political life. Given his personality, of course, the Texan found the notion of self-sacrifice deeply satisfying. “[He was] telling stories and jokes and laughing,” Vicky McCammon remembered, while staff and guests huddled in knots, talking in hushed tones.64 LBJ stayed up until well after midnight taking calls from well-wishers, telling his Texas friends to polish up on their dominoes, remarking several times that he was looking forward to spending more time with his grandson, Patrick Lyndon Nugent.65
Johnson’s decision not to run produced a collective sigh of relief. Perhaps the president’s politically selfless act could in fact bring the country together, stem the urban rioting that seemed to have gotten a life of its own, and end the seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam. The respite was to be short-lived, however, the nation’s hopefulness delusional.