CHAPTER 34

CIVIL WAR

THE ISSUE OF WHETHER OR NOT TO PROLONG THEChristmas bombing halt of 1965-1966 provoked an intense debate in the White House and beyond. The chief proponent of a continuation was Robert McNamara. When the Joint Chiefs were able to produce statistics showing a dramatic increase in infiltration during the halt, McNamara pointed out that it was the dry season and this was to be expected. But by early 1966, the defense chief was privately telling Schlesinger, Goodwin, and Galbraith that “he did not regard a military solution as possible. Infiltration from the North seemed to increase at a steady pace whether the United States bombed or did not bomb.”¹Moreover, he predicted that if the bombing were resumed and expanded—the two seemed inseparable—within the year U.S. aircraft would be engaging Chinese communist fighters directly.²The CIA agreed, continuing to insist that bombing had had no impact on the North’s willingness or ability to infiltrate and that the assault from the air would continue to be ineffective. From Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, under intense pressure from General William Westmoreland, railed against the pause. On Christmas Day alone, he reported to Johnson, “1,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were reliably observed entering South Vietnam.” “Every day increases their capability in the South,” Earle Wheeler insisted to Johnson, and he called for a full-scale air assault on Hanoi.³Nguyen Van Thieu added that with every day of a bombing pause, the chances of a coup against the government of South Vietnam increased. “His point was that cessation of bombing suggested appeasement of the communists and eagerness to negotiate which was not consistent with the policy of his government,” Westmoreland told his superiors.⁴

Increasingly, hawks rejected the notion of limited war, seeing negotiations not as a means to but as an alternative to victory. “We find that the vast majority of Americans are in full accord with your Vietnam policy,” L. Eldon James, national commander of the American Legion, wrote LBJ. “There is increasingly expressed, however, a concern that emphasis has shifted from pursuit of the war effort to pursuit of negotiations with the enemy. Loyal Americans do not want another ‘peace without victory’ as in the case of the Korean war.”⁵More ominously, Eisenhower, whose advice Johnson was soliciting on a weekly basis by early 1966, was expressing the view earlier offered by Richard Russell that the American people would not stand for a protracted war with an indefinite and unpredictable result. He urged LBJ to do as he had done during the Korean stalemate: threaten the communists with nuclear annihilation.

By January 20 Johnson had made the decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam. In no small part, the pause had been initiated to appease domestic doves and prove to the world that the United States was reasonable, flexible, and pragmatic, whereas the DRV and Beijing were fanatical militarists unwilling to give an inch.⁶By the third week in January, LBJ had become convinced that that goal had been achieved. Hanoi had repeatedly rejected the pause and invitation to negotiate as a hoax. Talks could begin when and only when the last American soldier had left Vietnam.⁷Political and diplomatic considerations aside, LBJ could not bear the thought that he was letting America’s fighting men down. On the evening of the 25th, Johnson met with the entire congressional leadership. He read from Bruce Catton’sNever Call Retreat on Lincoln’s anguish over decision making during the Civil War. “He [Lincoln] had told a friend,” LBJ read, “that all of the responsibilities of the Administration ‘belong to that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln.’ And as he tried to meet those responsibilities the last thing he needed or wanted was a contrived or enforced harmony.”⁸Senators Dirksen, Russell, McCormack, Bourke Hickenlooper, Carl Albert, and others urged the president to resume and even expand the bombing; only Mansfield and Fulbright spoke out for a continuation of the pause.⁹

On January 28 Johnson assembled the “Wise Men,” a bipartisan group of diplomats and soldiers—Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, General Omar Bradley, Allen Dulles—to give him their views on Vietnam. All had been principal architects of the containment strategy and all were for holding the line in Southeast Asia.¹⁰Clark Clifford, the establishment’s liaison with the Democratic party, argued that bombing was the best, probably the only way for the United States to exit Vietnam.¹¹As the consensus for resumption mounted, McNamara’s resolve melted away. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room on the 27th he was unequivocal. “Any further delay in the resumption of the bombing,” he said, “can polarize opinion in this country. I feel that we should resume the bombing and I recommend that we send an execute order tonight.”¹²

On January 31, 1966, American fighters and fighter-bombers took to the skies once again and struck bridges and staging areas north of the seventeenth parallel. Johnson hoped resumption would compel the North Vietnamese to “show their ass before we showed ours.” His public justification was done with a bit more rhetorical flourish. “They persist in aggression,” he announced in a broadcast from the White House theater. “They insist on the surrender of South Vietnam to communism. It is, therefore, very plain that there is no readiness or willingness to talk, no readiness for peace in that regime today.”¹³

That evening, J. William Fulbright appeared on CBS to declare the war morally wrong and counterproductive to the interests of the country. The administration, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared, was still a prisoner of the Munich analogy, a comparison that was totally inapplicable to Southeast Asia. To him, Vietnam did not represent Soviet aggression, but a genuinely indigenous revolt against colonialism. Fulbright and the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Carl Marcy, proceeded immediately with plans to hold public hearings on the war in Southeast Asia. On February 3 the Committee met in executive session; Fulbright, Gore, Morse, and Aiken persuaded the others to authorize hearings not just on the pending $415 million supplemental aid bill for Vietnam but on the war as a whole. The hearings were to be public, and Marcy was directed to obtain the widest possible exposure. As soon as the meeting broke up, the chief of staff got on the phone with executives from the major television networks and persuaded them to carry the hearings.

On February 3, 1966, without telling any of his aides, Johnson decided to call an impromptu summit meeting with Nguyen Cao Ky to be held in Honolulu. That day, Chester Cooper, McGeorge Bundy’s chief assistant on the National Security Council, had gone out for lunch. Upon his return, he discovered that his boss had been searching frantically for him. “ ‘For God’s sake, where the hell you been? Don’t you know we’re going to be meeting in Honolulu on Saturday?’ ” “Westmoreland was then on R&R in Hawaii,” Cooper recalled, “and the president had decided that it was a good time—in the midst of Fulbright’s SFRC hearings—to go out and visit with his commander. Then, he hit upon the idea of making it a summit conference to include Ky and Thieu, whom he had never met, and to emphasize America and the South Vietnamese government’s commitment to social justice and pacification.”¹⁴By four o’clock Cooper had an agenda ready; twenty-four hours later, the White House informed the world that the president was going to Hawaii for a summit with his advisers and his South Vietnamese allies. “No international conference of modern times had begun amidst quite so much helter-skelter improvisation as the strategy talks staged in Honolulu,” observedNewsweek.¹⁵ Indeed, Lodge, Ky, and Thieu did not learn of the impending summit until the night of the 3rd.

The U.S. entourage arrived in Honolulu in moderate disorder, trailing journalists with their shirttails out and their toothbrushes in hand. Cooper recalled that on Friday, “they sent telegrams to the two big hotels in Honolulu and said, ‘we’re coming; we need’—God knows how many rooms, ‘and we’ll be there on Saturday.’ And out went the Secret Service that night and the communications guys and so forth, and they just tore these hotels apart right in the height of the season.”¹⁶

LBJ spent Sunday, February 6, closeted with Westmoreland. “LBJ was intense, disturbed,” the general recorded in his diary. “I think he was torn by the magnitude of the problem and felt insecure about his bombing strategy.” Much depended on his performance, Johnson told Westmoreland, and assured the general that Washington would give him what he asked for in terms of troops and matériel. And then, “I hope that you do not pull a MacArthur on me,” that is, appeal to the hawks in Congress and through them to the American people to force the White House to wage all-out war against the North. “I felt it not appropriate for me to answer on this,” the general recorded.¹⁷

The first plenary session was held in a large room at Camp Clark, with the Americans and Vietnamese seated across from each other on either side of a long table. With press and observers, there were perhaps a hundred people in the room. In addition to Rusk and McNamara, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman and HEW Secretary John Gardner were among the Americans, high-lighting the priority to be given to pacification and reconstruction. In his opening statement, Prime Minister Ky outlined four goals: defeat the Vietcong, eradicate social injustice, establish a viable economy, and build true democracy.¹⁸He struck the Americans as candid, self-effacing, and sincere. “We must have a record of considerably more progress than we have been able to accomplish so far,” the mustachioed, diminutive former air marshal said. “We must create a society where each individual in Vietnam can feel that he has a future … that he has some chance for himself and his children to live in an atmosphere where all is not disappointment, despair, and dejection.”¹⁹

LBJ responded in kind. “The President opened with a typical Johnson approach leaning across the table talking intently to Chairman Thieu and Prime Minister Ky,” Freeman recorded. “He spoke about being close to the people … He referred again to his own closeness to REAs [rural electrification] … We must take a new look at AID [Agency for International Development] which he had recommended to the Congress and go for not only steel, highway building, but emphasize education, children learning to read and write at ages of 6 and 7, concentrated health facilities … to eliminate the killer diseases.”²⁰LBJ and Ky then retired to the King Kalakaua Suite in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The president pulled his chair up close to the youthful Vietnamese leader, occasionally thumping him on the knee for emphasis. He pointed out that 85 percent of the South Vietnamese were peasants who had suffered terribly for ten years. That must stop and the regime must have the support of the people.²¹“The plans are fine,” he said, “but what we needed is results, results.” Then he added, “We want to see those coonskins nailed to the wall.” He repeated the coonskins analogy at the second and final plenary session on Tuesday. “Vietnamese much perplexed,” Westmoreland noted. “They have no coons and were unfamiliar with the frontier tradition behind the remark.”²²

At session’s close, the two sides issued the Declaration of Honolulu, in which the United States and South Vietnam pledged to keep fighting until an honorable peace could be negotiated and to launch immediately an accelerated program of social, economic, and political reform. Freeman was enthused by the proceedings. “I came away with the feeling that the Vietnamese were absolutely sincere at least to the extent of knowing they had no alternative but to win the support of their people or lose the war.”²³LBJ himself was somewhat more restrained, more realistic. “I knew nothing about Ky and Thieu,” he subsequently told India’s ambassador to the United States, B. K. Nehru. “The impressions, the titles, the military backgrounds, the generals, the air marshals, the field marshals … They never have been very impressive to civilians in Johnson City, Texas, cause we didn’t have many storm troopers out there … He [Ky] certainly knows how to talk. Whether he knows how to do as well as he knows how to talk is different.”²⁴At a press conference before departing for Saigon, Ky told reporters that under no circumstances would his government agree to allow the National Liberation Front to be a party to negotiations and that “destroying the military targets in North Veitnam is a necessity.” Yet, LBJ had told him emphatically that there would be no escalation of the war and Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman had declared that the administration would be prepared to accept the NLF as a separate party to peace talks.²⁵

Before they departed Honolulu, LBJ informed Ky that there would be another meeting somewhere in the Pacific in three to six months to evaluate the progress toward social justice and democracy that had been made in South Vietnam.²⁶The president could not leave Honolulu without a blast at Fulbright, Morse, and other congressional detractors. He warned America that the war effort was being hampered by “special pleaders who counsel retreat in Vietnam.”²⁷

 

FULBRIGHT’S HEARINGSstretched across more than two weeks; the Honolulu Conference could be only a fleeting diversion. He and Marcy had intended to mix administration figures with prominent dissidents, but the White House had no intention of cooperating. McNamara and Rusk refused to appear in open hearing, so most of the testimony was from those with reservations about the war. General James Gavin presented the case for the enclave strategy that Fulbright and Walter Lippmann had earlier advocated and that the Johnson administration had already discarded. Fulbright was able to persuade Korean War hero Matthew Ridgway to submit a letter to the committee endorsing this approach. On February 11, Fulbright and Marcy pulled out their big gun: George Kennan. The author of the containment strategy agreed with Gavin that it was essential to avoid further escalation, and he also urged that the war be ended “as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area.” There could be no clear-cut military victory, given the threat of full-scale war with China.²⁸

Like the Kefauver crime investigations of 1951 and the army-McCarthy encounters of 1954, the Vietnam hearings were watched and discussed by millions. Worried by the attention, Lyndon Johnson called Frank Stanton of CBS and demanded that he cease coverage. On February 10, the network abandoned the hearings and ran its normal daytime fare, including reruns ofI Love Lucy. Only after respected news director Fred W. Friendly resigned over the incident did CBS resume coverage. NBC carried the entire proceeding, however, including Kennan’s powerful testimony.²⁹

With each day that the hearings continued, Johnson became more and more distraught. On February 19, he called J. Edgar Hoover and ordered the FBI to “cover the Senate Foreign Relations Committee television presentation with a view toward determining whether Senator Fulbright and the other Senators were receiving information from Communists.” The Bureau obliged by drawing “parallels” between presentations made at the hearings and “documented Communist Party publications or statements of Communist leaders.” Shortly after the hearings ended, Johnson had Fulbright and several other Senate doves placed under strict FBI surveillance.³⁰“The criticism from the Executive is becoming bitter and mean,” Fulbright complained to a constituent.³¹

In late February, Bill Moyers reported to the president that the approval rating for his handling of the war had dropped in one month from 63 percent to 49 percent. “Never have I known Washington to be so full of dissonant voices as it is today,” Moyers wrote to Theodore H. White.³²Most important, perhaps, Kennan’s and Gavin’s testimony and Fulbright’s cross-examination made it respectable to question, if not oppose, the war. On February 26, Robert Komer, McGeorge Bundy’s top aide, reported to Johnson that the New York business community was getting cold feet. If, as they suspected, the administration was going to spend $10 billion and then get out of Vietnam following the 1966 congressional elections, then it ought to get out at once.³³

Johnson could not help but note that Robert Kennedy took pains to associate himself with the Foreign Relations Committee and the hearings. Appealing as he always did to the president’s worst instincts, John Connally told him that Bobby was “the motivating force behind the Senate hearings.”³⁴Kennedy’s dissent was especially galling. Had LBJ had his wish, Diem would never have been assassinated and America would never have become bogged down in a land war in Asia. Vietnam, a cancer that LBJ already suspected would destroy his presidency, was a gift bequeathed to him by Jack Kennedy. Johnson could understand how and why JFK became involved in Vietnam and bore him no grudge. In public or private he never uttered a word criticizing his predecessor’s policies. Diem, LBJ was convinced, was not JFK’s doing. But now here were the ex-president’s brother and Fulbright joining forces to attack him for pursuing a policy that they had once fully supported.

LBJ’s decision to resume the bombing of the North did not constitute a decision to do what was necessary to win the war militarily. The Joint Chiefs were unanimous in wanting to expand the bombing to include the oil storage facilities and power plants around Hanoi and Haiphong. But the president, McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk were determined to keep a tight leash on the aerial assault to control dissent at home and to keep Chinese communists out of the conflict.³⁵American and Vietnamese soldiers might have to continue to die, but there would be no Armageddon. Johnson was convinced that he and his advisers had examined every option and that limited war was the only means to achieve double containment—of communism abroad and anticommunism at home. LBJ’s 1966 State of the Union address, half of which had been devoted to Vietnam, was a Niebuhrian call to stay the course. “Scarred with the weakness of men,” he had declared, “with whatever guidance God may offer us we must, nevertheless, and alone with our mortality strive to ennoble the life of man on earth.”³⁶

Johnson wanted the leadership of South Vietnam to build a viable nation, something that had never existed south of the seventeenth parallel. There was, as State Department analyst Philip Habib put it, “a strong sense of peoplehood but no sense of nationhood.”³⁷During the long years of French rule, the colonial authorities had done everything in their power to prevent the emergence of an authentic Vietnamese nationalism. They had pursued and jailed leaders not only of the Vietnamese Communist Party but also of the Vietnamese Nationalist and Constitutionalist Parties. They had pitted Catholic against Buddhist and encouraged the development of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and other sects. Then came Diem and Nhu and their failed experiment in personalism. The revolving door of military governments had made little or no attempt to develop a viable political culture. The Americans had only made matters worse. They had gotten rid of Diem, Nhu, and the “Dragon Lady,” Madame Nhu, but they had not been able to solve the riddle of which came first, military security or democratic, representative government. Now the United States was taking over the war directly. The conflict was no longer between Vietnamese communists and Vietnamese nationalists, wrote Ton That Thien in theFar Eastern Review , but between the United States and the forces of international communism. Vietnam was destined, it seemed, to become one vast military base either for America or communist China. He noted that Ky had recently stated that “so long as the Vietnamese people have no democratic spirit and habits, so long as they still do not know what democracy is, elections are useless.” Given these circumstances, “what is there left for the Vietnamese nationalists to fight for?”³⁸

And, in fact, the Americanization of the war was ripping the already delicate fabric of Vietnamese life. The fighting and bombing had driven an estimated 4 million South Vietnamese from their homes, some 25 percent of the population. These alienated, destitute villagers settled in squalid refugee camps or drifted into the cities looking for work. Rootless and hostile, they proved to be an excellent source of recruits for the Vietcong. The influx of hundreds of thousands of American troops and billions of dollars into South Vietnam had a devastating impact on urban life as well. Saigon and other large cities became boomtowns, crowded to the scuppers with human beings, automobiles, foot taxis, and garbage. To fight inflation, the Americans flooded the country with consumer goods, but among other things, this influx destroyed South Vietnam’s few native industries and made the economy ever more dependent on outside forces. By 1967 much of the urban population was employed providing services to the Americans. The port of Saigon became permanently clogged with ships backed up out to sea as far as the eye could see, waiting to unload.

The port was the center of a network of corruption that spread throughout the country, with military officials extorting money from importers, and importers grossly overcharging the U.S. government. In addition, South Vietnamese officials rented land to the U.S. mission at inflated prices; required bribes for driver’s licenses, passports, visas, and work permits; extorted kickbacks for contracts to build and service facilities; and participated enthusiastically in the thriving opium trade. By 1966 the nation was in the grip of runaway inflation. In Da Nang, for example, the price of chicken had risen 1,000 percent since the coming of the Americans.³⁹Seedy bars with their innumerable prostitutes were everywhere, offending the normally permissive Vietnamese.

The government, such as it was, was purely a military regime. Ky, Thieu, and the directorate of officers that backed them were dependent almost entirely on the support of the commanders of the four military districts into which South Vietnam was divided. The government was relatively strong in II, III, and IV Corps, but I Corps (the northernmost sector, which bordered the seventeenth parallel and included some of the most densely populated and revolutionary-minded areas of the country) was a different matter.

In truth, South Vietnam in 1966 consisted of two separate regions and cultures, the center and the south. The center ran from the seventeenth parallel down to the outskirts of Saigon and included the Central Highlands populated by the ethnically distinct Montagnards and the coastal plain. Comprising tiny parcels of relatively poor land, the region could not support itself and was dependent on the south for much of its rice. The south, formerly the French province of Cochinchina, included Saigon and the Mekong Delta, one of the great rice-producing regions of the world. Historic differences tended to follow geographic lines. The center, part of the former French province of Annam, was the seat of the imperial court, a haven for Buddhist monks and scholars. It was also the historic seat of strong resistance to both Chinese pressure from the north and French pressure from the south. The south was a frontier province of the center, settled rather late and in large land holdings. When they came, the French found it much easier to co-opt the large landowners of the south, who became typical clients of the colonial power—rich, French-educated, and totally divorced from the uneducated peasant masses.⁴⁰

The commander of I Corps, which comprised the northern half of the center, was the charismatic General Nguyen Chanh Thi. Unlike other warlords, Thi relied on more than clubs and bullets to maintain his position. He had established ties with local mayors and village chiefs, the intellectual community centered in Hue, Vietnam’s ancient capital and a symbol of nationalist sentiment, and with the Buddhist leadership, particularly Thich Tri Quang, head of the United Buddhist Church. For many Buddhists in South Vietnam, Tri Quang epitomized Mahayana Buddhism. He had organized the immolations and street demonstrations that had played such a key role in Diem’s and Nhu’s ouster, and he and his followers had acted as the people’s conscience to all the military regimes that followed. Lodge, Westmoreland, and the rest of the U.S. mission misunderstood, misrepresented, and generally despised Tri Quang.⁴¹Whatever the case, the bonze’s mission was clear and consistent: to organize resistance to any government that exploited peasants and workers and did nothing to relieve their suffering by refusing to seek a negotiated settlement to the war.

Upon his return from Honolulu, intoxicated by the attention and praise that had been paid him, Ky decided to move on his rival and reassert Saigon’s control over I Corps. He called the members of the directorate together—minus Thi—and informed them that if they did not authorize him to dismiss Thi, he would resign and go back to running the air force.⁴²Reluctantly, they agreed. Within days, antigovernment demonstrations flared up in Da Nang, the seaport headquarters of I Corps, and, with a population of some two hundred thousand, one of the country’s larges cities. In Hue students and faculty members of the university ran amok in the streets of the normally placid city. In the days that followed, Tri Quang and his associates announced the creation of the “Buddhist Struggle movement” and listed four demands: the return to Vietnam of ousted generals such as Duong Van “Big” Minh and Tran Van Don; the return of general military officers to purely military duties; the establishment of institutions characteristic of independence and democracy; and the launching of a social revolution to better the life of the masses.⁴³A leader of the movement pledged to reporters that he and his followers would work “to the last drop of blood, to the last breath” to achieve these goals.⁴⁴

The first week in April, riots broke out in Saigon. Gathering by the thousands in the city’s central market, demonstrators nailed pictures of Ky and Thieu to posts which the government had used in the past for the execution of Viet Cong agents and war profiteers. “Hue and Da Nang are now virtually out of control,” Rusk reported to LBJ on April 2. “The themes of the so-called ‘struggle’ movement are spreading to other areas … In addition to the Buddhist-backed ‘struggle’ group, the important Cau [Cao] Dai sect has now said that the present government is ‘illegal.’ Catholic discontent is also evident and would probably become acute if the government made special concessions to the Buddhists.”⁴⁵Johnson closely monitored developments from the White House. “It looks like to me, Bob, that there’s a very serious danger that there’s been a complete infiltration of the power base by the communists,” he observed to McNamara.⁴⁶

The threat of secession by I Corps, a civil war within a civil war, brought the Johnson administration to the brink of withdrawal from Vietnam. As Westmoreland told a member of the directorate, if the American people found out that 228 U.S. soldiers had been killed and 850 wounded during the month of March while all this “foolishness” was going on, there would be hell to pay.⁴⁷“I note that, for the third successive week, our casualties have exceeded those of Vietnamese forces,” Earle Wheeler cabled Westmoreland. “Rightly or wrongly, this latter fact is taken by the American people as proof of the position that … the United States forces are fighting the war against VC÷NVA forces while the South Vietnamese, whose freedom and country are at stake, squabble pettily among themselves to achieve political advantage … I think I can feel the first gusts of the whirlwind generated by the wind sown by the Vietnamese … My purpose in addressing you is to convey my own deep distress and concern that the lives, the resources, and the political capital we have expended in our effort to preserve South Vietnam as a part of the free world approach the point of having been in vain.”⁴⁸To make matters worse, the Buddhist Struggle movement began to take on a decidedly anti-American tone. After it was learned that U.S. planes had ferried Saigonese troops to Da Nang, the leadership cabled a protest to Lodge, and demonstrators paraded through Hue with banners reading “Down With the CIA” and “End Foreign Domination of Vietnam.” Johnson expressed his frustration to his secretary of state: “Now Dean what are we going to do … how are we going to justify and explain throwing in the towel if these people just take over that government and tell us to get out or if it just looks like we’re in the middle of a civil war? … Are we moving to the point where it would be difficult for us to ask people to continue to die out there with this going on every two or three months?”⁴⁹On April 2, LBJ observed to Rusk, McNamara, Rostow, Moyers, and Valenti that the United States must be prepared to make a terrible choice: to leave Vietnam entirely and make a stand in Thailand. He subsequently ordered Defense to draft a scenario for a withdrawal, possibly to be achieved within weeks.⁵⁰

In mid-April, the State Department asked Lodge and Ky to stop labeling opponents of the existing regime communist and insisted that there must be concessions to the Buddhist Struggle movement, principally a constitutional convention with elections to follow. From March 20 to 22, LBJ met once again with Westmoreland and Ky, this time on the island of Guam. He made it clear that he intended to stay the course in Vietnam, but he also let the South Vietnamese leader know that he expected democratic reform. “My birthday is in late August,” he told Ky. “The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election.”⁵¹The prime minister returned to Saigon, seemingly chastened.

Then suddenly, on May 15, 1966, Ky dispatched two thousand soldiers to Da Nang and staged a surprise attack on antigovernment forces. In house-to-house fighting, more than one hundred antigovernment troops and civilians were killed. Several pagodas were damaged or destroyed.⁵²Tri Quang, along with scores of other students and Buddhist leaders, was jailed indefinitely. LBJ, to put it mildly, was upset. “It seems to him that internally we cannot permit this thing to go on,” Moyers told Rusk. “It will tear us to pieces and [LBJ] thinks time has come for us to try to push whatever buttons we have to push.”⁵³

On the same day that he ordered the attack on Da Nang, Ky appeared before the National Political Congress, just convened by the government of Vietnam, and signed a decree mandating free, universal elections for a constitutional convention to be held within three to five months. The delegates, who stood and cheered, subsequently adopted rules barring “communist and neutralist elements from participating in the convention but offering amnesty to those who had participated in the struggle movement.”⁵⁴Elections were scheduled to take place sometime between July 5 and September 5, preferably in August to meet LBJ’s birthday deadline. “The problem,” Maxwell Taylor observed, “is to instill order in South Viet-Nam under a cooperative government capable of an effective prosecution of the war, while progressing toward a constitutional, freely elected government.”⁵⁵That had always been the problem. Those around the president were not particularly sanguine. Rostow reported that the consensus was that “we face, say, a 10 to 15% chance of chaos and total paralysis; a lower percentage possibility that a government might emerge that would seek to end the war on almost any terms and that would ask us to leave; a 50% probability that the government continues somewhat weakened and in no position to prosecute with full vigor the non-military programs; and a modest, perhaps 25% possibility that … we will have an even better situation than in the past.”⁵⁶Discouraged, dismayed, LBJ nonetheless refused to fold. The war would continue.

With U.S. jets flying around-the-clock sorties against targets north of the seventeenth parallel, LBJ went on national television to reassure Americans and the world that the United States had no intention of escalating the war, but that it would keep on doing what it had been doing in order eventually to wear the enemy down. At the same time, UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg told a specially called session of the Security Council that the Johnson administration would welcome its help in securing a negotiated peace and invited it to reopen the Geneva Peace Conference of 1954.⁵⁷

Two weeks later, Robert Kennedy called a press conference and issued a statement declaring that the willingness of the administration and the Ky government to admit “discontented elements in South Vietnam,” including the National Liberation Front, “to a share of power and responsibility is at the heart of the hope for a negotiated settlement.”⁵⁸Bobby took pains to warn Russia, China, and North Vietnam not to assume that if he were to become president of the United States, they could expect a policy of appeasement. “Coming from any other senator,”Newsweek observed, “the suggestion might have stirred a ripple of controversy; coming from a Kennedy, it jolted the Administration with the force of a Claymore mine planted in Dean Rusk’s in-basket.”⁵⁹LBJ was appalled both at the substance and the tone ofRFK ’s statement. “I think it’s tragic,” he told Dean Rusk. “It’s so presumptuous … He says that he doesn’t want the Russians and the Communists to be over-gleeful and expect him to be elected President because if he were elected President it wouldn’t mean that he’d have an easy surrender himself … Well hell, he don’t have to become President to do that—that’s what he’s trying to do now.” Johnson jumped to the conclusion that Kennedy and the liberals were getting ready to stab him in the back again and expressed the fear that the balance of power was tipping in their favor even within his own administration. Bundy had gone over to the dark side and now McNamara. “You know Bob McNamara has felt that while we ought to have limited objectives,” he confided to Rusk, “that we ought to make it abundantly clear that we did not necessarily have to have everybody of our own choosing in this government, that it could be a Communist government … a very dangerous position to me … but he has said to me a number of times that he thought that we ought to give serious consideration to this. And then when he said the other day that we only have one chance out of three of winning, it just shocked me.”⁶⁰

During a subsequent conversation, Joe Alsop told Harry McPherson that the reason for RFK’s coalition speech was that he was convinced that LBJ would not “stay the long course” in Vietnam and he, Bobby, did not want to get stuck out on the right wing when the administration worked out a negotiated solution.⁶¹“Bullshit,” LBJ exclaimed. “You make it clear on the Hill,” he told Larry O’Brien,

that there is all the difference in the world between [my] position and Bobby’s concerning the NLF … We don’t believe in favoring the communists, we are trying to kill ’em and we don’t favor them in the government before or after the election. We say that we are willing to let their voice be heard but we do not recognize them as a government and if they come to the peace table they would have to come through North Vietnam. He [RFK] favors permitting them to sit as an equal. We do not. He favors permitting them in the government. We do not.⁶²

Actually, Johnson was telling Congress one thing and Saigon another. He and Rusk did not accept the Lodge-Ky position about prohibiting any participation by the Vietcong in the forthcoming elections specifically and the political life of South Vietnam generally. “We believe the GVN [government of Vietnam] … would be wise to exclude communists,” Rusk, Komer, and Rostow advised the president, “not by name but by barring as candidates ‘agents of any external power committed to the overthrow of the GVN by force or subversion’ and they should even be prepared to give the vote to persons from VC-controlled areas if they can be properly identified.”⁶³Rostow in particular was and would continue to be an advocate of one man, one vote in South Vietnam, believing that the communists could be defeated legitimately at the polls. At the Honolulu meeting LBJ had urged Ky and Thieu to develop better contacts with the Vietcong to gain insight into the movement.⁶⁴

Kennedy and Fulbright’s perceived treachery continued to eat away at LBJ like a cancer. “Bobby is behind this revolt up there on Viet Nam,” he complained to Nick Katzenbach. “He made this damn fool speech [on including the Vietcong in the political process in South Vietnam] … Four different people told [me] that Schlesinger had written this speech … He has an idea … that I am an evil man that is trying to trip him up. I am not … My daddy used to say ‘some people are so damned crooked themselves, they think everybody else is,’—and some people are so evil themselves and are so manipulating themselves, they think everybody else is … I have no objections to Bobby becoming President of this country. I just, by God, want to be a President myself and I think it ill-behooves the Kennedys after all I have done for them to not reciprocate the treatment I have given them.”⁶⁵

On the evening of May 12, 1966, Johnson addressed a congressional dinner held in the National Guard Armory. “I am delighted to be here tonight with so many of my very old friends as well as some members of the Foreign Relations Committee,” he declared. “You can say one thing about those hearings, although I don’t think this is the place to say it.” Following a call to stay the course on the Great Society, he said, “Our people have learned that aggression, I think, in any part of the world, carries the seeds of destruction to American freedom.”⁶⁶

The Armory speech appalled McPherson, and he let his boss know it the next day: “I felt it was harsh, uncompromising and over-militant … The speech does not read as bad as it sounded. The combination of tone, emphasis, and frequent glances down at Fulbright made it wrong … Mr. President, I am one who believes we are right to stand in Viet Nam. I abhor the kind of vapid, sophomoric fighting that Fulbright is producing nowadays, but there are questions about Viet Nam and about our appropriate role in the world that are extremely difficult for me to resolve … Churchill, rallying Britain in 1940, is not the only posture a wise and strong leader can assume today.” LBJ’s reaction to these observations was to call McPherson in and chew him out.⁶⁷He was angry because he recognized the wisdom of McPherson’s remarks. He would grow closer to, not more distant from, this particular adviser as time wore on, even as he and others in the executive branch began to drift apart. What drove him to distraction about Fulbright’s dissent was its refusal to recognize the ongoing power of domestic anticommunism. Though one part of him ached, à la Richard Russell, for a leader to come to power in South Vietnam who would ask the United States to leave, another part perceived that neutralization and the communism of Vietnam would revive the conservative coalition and stall the Great Society and particularly the Second Reconstruction, thus exacerbating the urban rioting that was threatening to tear the nation apart. Fulbright, who had done battle with Strom Thurmond and the ultras throughout the Kennedy administration, should have known better.

Both Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk convinced themselves that the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s opposition to the war in Vietnam stemmed from his racism; the yellows, blacks, and browns of the world were just not worth bothering about. Fulbright had signed the Southern Manifesto and voted against the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. “The President said that on one occasion he was having a discussion with him,” Orville Freeman remembered, “and had asked Fulbright why he was so against Vietnam. Fulbright just said to him, ‘they’re not our kind of people’ and then with real vehemence the President said that means what Fulbright is really saying is ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ ”⁶⁸More ominously, in his never-ending conversations with sympathetic politicians and news people, LBJ began implying that Fulbright, Church, Morse, and Clark were tools of the Kremlin. “Now the Soviet Union has a hell of a campaign on,” Johnson confided to Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. “They are seeing I guess ten Senators per day on various phases of Viet Nam policy … This last pause originates with a fellow like Fulbright who eats dinner out there [at the Soviet embassy] and stays until 1 o’clock.”⁶⁹Johnson realized he was walking a fine line. He wanted to intimidate the dissenters, but he did not want to unleash a full-scale witch hunt. “Mr. President, I am basically a gut fighter,” Russell Long blurted out during one conversation with the president. “Now if you have got that information that Bill Fulbright was at the Soviet embassy … won’t you please let me put that on him on nationwide TV?” Not a good idea, LBJ responded immediately: “Well they would make a McCarthy out of you and they would just destroy you in the damn press and they would say that we were spying on them and they would give you hell.”⁷⁰

 

BIOGRAPHERS AND HISTORIANShave long painted Vietnam as a tragic mistake that undercut Johnson’s reforms at home. In fact, by 1966 the two projects had become closely linked in the president’s mind: Johnson wanted to build a strong, free society in both places. The concept of nation building lay at the very core of the Johnsonian vision; the Great Society itself, especially the Second Reconstruction, was nothing if not an experiment in nation building. In the midst of the I Corps crisis, LBJ had burst out during one meeting, “Dammit, we’ve got to see that the South Vietnamese government wins the battle … of crops and hearts and caring.”⁷¹

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the president and his advisers would transfer their vision of Utopia from the American heartland to the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia. There was first and foremost Johnson’s idealism. “I am going to start this year or try as best I can,” he told Roy Wilkins, “to commence it [Head Start] in the African countries and Latin American countries and Asian countries … I am going to take some of my AID money and start Headstart Programs in these countries and have the children come in and get examined physically then have a health program where they will all get inoculated for cholera and things of that kind. Then I am going to have them learn how to read and write instead of all these Ph.D.’s coming to exchange under the Fulbright program of $50 to $60 million.”⁷²Not far behind idealism, perhaps inextricably intertwined with it, was guilt. Just as Woodrow Wilson found it psychologically and emotionally necessary to justify the shedding of blood in the Great War in terms of making the world safe for democracy, so too did LBJ feel compelled to justify the carnage in Vietnam in terms of exporting the Great Society.

From a strategic and ideological perspective, there was still the perceived need to demonstrate to the third world that democracy and regulated free enterprise, “modern individualism,” brought about higher living standards, a better quality of life, and greater psychological well-being than Marxism-Leninism. Much of Walt Rostow’s meaningful intellectual life had been devoted to developing a noncommunist alternative for the peoples of the developing nations in their pursuit of social justice in the midst of decolonization. The United States had to be more than just a shining example to the rest of the world, he argued to Joe Califano. America must not only get money and land into the hands of South Vietnamese villagers, must not only bring them literacy, hygiene, and electricity, but must impart to them a sense of empowerment. If community ac-tion programs were appropriate for Watts, why not for Bien Hoa province.⁷³But, of course, it was not that simple. Outside of traditional village communalism, democracy was a foreign concept south of the seventeenth parallel. Nor did there exist the institutions—legislative bodies, quasi-independent federal agencies, and a federal court system—by which Americans had traditionally sought political empowerment and socioeconomic justice.

Actually, Johnson had been talking for more than six months with Robert Komer about how to win “the other war” in Vietnam.⁷⁴Komer, whom LBJ would appoint special assistant to the president to oversee “U.S. non-military programs for peaceful construction relating to Vietnam” and who was almost as hyperactive as Johnson, defined the other war in the broadest possible terms. Working through the government in Saigon, the American mission must control inflation; enforce discipline on the port of Saigon to see that commodities were duly landed and distributed; increase the number of AID workers (then three-thousand compared to 3 million military personnel) and send agricultural, health, and educational specialists into every village; provide security for the Americans and their Vietnamese counterparts as they struggled to win the hearts and minds of the peasant population; and compel the government in Saigon to institute a program of land reform and follow through on its promises of free elections. The other war would also involve counterinsurgency efforts to demoralize, intimidate, and, if necessary, eradicate the Vietcong. At the heart of the new pacification effort would be the already established Revolutionary Development (RD) program, by which, in a conscious imitation of NLF tactics, the U.S. mission assembled fifty-nine-man teams of Vietnamese, trained them in propaganda and social service, and inserted them in the villages of South Vietnam, there to build popular support for the government and undermine the appeal of the communists.⁷⁵Komer, Johnson, and the American mission wanted desperately to work through the South Vietnamese political and military power structure. “We cannot just take over from the Vietnamese—the growing US presence is already creating its own problems,” Komer observed to the president.⁷⁶

The commanders of the other war, Komer and his chief lieutenant, William Leonhart, reported immediate problems. Lodge, who was bored by social and economic issues, had to be forced to focus on pacification.⁷⁷Many of those who were willing to acknowledge that something needed to be done on the nonmilitary side took a very simplistic, if not simple-minded, view of pacification. “We found that in our frontier days we couldn’t plant the corn outside the stockade if the Indians were still around,” Maxwell Taylor observed. “Well, that’s what we’ve been trying to do in Viet Nam. We planted a lot of corn with the Indians still around, and we’ve sometimes lost the corn … [If] security becomes greater … pacification will move along much better.”⁷⁸Other than the marines, who lobbied constantly to be given control of pacification, the military, including Westmoreland, had little time for the other war. Ky was no more interested in economic and social questions than Lodge was. “The weakness of the GVN is the biggest bottleneck,” Komer told LBJ.⁷⁹RDs, militia, and police were under the command of the generals who headed the four corps areas, and they thought in purely military terms. Those who were assigned to protect the pacification cadre were loath to stay the night in the villages they were assigned to protect. As a result, many a dawn found the resident RDs with their throats slit. During a seven-month period in 1966, 3,015 RD personnel were murdered or kidnapped.⁸⁰Frequently, ARVN soldiers would undo any good the cadre had done by forcibly conscripting young men from the villages and imposing arbitrary and exorbitant taxes. Much of the money earmarked for RD found its way into the pockets of local military commanders.⁸¹

In August, the White House turned to David Lilienthal, the legendary force behind TVA, and asked him to oversee the pacification effort in Vietnam. Reluctantly, he agreed, but his talents were, as the administration should have foreseen, far more suited to peacetime reconstruction.⁸²By September, Komer had decided that for bureaucratic as well as substantive reasons, the other war had to be placed under military control, “I still favor (as does McNamara) giving the whole job to [Westmoreland]—and it will probably come to this if we want solid results,” Komer told Johnson.⁸³AID, State, and the CIA all strenuously objected, for obvious bureaucratic reasons, but also because they believed that the military could never get its priorities right, that it would focus primarily on physical security and let politics and reform fall by the wayside.⁸⁴They were able to delay the transfer, but only until spring, when LBJ made Westmoreland commander of both wars.

 

BY1966,ALTHOUGH OVERALL SUPPORT FOR THE WAR remained high, polls suggested plummeting support for Johnson’s handling of it. “Many people are simply not satisfied with the official explanations,” Harry McPherson observed to Bill Moyers. “They cannot believe we are there to ‘defend the freedom of South Vietnam.’ Why should we pick that place, to defend the freedom of those people? … Several people said … they wished the President would put the whole thing in the simplest terms of Realpolitik: we are there to fight China. She is trying to take Asia … So we are involved in an elemental, if dangerous, power struggle; that is acceptable, we are a power; to hell with ‘fighting for freedom and self-determination.’ ”⁸⁵In fact, Fulbright hearings and street demonstrations aside, the White House was feeling more pressure from the hawks than the doves in 1966. In surveys of states from West Virginia to Tennessee to Michigan, pollsters found that an average of 65 percent of those who gave LBJ an unfavorable rating on the war wanted “to go all out, short of nuclear attack.” Of all people surveyed, 50 percent wanted to “bomb Hanoi” and 60 percent wanted to blockade North Vietnamese ports.⁸⁶

As soon as it became apparent in January that the White House was going to resume bombing, the Joint Chiefs began to ask for the air raids to be extended to include petroleum storage facilities in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Wheeler also pressed the president to allow his aircraft to bomb the two railways connecting communist China and North Vietnam and to mine all of the harbors through which the DRV was receiving supplies from both China and the Soviet Union. As usual, LBJ resisted. He wanted to exert the maximum possible pressure on the enemy without escalating the war. “I am convinced that if I carried out all the recommendations made to me,” he told a group of representatives and senators gathered at the White House, “we’d be in World War III right now.”⁸⁷Yet he continued to believe that America could not afford to fail in Vietnam. In arguing that the United States could not fall back to Thailand, Rusk had opined that “even if sophisticated leaders understood the Vietnamese political weaknesses and our inability to control them—to the mass of the Thai people the failure would remain a US failure and a proof that Communism from the north was the decisive force in the area … Thailand simply could not be held in these circumstances and the rest of Southeast Asia would probably follow in due course.”⁸⁸Johnson did not argue the point.

Every military twist and turn was agonizingly debated. On June 22, LBJ called a meeting of his advisers to discuss extending the bombing to include the petroleum storage facilities. Rusk was for it; so were Humphrey, Rostow, William Bundy, Wheeler, and McNamara.⁸⁹The defense chief had consistently opposed bombing the facilities in the past, but he had changed his mind. With no petroleum, the enemy’s supplies would dwindle to a trickle and there would be no trucks available to carry regular NVA units into the South.⁹⁰Of LBJ’s advisers, only Arthur Goldberg and George Ball spoke up in opposition. The Chinese communists would eventually send MIG fighters in to protect key installations in North Vietnam, and U.S. planes would have to engage them they argued. Moreover, the president was going to lose liberal opinion once and for all if he escalated the war.⁹¹Johnson took their words to heart. “They [McNamara and the Joint Chiefs] think it’s a tragic mistake not to destroy that petroleum that’s supplying ten thousand trucks that are coming down now,” the president told Mike Mansfield. “I seem to be the only one that’s afraid that they’ll hit … a hospital or hit a school or something.”⁹²

In truth, Johnson was continuing to have nightmares about unforeseen events that would cause him to lose control of the situation in Southeast Asia. “You’re familiar with our battleship Maine,” he remarked to McNamara. “Now what’s going to happen if we hit their tanker there … We’ve got to analyze this very carefully … and we have … do we get enough out of this for the price we pay?” McNamara responded that it would indeed be serious if a Soviet tanker were hit, but that American pilots would exercise every caution. In his opinion, the defense chief told Johnson, the administration really had no choice. “This is a minor incident in the war. I don’t see how you can keep fighting out there, frankly, Mr. President without doing this … I don’t think you can keep the morale of the troops up and I don’t think you can keep the morale of the people in the country that support you up … I believe it has military value, although I don’t put the weight on it that the Chiefs do. But I don’t put the cost on it that the people in State do, Ball, for example.”⁹³Then, on the 24th, a story appeared in theNew York Times by Max Frankel that the Pentagon was planning to bomb targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Johnson was furious and frightened. He had visions of the reinforced and forewarned enemy lying in wait for the American assault aircraft. “I wish I could put Frankel in the first plane,” he told Cy Vance.⁹⁴On June 28, LBJ gave McNamara the go-ahead to strike the two major petroleum storage facilities in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. What ensued was the most intense and sustained aerial offensive of the war to date.

From 1A.M. to 3A.M. during the initial assault, LBJ stayed on the phone with Rostow and Vance asking for minute-by-minute reports. From their vantage point in the Situation Room, they related that 60 percent of the targets had been hit, with no bombs falling outside the target areas, then 80 percent. Reports were coming in of mushroom clouds reaching twenty thousand feet. To Johnson’s intense relief, not a single U.S. plane was lost.⁹⁵

 

“WASHINGTON IS A CITY OBSESSEDby Vietnam,” Ronald Steel wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1966. “It eats, sleeps, and particularly drinks this war. There is virtually no other subject of conversation worthy of the name, and no social gathering or private discussion that does not inevitably gravitate toward the war. Never, one feels, has a war been so passionately discussed, so minutely examined, so feverishly followed—and so little understood—as the war in Vietnam … The administration … has not had the time, or the aptitude, or perhaps the understanding to explain this war in terms that could reconcile it with traditional American values. As a result, it has lost the support of much of the nation’s intellectual community.”⁹⁶In a spate of essays and books LBJ began to appear as a power-mad Machiavellian figure who was establishing in America an “imperial presidency.” When Johnson pointed out in a speech in Omaha that he was the only public official in America elected by all the people, Walter Lippmann’s pen scratched defiance: “This is such an extraordinary conception of the American Presidency that if it is taken at face value … the President has unlimited and arbitrary power in the making of war and peace.”⁹⁷

“There’s a great infiltration in the government and in the press particularly and in the networks of folks that have little faith in our system and who want to destroy it every way in the world they can,” Johnson complained to George Brown.

They are making an all out pitch against everything—getting out of Vietnam … I think we’re going to have to start a drive to run ’em underground because they’re getting to a point now where they’re dangerous … No mother and no daughter and no married woman wants her husband or her son to go to Vietnam. The only thing that would … compel ’em to go would be love of country and their honor and their duty. But they no longer think it’s an honor or duty; they think it’s a terrible thing to do. So pretty soon you’ll get no one to do the fighting and all you’ll do is just have a little reaching and then by god they are gonna come eat us … I don’t think they do any good to the morale of our people … when they raise a doubt and a question based on misinformation about everything we do. Because a mother sits there and it’s anguish enough for her to give up her boy anyway without some goddamn senator say[ing] that he’s being manipulated and maneuvered and unfairly sent. It’s just too cruel, too brutal. It’s all right if they have an alternative and debate the alternative, but to say that you’re maneuvering ’em and lacking candor and you’re lying … it just goes a little bit further than it oughta go.⁹⁸

In a series of articles, University of Chicago political scientist Hans Morgenthau took it upon himself to reveal the truth about the tyrant who was corrupting American life and institutions. Johnson was about power, he declared in one piece; intellectuals (read: dissenters) were about truth. The two could never meet.⁹⁹In an essay entitled “The Colossus of Johnson City,” Morgenthau wrote, “What is so ominous in our present situation is not that the President has re-asserted his powers, but that in the process he has reduced all countervailing powers, political and social, to virtual and seemingly permanent impotence. What the Founding Fathers feared has indeed come to pass; the President of the United States has become an uncrowned king. Lyndon B. Johnson has become the Julius Caesar of the American Republic.”¹⁰⁰Suddenly, even conservatives like Emmet Hughes, who had been a speechwriter for Dwight Eisenhower, began to bemoan the threat posed to the Great Society by the war in Vietnam.¹⁰¹How much more so liberals? “Who could have foreseen it?” opined the New Republic. “The Great Society exponent, the practitioner of common sense, compromise, and consensus, has become The War President—sworn to prevent at any cost one set of Vietnamese (unfriendly, we have guaranteed that) from overcoming other Vietnamese (who could not hold power without us).”¹⁰²

A number of books published in 1966 reinforced the negative stereotypes that intellectuals had been attempting to instill in the reading public’s mind since 1965. The kindest was by Philip Geyelin,Lyndon Johnson and the World , which portrayed the thirty-sixth president as a simple-minded idealist who, when his attempt to substitute the Great Society for armed intervention failed, resorted to the outworn shibboleths of the 1930s and 1940s. Geyelin quoted a White House aide: “You will search without success for any evidence of deep commitment or firm philosophy.”¹⁰³In January, Theodore Sorenson(Kennedy) and Arthur Schlesinger (A Thousand Days) published books lauding JFK and Camelot. There again was the incomparable Jack: handsome, witty, urbane, self-effacing, cool under pressure, inspiring.¹⁰⁴There was Johnson, the super-numerary who accidentally and quite undeservedly became president. Later in the year, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak published theirLyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. Larry King reviewed the book: “It is all there: the hoo-hawing, indiscriminate profanity and compulsive flesh-pressing; LBJ’s crying need to be loved by all and yet retain a drill sergeant’s iron-fisted control; the little miracles and helpful deceits which form the foundation stone of Lyndon Johnson’s career … They understand Johnson’s troubled Jekyll-Hyde existence: parochial nose-pick politician on the one hand and frustrated national figure on the other.”¹⁰⁵

Feebly, ineptly, the White House tried to fight back. When columnist Joseph Kraft wrote that President Johnson couldn’t hold and attract the most competent men from the “knowledge community” because he “uses them only for cosmetic purposes,” the White House pointed to John Roche, the Brandeis University political scientist, and to LBJ’s long-time relationship with novelist John Steinbeck.¹⁰⁶LBJ was particularly bitter about the charge that his administration was devoid of first-rate brains. “He concluded our visit,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary, “by saying that it’s alright if they said he couldn’t speak without dripping tobacco juice on his shirtfront, but it was grossly unfair to say that he did not have intellectuals in his Administration.”¹⁰⁷Roche heaped scorn on what he termed “Highbrow Illiterates.” “Mainly the New York artsy-craftsy set,” he told columnist Jimmy Breslin, “they’re in thePartisan Review and theNew York Review of Books and publications like that. The West Side Jacobins, I call them. They intend to launch a revolution from Riverside Drive.”¹⁰⁸Johnson suggested to Arthur Krim that he persuade Hollywood to produce a picture based on The Mission, a memoir by one of the men with whom the president had flown in the Pacific.¹⁰⁹When John Wayne approached the White House and Defense Department about making a patriotic movie on the war in Vietnam—ultimatelyThe Green Berets— Valenti and Moyers convinced LBJ to approve government cooperation. “My own judgment is that Wayne’s politics are wrong,” Valenti told his boss, “but insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture he would be saying the things we want said.”¹¹⁰

Johnson himself pled with literate Americans to look at both sides. “So when you hear these voices in the days to come, the men who exercise the right to dissent,” he beseeched an Indiana crowd, “I hope you will ask yourselves the question: ‘I just wonder why we don’t talk about all the war? I just wonder why they are so anxious to get us to stop bombing to protect our men and they never say a word about stopping them from infiltrating and killing our men? Why don’t we talk about both sides sitting down?’ Your President is ready.”¹¹¹

Meanwhile, the administration’s press continued to worsen. When Marvin Watson insisted on monitoring incoming and outgoing calls between reporters and members of the executive, the media, led by the imperious Joe Alsop, responded with a slew of denunciatory articles. “You can tell the President from me,” Alsop wrote Moyers, “that the rather considerable debt that he owes me has been very ill repaid, in my opinion, by this kind of response to the independence which no self-respecting newspaperman can ever sacrifice. He may not think so, but he would be very ill served if all the members of my business were transformed into the type of waffling sycophant that appears to be the current White House ideal.”¹¹²June and July saw a series of stories on LBJ’s personal unpopularity. “Many Americans Seem to Dislike, Distrust President,” ran a Tom Wicker Story in theNew York Times.¹¹³ Johnson read every negative article, every column. “It is awfully goddamn hard to have a foreign policy if they [theNew York Times ] don’t approve of it,” he grumbled to Eugene McCarthy. The government had done everything the pundits recommended, but they were never satisfied. “They started with … Diem you remember,” he said. “He was corrupt and he ought to be killed so we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamned bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. We have really had no political stability since then.”¹¹⁴“They wanted Khanh gone so he left. They wanted a bombing pause, so they got a bombing pause. They wanted negotiations, so we offered unconditional negotiations.” The president spent hours on the phone with publishers Walker Stone and Henry Luce trying to explain the administration’s position on Vietnam.¹¹⁵

Johnson could not give the press and the American people the answers they wanted, and he knew it. “I cannot say ‘when’ and ‘how’ about Vietnam,” he remarked to McGeorge Bundy. “Can you?” “No,” Bundy replied.¹¹⁶“We have by-and-large blunted the communist military initiative,” McNamara reported to Johnson following a fact-finding trip to Vietnam in early October. “My concern continues, however, in other respects. This is because I see no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon. Enemy morale has not broken—he apparently has adjusted to our stopping his drive for military victory and has adopted a strategy of keeping us busy and waiting us out (A strategy of attriting our national will).”¹¹⁷“I think that I have failed you and I’ve failed the American people in my inability and my incapacity to bring about the united front that I would like to see in this country in connection with our objectives there [Vietnam],” Johnson subsequently told a group of representatives and senators. “I have been ineffective in communicating our position there.”¹¹⁸

Following the extension of the bombing to petroleum storage sites around Hanoi and Haiphong, LBJ’s approval rating shot up six points, but it quickly fell back to the high forties. When a September poll asked who the Democrats would run for president in the next election, an astounding 46 percent responded that they did not know.¹¹⁹There was too much consensus and too little decision, Emmet Hughes opined inNewsweek. What Richard Russell feared was coming to pass. The American people were psychologically and historically unprepared to fight an extended war of uncertain outcome, and Johnson’s attempt to conduct one was endangering the whole containment regime that had been so painstakingly constructed in the United States. “When I was that young girl,” Nancy Harjan remarked in an oral history of World War II, “I saw on the news films the Parisian people, with tears streaming down their faces, welcoming our GIs. They were doing what I wanted them to do. When the Holocaust survivors came out, I felt we were liberating them. When the GIs and the Russian soldiers met, they were all knights in shining armor, saving humanity.”¹²⁰What these same Americans saw in 1966 was burning villages, corrupt Saigonese, and an inconclusive war for indeterminate ends.

 

IN THE CONTINUING SEARCHfor compelling justifications for America’s war in Southeast Asia, LBJ, Dean Rusk, William Bundy, and other administration spokesmen repeatedly resorted to the issue of credibility—that if the United States abandoned its SEATO ally, none of the other of the forty-odd agreements the United States had signed with foreign powers would be worth the paper they were printed on. What about reciprocity, Fulbright and other dissenters had asked? Why didn’t the British and Canadians have troops in Vietnam? What about those most directly threatened by communist expansion? Besides Korea and Australia, no other Asian power could claim a significant combat presence in Vietnam. To undercut this criticism, the White House announced that the president would embark on a ten-day Asian tour highlighted by a gathering in Manila of representatives from the SEATO nations. White House advance men fanned out across the Pacific, and dozens of destroyers, cruisers, and other warships moved into position along Air Force One’s planned line of flight.¹²¹The tour would include South Korea, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, and New Zealand. First stop was New Zealand. Lyndon, Lady Bird, and their formidable entourage were greeted by Prime Minister Holyoake and a Maori delegation. The chief of the Maori, “very fierce looking in appearance,” stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes, and commenced a frantic dance. He interrupted his dervish three times to lay ceremonial gifts at the president’s feet. The prime minister picked up each and handed it to LBJ, informing him that accepting the gifts meant he had come in peace. Then the whole group, men and women, clad in all their aboriginal finery, began dancing and singing. One of LBJ’s staff could not help but notice that one of the troupe was humming the Beatle’s hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand” under his breath.¹²²

From Christchurch, the presidential party proceeded to Australia. Seven hundred thousand Aussies turned out to cheer the Johnson motorcade and shower it with confetti. The president stopped his automobile more than a dozen times to get out and shake hands. There were also antiwar hecklers; two of them threw red and green paint bombs at the bubble-top limousine carrying the guests of honor, causing it to stop momentarily. Once the windshield and Secret Service agents were cleaned up, however, the motorcade proceeded to Government House without further incident.¹²³“You have given me a very colorful welcome,” Johnson joked in his opening remarks. Later in the evening, the president invited the press corps, who were having to stand outside in the dark and cold, in for a drink. “Remember this,” he quipped, “all this is off the record—both what I say and how much you drink.”¹²⁴

While in Melbourne, LBJ took a side trip to visit Dame Mabel Brooke, who had entertained him more than twenty years earlier during his Pacific tour. Back in Canberra, the capital, the Johnsons had dinner with Premier Harold Holt and his family, and the president briefly addressed a cabinet meeting at Parliament House. In his comments, he referred to how “bigoted” he had been concerning Asia and the Pacific early in his life. He had originally opposed state-hood for Hawaii because, like most Americans, he was an Atlanticist, and regarded the people of the Pacific as somehow different. Then, during the war, he had traveled the area and seen that there was no fundamental difference. He had been appalled at how the Pacific theater had been given such short shrift in the allocation of war matériel. After a swipe at Harold Wilson and the British—“God forgive them for they know not what they do”—(Wilson had refused to commit troops and repeatedly expressed doubts about the war) he went on to praise steadfast allies, the sanctity of treaties, and foreign policies that made room for both guns and butter.¹²⁵

From Australia, the presidential party proceeded to the Philippines and the Manila Conference. Behind the scenes, LBJ met with Philippine President Marcos and South Korean President Park. His message was consistent: “We must remain united at this conference; secondly, we must demonstrate our determination that we shall not pull out and that Hanoi cannot win; third, [we must] focus the world’s attention on the problems of Asia.” There was also a warning: “You cannot impose freedom on people who don’t want it,” he said, “but if they love liberty and freedom, we will stay with them and support them. If they don’t want freedom the U.S. can look after itself and meet the threat at Honolulu.”¹²⁶He met with Ky and Thieu, telling the former that his forthcoming speech at a conference plenary session would be very important. As usual he had some advice: “Lean as far away as you can from the ‘imperialist’ Johnson, from the hard-liner Rusk, and that fellow with stars on his shoulders, Westmoreland. You just hold the Bible in your hand tomorrow. You be a man of good will; love your neighbor; but indicate, of course, that you will not take steps which tie your hands behind your back when they are still shooting.”¹²⁷

Following the last session of the Manila Conference, LBJ called Rostow, Moyers, Lodge, Clifford, and Westmoreland together. He wanted to make a surprise visit to Vietnam the next day. Westmoreland eventually agreed to arrange for American forces to receive Johnson around five o’clock in the afternoon at Cam Ranh Bay. There began one of the more frantic twenty-four hours in Westmoreland’s career. He cabled his lieutenants that he wanted a major awards ceremony at Cam Ranh the following day and ordered them to round up America’s finest soldiers from units throughout the country. The huge military complex became a beehive of activity. The First Cavalry Band was flown in by Caribou. Preparations were completed a bare thirty minutes before the president and his party arrived.¹²⁸

Meanwhile, aboard Air Force One, LBJ had slipped into his “cowboy” outfit, as White House reporters referred to it: tan gabardine slacks and a matching zipper jacket bearing the gold seal of the president of the United States on the right breast. To minimize exposure to possible enemy fire, the presidential aircraft made a steep and rapid descent. On the ground, LBJ and Westmoreland boarded a jeep and stood in the back as it drove past the seven thousand American service men and women who had assembled for the occasion. Johnson reviewed the nine-hundred-man honor guard and then pinned medals on heroes. “A grateful nation … ,” he repeated over and over.

Then it was time to address the troops. Among them were some of the wounded from the nearby base hospital. The soldiers were quiet, attentive. “I came here today for one good reason,” Johnson began strongly, “simply because I could not come to this part of the world and not come to see you. I came here today for one good purpose: to tell you, and through you, tell every soldier, sailor, airman and marine in Vietnam how proud we are of what you are doing and how proud we are of the way you are doing it … I give you my pledge: We shall never let you down, nor your fighting comrades, nor the 125 million people of South Vietnam, nor the hundreds of millions of Asians who are counting on us.” Then, his voice breaking, “We believe in you. We know you are going to get the job done. And soon, when peace can come to the world, we will receive you back in your homeland with open arms, with great pride, and with great thanks.”¹²⁹

After brief stops at the hospital and mess hall, the president and his party departed. They had been in South Vietnam a little more than two and a half hours. “It was obvious that he was speaking as much with his heart as with his mind,” Farris Bryant, who was a member of the entourage, later recalled. He was “as emotional as I have ever seen him.”¹³⁰

Hubert Humphrey would later make an insightful observation concerning LBJ’s empathy for those fighting and dying in Vietnam: “When you send men into battle, you know some are going to lose their lives. That is an awful part of political power. I don’t suppose it is easy for anyone, but military people are at least trained in war. Most politicians are not. Yet the compassion breeds an irony: once an early order causes the first person to die, leaders feel required to justify what has been done. Thus, the compassion helps to create an insidious condition that leads, I fear, not to less killing, but to more.”¹³¹