PERICLES, perhaps the wisest statesman of antiquity, led Athens into a golden age in the years between the close of the Persian War in 449 and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. He greatly extended democracy by granting citizenship to poor males, allowing them to take seats in the legislature, and placing them on juries in the courts. He launched a massive rebuilding program to restore the damage suffered by Athens during the Persian War. The capstone was the Acropolis with its great new structures—the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erectheum, and the Odeum. The culture of the city soared to heights matched among city-states only by Renaissance Florence. Architecture, sculpture, painting, drama, literature, music, history, and science flowered. “Few eras in human history,” Donald Kagan wrote, “can compare with the greatness achieved by Athens under the leadership of Pericles in the fifth century B.C.”
These achievements, as Pericles knew better than anyone, depended upon three interdependent factors: the empire, prosperity, and, above all, peace. Athens possessed by far the largest empire of the Greek world, reaching from Macedonia in the north almost to Crete in the south. It included much of mainland Greece, most of the Aegean Islands, the coast of Asia Minor, and the straits leading into the Black Sea. The greatest navy of its time was its protector.
Athens became wealthy from her empire, which imported her goods and paid tribute to her. A large hoard of gold and silver was deposited in the treasury in the Parthenon.
Peace was the key. Pericles, who had been a commander in the Athenian navy, knew war and much preferred to avoid it. But the Greek world was an unstable system of competing cities which frequently took up arms.
In 433 Corcyra appealed to Athens in its conflict with Corinth, which had brought powerful Sparta to its aid. Pericles engaged in complex negotiations. But neither Athens nor Sparta would make the concessions needed to gain peace. Sparta and the Peloponnesian League voted for war. Proud Pericles, the honor of Athens at stake, went to war in 431 on behalf of Corcyra. Sparta’s goal, Kagan wrote, was “the destruction of Athenian power.”
Each year as the crops ripened the Spartan army advanced into Attica. The Athenian farmers, their families, and their animals took cover behind the city’s walls. The troops destroyed the crops. In this war of attrition which continued for ten years Sparta held the trump cards. The morale of the Athenians was undermined, the treasury was depleted, and the colonies broke away. Worse, ferocious plagues swept the overcrowded city, killing a third of the population, including many soldiers. In 430 the Athenians turned on Pericles for leading them into disaster. They removed him from office and convicted him of embezzlement. In 429 a defeated and saddened Pericles died, evidently a victim of the plague.
In 425 in Athens Sophocles staged his masterpiece, Oedipus Tyrannus. While the setting was Thebes and the leading character was the tragic king Oedipus, the Athenians read his name as Pericles.
Finally in 404 the Spartans, now supported by Persia, brought the bitter war to an end as Athens capitulated. She lost her empire and her fleet; the walls were torn down; the treasury was gone; the populace was starving. The Spartans imposed their foreign policy on Athens. They installed a puppet government of oligarchs which destroyed democracy and imposed a reign of terror.
Such was the tragic end of the Periclean dream. Pericles in the twentieth-century phrase had given up butter for guns and had thereby invited disaster. For the Greeks Pericles was an example of what they called hubris, the arrogance that was certain to bring on the destruction of those who dared to rule over others as though they were Gods.1
The choice between peace and war goes back to an early stage in human history, but the guns-or-butter metaphor did not emerge until the twentieth century. It was invented, according to William Safire, by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who said, “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with arms.” Shortly, Hermann Goering, the head of the German Air Force, said in a radio speech: “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” Goering must have spoken from the heart because he was very fat.
In the first phase of the Americanization of the Vietnam War President Johnson insisted that the U.S. could have both guns and butter:
I believe we can do both. We are a country which was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other. We are a nation with the highest GNP, the highest wages, and the most people at work. We can do both. And as long as I am president we will do both.
He repeated this empty promise in his 1966 State of the Union message and the press immediately called it guns and butter. Chairman Wilbur Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee said, “The Administration simply must choose between guns and butter.”
This dilemma was the key to the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, perhaps the most tragic in the history of that great office. He acted as though he could have both, while everyone, himself included, knew that he could not. Stephen Skowronek wrote,
The “tragedy of Lyndon Johnson” is a drama without parallel in modern American politics. It is the story of a master politician who self-destructed at the commanding heights, of an over-arching political consensus shattered in a rush of extraordinary achievements, of a superpower that squandered its resources in a remote conflict with people struggling on the fringes of modernity.
Lyndon Johnson generated and shouldered through Congress a formidable bundle of domestic legislation that he called the Great Society. With this very important achievement, he joined two of his illustrious presidential predecessors in the twentieth century—Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Together they created a significant historical rhythm: a burst of progressive laws occurring approximately a generation apart. Wilson’s New Freedom statutes were enacted between 1913 and 1915, Roosevelt’s New Deal program between 1933 and 1935, and Johnson’s Great Society legislation between 1964 and 1966. They shared several important characteristics: a strong and energetic Democratic President who did not hesitate to lead; large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, which followed their President; solid public support; and the guns-or-butter dilemma which eventually led the President to abandon domestic reform and lead the nation into war—Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, and Johnson into the Vietnam War.
Measured by legislative output, Johnson’s presidency fell into two periods—1964–66 and 1967–68. Although 1964 constituted the second session of the 88th Congress in which the Democratic majorities were modest, the performance was impressive. In November 1964 Johnson won a landslide victory and carried with him very large majorities in both houses. Thus, 1965 was an extraordinarily productive year with the first session of the 89th. The second in 1966 saw a marked fall-off, but remained a strong year. In the second period, reflecting a sharp Republican rebound in Congress in the 1966 elections and the hemorrhaging of the Johnson presidency due mainly to the war, legislative output dropped sharply in 1967 and virtually disappeared in 1968.
On October 24, 1966, Larry O’Brien and Joe Califano submitted a report to the President on the legislative gains of both sessions of the 89th Congress. They reached this conclusion:
In a word, this was a fabulous and remarkable Congress. We say this not because of its unprecedented productivity—but because what was passed has deep meaning and significance for every man, woman and child in this country—and for future generations. A particularly striking feature about the 89th was that its second session was as equally productive as the first.
The report then listed all the bills passed in each session as though each was equal in significance to the others. In the first session of the 89th, 84 were passed of the 87 proposed; in the second session, 97 of the 113 submitted. By this method of counting the second session was even more productive than the first. But the yardstick was seriously defective. Most of the statutes were of very modest importance. A relatively small minority of the laws was significant, and a very small number was of great importance. In 1965, for example, Medicare far outweighed the statute that authorized the legislature of Guam to fix the compensation of its members. Nevertheless, the 89th was in fact a “fabulous and remarkable Congress,” as the authors claimed.
The Congressional Quarterly in its annual Almanac tracked the legislation more comprehensively than O’Brien and Califano. By CQ’s rating, 1965 stands alone as the banner year, 1964 is second, 1966 and 1968 are tied for third, and 1967 is last.
Perhaps most significant, CQ also made narrative judgments of the President’s legislative performance. It wrote of 1964: “He had great success with Congress.” The editors were swept off their feet by 1965, a “legislative grand slam.” CQ stated,
It was clear that the first session of the 89th, starting early and working late, had passed more major legislation than most Congresses pass in two sessions. The scope of the legislation was even more impressive than the number of new laws. Measures which, taken alone, would have crowned the achievements of any Congress, were enacted in a seemingly endless stream. …
The pace of the session was so breathless as to cause a major revision of the image, widely prevalent in preceding years, of Congress as structurally incapable of swift decision, prone to frustrate demands for progress.
The 1966 session was a big letdown. “With the public increasingly concerned with inflation and the Viet Nam War,” CQ wrote, “Congressional Republicans found new Democratic allies in the effort to curb the ‘Great Society’—not only its spending programs but almost any measure providing social reform.”
CQ summarized the President’s performance in the 1st session of the 90th Congress in 1967 as follows:
Mr. Johnson’s success in 1967 did not nearly meet his historic accomplishments in getting landmark Great Society legislation through the overwhelmingly Democratic 89th Congress (1965–66). The specter of the war in Viet Nam coupled with the shift to the GOP of 47 House seats and three Senate seats in the 1966 election gave the President a relatively hostile Congress which was intent on holding down Government spending.
Accordingly, the President introduced little in the way of new Great Society programs, preferring instead to improve and expand already enacted programs. Even some of these proposals—notably the antipoverty program, model cities and rent supplements—faced serious trouble. …
The President suffered major defeats when the House Ways and Means Committee refused to act on his proposal for a 10-percent surcharge on personal and corporate income tax and when Congress voted the lowest foreign aid bill in 20 years.
By Labor Day the year was notably unproductive. Congress had enacted only six of the 52 bills … Mike Mansfield … had listed as “must legislation.”
CQ on the second session of the 90th Congress in 1968:
Mr. Johnson’s success did not nearly meet his historic accomplishments. …
In many cases Congress enacted bills requested by the White House only after adding relatively unpalatable provisions or restrictions.
The important income tax surcharge, for example, was approved in conjunction with a limitation on federal expenditures which the President was forced to accept as the price for passage of the tax hike. …
The President’s spending plans for a variety of health, education and urban welfare programs were cut back considerably by the budget-minded Congress.
This book addresses small numbers and large significance. That is, it deals with only 17 of the bills President Johnson proposed that were enacted which were, in this author’s judgment, significant. That term is understood to mean both (a) measures which represented a new policy or an important change in an old policy and (b) statutes which affected very large numbers of Americans. There have been few acts of Congress, even in so productive a period as the Johnson presidency, which can meet both of these tests. For the years 1964–68 there were merely 17, which is less than 1 percent of the 1902 bills, according to CQ, that Johnson proposed to Congress.
These 17 statutes, in turn, break down into two categories: blockbusters and those that are no more than significant. There were six blockbusters, counting both major education and conservation statutes as one, which is justified because the former involved the same principle of federal aid for education and the latter were both concerned with the preservation of the nation’s physical heritage. The blockbusters were: the Revenue Act (Keynesian tax cut), Civil Rights Act, Economic Opportunity Act (poverty), and the Wilderness Act and Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, all 1964; and Medicare and the Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education Act, both 1965.
President Johnson must share credit with President Kennedy for these statutes because all, excepting poverty, which was only a Kennedy idea, had been drafted and were well on their way through the congressional machinery at the time of the assassination. Had Kennedy lived, there is no doubt that all would have been passed by 1965. Nevertheless, Johnson deserves much of the glory because he quickly endorsed every one (including getting the poverty bill drafted) and brought his legislative experience and skills into play to assure their passage. All were enacted during the first two years of the Johnson presidency, 1964 and 1965.
In addition, there were 11 statutes which, if they did not meet the high test of a blockbuster, were nevertheless significant: the Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act, Water Quality Act, and Clean Air Act amendments and Solid Waste Disposal Act, all 1965; the Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage amendments and Model Cities Act, 1966; the Air Quality Act and Public Broadcasting Act, 1967; and the Tax surcharge, Social Security Act amendments, and civil rights with open housing, all 1968. Johnson takes the credit for all of this legislation.
If the blockbuster and significant groups are joined, the importance of the first two years of Johnson’s presidency becomes dramatic. In 1964 and 1965 the total was ten; in 1966, 1967, and 1968 together it dropped to seven.
These numbers are remarkable. While they look small, they are huge. The likelihood is that a majority of U.S. Presidents did not produce a single blockbuster and many failed even to achieve passage of one significant statute. Clearly, the only President in U.S. history who was on Johnson’s level was Franklin Roosevelt. Here Wilbur Cohen, who served under both, on an intuitive “Richter-type scale” of legislative effectiveness with a yardstick of 10, ranked LBJ first at 9.8 and FDR second at 6.7. This can be argued. Despite the fact that Roosevelt was Johnson’s great hero, LBJ consciously set out to surpass FDR and he may have succeeded. He certainly was at least FDR’s equal.
This legislation in the aggregate thrust the U.S. a giant step forward in the direction of democratization by assisting those who needed help the most. The unemployed found jobs; the elderly gained health care; the young enjoyed greater educational opportunity; blacks and women, among others, overcame discrimination and the former in the Deep South won the right to vote; the poor received hope; discrimination against certain types of immigrants was ended; the national park system was much expanded and great stretches of wilderness were preserved; and the first efforts were made to counter air and water pollution.
For these achievements Lyndon Johnson deserves the lion’s share of the credit. He, of course, received great help from others, starting with the critical Kennedy legacy. In the departments Wilbur Cohen on Medicare and Social Security and Stewart Udall on conservation and pollution performed masterfully. Several members of Johnson’s White House staff made notable contributions: Larry O’Brien and his assistants, Mike Manatos and Henry Hall Wilson, on congressional relations, Joe Califano on overall domestic policy, Douglass Cater on education. But Lyndon Johnson was at the center of the whirlwind. He relentlessly drove himself, his staff, and the Congress to enact this program. It was a virtuoso performance.
In fact, Johnson did not even stop to catch his breath at the close of the first session of the triumphant 89th Congress. Majority Leader Mansfield, noted for good judgment, recommended a slowdown, taking time for digestion, and concentrating on the administration of the laws that had already been enacted. Many newspapers and magazines sang the same chorus. White House aide Harry McPherson pointed out that congressional investigations would expose much “confusion, duplication, and waste.” He recommended that the President beat Congress to the punch by naming Charles Schultze to head an administration investigating commission on the implementation of the new laws. McPherson also suggested a major campaign to explain them to the public.
But Johnson, driven by his need to surpass Roosevelt, would hear none of this sensible advice. There was still room over his fireplace for new coon-skins and he intended to get them. The progress of a bill, Doris Kearns wrote, was “the center of Johnson’s life, and the ceremony of successful completion was also a personal celebration. … The ceremonies were also a public forum in which Johnson bestowed upon the nation his most valued creation—the laws of the Great Society. The ceremony was also a summons to the next series of legislative endeavors.” “He adopts programs,” Califano wrote, “the way a child eats chocolate-chip cookies.” Califano took his son to the hospital after the boy swallowed a full bottle of aspirin. The President tracked him down there and listened to the account. “There ought to be a law,” Johnson said, “that makes druggists use safe containers.” This led eventually to passage of the Child Safety Act of 1970.
On October 22, 1965, when Congress adjourned, the President wrote a long letter to Mansfield. After thanking the majority leader for playing a major part in “the first session of the 89th Congress [that] will go down in history as the greatest session … in the history of our Nation,” he pointed to the job left still to be done: “23 major items of legislation, recommended by the Administration, which the Congress did not enact.” There was also a batch of budget questions. Johnson sent Califano out to several major universities to dig out legislative ideas and instructed him to establish task forces to flesh them out. For Lyndon Johnson, 1966 would be like 1965, 1967 like 1966, and so on. In his mind, evidently, there were no changes under way in the conditions that he and the Congress would face. He could not have been more wrong.2
Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War in mid-1965. The conflict would continue until January 27, 1973, almost eight years, when Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated a cease-fire. This armistice, not a peace treaty, provided for the withdrawal of the few remaining American troops, a prisoner exchange, and related military matters, leaving the fundamental question, the political future of South Vietnam, unresolved. The North Vietnamese gave the answer in the spring of 1975 with a quick offensive that destroyed South Vietnam’s military forces and culminated in the capture of Saigon. The seemingly interminable war came to an end because Vietnam was united. Ho Chi Minh was now dead, but his followers had won the war he had started.
Did the United States lose the war? Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., called the result “tactical victory, strategic retreat.” He wrote, “On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. … Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victorious.” Thomas C. Thayer wrote, “The Americans couldn’t win in Vietnam but they couldn’t lose either as long as they stayed.” Stanley Karnow put it this way:
In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won—a struggle between victims. Its origins were complex, its lessons disputed, its legacy still to be assessed by future generations. But whether a valid venture or a misguided endeavor, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions.
That epic tragedy included the costs the Vietnam War imposed on the American people. They were stupendous and are suggested by the following analysis.
The war exacted a terrible human toll on the 3.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam. As of March 1973, some 57,625 U.S. troops had died, 47,205 in combat and 10,420 otherwise. In addition, 153,312 had been wounded or injured and required hospitalization; another 150,341 had been wounded or injured and were not hospitalized. Further, 3,592 were missing and 750 had been captured. Soldiers and marines fighting on the ground suffered 88 percent of combat deaths and 90 percent were enlisted men. Some 12 percent of those who died in combat were black. When the Vietnam Memorial was opened in Washington in November 1982, it listed the names of almost 58,000 men and women who had been killed or were missing in action in Vietnam. Among those not listed were a large number of amputees and paraplegics. About 6,655 persons lost limbs during the war.
The most melancholy cost of the war was that of combat veterans who survived only to suffer from severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The rigorous National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study made in the late eighties, twenty years after the war, revealed that 36 percent of combat veterans met the full American Psychiatric Association diagnostic criteria for PTSD. When Jonathan Shay published Achilles in Vietnam in 1994, there were more than 250,000 of them.
All of these men suffered from severe combat trauma, usually from sniper or mortar fire or from stepping on a land mine. Example from one of Dr. Shay’s patients:
I was walking point. I had seen this NVA soldier at a distance. … I stuck my head in the bush and saw this NVA hiding there and told him to come out. He started to move back and I saw he had one of those commando weapons, y’know, with a pistol grip under his thigh, and he brought it up and I was looking straight down the bore. I PULLED THE TRIGGER ON MY M-16 AND NOTHING HAPPENED. He fired and I felt this burning on my cheek. I don’t know what I did with the bolt of the 16, but I got it to fire, and I emptied everything I had into him. THEN I SAW BLOOD DRIPPING ON THE BACK OF MY HAND AND /just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. …
I lost all my mercy. … I just couldn’t get enough. … I built up such hate. I couldn’t do enough damage. …
Got worse as time went by. I really loved fucking killing, couldn’t get enough. For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away.
Such experiences often cause PTSD, which clamps its grip on the soldier for the rest of his life. The common symptoms are formidable: loss of memory and perception; constant mobilization for lethal danger with the potential for extreme violence; chronic health problems; expectation of betrayal and exploitation by others; alcohol and drug abuse; despair, isolation, a sense of the meaninglessness of life; and a tendency to suicide.
The cost of PTSD, evidently, has not been estimated, but it must be enormous. The total would have to include at least the following costs over the victim’s lifetime: psychiatric care, medical care, hospitalization, and drugs; forfeited income because many of these men are unemployable; incarceration because a disproportionate number are in jail; and welfare support.
The total dollar cost of the Vietnam War was immense and will continue well into the twenty-first century. In 1976 Robert Warren Stevens, using studies then available, divided his global estimate of the cost into four components: (1) the incremental budget cost to the U.S. government during the years the war was fought, that is, excluding defense expenditures that would have been made if there had been no war, estimated at $128.4 billion, (2) budgetary costs, mainly veteran’s benefits, incurred since the end of the war that must be paid because it was fought, $304.8 billion, (3) extra-budgetary economic costs imposed by the war on the American economy, $70.7 billion, and (4) indirect economic costs attributable to the war, such as recession, inflation, loss of exports, $378 billion. These four groups of costs add up to the gigantic total of $882 billion.
Was the war worth this immense price in blood and treasure? Admiral James B. Stockdale, who spoke with special authority, gave the answer. As a naval fighter pilot he had led a group of planes over that part of the Gulf of Tonkin where two U.S. destroyers had allegedly been attacked on August 3, 1964, which gave Lyndon Johnson the pretext for his first giant step into the war, passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Stockdale saw no North Vietnamese boats. He was later shot down, lost a leg, was tortured, and spent over seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp blindfolded. He did not see Vietnam until he returned in 1994. “I was surprised at how junky it looked. God, we were so dumb about it. Did we think of the lives we squandered on this dump?”
Robert Jay Lifton, the noted psychiatrist, celebrated the end of two wars in Times Square. On VE-Day in 1945 he was a medical student who joined a huge throng in a mood of “pure mass joy.” When Kissinger announced the standdown in Vietnam in 1973, the square was “seedy, almost deserted.” There were “a few Vietnam veterans gathered in anger, some drinking, others apparently on drugs, most simply enraged, screaming at the camera, at the society, about having been deceived by the war and ignored upon coming back.”
These veterans were bitter largely because they did not know why they had been sent to Vietnam. Nobody had told them. This was President Johnson’s job and he had failed to perform it. This must have been in part caused by his own inconsistency and dishonesty on the record. During the 1964 presidential campaign he repeatedly made the following point: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people [China] and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”
But in the first half of 1965 Johnson secretly reversed himself and on his own initiative led the United States into that war. He approved Rolling Thunder in February, the marine landing at Danang in March, and the commitment of major ground forces by July. Further, in April, his National Security Action Memorandum No. 328, after approving the troop commitments, stated: “The President desires that … premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions.” His intent was that “these movements and changes be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy.” How could the American people, including those who would serve in the war, understand a new policy that was being withheld from them? David Wise called 328 “one of the most shameful official documents of a shameful time in American history.”
Finally, on July 28, the President discussed publicly for the first time the military actions he had already authorized. This was as close as he came to a statement of his war aims in Vietnam. He offered the following arguments in defense of his actions: “Why,” he asked, “must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote place?” Answer: “We have learned at a terrible and brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.” This is an excellent question and a meaningless response.
Later Johnson says, “Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.” In fact, neither South Vietnam nor the U.S. faced the prospect of surrender. The comparison of Ho’s North Vietnam to Hitler’s Germany is ludicrous. The Nazis commanded enormous military force and, as Johnson put it, North Vietnam was a sixth-rate power.
Ho’s goal, the President said, was to “conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism.” There are two disparate ideas here. Ho’s objective, obviously, was to unite Vietnam under his rule. If that required “conquest” of the South and the “defeat of American power,” North Vietnam had no alternative but to assume those burdens.
The other idea, extending the “Asiatic dominion of communism,” was, of course, the domino theory. If South Vietnam falls, Johnson said, “most of the non-communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist the growing might and the grasping ambition of communism.” Eisenhower had introduced the domino metaphor in 1953 by warning that the loss of Vietnam would lead inexorably to the fall of Malaysia, other parts of Asia, and Indonesia. But it was a metaphor, not a description of reality. North Vietnam had given no sign of either the ambition or the capability to overrun other nations in Southeast Asia. In fact, in the seventies when it had united Vietnam it made no effort to do so. Nor did the other countries fear an invasion by North Vietnam. Neil Sheehan wrote, “There was, in fact, no international Communist conspiracy and no ‘Sino-Soviet bloc.’ The Communist world of the 1960s was a splintered world. The Chinese and the Soviets had openly despised each other for years.” So, too, had the Vietnamese and the Chinese, historic enemies. Sheehan continued, “Guerilla wars could not be spread like bacteria, and countries were not dominoes. They were living entities with national leaders who pursued their own agendas.”
Johnson then pointed out that “three Presidents—President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and your present President—over 11 years have committed themselves and have promised to help defend this small and valiant nation.” On its face, this statement was factually correct. But there was a fundamental difference between the Eisenhower and Kennedy policies and the policy Johnson was now implementing. As moderate cold warriors, they had sent equipment, trainers, and advisers to South Vietnam. They had not bombed the North and they certainly had not launched a land war in Asia in defiance of traditional American military doctrine.
Finally, the President left a gaping omission: a strategy for victory. He did not tell the American people how the war would be won or how long it would take. No wonder that thereafter Johnson’s aides repeatedly urged him without success to present a credible justification for the war and that the troops in Southeast Asia never knew why they were there.
The absence of meaningful war aims contributed to a massive decline in national morale, which fed both the peace movement and the young men subject to the draft. Draft evasion became the great pastime of the period. Millions of young men went to college or graduate school or got married to avoid service. A great many simply ignored their draft cards and some even burned them. An important haven of escape was the reserves and the National Guard, which Johnson refused to call up. Only 15,000 went to Vietnam and nearly a million remained comfortably at home. A significant group of young men went into exile, particularly in Canada and Sweden. A generation later two prominent politicians were embarrassed by draft evasion—Republican Vice President Dan Quayle and Democratic President Bill Clinton.
The pointlessness of the war undermined the morale of the troops in Vietnam, particularly in the Army. This created rage and mindless killing both of innocent civilians, as at My Lai, and the “fragging” of officers. Drugs and alcohol were widely used and there was racial tension. This came to a head in 1971 with riots among the troops in Vietnam.
One of the great casualties of the war was the credibility of the government, particularly the presidency. Lyndon Johnson had never messed much with the truth and his style—Texas hype, an obsession with secrecy, and a gross misunderstanding of the press—led to massive lying about the war. “There was a certain inevitability,” David Wise wrote, “that the term ‘credibility gap’ should have been born during the Johnson administration.” Wise should know because he was White House correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and his dispatch on May 23, 1965, contained probably the first use of the phrase. “It was a case where the man and the times fused.” Lying, particularly in wartime, was hardly a new feature of American politics. But, Wise noted, “nothing in our past had matched, in scale and quality, the grand deception of Vietnam.” Nixon, who confronted both the war and Watergate, was an even bigger liar than Johnson. Between them they undermined the credibility of American government for at least a generation.
Many of Johnson’s supporters recommended that he address his credibility problem. An example is a letter J. K. Galbraith wrote to Califano on December 16, 1966:
I would strongly urge the President to stamp very hard on this talk about credibility. And he should do it in the only possible way. This is to be particularly unvarnished in not only the good news but the bad. …
I would like to urge him to say flatly that we favor the equitable procedure of paying bills by taxation rather than by the inequitable and dangerous levy that is imposed by inflation. And I would also like to urge an equally flat statement that since personal incomes are now at an all time high, and are partly so in consequence of war spending, we can’t justify any argument for cutting back needed civilian expenditures because of the war.
I would urge the President to be equally candid and blunt on the problems that we face on foreign policy and notably on Vietnam. I think the ultimate response would be extremely favorable.
The President did not listen to such advice.
Johnson’s deceit, abetted by McNamara, as noted in Chapter 14, launched the Great Inflation. The rapid rise in prices was, in effect, a general sales tax on goods and services paid by Americans and those foreigners who imported our goods. Stevens estimated the inflation of gross national product for 1969–72 at $140 billion. It was much harder on those with fixed incomes than on those whose wages and salaries kept pace with advancing prices.
Perhaps most important, the great meat cleaver of the Vietnam War divided the country in a variety of ways. The conflict bitterly split those who favored it from those who opposed it, the old from the young, the well-educated from those who were poorly educated, most of the country from the South and the Southwest, and, most painfully, families. This did not end with the conclusion of hostilities in 1973; it was much in evidence a generation later. The war was the main cause for the great civil unrest that characterized the late sixties. The U.S. had not known such chaotic and violent division since the sectional conflict of the 1850s that led to the Civil War. The split was deep and venomous within Lyndon Johnson’s own Democratic party, particularly at the disastrous Chicago convention in 1968.
One may speculate over what might have been if the country had remained at peace. Economic policy was working superbly in 1965 and it is likely that prosperity would have continued into 1968. In Chicago the Democrats would have renominated the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and it would have won easily. This might have launched a long period of Democratic control of the White House and the Congress. The Great Society would have survived and might have been expanded.
This leads to the guns or butter issue—the Great Society versus the Vietnam War. Johnson tried desperately to have both, but that was impossible. The war squeezed out reform. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1966, “The Great Society is now, except for token gestures, dead.” This is substantially correct in the sense of further efforts to help the underclass—programs to eliminate poverty, to improve the education of the poor, to raise standards of health care, and to replace the ghettoes with decent housing. The legislative monuments of the Kennedy-Johnson era that primarily benefited the middle class, however, remained in place—tax policy, aid to education, particularly higher education, Medicare, the national parks, wilderness, efforts to improve air and water quality, public broadcasting, and so on. Neither the war nor Nixon undermined these programs. But after 1966 Vietnam and growing Republican strength revived the GOP-southern Democratic coalition which blocked Johnson’s efforts to help the underclass, and Nixon later substantially disemboweled these programs. Thus, Lyndon Johnson’s great dream of lifting the poor, particularly black people, to a level playing field was destroyed by his own war.3
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was a metaphor for a manic-depressive personality: the stunning highs of the Great Society followed by the abysmal lows of the Vietnam War. No other American President has experienced so striking a swing from success to failure. Joe Califano, who certainly was a witness, called his book The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. What manner of man was Johnson that he could spawn such a dramatic transformation?
He was a gigantic bundle of contradictions. Robert McNamara told Califano that he was the “most complicated man he’d ever met” and Califano agreed. The frequent shifts in mood and behavior make one wonder whether he ever established his own identity. What were the main contradictions in his personality?
Johnson possessed a first-class mind, perhaps at the genius level. This included a phenomenal memory and a large vocabulary. George Reedy, who understood him very well, wrote, “The Johnson IQ took a back seat to very few others—perhaps even to none. His mind was magnificent—fast, penetrating, resourceful.” Further, “he had the most superbly developed sense of timing in the whole history of American politics.” He had an uncanny ability to foresee future events and their impact on particular senators. “He could predict votes other senators did not even know they were going to cast.” White House aide Lee White stressed his “single-mindedness.” “He keeps his eye on that damned bull’s eye all the time.” In the debate over the 1957 Civil Rights Act a question of great intricacy under the common law arose—the distinction between civil and criminal contempt. Johnson took a few law books home one evening and the next day, according to Dean Acheson, one of the nation’s top lawyers who was helping Johnson with the amendments, was competent to argue the point before any court in the U.S. Intellectually, Acheson said, it was “awe-inspiring.” When he became President, Johnson had virtually no understanding of the federal budget. After evening and weekend meetings with Kermit Gordon, his budget director, he attained mastery of the subject.
But much of this intellectual power was piddled away. “He simply could not see a concept,” Reedy wrote, “without an immediate pragmatic objective.” Because of his marginal education and his refusal to read anything not directly related to his job, Johnson was unable to link his brilliance to a broad range of knowledge. Thus, he often perceived only half of a problem. Put another way, he was extremely bright but lacked wisdom.
He was obsessed with politics and cared about almost nothing else—literature, history, art, music, sports. When he was President and threw out the first ball at the Washington Senators opening game, he talked politics with the others in his party and paid no attention to what was taking place on the field.
Johnson cultivated the image of the proud Texan who was a tough, powerful leader. He wore expensive white beaver Stetsons, invoked Davy Crockett and the Alamo, and proudly showed off his handsome ranch on the Pedernales. In fact, he had lived most of his adult life in Washington, bought his clothes from expensive tailors, and moved in the highest social circles. His toughness was only skin deep. In his childhood he had been very insecure and dependent on his strong mother. He dreamed about flight from responsibilities and sometimes did run away. When his parents insisted that he go to college, he fled to California. On the day before the 1964 Atlantic City convention would nominate him for President he informed his wife and his closest aides, including Reedy, that he would not run. Both in 1960 and in 1968 he diddled with the decision to run and never became a serious candidate.
Johnson was extremely funny and was a brilliant mimic. He could split the sides of the people in his audience with his vast store of down-home stories delivered stone-faced in a rich Texas accent. Example: J. K. Galbraith wrote a speech for him. “Ken,” Johnson said, “this is a great speech. But I have to tell you that whenever a man makes any kind of economic speech … it’s like pissing down your leg; it makes you feel warm, but your audience is colder than a Texas norther.” Despite this wit, throughout his life Johnson fought spells of deep depression.
No other President except Nixon was so obsessed with secrecy. He did not want anyone to know what he was doing or intended to do until he alone made the announcement. He lectured, threatened, and berated his aides to protect his cocoon of secrecy. Yet he talked incessantly and was an incurable gossip. Smart reporters could sometimes figure out what he was going to do simply by studying what he said. This was eased by the fact that Johnson, though he officially “hated” the press, could not stay away from reporters. According to Charles Mohr of the New York Times, this was because he was lonely in the evening, particularly when his wife was away, as she was in early May 1965. Mohr wrote that one week Johnson “walked with the press” every day except Sunday. There were two-hour walks on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, on Saturday a walk followed by a long talk on the Truman balcony. On Monday Mohr was off, but there was a twilight walk on Tuesday.
Johnson, as noted above, had great trouble distinguishing between truth and falsehood. But, Reedy pointed out, he could always convince himself that whatever was coming out of his mouth was true. In time, of course, particularly over the war, the reporters and the public became aware of his massive lying and his credibility was destroyed. Some of the lies were whoppers. Example: During the 1964 campaign he repeatedly promised that he would not send American boys to fight and die in Vietnam. He was busy repudiating that pledge even before he was inaugurated on January 20, 1965.
Lyndon Johnson was indissolubly married and was at the same time a womanizer. When someone mentioned John Kennedy’s sexual escapades, Johnson would boast that he “had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose.” Reedy thought this “pure braggadocio. His physical desires were nowhere near those ascribed to JFK and to the extent that he indulged in extra-marital activity, it was usually with girls for whom he had ‘fallen.’ “ Lady Bird Johnson, Reedy wrote, “bore the whole thing with incredible fortitude. Always he came back to her because he needed her. She did have brains; she could be trusted; she would step into the breach at the psychological moment and patch up the gaping wounds he had inflicted.” Joe Califano on Mrs. Johnson: “She was a saint. … The most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met, including my own wife and mother.”
Johnson loved people in the abstract and treated many who depended upon him outrageously. He was a confirmed New Dealer who unhesitatingly invoked the power of the federal government to help the people at the bottom of the income scale. This, of course, led him to the Great Society. But a streak of cruelty caused him to humiliate his subordinates. Knowing that Hubert Humphrey hated to kill, he demanded that the Vice President shoot a deer at his ranch. He insisted on doing business with his aides in the bathroom while he defecated. He told them that he wanted a “kiss-my-ass-at-high-noon-in-Macy’s-window loyalty.” An outraged Reedy as witness:
He was notorious for abusing his staff, for driving people to the verge of exhaustion—and sometimes over the verge; for paying the lowest salaries on Capitol Hill; for publicly humiliating his most loyal aides; for keeping his office in a constant state of turmoil by playing games with reigning male and female favorites. …
His manners were atrocious—not just slovenly but frequently calculated to give offense. … He was a bully who would exercise merciless sarcasm on people who could not fight back but could only take it. Most important, he had no sense of loyalty. … To Johnson, loyalty was a oneway street; all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else—his family, his friends, his supporters. …
Occasionally he would demonstrate his gratitude for extraordinary services by a lavish gift—an expensive suit of clothes, an automobile, jewelry for the women on his staff. The gift was always followed by an outpouring of irrelevant abuse.
Califano’s ovservation on the effect of LBJ’s exploitation upon his aids: “There wasn’t a guy on the White House staff who didn’t have a hell of a problem with his wife, including me and everybody I knew on that staff. Everybody.”
Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, after each checked independently with a psychiatrist, became convinced that Johnson was paranoid and, in part for that reason, both left him. Doris Kearns, after interviewing him at length, reached the same conclusion. Douglass Cater said that he drafted many letters of resignation and never sent any of them. Reedy wrote of Johnson’s “tantrums” and “rampages,” often caused in part by heavy drinking, that were the prelude to “a flood of invective.” He speculated unsuccessfully about the causes, “but I cannot avoid the feeling that there were deeper causes which will probably never be known.”
Johnson did not vent his rage on Califano. Rather, he refused to talk to him and would give instructions through his secretary. Jack Valenti simply took the President’s outbursts. Moyers, according to Califano, “would go out for two hours and just drive around in a car.” Harry McPherson spoke of Johnson’s “moods.” “I suppose,” he said, “an analyst would say [he behaved] in some manic depressive way.” McPherson’s relationship with Johnson became “intense” and he saved his “sanity” by pulling away. He talked to a psychoanalyst friend who said that Johnson was a “clean-tube man.” Every once in a while his plumbing got plugged and “he blows everything out: good, bad, fears, rages, all of it. And he has got more to blow out than most people do.” McPherson learned to get out of the way when Johnson was about to blow out his tubes.
Thus, if all of Lyndon Johnson’s contradictions worked out on the downside, he would have had these characteristics: ignorance of many important matters, a warped over-emphasis on politics, a preoccupation with his own image, a tendency to run away from important decisions, an obsession with secrecy, an addiction to lying, a yen for sex, a cruel streak that caused him to humiliate people who were loyal to him, and a propensity for “moods” and “tantrums” that some called paranoid or manic depressive.
These contradictions, this yin and yang of personality, meant that Johnson was prone to making mistakes of judgment. Reedy devoted a chapter of his memoir to what he called “A Gap of Understanding,” that is, Johnson’s failure to grasp the role of the press in our society and his mule-like refusal to try to understand.
During his presidency Lyndon Johnson made two momentous decisions. The first was reached on Air Force One on November 22, 1963, immediately after he was sworn in as President: he would push at once for the enactment of Kennedy’s domestic program in 1964; he would win election as President in November of that year; and he would announce his own much broader domestic program in 1965. In his mind there was a sharp distinction between government officials who were elected and those who were not. He had become an unelected, accidental President. Kennedy had won the office by election and his agenda, therefore, was in Johnson’s mind sanctioned. Excepting poverty, all the programs had their legislative origins in the Congress of the late fifties when he had been majority leader in the Senate. He was thoroughly familiar with them and he strongly approved of the tax cut, civil rights, federal aid for education, and Medicare. Now a national figure, he was no longer constrained by Texas conservatism and could act out his own New Deal convictions on the Kennedy program.
The second momentous decision, of course, was to commit American military forces to the war in Vietnam. Here, too, he confronted legitimacy. As an accidental President he could not make that bold commitment. But his landslide victory over Goldwater in November 1964 was a transformation. Reedy, who was working for him at the White House, wrote, “His presidential style changed overnight and it was not a good change.” Reedy had been trying to get him to hold a long overdue press conference. Johnson said, “I’ve been kissing asses all my life and I don’t have to kiss them any more. Tell those press bastards of yours that I’ll see them when I want to and not before.” Reedy thought there would be trouble and that it would not be confined to the press.
Richard Goodwin, who was also in the White House, made an even graver observation. “During 1965, and especially in the period which enveloped the crucial midsummer decision that transformed Vietnam into an American war, I became convinced that the president’s always large eccentricities had taken a huge leap into unreason.”
These observations lead to the reason for Lyndon Johnson’s decision to go into Vietnam: hubris. He was convinced that he headed the world’s mightiest military power. With contempt he called North Vietnam a “pissant” sixth-rate or “raggety-ass” fourth-rate nation. With the legitimacy he had won in the election, he need not consult the Congress, or, for that matter, even let Congress or the American people in on his secret. In the Greek sense, this was the arrogance that aroused the anger of the gods and caused them to inflict disaster upon the one who went to war. As with Pericles and Athens, the preference for guns over butter would bring calamity to Lyndon Johnson and to the United States.4