CHAPTER 23

CONTAINMENT AT HOME AND ABROAD

FEW PRESIDENTS, UPON ENTERING OFFICE, CARE MOREabout foreign than domestic policy; Richard Nixon is at the head of a short list. More than most, however, Lyndon Johnson would have preferred to concentrate on domestic affairs. He had no overriding desire to remake the world in America’s image, and he quite naturally hoped that ongoing hot spots like Korea, Southeast Asia, Berlin, and Cuba would remain calm. But after thirty years in Washington observing and participating in matters relating to World War II and the cold war, he labored under no illusions. The United States had faced threats first from the fascist powers and then from the forces of international communism. The cold war was a fact of life.

Johnson was not a triumphalist, but a Niebuhrian. Evil exists in the world. With an eye to the evil within themselves, righteous men and women must confront the evil without, knowing that they can never triumph completely but taking comfort in their willingness to struggle. Johnson had no comprehensive strategy for winning the cold war; as with most presidents, his policies and philosophies emerged in response to the management of specific situations and crises. He began with some basic assumptions, however. First and foremost was the avoidance of nuclear war.¹At the first National Security Council meeting following Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson read and reread a statement that had been prepared by McGeorge Bundy: “The greatest single requirement is that we find a way to ensure the survival of civilization in the nuclear age. A nuclear war would be the death of all our hopes and it is our task to see that it does not happen.”²Throughout the 1964 presidential campaign, he made it clear that he rejected all notions of “limited nuclear war” and did not intend to delegate the decision to use atomic weapons to other persons or nations. In one of his most powerful speeches, Johnson told a Detroit audience in September, “Modern weapons are not like any other. In the first nuclear exchange, 100 million Americans and more than 100 million Russians would all be dead. And when it was all over, our great cities would be in ashes, our fields would be barren, our industry would be destroyed, and our American dreams would have vanished. As long as I am president I will bend every effort to make sure that day never comes.”³

Like George Kennan and other apostles of containment, LBJ believed that the object of the cold war was to restrain the forces of international communism until the system collapsed of its own internal contradictions. He was convinced that any leader who placed an abstract idea above the interests of the individual was bound to fail. No one better understood that freedom had to be limited to protect the common good—big business had to be regulated to prevent abuse of the public interest, for example—but denial of the right of individuals to exercise a voice in their own government and to strive to better their lives transgressed against human nature and would not long be tolerated. To Johnson, containment meant not just bases, alliances, and weapons systems, but people-to-people aid. How to assist peasants and workers living in third world nations directly, bypassing the dictatorial and often corrupt regimes that ruled them, was a problem that occupied an increasingly large part of the president’s foreign policy thought.

By the time Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office, a broad anticommunist consensus had emerged in America. It was accepted by virtually the entire political spectrum except for the far left, always a tiny minority. Its cutting edge was a small, fanatical minority on the far right. The 1960s had begun not only with the political triumph of a young, activist, progressive president but also, and perhaps not coincidentally, with the emergence of a new American radical right whose membersTime magazine labeled “the ultras.” Early in 1959, Robert H. W. Welch Jr., a fudge and candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, had gathered eleven of his friends in an Indianapolis hotel where, in due course, they founded the John Birch Society. The organization, which spread like wildfire for two years, was a semisecret network of “Americanists” dedicated to fighting communists by deliberately adopting some of communism’s own clandestine and ruthless tactics—including the deliberate destruction of democracy, which Welch contemptuously described as government by “mobocracy.” Meanwhile, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Reverend Billy James Hargis had launched the Christian Crusade (“America’s largest antiCommunist organization”). The pink-faced, jowly evangelist specialized in coast-to-coast revivalist meetings, during which he delivered fundamentalist and anticommunist sermons, and organized Christian youth to combat the “Red Menace.” Similarly, Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt financed an anticommunist radio program broadcast over three hundred stations.

Racism was a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit feature of the radical right of the 1960s. Whether in the speeches of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond or in the pages of theCitizen , the national publication of the white supremacist Citizens’ Councils of America, segregationists lambasted the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy to undermine American society.⁴The leaders of the radical right promised to make communism a tangible problem with which the average American could come to grips. As had the McCarthyites of the previous decade, the ultras argued vehemently that the real threat to the nation’s security resided not so much in Sino-Soviet imperialism overseas as in communist subversion at home. They urged citizens to fight this subversion by keeping a close eye on their fellow citizens, scrutinizing voting records, writing letters, and generally raising the alarm. Above all, the ultras were extremists—they brooked no compromise. “You’re either for us or against us,” insisted a California electronics company executive. “There’s no room in the middle any more.” Mainstream conservatives shunned the ultras because of their religious fundamentalism, often blatant racism, and their flirtation with fascism. But they shared their view of communism. The intellectuals who wrote for theNational Review in the 1950s and 1960s—Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Freda Utley, and Max Eastman—all viewed foreign affairs “as a titanic conflict of ideologies, religions, and civilizations.” As Robert Strausz-Huppe of the University of Pennsylvania put it, “The Communist system is a conflict system; its ideology is an ideology of conflict and war … In spite of the twists and turns of the internecine power struggle, the communist system will endure so long as external pressures do not compound internal strains and bring the system crashing down.”⁵

America’s mainstream cold warriors, however, melded the philosophies of conservative anticommunists, who defined national security in terms of bases and alliances, and liberal reformers who were determined to export democracy and facilitate overseas social and economic progress. Spearheading the first group were former isolationists like Henry Luce, who believed that if the United States could not hide from the world it must control it. Joining these realpolitikers were liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Dean Acheson, and Hubert Humphrey. Products of World War II, these internationalists saw America’s interests as being tied up with those of other countries. They opposed communism because it constituted a totalitarian threat to cultural diversity, individual liberty, and self-determination. Conservatives and their liberal adversaries may have differed as to their notions of the ideal America but not over whether America was ideal or over whether it was duty-bound to lead the “free world” into a new era of prosperity and stability.

Whatever his thoughts concerning their political shrewdness, Johnson identified with Humphrey, Rauh, and Schlesinger when it came to foreign policy matters. He was a liberal internationalist committed to containing communism through both military strength and foreign aid. He was also determined to prevent conservatives from painting the Democratic party and the social justice goals for which it stood as socialist-communist. Domestic anticommunism threatened the Great Society in general and the civil rights movement in particular. How to control these passions, he was not at all sure. In early 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, Johnson would observe to a group of China experts that it was difficult to wage a major war against one communist entity without having the public and Congress wanting to go to war with all of international communism. He was immensely proud that he had been able to do battle with North Vietnam and the Vietcong and at the same time pursue a policy of détente with the Soviet Union—but could he control anticommunism at home? It was up to the United States to carry on an endurance contest in Vietnam in such a way as not to lead to inflexibility on other issues.⁶

Like other liberal internationalists, Johnson was convinced that communism was able to make inroads only in areas where the existing political system had failed to provide basic economic and social security for its citizens. Where there was hunger, disease, homelessness, and ignorance, fascism or communism would flourish. Men and women would always be willing to sacrifice their liberty for food, shelter, and a future for their children. It was thus incumbent upon the democracies to create the social and economic conditions where freedom could exist. Johnson’s was a kind of Christian internationalism. It was based on the Social Gospel, not institutional engineering; on compassion, not more perfect government. Christian internationalism was not a substitute for multilateralism, but it was meant to transcend it. Indeed, in conversations with Bill Fulbright and others in 1964, Johnson expressed grave reservations about the efficacy of the assumptions that had been responsible for the original containment policy: the Munich analogy, the domino theory, and the notion of a monolithic communist threat. They were deeply embedded in the culture and could not be ignored. Yet they all boiled down to balance-of-power concepts that were irrelevant to Khrushchev’s wars of national liberation. They presumed that conflict would be international rather than intranational. Addressing a celebration of the bicentennial of American Methodism in early 1966, he declared:

From John Wesley to your leaders of today, Methodists have always believed that works of compassion among men were part of God’s will in action … The Social Creed of the Methodist Church—written in 1940—is a most eloquent statement of that belief … “We pant for equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life … for adequate provision for the protection, the education, the spiritual nurture and the wholesome recreation for every child … for the abatement of poverty and the right of all men to live … We believe that it is our Christian duty to do our utmost to provide for all men the opportunity to earn an adequate livelihood … We oppose all forms of social, economic, and moral waste … ” It would be very hard for me to write a more perfect description of the American ideal—or of the American commitments in the 1960s … And while we are doing that I am not going to confine our efforts just to my own children or just to my own town or my own State or my own Nation. I am concerned with all the 3 billion human beings that live in this world. I was concerned with the people of Europe when a dictator was marching through, gobbling up selfless countries and helpless countries … But just as I was concerned then—the human beings that were in concentration camps—I am concerned now with the little brown men in Southeast Asia whose freedom they are trying to preserve.⁷

LBJ’s moral rhetoric was a justification for foreign policies undertaken for strategic and economic reasons, but they were also a natural outgrowth of his background, his family, the milieu in which he grew up, his concepts of right and wrong. He understood that freedom did not always translate into social justice, and he believed that democracy would not necessarily eradicate hunger, ignorance, and injustice. Only in the context of a morally compelling ethic could freedom and democracy do these things. If they could not, then they would be discredited in the eyes of the world, and alternative political creeds might very well triumph.

 

THE FOREIGN POLICY ESTABLISHMENTthat LBJ inherited was headed by an impressive triumvirate: Robert McNamara at Defense, Dean Rusk at State, and McGeorge Bundy as NSC adviser.

Robert Strange McNamara, his middle name taken from his mother’s maiden name, had grown up in a middle-class family in San Francisco and Oakland. His father, sales manager for a shoe firm, was a Catholic, but Bob chose the Protestant faith of his mother. After graduating from high school with honors, he entered Berkeley when Robert Gordon Sproul was turning it into a great university. At Berkeley, he balanced academics, socializing, and sports—mountain climbing and skiing—with ease. High marks came to him easily, so easily that he was able to read broadly and take an astounding array of courses. Upon graduation he entered Harvard Business School, where his mathematical and analytical skills made him a standout. He married an old friend, Margaret Craig, and settled down to teach accounting at Harvard. During World War II he served in the army air corps. Almost single-handedly, young McNamara developed the planning and logistics for the Allied strategic bombing of occupied Europe. Following the war, he took a job with Ford Motor Company, whose antiquated business practices had caused it to fall far behind General Motors in the race to dominate the domestic and foreign auto markets. He and a group of equally talented young engineers and statisticians worked to convert Ford from its archaic one-man-rule ways to the GM corporate model, which featured planning, rationalization, decentralization, and accountability. McNamara quickly became first among equals at Ford, but he was more than that. He was one of a new breed of corporate executives who did not come from business, but were well-educated technicians who relied on statistics and computers to rationalize every phase of the business operation. At work McNamara was totally focused, single-minded, driven, but out of the office he proved social, gregarious, philosophical, and philanthropic. “Why is it,” asked Bobby Kennedy, “that they all call him ‘the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?”⁸He had been president of Ford barely a week when Robert Lovett, who had been McNamara’s boss in the air force, recommended him to the Kennedys to be secretary of defense.⁹

McNamara was already something of a legend when Johnson succeeded to the presidency. He was superb with charts and statistics. Once, while sitting at a CINCPAC (Commander in Chief Pacific) meeting for hours, watching hundreds of slides on the logistics of the Vietnam War, McNamara stopped the show. Slide number 869 contradicted slide number 11, he said. He was right, of course. As intended, his audience was intimidated. With his characteristic steel-rimmed glasses and slicked-back black hair, McNamara came to Washington to rationalize the Defense Department’s $85 billion operation, to squeeze every globule of fat out of it, to make it the most efficient machine known to man. As he promised LBJ a week following the assassination, the foundation stones of his defense policy would be military strength at the lowest possible cost.¹⁰

But McNamara also intended to change the culture in Defense. In his view, the department had degenerated into groups of military spoilsmen, focusing on expanding the mission and assets of their particular branch without any consideration for the whole, strategically or politically. And they tended to respond to any and all perceived threats with contingency plans that called for maximum use of force.¹¹He insisted that the Joint Chiefs be aware of and take into consideration not only the total defense picture, but political and diplomatic considerations as well. There was but one national interest, and it was defined by the president of the United States. In 1964, he promoted General Earle “Bus” Wheeler over several more senior officers for the job of JCS chairman. Cool, intelligent, articulate, educated, Wheeler was McNamara’s kind of general.¹²

When he entered office, McNamara discovered that the belief that the use of nuclear power could in some circumstances serve the national interest was pervasive in the military and in Congress. He dedicated himself to correcting that view. And he was determined that congressional committees not be the tails that wagged the defense dog. “I did not believe that it was my function to yield to the pressures of narrow constituencies,” he observed.¹³To help reform defense policy, McNamara brought in a new group of whiz kids, Rhodes scholars and editors of the Harvard and YaleLaw Reviews: Cyrus Vance, Roswell Gilpatric, Harold Brown, Paul Nitze, Alain Enthoven, Joseph Califano, and John McNaughton. This group worked almost as a fifth column within the Defense Department, laboring to bring it to heel.¹⁴

McNamara was a man of first-rate intelligence, dedicated to using the power that he craved, and proved so adept at accumulating, to serve the common good. The fact that he had contempt for his own department and little or no appreciation of the military as a human institution boded ill for the future. So, too, did his lack of experience in and feel for electoral or congressional politics. “McNamara … certainly is a ‘can do’ guy,” Orville Freeman, his squash partner, observed, “but [he] … also has about as little perceptiveness, understanding and sensitivity in politics as anyone I’ve ever talked to.”¹⁵

Second in the foreign policy triumvirate LBJ had inherited from Jack Kennedy was Dean Rusk. Two themes appear to have dominated the secretary of state’s upbringing: Calvinism and militarism. Dean was the son of Robert Hugh Rusk, one of twelve children from a poor Scots-Irish Georgia family. After working his way through Davidson College, Robert Rusk studied to become a Presbyterian minister, abandoned that for life on a hardscrabble dirt farm, and finally settled his family in Atlanta. Dean, one of three brothers, was fond of church and reading the Bible; like so many other southern boys he revered all things military, read military history, and played war games at every opportunity. By the time Dean graduated from high school, the traits that would characterize his adult life had emerged: self-control, diligence, a sense of fatalism concerning the vagaries of life, and an overwhelming commitment to duty. Like his father, young Rusk attended Davidson College, where, because of his intelligence and hard work, one of his teachers suggested that he interview for a Rhodes scholarship. Dean was a candidate that would have warmed the cockles of Cecil Rhodes’s heart; while earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, he played basketball and tennis at Davidson and took a leading role in both the ROTC and YMCA. At Oxford, Rusk focused on international affairs and won a number of prestigious academic awards. He returned to the States and took a teaching job at Mills College in California.¹⁶

During World War II, Rusk served in army intelligence and then as a plans officer in the China-Burma-India theater. There he caught the eye of George Marshall. Rusk was one of the soldier-intellectuals—John McCloy, Charles Bonesteel, and Andrew Goodpaster were others—whom Marshall identified to map out strategy for victory and peace in East Asia. After the war, he brought Rusk back to Washington to work in the State Department under him. Marshall—civil, selfless, austere, self-controlled, hard-working, and loyal—became Rusk’s hero and role model. Both men were intelligent, with strong analytical minds, but they did not force their ideas on others; they demanded structure, obedience, and discipline of themselves and those who worked for them. Marshall and Rusk believed in good and evil but appreciated the difficulty of identifying both. They understood that man is a fallen creature, with only a very limited ability to do good, but it was humankind’s duty to try, and they gloried in the struggle. Capitalism had its faults, but it was virtuous compared to communism. Capitalism, at least, was compatible, even conducive to democracy, but communism could coexist only with totalitarianism.

Following Eisenhower’s election, Rusk retired from public life to head the Rockefeller Foundation. It was there that Jack Kennedy found him and decided to make him secretary of state. Rusk, who loved the office he held, believed it was his duty to discern the president’s will and adhere to it. “I never let any blue sky show between his point of view and my point of view,” he said of the presidents he served.¹⁷Unlike McNamara and Bundy, Rusk was not a member of the Hickory Hill gang. Bobby Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, and Pierre Salinger found him dull, pedestrian. They viewed his habit of speaking his mind only privately directly to the president as quaint and unproductive. But he was clearly dutiful, loyal, diligent, and hard-working—a difficult individual to get rid of.¹⁸

McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was a man much more like McNamara than Rusk. Bundy’s credentials as a Boston Brahmin were impeccable. His mother was descended from the Lowells, who had long dominated the intellectual and cultural life of New England. McGeorge was one of those “Harvards,” as Lyndon Johnson referred to them, who reveled in his milieu but recognized its provinciality. He took care to profit from the education and connections that upper-class life in New England offered, but he flattered himself that he had transcended them. McGeorge was born in 1919 and attended Groton, the finest preparatory school in the East. There he dazzled, winning every academic honor. He played football, debated, and earned a perfect score on his college entrance exams. It was here that he entered the world of rich and privileged intellectuals-to-be who would opt for a life of public service rather than academe or business. Indeed, Groton’s motto wasCui servire regnare , “To serve is to rule.”¹⁹To broaden him, Bundy’s parents sent him to Yale rather than Harvard because the former was thought to be somewhat more plebian than the latter. He earned Phi Beta Kappa honors, starred again as a debater, and wrote for theYale Daily News. In one piece he addressed himself to the fascist threat then confronting Europe: “Let me put my whole proposition in one sentence. I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good god; these beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolf Hitler.”²⁰From Yale McGeorge went to Harvard, but not as a regular graduate student; he was a junior fellow, enrolled in a special program funded by his great uncle, A. Lawrence Lowell, designed to allow the truly gifted to bypass ordinary doctoral work. Despite his poor eyesight, Bundy managed to get into the navy during World War II, serving as an aide to Admiral Alan Kirk. Following V-J Day he returned to Harvard to teach government.²¹

Bundy came to Kennedy’s attention when the candidate was courting the Charles River intellectuals during the 1960 campaign. The two men took an instant liking to each other. Both had a strong sense of public service and sharp, incisive minds, and they both hated to bore and be bored. With his insightful, lucid analyses and his self-effacing arrogance—Bundy was contemptuous of and abusive toward those in government he considered unequal to the task at hand—Bundy quickly became Kennedy’s chief foreign affairs lieutenant. The national security adviser was “a super pragmatist,” observed James Thomson, his assistant for East Asia. He recalled a typical Bundy observation: “The fact of the matter is: We’re here and what do we do tomorrow?” He believed, Thompson said, that “if you begin to suggest reconsidering the whole, unraveling the entire ball of yarn, you’re in danger of being viewed as a sorehead and a long-winded fool.”²²

Johnson was initially deferential to his foreign policy team. He perceived that, whether from ambition or principle, they were willing to put the past behind them and work to make the Johnson presidency successful. At one level, the president viewed those who worked for him as both trophies he had won and reflections on the magnetism of his personality and the glamour of his agenda. He was intensely proud to have a Rhodes scholar, a former president of Ford, and the dean of Harvard College as his foreign affairs advisers. An observer recalled Johnson’s visible appreciation of Mac Bundy’s style: “A small amused smile would come to his face, like a hitting coach watching a fine hitter or a connoisseur watching a great ballet dancer. Mac was dancing, and dancing for him.”²³

Personally, LBJ felt most comfortable with Rusk. As he remarked to Sam Houston, the Georgian was not like some of the “bastards in the Kennedy administration: He’s a damned good man. Hard working, bright, and loyal as a beagle. You’ll never catch him working at cross purposes with his President.”²⁴But he viewed the State Department as undisciplined, filled with egotistical individuals willing to go off on their own and to leak state secrets if it furthered their agenda. To Johnson, Rusk would be primarily a furnisher of information. He appreciated Bundy but also felt, wrongly, that the national security adviser condescended toward him. LBJ loved technology, the notion that science and rational thought could work outside the box, solve the insoluble, and thus produce a better world. Thus did he find Robert McNamara attractive. He knew he would have to win the defense secretary’s respect; consequently, during several initial cabinet and NSC meetings, LBJ demonstrated that his grasp of detail and ability to multitask was equal or superior to McNamara’s. He agreed with the Defense chief that the uniformed members of the Pentagon staff should be carefully controlled, and he went out of his way to broadcast his position. “Tell the admiral … and tell the generals … that if they think they can pressure their commander in chief about what his strategy ought to be in war or what his decision ought to be in peace,” he instructed Roswell Gilpatric, McNamara’s deputy, “they don’t know their commander-in-chief.”²⁵He seemed to trust McNamara implicitly, until he began to turn against the war in Vietnam. Though McNamara and Bundy had voted Republican for most of their lives, they, along with Rusk, were committed to social justice. McNamara especially would play a leading role in helping to make the Great Society efficacious.

Strong as they were, none of the three could match LBJ’s force of personality. “I’m not afraid of him,” David Bruce, the respected American diplomat, said, “but I must say that when he entered a room, particularly if you were going to be the only person in it, somehow the room seemed to contract—this huge thing, it’s almost like releasing a djinn from one of those Arabian Nights’ bottles. The personality sort of fills the room. Extraordinary thing.”²⁶

Under Eisenhower, the CIA, run by John Foster Dulles’s brother, Allen, had played a major role in formulating and implementing the nation’s foreign policy. The agency not only gathered information but conducted covert political and paramilitary operations from Guatemala to Iran. Angered and embarassed by the botched Bay of Pigs affair, Kennedy had relegated the CIA to intelligence gathering, although he did permit it to continue its conspiracy to kill Castro. The man whom Kennedy had selected to replace Dulles as head of the CIA, John McCone, deplored the “cloak and dagger” reputation the agency had acquired. “Our real contribution was to take all intelligence, including clandestine and technical intelligence, and meld it into a proper and thoughtful analysis estimate of any given situation,” he once observed.²⁷Almost as soon as he returned from Dallas, LBJ called McCone and assured him of his faith both in the agency and in the director personally.²⁸“He said that he felt my work in intelligence was of greatest importance,” McCone recorded in his notes of the meeting, “but he did not wish me to confine myself to this role. He said that he had observed that I had rather carefully avoided expressing myself on policy or suggesting courses of action and he suggested that it might be for interdepartmental reasons that I would wish to continue to do this in meetings … but nevertheless he invited and would welcome my coming to him from time to time with suggestions of courses of action on policy matters which, in my opinion, were wise even though they were not consistent with advice he was receiving from responsible people.”²⁹And, in fact, unlike Kennedy, LBJ appeared to want policy advice from the agency. As he would demonstrate, he was perfectly willing to conduct covert operations.³⁰

Kennedy had relied heavily on the national security adviser but not at all on the National Security Council, two very different entities. The adviser was a person, Bundy, who presided over a staff of forty-eight people operating its own situation room in the White House. Bundy organized foreign policy meetings for the president, providing the documents that would enable him to evaluate the recommendations he received and make his own independent decision if he deemed it necessary. The NSC, on the other hand, was a large, unwieldy body that included not only the foreign policy cabinet officers but the vice president, the secretary of the treasury, and a host of other officials.

Johnson met regularly with the NSC for show. Except for the bombing of North Vietnam and the Dominican crisis of 1965, he did not jump down the chain of command on military diplomatic matters, and he didn’t make decisions at NSC meetings. He preferred to deal solely with the relevant cabinet and agency heads or their deputies. Indeed, Johnson proved to be a fairly competent, disciplined administrator.³¹Under LBJ, the “Tuesday Lunch” meeting became an institution. On Tuesday, February 4, he convened Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy for an informal discussion of foreign policy. The same group met two weeks later, and regularly thereafter with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Bus Wheeler, CIA Director McCone, and (after he became press secretary) Bill Moyers. Johnson, who feared and detested leaks, favored these meetings. “They were invaluable sessions,” Rusk recalled, “because we all could be confident that everyone around the table would keep his mouth shut and wouldn’t be running off to Georgetown cocktail parties and talking about it.”³²

Johnson also had informal advisers. He frequently discussed thorny diplomatic problems with Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, and Richard Russell. All were nationalists, Russell conservative, Fortas and Clifford more liberal, and all had a sharp sense of political reality. All were practical, pragmatic men who recognized the need to work within the parameters of the cold war consensus, and all wanted the Johnson presidency to succeed.

When it came to foreign affairs, LBJ was excruciatingly sensitive to the media. In January 1964, theNew York Herald Tribune ran an article arguing that the Johnson administration seemed to have no plan of action for the international arena, preferring simply to react to events as they developed, to limit its role to that of crisis manager. That same month, Douglas Kiker wrote a series of articles forTime implying that LBJ did not know anything about foreign affairs; when it came to international relations, the country was adrift. Writing in theNew York Times , James Reston observed that the president seemed “insecure” when it came to dealing with matters of diplomacy.³³Convinced that the stories had been planted by Bobby Kennedy and his entourage, Johnson took momentary comfort in the fact that his top three policy advisers were Kennedy holdovers. But he could not help taking the criticism personally, and it spurred him to a frenzy of activity, meeting with every ambassador and foreign dignitary he could round up and lashing his aides to develop new initiatives. On New Year’s Day, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had sent a widely publicized proposal to Johnson and other world leaders calling for an East-West nonaggression pact. LBJ felt as if he were being shown up. “I wonder why you don’t get Rusk and the five ablest men in the State Department and go up to Camp David,” he told Bundy, “and lock the gate this weekend and try to find some imaginative proposal or some initiative that we can take besides just reaction to actions and just let Khrushchev wire everybody … and us just sit back and dodge … I am tired, by God, of having him be the man who wants peace and I am the guy who wants war. And I’m just a big, fat slob that they throw a dagger into and I bleed and squirm just like a Mexican bullfighter.”³⁴

Of necessity, Johnson and his foreign policy team turned their attention first to Latin America. The goal of U.S. foreign policy had been and would continue to be to promote democracy, prosperity, and social justice south of the Rio Grande, without opening the door to communist infiltration. This objective proved virtually impossible to attain. Despite the election of democratic, civilian governments in Venezuela and several other countries, most Latin American republics were ruled by coalitions consisting of landed aristocracy and the business elite, the military, and the Catholic Church. For centuries, this unholy alliance had exploited peasants and workers while the Church’s teachings on birth control contributed to a population explosion. U.S. military aid did nothing to feed, educate, or enfranchise the masses; indeed, it was often used to oppress the very people it was intended to help. Nonmilitary aid, too, was generally diverted by ruling elites into their own pockets or manipulated to safeguard their political position. By the time LBJ entered the White House, there were already signs that the Alliance for Progress was proving unequal to the task of fostering a social and economic revolution in Latin America. First, unlike the Marshall Plan, the Alliance offered loans rather than grants. Second, between 1961 and 1969, only a fraction of the $10 billion promised had been delivered, and much of it went to pay Latin American debts owed to the United States. Though the region’s GNP grew at an annual rate of 4.5 percent during the 1960s, the per capita increase was only 2 percent because of population growth.³⁵Social discontent increased accordingly.

Marxism-Leninism had been a part of the Latin American left since the 1920s, and it remained on the cutting edge of many worker-peasant movements from Chile to Mexico. With the rise of Castro in Cuba, that nation’s increasingly close ties with the Soviet Union and communist China, and Castro’s periodic promise to spread his revolution to the rest of Latin America, communism appeared to North Americans to be a real threat to the hemisphere’s security. No one had been more alarmed than Jack and Robert Kennedy. Bobby had been obsessed with the plot to kill Castro, the administration’s support for the coup in Argentina by the anticommunist military that ousted Arturo Frondizi in 1963, and the political warfare it waged against left-leaning Brazilian president João Goulart.³⁶Indeed, by the time of Kennedy’s assassination, U.S. Latin American policy had left Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin and their “openings to the left” strategy far behind. According to historian Stephen Rabe, by 1963 the Kennedy administration had ruled out “financing expropriations of land and actually opposed agrarian reform laws.”³⁷Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien asked Ralph Dungan, another Kennedy aide with foreign policy experience, to keep an eye on that “Goddamned Goodwin and Schlesinger, crazy nuts on Latin America.”³⁸

LBJ had been an outspoken supporter of the Alliance for Progress, and he believed that Operation Mongoose was counterproductive, ordering its end almost as soon as he became president.³⁹At the same time, he was aware of the public’s Castrophobia, which was shared by Congress and fueled by expatriate Cubans. At a foreign policy meeting with LBJ, Bundy, and others in December 1963, McCone reported that Cuban agents were hiding large caches of arms in Venezuela and recommended “a series of steps ranging from economic denial through blockade and even to possible invasion.”⁴⁰Yet when he was vice president, LBJ and his advisers had come to the conclusion that the threat posed by Castro in Cuba had been “grossly exaggerated.” As George Reedy put it, “The facts are that Castro is a two-bit dictator who took over from another two-bit dictator. He maintains his position only because of his lifeline to Moscow and Peiping [Beijing].”⁴¹Nonetheless, not only Republicans but also ambitious Democrats would be waiting to pounce if the administration showed any sign of weakness.⁴²

From all accounts, JFK’s assassination had badly shaken Castro. He feared that Oswald’s links to the Free Cuba committee would be used as an excuse for an outright U.S. attack. There were no longer any Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba to use as leverage. Consequently, although Cuba had received renewed assurances from the Soviet Union of continuing economic aid and, if there was an invasion, military intervention, Castro intimated that Cuba was prepared to take significant steps to normalize relations with the United States. Johnson and his advisers decided to participate in supersecret talks with Castro, all the while keeping the economic blockade in place, attempting to penetrate the Cuban army and government with anti-Castro personnel, and sponsoring acts of sabotage that would create chaos in Cuba. A hypothetical conversation with Castro conjured up by Gordon Chase of the NSC staff summed up America’s position in early 1964: “Fidel … we intend to maintain, and whenever possible, to increase our pressure against you until you fall … However, we are reasonable men. We are not intent on having your head per se, neither do we relish the suffering of the Cuban people. You know our central concerns—the Soviet connection and the subversion. If you feel you are in a position to allay these concerns, we can probably work out a way to live amicably together.”⁴³

In January 1964, LBJ appointed Thomas Mann assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and special assistant to the president. A native of Laredo, Texas, Mann had earned bachelor’s and law degrees from Baylor before entering the foreign service. He had worked in the Eisenhower State Department as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs under Douglas Dillon and was ambassador to Mexico when Johnson tapped him. Fluent in Spanish, Mann had grown up in a border town where Latin American history had real meaning. He remembered as a very young child in 1915 being sequestered in a back room of his parents’ house while Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa fought for control of Nuevo Laredo.⁴⁴A committed noninterventionist and supporter of FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, Mann considered himself a liberal. He was, nonetheless, staunchly anticommunist. Though he remained close to Dillon and considered himself a friend of Jack Kennedy, he immediately found himself on the outs with the Schlesinger-Goodwin group. “Some of the supporters of President Kennedy, none of them in senior positions,” he noted in his diary, “began to speak of the need for ‘structural change’ in all American societies; about the need to cultivate the ‘angry young men’ in Latin America and to compete with them for popular support in the area by proposing ‘bold’ changes of our own; about the need to disassociate ourselves from the middle and upper classes in Latin America and to identify ourselves with young revolutionaries who represented ‘the wave of the future’; about the need for the United States to enforce respect for ‘human rights’ in other American states.”⁴⁵But Mann believed that the very middle-and upper-class moderates whom Schlesinger and Goodwin would have the United States abandon were the hope of the future.⁴⁶Mann’s critics accused him of wanting to rely only on the free enterprise system and inter-American trade to bring about social and economic progress in Latin America. In fact, he consistently supported such initiatives as a Nicaraguan Rural Electric Cooperative, $2 million to Chile for school construction, malaria eradication in Brazil, and farmer cooperatives in Uruguay. He preferred that Latin American governments control inflation and impose austerity programs if necessary, but not if it would lead to widespread suffering.⁴⁷

Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Averell Harriman, a bureaucratic empire builder par excellence, predicted that Mann would “reverse the whole direction of Latin American policy.” Schlesinger, now in official exile, denounced the Texan as “a colonialist by mentality and a free enterprise zealot.” He considered Mann’s appointment “an act of aggression” against Camelot. “Johnson has won the first round,” he wrote Bobby Kennedy. “He has shown his power to move in a field of special concern to the Kennedys without consulting the Kennedys. This will lead people all over the government to conclude that their future lies with Johnson.”⁴⁸Following Mann’s appointment, stories appeared in theWashington Post, New York Times , and other national papers quoting unnamed sources in the State Department that the Alianza was now dead, that Mann was too conservative and rigid to make it work.⁴⁹

In fact, LBJ picked his fellow Texan not because of his substance but because of his form. He was considered an excellent, tireless negotiator, a superb diplomatic technician who could be counted on to carry out orders and get things done. “He’s a coordinator,” Johnson told journalist Jerry Griffin. “He’s a shy, quiet, progressive fellow … Schlesinger, and Goodwin and some of these other fellows are not too happy about this, but you can understand that, if someone were brought in over you, you wouldn’t be too happy either. If there is any flack about him becoming undersecretary we’ll just make him special asst. to the president and let him use the power of the commander in chief. This doesn’t mean we’re going to give up on any of our idealism. We still believe you’ve got to have land reform and increased taxes. We want to build houses and we want to build schools.”⁵⁰He pointed out that George Ball, then undersecretary of state, Senators Fulbright and Morse, the latter a congressional expert on Latin America and a harsh critic of the U.S. foreign aid program there, all thought very highly of Mann.

The first hemispheric test for the Johnson administration came in January 1964, when rioting erupted in and around the Canal Zone in Panama, and that country’s national guard informed Washington that it could no longer maintain order. Trouble had erupted when American students raised the Stars and Stripes in front of Balboa High School in the Zone. Panamanian students protested, and fighting erupted. The commander of U.S. troops in Panama, General Andrew O’Meara, stationed soldiers around the perimeter of the Zone. Meanwhile, as the embassy’s Wallace Street observed, many of the Panamanian students seemed to grow markedly bolder. Soon snipers began firing on U.S. troops, who responded in kind; when the smoke had cleared, twenty Panamanians and four Americans lay dead, with hundreds more wounded. Roberto Chiari, the Panamanian president who would soon be up for reelection, declared that “the blood of the martyrs who perished today will not have been shed in vain.”⁵¹

LBJ’s in-house advisers were virtually unanimous in their opinion that the Panamanian demonstrations had been taken over by communists and were being manipulated in hopes of destabilizing the government. The U.S. Embassy identified Victor Avilo, a “known Communist,” as leader of the rock- and Molotov cocktail—throwing mobs. Mann was convinced that the leaders of the demonstrations were Castroites. Intelligence reports coming from the Southern Command in Panama blamed much of the fighting on the Vanguardia Accion Nacional, “a pro-Castro, violently anti-U.S. revolutionary group” that was determined to bring off “a Castro-type revolution in Panama.”⁵²In fact, there were a handful of communist agents involved plus a larger group of genuine Panamanian nationalists sympathetic to Castro. He and his revolution had become models to those in Latin America who identified oppression and economic exploitation with ruling elites historically supported by Washington. On January 10, LBJ called Chiari and talked to him directly. The Panamanian leader did not dissemble. “I feel, Mr. President, that what we need is a complete revision of all treaties which affect Panama-U.S. relations because that which we have at the present time is nothing but a source of dissatisfaction which has recently or just now exploded into violence which we are witnessing,” he said. Johnson replied that the immediate need was to stop the violence and he was sending Ambassador Mann immediately to work out a solution. But he offered hope; “We want to look forward and not backward.”⁵³

Johnson was not averse to granting concessions to Panama over the canal; he acknowledged the justice of Panamanian charges of Yankee imperialism and agreed privately with Dean Rusk, who was of the opinion that eventually, supervision of the canal should be turned over to the Organization of American States (OAS). But he also believed that Chiari was playing demagogue, that Castro was more than ready to fish in troubled waters, and that American nationalists, to whom the Panama Canal had become something of an icon, had to be placated.⁵⁴In response, a formula began crystallizing in Johnson’s mind: contain the communists abroad, stroke the nationalists at home, and work for peaceful change.

While Tom Mann was explaining the facts of life to Roberto Chiari in Panama City, Johnson began work on Richard Russell, the bellwether of old-fashioned nationalists. Russell argued that the Panama Canal lay at the heart of the nation’s strategic empire and should be protected at all costs. “I think this is a pretty good time to take a strong stand,” he told LBJ. “The Panama Canal Zone is a property of the United States, the Canal was built with American ingenuity and blood, sweat, and sacrifices … [You ought to tell Chiari] that it was of vital necessity for the economy and the defense of every nation of this hemisphere and that under no circumstances would you permit the threat or interruption by any subversive group that may be undertaking such steps … We can’t risk having it sabotaged or taken over by any Communist group and there’s no question in my mind but that that is Castro’s chief aim there.”⁵⁵Johnson assured his old friend that he was not going to let himself be intimidated and he was not going to renegotiate the canal treaty under duress, but “we are hurting, Dick,” he said. “We’re hurting in the hemisphere and the world. That damn propaganda is all against us.”⁵⁶In a subsequent conversation the president made it clear that he was not going to give up the right to defend the canal, but when substantive talks with the Panamanians got under way, “we’ll find ourselves able to agree to significant changes in our existing relations.”⁵⁷

“When we finally arrived at the Palace, we were met by the President of Panama who seated us near a large window which looked out over the square in front of the Palace,” Mann recorded in his diary. “No sooner were we seated than a crowd of people gathered in the square where they began to shout and to throw stones against the window nearest us … The noise caused by the shouting and by the sound of stone striking the glass made it necessary for us to raise our voices to hear and be heard.”⁵⁸Mann ordered everyone out of the room so that he could talk to the president alone. The United States had information that “Castroite communists” had penetrated the very highest level of his government, that Cuba was on the verge of flooding Panama with arms, and that a coup was imminent. Make no mistake, he said, Washington would invoke the right to defend the canal and take whatever military action was necessary to restore order. Chiari and his foreign minister, Galileo Solis, quickly backpedaled. They agreed to the restoration of diplomatic relations, and they pledged to protect U.S. citizens from mob violence. Panama would not disavow the 1903 treaty and would be satisfied with revision talks that could take up to three years.⁵⁹

When word of this softening stance reached the street, however, nationalists called for Chiari’s head, and rumors of an impending communistled coup flooded Washington. At the same time, LBJ and his advisers received word that there were right-wing elements in Panama’s national guard who were ready and willing to use the threat of communist subversion to stage their own coup.⁶⁰

While Chiari hung by a thread, caught between the military and left-wing nationalists, Johnson resisted the urge to impose a settlement. Whatever solution emerged would probably have to include some revision of the Panama Canal treaty, and that meant Senate approval. Republicans were having a field day. New York GOP Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating proclaimed that “Castro-Communist agents” were spearheading the turmoil in Panama and declared that the canal belonged to America, period. Democrats were divided. Richard Russell led a group of hard-liners who wanted to take a tough line and give nothing away, while Humphrey and Fulbright argued for negotiations and concessions. From the UN, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, much to Johnson’s annoyance, pressed the White House to agree “to discuss and review everything in U.S.-Panamanian relations, including the canal treaties.”⁶¹White House mail ran fifteen to one for taking a hard line.

The White House let it be known, not entirely convincingly, that it was opening conversations with Nicaragua, looking toward the construction of a new canal. A new waterway would deal a crippling economic blow to Panama. At the same time, the U.S. Embassy informed Chiari that the dozens of loan applications Panama then had pending with the United States would be reviewed and would not be approved unless the president could assure that there would be no recurrence of violence. “I don’t want to settle Panama,” Johnson confided to one of his staff. “I just pull out a little every day and sweat ’em a little more.”⁶²After repeated conversations with Russell, Johnson reached a tacit understanding with him that in any agreement to end the crisis, the United States would never approve the word “negotiate’ in connection with the Panama Canal treaties, but would insist on the term “discuss.”⁶³On March 21, LBJ surprised reporters and his new press secretary, George Reedy, by paying an unannounced visit to that day’s briefing. He was, he confided to the assembled journalists, shortly going to deliver to the OAS a statement clarifying his position on the Panama situation. In conciliatory tones, he said that he knew that the vast majority of Panamanians bore no malice or hatred toward the United States. That country had been one of America’s earliest and staunchest allies during World War II. “We are prepared to review every issue which now divides us,” he declared, “and every problem which the Panama Government wishes to raise.”⁶⁴An exhausted Chiari made one last unsuccessful attempt to have the term “negotiate” included and then gave in. The crisis ebbed, and talks that would lead to major treaty revisions a decade later got under way.⁶⁵

The Panamanian crisis pointed up a key characteristic of Johnson’s presidential decision making: like his mentor FDR, LBJ wanted to keep his options open until the last possible moment. His goal in consulting with the Bundys, McNamaras, Manns, Russells, and Fortases was to gather information or to check out a particular viewpoint or constituency. “When he wanted to do something,” James Rowe observed of Johnson, “he would call a fellow, and he had a picture of exactly what this fellow was going to say to him in reply on any particular idea. When he got the response that he expected, he didn’t pay much attention. But if he hit one of these fellows that responded differently, he sort of stopped and wondered what the hell was going on, why did this fellow say this … I think he would pause and try to figure that out. It was a very, very careful political technique.”⁶⁶“As far as expertise was concerned,” observed Robert Komer, who served as the State Department’s expert on the Middle East and who would head up the pacification program in Vietnam, “he had access to all the expertise he needed. He had expertise coming out of the gazoo. Let me tell you, as a guy who jousted with most of the experts … a guy with good, sound, political instinct and a feel for the jugular—and nobody ever said that Lyndon Johnson didn’t have that—and who’s a good horse trader—and nobody ever said he wasn’t—is in business … It seemed to me a consistent principle of Johnson’s conduct of affairs, as I saw it, was he did not want to make decisions before they had to be made. Now the bureaucracy is always pressing the President to make decisions as far ahead as possible in directions they want and so are all the foreign countries.”⁶⁷Even more so were pundits in the press who aspired to become players in the policymaking process, Johnson believed. “I’ve looked over the Matthews, Raymonds, Szulcs … background,” he remarked to McGeorge Bundy during the Panamanian crisis, “and they … have more to do with the running of this country than [the Bundys and McNamaras] … or [than I do] … I really honestly believe that … I think that they predict the day before and they get you in a position where you almost got to take it … I think they’re very dangerous characters … And I don’t think that we can allow them to get us boxed in here.”⁶⁸In Latin American policy as elsewhere, it would not become apparent to press and public what LBJ intended to do until he had acted, a fact that may have sharpened the effectiveness of his policy but that increasingly damaged his credibility with public intellectuals and journalists.