CHAPTER 35

BATTLING DR. STRANGELOVE

IT HAD BEEN DEEMED TOO DANGEROUS FORLADYBIRDto accompany Lyndon to Vietnam, so she stayed behind on the island

of Corregidor, where Air Force One had touched down briefly to pay

tribute to the heroes of the Bataan Death March. She had relished the Asian tour, however, because it provided a rare opportunity for her to spend time with her husband. She had given up much to be Lyndon Johnson’s wife. So had her daughters, Lynda and Luci. When their father had suddenly become president, Luci was sixteen, a junior at National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington, D.C., and Lynda nineteen, a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin. Reluctantly, Lynda agreed to transfer to George Washington University and move into the White House with the rest of the family. Among other things, Lady Bird had hoped that Lynda could help manage and calm the high-strung, sometimes melodramatic Luci. But the two girls were as different as sisters could be and were as often thorns to each other as comforts. “I love her. I just don’t like her very much,” Luci once remarked indiscreetly to a White House reporter.¹Both young women felt abandoned by their parents and resented it. “I never understood why my mother had to leave and travel with my father,” said Luci. “I remember one time [when I was a little girl] I clung to her skirts and tried to keep her from leaving. I screamed at her, ‘You’re not a real mother! A mother stays home!’ ”²Lynda also felt orphaned, but she reacted differently. She remembered going into her mother’s room when she was gone, feeling her bedcovers and clothes and smelling her perfume to take some of the sting out of her loneliness. She typically reacted with accommodation. As a teenager, Lynda became a student of politics, reading theCongressional Record in her room after school, trying to impress her father with her knowledge of public affairs.

Luci perceived that one of her primary roles was to be “the pretty one.” She was periodically obsessed with her weight.³After the family moved into the White House, Luci’s search for an independent life continued. There was the conversion to Catholicism and then, at midnight on Christmas Eve 1965, the family announced from the ranch that she had become engaged to Patrick Nugent of Waukegan, Illinois. Nugent, a twenty-two-year-old senior at Marquette, had been introduced to Luci a year earlier at a Washington party by Beth Jenkins, Walter’s daughter.⁴Everybody in the family believed that at nineteen, Luci was too young to get married and had tried to talk her out of it. But as usual, she had not listened. Lynda responded by striking up an affair with George Hamilton, the tan, dark-haired, strikingly handsome movie actor. The two first appeared together when a more glamorous Lynda appeared on George’s arm at the Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans on January 2, 1966.⁵Both Lyndon, who called Hamilton “Charlie” behind his back, and Lady Bird worried initially that Lynda was out of her league and that the actor was just trying to take advantage of the first family for publicity purposes, but eventually, Lady Bird at least warmed to the relationship. “He was extremely good for her—he really brought her out as a woman,” she observed in a 1997 interview.⁶

There was an undertone of competition in the Luci-Pat, Lynda-George relationships. When aWomen’s Wear Daily story placed all three Johnson women in their worst-dressed in America category, Luci blamed Lynda for being deliberately plain and frumpy. The older daughter responded by losing more weight and had George introduce her to the Hollywood hairdresser George Masters. He persuaded her to abandon the UT coed, puffed bouffant for a more relaxed hairstyle. After one subsequent capital soiree, theWashington Post described her as “resplendent in a white dress with dark hair down over her shoulders.”⁷

Luci and Lynda frequently complained about life in the White House. “If I’m drinking a glass of milk at a party,” Lynda toldNewsweek , “it gets reported as milk punch and some nice WCTU lady will write me saying ‘the sins of the flesh move upon you.’ ” “When my grades weren’t so good, complete strangers scolded me,” says Luci, “and when they got better and we sort of leaked the news about my B average, people said I was bragging.” Lynda quipped, “Caesar’s daughter must be above reproach.” But as Lady Bird said, “They wear their bonds rather lightly.”⁸

All three Johnson women seemed to enjoy preparations for Luci and Pat’s August nuptials. The wedding was preceded by a week of parties. Lyndon struggled not to overwhelm. “All I’m going to do is put on a cutaway and walk down the aisle and pay the bills,” he told reporters. But one thing the Johnson family never lacked was sentiment and affection. The president did nothing to hide how much he was going to miss his younger daughter. At lunch at the White House, journalist John Steele recorded a prewedding moment between father and his elder daughter. “Quietly Lynda Bird slipped through the room in a dressing gown, then appeared again attractively attired to kiss her father on the top of his head, hold his hand for a long moment. The two looked somewhat soulfully at one another.”⁹The wedding ceremony was an hour-long extravaganza in the cavernous National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Seven hundred guests sweltered in the oppressive Washington heat. Both bride and maid of honor, Lynda, nearly fainted, but with some assistance they remained upright. Wedding party and guests retired to a White House reception featuring a wedding cake that stood eight feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds.¹⁰

Luci’s wedding was a highlight in the Lyndon?Lady Bird relationship, but their marriage continued to be plagued with the roughness and misunderstanding that seemed always to characterize it. Two weeks after the wedding, Lady Bird returned from a shopping trip to New York. She found her husband at work in the Oval Office. On his desk was a small package. At first she thought it was for him; he would be fifty-eight on the morrow. But he gestured for her to open it. Inside was a large, obviously expensive diamond ring. Lady Bird had pretended to be content with the $2.50 Sears and Roebuck ring Dan Quill had bought for her on Lyndon’s behalf so many years ago. “All these years I’ve taken a rather condescending view of women who wanted or needed diamonds,” she wrote in her diary. “Now I find myself, at 53, proud to have that shiny rock, delighted to be told that I am cherished.”¹¹For his birthday, Lyndon received from Lady Bird an antique wooden seaman’s chest, circa 1840, that had been owned by a German immigrant family. He was insulted. It was like giving your wife a toaster oven for her birthday. “If I live long enough I guess Lady Bird will get enough of these chests,” he announced to the thirty-two guests who had gathered at the ranch for a birthday feast of barbeque and peach ice cream.¹²She was humiliated.

 

ALTHOUGH OUTWARDLY BUOYANT,Democratic leaders approached the midterm elections of 1966 with apprehension. “The American people are concerned about Vietnam,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary. “There is a dark void there, and they don’t know exactly where we’re going as a Nation … The same thing seems to be true about the economy. The President’s obsession with it, with inflation, with what should be done about it, and the failure to act … and certainly these civil rights disturbances and riots everywhere and the whole white backlash problem is another where there is such doubt and indecision.”¹³

Further contributing to Democratic gloom was a growing awareness that the president had grossly neglected the party and its machinery. Indeed, Johnson was proving to be one of America’s least partisan presidents. “I hear rumors you were a politician,” John Roche told LBJ, “but have no evidence of it.”¹⁴Part of his conflict with Richard Daley had stemmed from Johnson’s contempt for the patronage system. The Johnson administration featured a running feud between John Macy, LBJ’s chief talent scout who was also head of the Civil Service Commission, and Jim Rowe. Without success, Rowe continually hounded Macy to recommend some good party loyalists for appointment to government office. In answer to one of Macy’s polite but noncommittal responses, Rowe replied, “I am delighted … you are grateful for my words of wisdom and encouragement … However that ain’t what I want! What I want are some Democrats appointed to something.” And again, “Perhaps you can train some of those career men to run the political campaign in 1968.”¹⁵

LBJ was driven by his search for excellence and expertise, as well as by his determination to be above reproach. “You know,” he told Rowe, “I can only feel safe if I pick civil servants or military men, because their whole life has been under such complete scrutiny, they won’t surprise me … You lawyers, you are not trustworthy, you have always got a client some way or other that’s embarrassing.”¹⁶Johnson’s neglect of the Democratic National Committee was common knowledge. He did not consult it, use it, or even acknowledge it. One sign of his indifference was that he did not bother to remove John Bailey, a man for whom he had utter contempt, as national chairman.¹⁷

As the campaign season got under way, the Johnson administration discovered that the two-party system was alive and well. By 1966, the GOP was well on its way back to the center of political life in America. Heading this resurgence was a new, sleeker, more relaxed Richard Nixon. Since his 1960 presidential defeat and his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial contest, Nixon seemed to have shed the insecurity and humorlessness that had plagued him. “Remember when the Democrats tried to run with LBJ?” Nixon asked a whooping throng of Republican loyalists. “Now they’re trying to run away from him.”¹⁸

The Kennedys could have cared less about the midterm elections; they had their sights set on 1968. On the war in Vietnam (the administration was too in-flexible), on the Great Society (the administration was quitting too early), and on the plight of the cities (the administration was not doing enough), RFK worked to stake out an alternative position. But the “exquisitely modulated battle,” asNewsweek termed it, between RFK and LBJ was having an immediate and detrimental impact.¹⁹Polls by both Gallup and Quayle taken in the first week in September indicated that Democrats favored Bobby 40 to 38 percent for the 1968 presidential nomination and independents preferred him by 38 to 24 percent. If the election were held then, Kennedy would beat George Romney easily by 55 to 39 percent, and LBJ would squeak by with 48 to 44 percent.²⁰To many voters, the Democrats seemed disorganized and demoralized.

To campaign or not to campaign, that was the question facing the president as Democratic and Republican hopefuls hit the campaign trial in August. He sensed some ambivalence among Democrats about the attitude they should take toward the administration, and it created more than a little ambivalence in him. Nevertheless, in the last week in August he made a campaign swing through New York and New England, remembering fondly the tumultuous welcome he had received there during the 1964 campaign. Momentarily dispelling doom and gloom among Democratic strategists, he was greeted by large, enthusiastic crowds and seemed to be at his press-fleshing best. A week later, he traveled through Michigan and Ohio, ending up at the Fairfield County Fair Grounds in Lancaster, Ohio, where twenty-five thousand, including some two thousand high school band members from around Ohio, turned out.²¹Two weeks thence, Air Force One made visits to Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado.

At all of his campaign stops, Johnson hammered away on the achievements of the Great Society. Inflation there was, but relative purchasing power continued to increase. Crime on the streets was a growing problem, but it had not reached epidemic proportions, nor was it exclusively an African American problem. The president condemned rioting and looting, pointing out that 99 percent of black Americans did, too.²²He was particularly energized by a sight he had seen in Denver. On his way to a speaking engagement, his motorcade had driven through a nice, lower-middle-class neighborhood. With growing excitement, Johnson noted that the residents were black. Repeatedly, he stopped and got out of his car to walk and chat with them.²³At a subsequent news conference at the ranch, he described what he had seen: “You drove through the places where you would expect to see the ghettoes in Denver and you saw modest homes. I said to some of my people that it looked very much like my mother’s home in Austin, Texas, a three-bedroom little home with one bath, with a beautiful lawn, small, attractive, with flowers growing in the windows, well kept with great pride, and happy people living in it … It would have been difficult to believe that those were Negro homes, if you hadn’t seen them standing there.”²⁴

From every quarter, the White House was advised that Vietnam was on the nation’s collective mind and that voters wanted to see some light at the end of the tunnel. This, of course, was one of the major reasons LBJ undertook his whirlwind Asian tour in October. But at the end, all the American people could see when they looked ahead was continued darkness.²⁵

Election day proved to be humbling, if not disastrous, for the Democrats. The GOP gained forty-seven seats in Congress, three in the Senate, eight governorships, and, perhaps most significant, over five hundred seats in state legislatures. Critics of the administration were elated.²⁶Liberals predicted a revival of the Dixiecrat-conservative coalition. Some Democrats saw a silver lining, however. “It is, I think, a brand-new ball game,” political activist Frank Mankiewicz wrote Bobby Kennedy after the elections. “In every contested election the young, attractive, more non-political candidate won. And the oldest, least attractive, most political candidate is LBJ.”²⁷Vietnam was not as important in explaining GOP gains, Arthur Schlesinger told reporters, as “the picture—true or false—which people have about President Johnson’s character.”²⁸LBJ tried to put the best face on the outcome. Democratic margins had been reduced from 249 to 187 in the House and sixty-four to thirty-six in the Senate—still workable majorities. And though he did not say it, LBJ believed that some of the newly elected Republicans might be easier to get along with than some of his liberal fellow Democrats.²⁹

 

INDECEMBER1966, BILLMOYERS LEFTthe White House to become publisher ofNewsday. A break had been in the offing since he first took the job as press secretary. At the time, Moyers had remarked to his wife, “This is the beginning of the end, because no man can serve two masters,” meaning LBJ and the press.³⁰Particularly when those two masters were so continually and vexatiously at odds. Johnson was dissatisfied with his relationship with the media and, increasingly, he tended to blame his press secretary. The White House press corps began to view Moyers less as a witty, informed, sincere individual who was doing his best to accommodate them than as the defender of the paranoid, arbitrary, dishonest man in the White House. In the summer of 1966 Moyers had gone to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.

There were many former and current members of the Johnson entourage who did not like or trust Moyers. George Reedy and his assistant, Joe Laitin, detested him as a Johnny-come-lately, a bureaucratic imperialist, a trafficker in the ideas and influence of others. Jake Jacobsen, who worked in the White House for a time, felt that Moyers talked too much, and too frequently presumed to speak for the president. Everybody outside his own circle, especially his boss, believed that Moyers was too close to the Kennedys and too active on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Then there was the war. By the late summer of 1966, Johnson’s press secretary was beginning to question, both in house and out, the efficacy of the bombing of North Vietnam.³¹Moreover, he had been extremely upset about the growing power of Appointments Secretary Marvin Watson and especially the decision to censor the staff’s contacts with journalists.

Still, Johnson was fond of Moyers and continued to regard him as immensely capable. There was a sense of inevitability in the relationship between the two men, an understanding that no one of Moyers’s intellect and independence of mind could continue indefinitely in the press secretary’s job. During the pressure and confusion leading up to the 1966 State of the Union address, Johnson and his protégé had had a falling out. Moyers had been intensely irritated with the way LBJ was treating Richard Goodwin, with his perfectionism and hypercriticism. When LBJ implied that Moyers was behind all of the anti-Watson stories then circulating, his aide had stalked out of the room and during the rest of the day had given Johnson a taste of his own deep-freeze medicine. Finally, at 1:30 in the morning, LBJ called him. “I had the feeling that you got angry this morning and kinda sulked all day long … puffed up like a powder pigeon,” Johnson remarked. Moyers didn’t deny it. The press secretary’s job was hellacious, the president observed: “I don’t believe you are constitutionally and physically and temperamentally and emotionally fitted. I know I am not … All I am trying to do is struggle and preserve for myself until my last heart beats a complete succumbing to their [journalists’] domination.” But he realized, he said, that as press secretary, Moyers was inevitably part of the Fourth Estate. Did he want out, LBJ asked? “I find it an exciting job,” Moyers replied. “I find it an unsatisfying job for the way I am built,” the president observed. “A man like you or a man like me are never going to be satisfied by the press secretary job.” “Anytime you want out,” Johnson said, “I’ll understand and help you find another position as long as you come to me first.” Again he asked, “Is there any job you would rather have that you want to go to?” Moyers sighed, “No sir. There is not another job that I believe that I should do right now.” Both men clearly understood the phrase “right now.”³²The very day Moyers left the White House, he agreed to lunch with Bobby Kennedy at Sans Souci. The next day theWashington Star ran a front-page picture of the two in rapt conversation. “Of course,” John Roche observed, “after that nothing would ever convince Johnson that Moyers really hadn’t been on the Kennedy payroll for years and years.”³³

 

THENEWYEAR BEGAN WITHa brouhaba over the official portrait of the thirty-sixth president. LBJ had long admired the work of portraitist and western landscape painter Peter Hurd. As a result, the White House Historical Association had commissioned him to render the official portrait. As Hurd later put it, the president had “no idea of the obligations of a sitter to the artist.” In the spring of 1966, LBJ viewed the preliminary work at the ranch and pronounced it “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” He then sent Hurd a flock of White House photos to work from. The first week in January, the artist announced that he had lost interest in the project and was going to put his original work on public display at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Columbus, Ohio. LBJ incurred further derision from habitués of high culture when he indicated his preference for a sketch of him done by Norman Rockwell.³⁴But LBJ was right. The Hurd portrait was flat and lifeless, although Johnson had no one to blame but himself.

 

DESPITEVIETNAM, HIS TROUBLES WITH THE PRESS,and GOP gains, LBJ’s appetite for reform had not abated. As he prepared for his fourth State of the Union address, he was as determined as ever to forge ahead on the domestic front. Any other man might have been satisfied with the enormous progress made to date: since 1963 unemployment was down from 5.7 percent to 3.7 percent; industrial production was up by 25 percent; GNP had increased more than $100 billion, or 17 percent; real income was up by 14 percent; profits had grown by 36 percent; 4 million Americans had moved above the poverty line; 8 million disadvantaged children in seventeen thousand school districts were receiving aid under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; 8 million more workers were covered by minimum wage; and never-before-provided federal health care was available to millions of disabled and elderly Americans.³⁵

Shortly after Christmas, Joe Califano arrived at the ranch to go over the next year’s program. For months, Johnson had been thinking about upgrading nursing homes. At the president’s direction, Califano had put together a task force to make recommendations. LBJ’s charge to the members had been memorable. As he described some of the conditions he had witnessed, his voice rose and he became more agitated, “Fire traps, rat traps, a disgrace … no one of you would let your mother near one.” He invoked the Bible and the commandment to honor thy father and mother. “I want nursing homes that will be livable, happy places for people to serve out their old age, places where there will be a little joy for the elderly, but most of all places that take care of their special needs.” There needed to be “flat floors, and grades, so that the wheelchairs can easily be used … And when you design toilets … ”—at this point he leaned sideways on his left buttock, put his elbow on the arm of his chair, took his right arm and hand, and strained to twist them as far behind himself as he could, and, grunting and jabbing his hand behind his back, he continued—“make sure that you don’t put the toilet paper rack way behind them so they have to wrench their back out of place or dislocate a shoulder or get a stiff neck in order to get their hands on the toilet paper.”³⁶

Califano suggested legislation requiring tobacco companies to reveal the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes on their packaging. LBJ was sympathetic but did not want to do anything further to alienate the tobacco states. His civil rights initiatives were doing enough. LBJ was enthusiastic about lowering the voting age to eighteen, but wanted to wait a year (he proposed a constitutional amendment to that effect in June 1968). He wanted a truth-in-lending bill, the president told his advisers. Earlier that year, Califano’s son, Joe, had swallowed the contents of an aspirin bottle and had had to have his stomach pumped. “There ought to be a law that makes druggists use safe containers,” LBJ declared on hearing of the accident. “There ought to be safety caps on those bottles so kids like little Joe can’t open them.” Thus was born the Child Safety Act, which Congress eventually passed in 1970.³⁷

Johnson continued to believe that the answer to urban unrest—both rioting and everyday murders, muggings, drug use, and theft—was better housing, more education, jobs, and health care, but he also recognized that the public felt unsafe and wanted government to reaffirm its commitment to law and order. In addition, he believed that, in the long run, such a commitment was just as much in black America’s interest, if not more, than white America’s. He instructed Califano, Harry McPherson, and Ramsey Clark, then in the Justice Department, to come up with a recommendation that would demonstrate the administration’s support for law and order. “When I sent Harry McPherson an early draft of the message,” Califano recalled, “I wrote, ‘Please get mean and nasty before you start work on it, since the President wants a tough anticrime message.’ ” The president instructed his subordinates to pay close attention to the title of the proposed legislation. They should be “godamned careful what you call these bills. Don’t name them at midnight when you’re tired and should be doing something like answering mail or returning calls. Do it in the morning. And then count to ten.”³⁸Califano liked “Safe Streets Act.” Clark objected that the streets could never be made completely safe, not in a free society, and suggested “Crime Control Act.” LBJ settled on “the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act.” He understood that policing the nation was a function of local and state governments. He had envisioned federal grants to improve existing police and criminal justice systems, to encourage the development of innovative law enforcement programs, and to fund modern crime labs and police academies. He also intended to ask Congress for a gun control law and more money to fight drugs through prevention and rehabilitation.

To balance the Safe Streets Act and to put law-and-order zealots on notice that they could not flout civil liberties, Johnson planned to submit a Right of Privacy Act that would ban all wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping, except in national security cases, and even then to prohibit the use of evidence gathered in this manner in court. Writing in theNew York Times near the end of the Johnson administration, journalist Sidney Zion observed that LBJ’s record on civil liberties was perhaps the best of any twentieth-century president. He did not impose censorship in Vietnam. In the face of urban rioting and subversive activities by groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, he sought no exceptional authority for the federal government, no suspension of rights.³⁹Indeed, he seemed at times fanatical about the subject. In May 1966, Missouri Democratic Senator Edward Long, chair of a subcommittee investigating electronic eavesdropping, had singled out the IRS and accused its director, Sheldon Cohen, of trampling on the rights of taxpayers. LBJ subsequently demanded an explanation. Cohen tried to defend electronic snooping to catch tax evaders and perpetrators of fraud. What the IRS was doing, he said, was not wrong “in the eyes of the law or of reasonable people.” Johnson disagreed. “Sheldon—Stop it all at once,” he scribbled on Cohen’s memo, “and this is final—no microphones—taps or any other hidden devices, legal or illegal, if you are going to work for me.”⁴⁰

Charged with drafting a White House position paper on wiretapping, Joe Califano and Lee White suggested three alternatives: unlimited official wiretapping, a complete ban on all taps, and a middle ground permitting wiretapping under stringent controls. Next to the complete ban, LBJ scribbled, “I like this best.”⁴¹At first glance, this Johnsonian commitment to civil liberties seemed to go against the grain. Here was a man who had based his political life and effectiveness on information gathering, knowing more about an issue and the men who would decide it than anyone else. He had a Dictabelt system installed on his phones so that at his signal his secretaries could record incoming and outgoing calls. He read voraciously the “raw files” J. Edgar Hoover sent over. He relied on the Bureau to run careful background checks on individuals he proposed to nominate to federal office. According to Jim Jones, the young White House aide who sat at LBJ’s right hand from late 1967 thorough 1969, “Homosexuality, run-ins with the law, and habitual drunkenness were red flags for the president.”⁴²But at the same time, he thought Hoover “weird” for collecting the data. There is no evidence that LBJ ever used personal information to blackmail; he liked to know an individual’s weaknesses so that he could predict his or her actions and to decide whether the person could be depended on, but he did not blackmail. “Johnson was an excessive man in many ways,” Harry McPherson observed, “but he had a sense of proportion about the government and the governed and about the Congress and Executive; he was prudent.”⁴³

By late 1967, LBJ was under pressure from law-and-order advocates in Congress to have the Justice Department actively prosecute urban rioters and violent antiwar demonstrators, using various communist control statutes if necessary. In January 1968, the president began to badger Ramsey Clark to refer cases to the Subversive Activities Control Board, a congressionally created watchdog agency. But Johnson did so not out of a lack of respect for civil liberties, but because Everett Dirksen, whose support LBJ needed to pass the 1968 civil rights bill, had assumed control of the committee overseeing the board and needed some action for publicity purposes.⁴⁴There was another reason for Johnson’s high profile on civil liberties; it would show him in sharp and favorable contrast to Bobby Kennedy. In late 1966, following reports that the FBI had used electronic surveillance to arrest and charge defendants in criminal cases (including Bobby Baker), Ramsey Clark, also a lion on civil liberties, ordered an investigation that revealed that the FBI had indeed engaged in widespread eavesdropping. When news of the investigation leaked to the press, Hoover responded by declaring that his boss, then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had ordered the wiretaps. Bobby denied that he had ever done anything other than authorize electronic eavesdropping in national security cases, but the fat was in the fire. It was in response to this brouhaha that Congressman Edward Long’s committee began its work. Bill Moyers confided to Richard Goodwin of Long, “He is out to get Bobby. Johnson is egging him on.”⁴⁵

LBJ and his advisers picked the evening of January 10, 1967, for the State of the Union address. Johnson did not want to conflict with Ev Dirksen’s birthday party scheduled for the 11th and he did not want to shoulder aside popular television programs. “I don’t want millions of people looking at me for an hour and thinking, ‘This is the big-eared son of a bitch that knocked my favorite program off the air,’ ” he told Califano.⁴⁶Still, the 10th turned out to be an unfortunate choice. “On the Hill today there had been a death [the aged Congressman John E. Fogarty of Rhode Island] and an expulsion,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary. “Adam Clayton Powell had been expelled from the House [for misuse of public funds and other offenses] in an atmosphere tense with violence and hatred.”⁴⁷

Observers noted a different LBJ who strode into the House chamber that January evening. There was a diffident, almost apologetic smile on his face. His tone was subdued, his rhetoric measured. He admitted that sundry “mistakes” and “errors” marred his leadership. He alluded to the need sometime in the future for a tax increase. He promised safer streets, maintenance rather than extension of most Great Society programs, and, as in 1966, emphasis on quality of life issues. Johnson mentioned civil rights only briefly. The theme was not what the federal government was going to do for America, but what could be achieved in partnership with state and local government.⁴⁸James Reston hailed the speech as the beginning of a new and creative federalism. In a laudatory column entitled “Johnson and the Age of Reform,” Reston wrote, “This is not a conservative but a radical program. He is not trying to follow but to transform the New Deal. He is not proposing to console the poor in their poverty but to give them the means of lifting themselves out of poverty. He is not using Federal funds to keep them where they are or to impose Federal control over the states and cities, but to finance the passage of the poor into useful, effective jobs, and create new partnerships between Washington and the state capitals and the cities and other political centers in the world.”⁴⁹Johnson was in fact saying to the South Vietnamese, to African Americans, to the white middle class, to labor, to management that he had carried forward and modernized the Roosveltian vision; he had put in place the tools with which to achieve the goal of a just, peaceful, diverse, and democratic society. Now it was up to the people to determine whether they had the will and wisdom to sustain that vision.

On the war itself, the president offered little solace. “I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over,” he said. “This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year—or come next year.” America and its allies would prove equal to the task, however. Significantly, Johnson did not cite the cold war as justification, did not pitch the battle in terms of a cataclysmic clash between the good of capitalism and democracy and the evil of communism and totalitarianism. “One result of our stand in Vietnam is already clear,” he declared. “It is this: The peoples of Asia now know that the door to independence is not going to be slammed shut. They know that it is possible for them to choose their own national destinies—without coercion.”⁵⁰The subtle listener would notice the shift to national self-determination rather than simple anticommunism as a justification for the war and conclude that the president was laying the ground-work for public acceptance of a coalition government in South Vietnam, a government that would include the National Liberation Front, communists and noncommunists alike. Indeed, starting in 1966, LBJ had begun talking more in terms of moderation versus extremism than communism versus freedom. America’s policy of “patience and daring, of commonsense and vision, of the wise use of power and its wise restraint when needs be,” he told a Democratic gathering in Des Moines, “has made possible a rebirth of moderation and commonsense, not just in the United States but throughout all the continents of the world. In the last few years, in country after country, on continent after continent, extremist leaders have suffered one defeat after another. They have been replaced by men of moderation.”⁵¹

Two weeks later, the United States endured its first manned space tragedy. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, Navy Lieutenant Commander Roger B. Chaffee, and Air Force Colonel Edward H. White II were burned to death when a ball of flame engulfed theirApollo I spacecraft at Cape Kennedy as they rehearsed one of the steps designed to take man to the moon. Grissom, Chaffee, and White were buried on a clear wintry day in Arlington Cemetery. Both Lyndon and Lady Bird attended the service. One photograph showed the president bent almost double shaking the white-gloved hand of eight-year-old Shelly Chaffee.⁵²When Lady Bird stopped to offer condolences to White’s widow, the young mother pulled her down and said, “Please tell the President that Ed loved him. Now will you remember to tell him that?”⁵³

 

BY1967, the war in Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s principal preoccupation, not merely because American lives and treasure were bleeding out all over that land, but because the course of the war would have a major impact on the future of domestic reform and especially the Second Reconstruction. If the war could not be won, it would have to be managed in a way that kept the conservative coalition from joining hands with disgruntled liberals in gutting the administration’s domestic programs and foreign aid. As 1967 began, some commentators suggested that the Johnson administration was having to fight two wars: one in Vietnam against the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong and one at home against opponents of the war. Johnson continued to believe that he could not withdraw from Vietnam over the objections of the hawks, and he could not take the land war to North Vietnam and interdict Soviet and Chinese supply lines running into the enemy’s heartland, both because that would risk a wider war and because it would completely alienate the doves. There was another possibility: that hawks and doves, both convinced that the war could not be won or that the administration was unwilling to do what was necessary to win it, would join forces and compel American withdrawal from Southeast Asia. They would in fact unite behind the neoconservative vision of Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover in which the United States would forswear a military presence on the Asian mainland and be content for its defense on a string of island bases stretching from Japan to the Philippines.

In truth, by 1967 LBJ was willing to accept the communization of Indochina by peaceful means. “He is prepared for a cease fire and phased withdrawal of all combatants in Vietnam,” James Reston, a not uncritical observer of the president, noted in theNew York Times. “He is willing to dismantle American bases in that peninsula; he is in favor of neutralization of all Southeast Asia, and he is prepared to let the peoples of South and North Vietnam decide their own political future even if this means a coalition with the Communists.”⁵⁴What Johnson could not permit, under any circumstances, was the overthrow of the Saigon regime by force of arms. To do so would threaten the entire containment regime so painstakingly built by Dean Acheson and the Wise Men in the post-World War II era. If America chose to abandon rather than modify containment, it would soon find itself alone in a dangerous world. But for a variety of reasons, Hanoi, if not the NLF, proved unwilling to renounce the military option and to consider participating in a political coalition with the Saigon regime. For fear of destroying South Vietnam’s will to war and alienating the hawks forever, LBJ could not speak openly of neutralization. So Bill Fulbright, Walter Lippmann, and George McGovern did not believe that he truly did want to turn the war over to the Vietnamese and let matters take their course. To his mind, LBJ would have to continue to steer a middle course between appeasement and Armageddon until either the communists and Saigon agreed to a coalition government, or Hanoi’s will to war evaporated, or a hawk-dove, neo-isolationist consensus materialized. In the meantime, thousands of young men, white and yellow, were fighting and dying, thousands of civilians were being incinerated, maimed, and rendered homeless. “Now is indeed ‘the Valley of the Black Pig,’ ” Lady Bird recorded in her diary on January 5. “A miasma of trouble hangs over everything … It is unbearably hard to fight a limited war.”⁵⁵

 

AS1966CAME TO A CLOSE, heavy fighting in Vietnam was increasingly concentrated in I Corps, the northernmost part of South Vietnam that bordered on the demilitarized zone (DMZ). North Vietnamese main force units had massed just north of the border, periodically thrusting southward to isolate and decimate ARVN positions. U.S. marines and Special Forces engaged the enemy, inflicting heavy losses, but were frustrated by their inability to strike across the border into North Vietnam and Laos. So frustrated, in fact, that General Westmoreland’s command began to develop plans for an antivehicular, antipersonnel “barrier” to be built along the southern edge of the DMZ extending into Laos. The barrier would consist of mine fields, concertina wire fences, sensing devices, foot patrols, air-mobile troops, and constant air reconnaissance.⁵⁶Meanwhile, the fighting on the ground continued. The first week in October, American casualties had soared to a record 142 killed and 825 wounded as marines attempted to clear units of North Vietnam’s crack 324B Divisions from the “Rockpile,” a rugged, seven-hundred-foot-high outcropping that dominated the main valley approaches to northern South Vietnam. A journalist embedded with the Americans reported, “As we thread our way along the ridgeline between the two hills, I notice a few bone fragments on the trail. Then dried, bloodstained Marine flak jackets and fatigues … we pass a skull on a stake at the side of the trail. A few yards further a crudely penned note on a branch says in English: ‘We come back kill marines.’ ”⁵⁷

On the other side of the country, the Vietcong headquartered in War Zone C, a tangled jungle tract in South Vietnam’s Tay Ninh province near the Cambodian border, continued to set up roadblocks, terrorize villagers, and operate a sophisticated system of tax collection. “We fight ’em, we pull back, we regroup, and we go back and fight ’em again,” observed Corporal Robert Lee Cotton of the 101st Airborne. “We get soft, and then we go jump off again for five or six days and kill 300, maybe 400 VC, and then we come back and sit on the hill for another month. I can’t say whether I’m for this war or not. I can’t say whether we should be here or not. But I will say this: since we are here, we can’t leave.”⁵⁸Lyndon Johnson could not have put it better.

 

SOME THREE WEEKS FOLLOWINGthe midterm elections, James Reston observed to Bob Komer that if the president did not settle Vietnam by the end of 1967, “the ensuing ruckus will tear the country apart.”⁵⁹Similar feelings pervaded the foreign policy establishment. “The time is ripe” for negotiations, Bill Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asian Affairs, advised Rusk just before the New Year. The American people were not prepared to stay in South Vietnam indefinitely. At some point, the citizens of that putative nation were going to have to pull their socks up and admit the NLF/VC to the electoral process. In terms of both political survival and ideological consistency, it was in the Johnson administration’s interests to see this happen. The task ahead, therefore, was to begin talks with the enemy—sure to be protracted—while South Vietnam grew stronger politically and militarily until at some point, hopefully before the end of 1967, it would be safe to involve the NLF/VC in the political life of the nation. The bombing of the North would continue but under close restraint. “If we are to pursue a serious negotiating track on a ‘package deal’ basis,” Bundy concluded, “we simply must accept that we will not hit politically sensitive targets, and specifically the Hanoi and Haiphong areas.”⁶⁰

American officials later tallied as many as two thousand attempts to initiate peace talks between 1965 and 1967. Some, obviously, were taken far more seriously in Washington than others, and all were tied up with decisions concerning the bombing of the North. Lyndon Johnson rarely had a conversation with an individual—and he had thousands of them—without an ulterior motive. He was determined to convince those with reservations about the war that he was going the last mile to secure a negotiated settlement and those who were committed to the struggle that he would never submit to a “dishonorable” peace. He would continue to bomb, but he wanted to show the doves that he was the image of restraint, that he would do nothing to precipitate a “wider war.”

At the same time, Johnson worked to prevent a revolt within his own military, which was having to fight a war knowing that it had the power to destroy the enemy but could not use it. In a November 1966 conversation with McNamara, LBJ outlined the position he would take on bombing: “I think if we’re causing ’em damage and they’re hurtin’ but we haven’t got their children’s hospitals afire and so forth, I think Moscow can say to Hanoi, ‘Goddamnit, this thing is getting awfully costly on you and on us and on everybody else. Let’s try to find an answer here’ … I think that this pressure must be as steady but—this looks like a contradiction but I don’t want it to be—steady but as undramatic as we can make it.”⁶¹

Johnson exhausted his advisers with endless conversations and meetings, demanding that both supporters of the bombing campaign and advocates for negotiations defend their positions. To those internal opponents of bombing, he played the hawk, and to the generals he played the dove. In so doing he hoped to squeeze every personal prejudice and bureaucratic interest out of them. He hoped that negotiations would succeed, that the enemy would weary of the war to the point of, if not surrendering, then agreeing to a mutual North Vietnamese—U.S. withdrawal from the South followed by free elections. Johnson believed that under the circumstances, given all of the factors that needed to be taken into consideration, he was doing the best he could. The casualties deeply distressed him, but increasingly he found the spiritual means to deal with the anguish and guilt. What infuriated him, at times unbalanced him, was the mounting criticism from liberals whose idealism had in no small part been responsible for the war and who now seemed to be determined to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats. Harry McPherson later recalled that this friend, Pat Moynihan, often spoke of Vietnam as being “ ‘our war,’ meaning the war of the liberal intellectuals really, because they were the ones who were most upset over the Eisenhower-Dulles massive retaliation policy. They were the ones who called for a capacity to meet limited wars and keep them limited. They were the ones who wanted the helicopters and the Green Berets, who thought that by a combination of this skillfully applied military power and economic resources and a commitment to political democracy, that we would settle just about any problem anywhere in the world.”⁶²Johnson truly believed that in Vietnam he was sustaining the legacy bequeathed him by his predecessor, the darling of his liberal critics. “I’ve tried my best to play fair with Jack Kennedy,” he told Larry O’Brien in 1967. “I think I have; my conscience is very, very clear on that point and I think on Vietnam that he’s right where I am and I’m carrying out his policy.”⁶³

The first week in January, Walt Rostow speculated that the North Vietnamese wanted “to get out of the war but don’t know how.” North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and his colleagues could not openly negotiate with Washington. To do so would risk a split within the communist Lao Dong Party and alienation of Beijing. The communists in Hanoi would have to have before them the minimum terms for a face-saving settlement before negotiations were acknowledged. He suggested direct communication between the president and Ho Chi Minh, either outlining the terms of such a minimum arrangement or setting up top-secret, face-to-face talks, or both.⁶⁴Johnson agreed to a strategy whereby in a letter to Ho, he would propose that the United States agree to an immediate halt to the bombing and a freeze on the buildup of military personnel in the South, in return for a commitment from Hanoi to halt NVA infiltration into the South. At the same time, through a variety of channels, the administration tried to signal Hanoi what an acceptable final settlement would look like. “Thus far the greatest unanswered question,” he told Mike Mansfield, “is whether they are prepared to see the third of their four points [unification of the country] settled by free, democratic elections in the South rather than by force.”⁶⁵

At the close of January, the beginning of the Vietnamese New Year, or Tet, Johnson authorized a four-day bombing halt and, through intermediaries in Moscow, sent a letter to Ho offering an indefinite suspension of the bombing and troop freeze in return for the closing of the Ho Chi Minh trail. After some delay, the North Vietnamese representative rejected the notion of placing conditions on a bombing halt.⁶⁶At the same time, Washington took advantage of a meeting between British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Alexey Kosygin in London to send a different message. If Hanoi would secretly agree to respond after a short period of time to an American bombing halt and troop freeze by de-escalating the war, the United States would agree to a “unilateral halt and freeze.” As a sign of good faith, the Tet bombing suspension was extended.⁶⁷In essence, the Johnson administration was pursuing the same tactic Kennedy had employed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, offering a hard and a soft choice to enemy simultaneously. But then, LBJ and his advisers got cold feet. The White House communicated through Kosygin and Wilson that if Hanoi accepted its soft proposal, it would have to allow the U.S. mission to announce that the communists were winding down the war and there would have to be instantaneous proof that this was indeed happening. “We will take whatever actions we can to verify it and to observe it by land, sea, air, tunnel, and everything else,” Johnson told McNamara, “that they just be sure they close down and do not one damn thing on infiltrating,” and this “within a period of very minimum necessary hours.”⁶⁸Wilson, who did not know of the direct, harder offer Washington had made to Hanoi, pled with Johnson to relent, but he would not.⁶⁹On January 12, without waiting for a reply from Hanoi, the president ordered a resumption of the bombing.

The degree to which Hanoi was seriously considering negotiations is a matter of speculation. “Pham Van Dong, chief figure in the so-called moderate clique, firmly believes that the war is going so badly for the North Vietnamese that if it is not ended in a matter of months, North Vietnam would need massive Chinese intervention,” the CIA reported. However, he and his associates feared Chinese occupation almost as much as American.⁷⁰Whatever the state of the DRV’s mind, it was still not master of its own ship. From 1965 through 1968, Beijing opposed any and every attempt at a negotiated settlement. As one peace initiative after another popped up on the radar screen, China pressured its tiny neighbor not to compromise. If cajoling were not enough, Beijing would threaten a cutoff of aid and even military occupation. The war in Vietnam, Mao and Zhou Enlai perceived, could do nothing but improve China’s international position. If successful, it would vindicate the concept of “wars of national liberation.” The conflict was tying down American forces and sapping its will, thus giving a fillip to other liberation movements. The war could also prevent the Soviet Union from turning the international communist movement into some kind of revisionist compromise with the West. Finally, Beijing feared another Geneva Conference where it would once again be relegated to a secondary position behind the traditional great powers.⁷¹

The Russians continued to prefer a cessation of hostilities in Vietnam, but they had to be very careful lest the Chinese get wind of any effort they might make to mediate peace between Hanoi and Washington. Mao could blame anything less than total victory on the cowardly revisionists in Moscow, thus discrediting them with those parts of the world still struggling to throw off the bonds of colonialism.⁷²In addition, if the Soviets were not careful, Kosygin and his colleagues believed, they would inadvertently turn North Vietnam into a communist Chinese colony. During their meeting, Kosygin had told Harold Wilson that 3 million Chinese soldiers were poised to invade North Vietnam if it showed any weakness in the struggle with the imperialists.⁷³Neither Hanoi nor Moscow wanted another Geneva Conference because, especially after the Cultural Revolution got under way, neither nation wanted communist China involved in any peace negotiations.⁷⁴

On the 15th Ho officially responded to LBJ’s letter: “The government of the United States must stop the bombing, definitively and unconditionally, and all other acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, withdraw from South Vietnam all its troops and those of its satellites, recognize the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and allow the people of Vietnam to settle their problems by themselves.”⁷⁵There would be no negotiations.

Suddenly, Johnson was consumed with anxiety lest both doves and history view him as inflexible, uncompromising, and deceitful. “I think it is extremely important that you not be put in the position of torpedoing peace again,” McNamara advised his boss. “And this is just exactly what Wilson would try to do to bring glory to himself. He had it all made, and you screwed it up.”⁷⁶LBJ instructed McNamara to draft a cable to Wilson praising him for his efforts in behalf of peace and reiterating that the United States would negotiate anytime, anywhere. “I think we ought to try to write a wire, and when Fulbright thinks he’s got you and getting ready to railroad you and sends you right to jail, you can read this wire and he’ll say, ‘I’ll be damned, you did all a human could.’ ” To Wilson, they should say, “ ‘I think you ought to pursue this, because you’ve done a noble job here, and I’m going to say so to the world, and I think that every freedom-loving person will admire it.’ And let’s just play this one for the record. And you be thinking all these things that we stuff up his bottom good and let him dilate before we shoot in the second one.”⁷⁷

It was all to no avail. Wilson subsequently issued a statement saying in effect that peace had been at hand but Washington had spoiled things by prematurely resuming the bombing.

With the collapse of Sunflower, as the early 1967 peace initiative was codenamed, the foreign policy team’s attention switched to the bombing, surely the most controversial and most studied aspect of the entire Vietnam War. As Rostow had put it in early January, “If we do not get a diplomatic breakthrough in the next three weeks or so, it probably means that they plan to sweat us out down to the election of 1968.”⁷⁸Westmoreland, General Wheeler, and the JCS continued to argue that any and all bombing was good. “The air campaign directed against North Vietnam is an essential element of our strategy for achieving U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia,” U. S. Grant Sharp cabled Wheeler. Indeed, he insisted the bombing had provided the “balance of power” that had kept the enemy from gobbling up large chunks of I and II Corps. U.S. and ARVN troops were outnumbered by NVA units operating just north of the DMZ. “A stand-down of air operations against enemy forces in or within supporting distance of the DMZ for even the shortest period of time would create the gravest of risks to the security of friendly force.”⁷⁹At his meeting with Johnson at the ranch in August, Westmoreland pled with the president at a minimum not to stop the bombing of supply lines and troop concentrations in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam from the DMZ to Vinh.⁸⁰

In late 1966, LBJ confided to several of his cabinet members that Fritz Hollings, newly elected senator from South Carolina, had taken a trip to Vietnam and then come in to see him. “He had been out in Vietnam,” Orville Freeman remembered LBJ saying, “had talked to some general who had told him the war would be won in a week if there was more bombing and that if Johnson would only give the go-ahead the whole matter would be taken care of.”⁸¹From the other side, Averell Harriman and his team, supported by Arthur Goldberg at the UN, pressed continually for one more bombing halt to jump-start peace talks. Statistics and world opinion were on Harriman and Goldberg’s side. Studies by both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that the bombing had destroyed much of the economic and industrial infrastructure of North Vietnam but that it was having little or no effect on the war. Moreover, “There is no concrete evidence that the air strikes have significantly weakened popular morale.”⁸²“There is no evidence that any significant portion of the population blames the Hanoi regime for the bombing,” Westmoreland’s intelligence branch reported to him. “Instead, US ‘imperialism’ is the focus of hatred.”⁸³

On December 21, 1966, the New York Times began publishing the first of fifteen dispatches from North Vietnam by Assistant Managing Editor Harrison E. Salisbury. His vivid reports detailed the suffering the bombing was causing in the North; in addition to those civilians killed and maimed by the air war, thousands were homeless and suffering from malnutrition.⁸⁴Just before Christmas, LBJ declared the area in and around Hanoi-Haiphong off-limits to American attack aircraft. His decision probably had more to do with public opinion than a desire to get negotiations on track. “We were just starting to put some real pressure on Hanoi,” Sharp complained to Wheeler. “Our air strikes on the rail yard and the vehicle depot were hitting the enemy where it was beginning to hurt. Then, Hanoi complains that we have killed a few civilians, hoping that they would get a favorable reaction. And they did, more than they could have hoped for … Let’s roll up our sleeves and get on with this war.”⁸⁵

Beginning in the fall of 1966, McNamara argued that the conflict would be won or lost in the South. He pressed not only for a timely end to the bombing but a ceiling on U.S. troop levels and a shift of responsibility for the fighting to ARVN. McNamara was undoubtedly correct; if the United States did not want to turn South Vietnam into a colony or the fifty-first state, the South Vietnamese would have to assume responsibility for their own fate. But as of late 1966 and early 1967, they were both unable and unwilling to do so. Saigon and environs were just starting down the long road to democracy—elections would not be held until August 1967—and the American decision to assume control of the fighting was undercutting any move the South Vietnamese might make toward taking the war into their own hands. From 1965 through 1967, South Vietnamese and U.S. aircraft dropped more than a million tons of bombs on South Vietnam, more than twice the tonnage dumped on the North. American fighter bombers staged retaliatory raids against villages suspected of harboring Vietcong. Entire areas of Vietnam were designated Free Fire Zones that could be pulverized indiscriminately. The expansion of the war drove an estimated 4 million South Vietnamese, 25 percent of the population, from their native villages. Some drifted into the already teeming cities; others settled in squalid refugee camps. Washington provided $30 million a year to care for victims of the war, but corruption drained most of this away before it reached the intended recipients. Thus, a large portion of the population was left rootless and hostile, a fertile breeding ground for the Vietcong.

At the same time, what went on north of the DMZ in late 1966 and 1967 was crucial to the course of the war. North Vietnamese main force units were tying down large numbers of U.S. and ARVN troops in I Corps. The casualties they inflicted contributed to growing antiwar sentiment in the United States. Hanoi’s ability to supply its troops and the Vietcong was crucial to the war effort. That ability in turn depended on a continuing flow of supplies from the two communist superpowers. Rostow’s World War II analogy was absurdly wide of the mark. There were no Axis superpowers immune from Allied attack sitting on Germany’s flanks ready and willing to resupply Hitler’s forces, as there were in Southeast Asia. As Clark Clifford remarked in a meeting with the president and Maxwell Taylor, “As long as the supplies continue to reach the troops in the South coming in from Laos, over the Northeast railway, through Haiphong Harbor, and down from Cambodia we can’t get the war over. As long as the faucets are on, we cannot reach our objective.”⁸⁶

There was another option. The United States could bomb the system of dikes the North Vietnamese had so laboriously built up over the years to control flooding in the Red River Delta. In 1967 the delta area and the surrounding plain where the dike system was concentrated contained 9 million people. Eighty percent of the rice grown in North Vietnam was artificially irrigated through the man-made system of waterways.⁸⁷Bombing the dikes would destroy one of the enemy’s principal sources of food. But the specter of thousands of drowned and starving civilians prevented the Johnson administration from ever seriously considering such a move.

Attacking Chinese supply lines and cutting the Soviets off by blockading Haiphong harbor also continued to be unattractive courses of action. The CIA advised the White House that “the Soviets would not enter the war directly unless American forces sought to physically occupy North Vietnam, but that Soviet convoy commanders had orders to shoot their way through any blockade.”⁸⁸Besides this, there was the whole issue of détente. NATO was still the bedrock of American foreign and defense policy, and prevention of an East-West confrontation in Europe was priority number one. Washington’s perception was that Moscow would have liked to have a compromise settlement of the war in Vietnam. Johnson’s advisers speculated that the Russians secretly hoped that a continued American military presence south of the seventeenth parallel would act as a counterweight to the expansionist Chinese.⁸⁹Why risk a confrontation with a blockade?

Communist China continued to be a dangerous enigma. By the opening weeks of 1967, the Cultural Revolution showed signs of running out of control. “From Mukden to Canton,”Newsweek reported, “the Red Guards marched and countermarched; sound trucks rolled through the streets spitting charge and counter charge; the airwaves rang with threats, cajolery and baleful maledictions; and on every city wall the battle of the posters raged on.” Trains all but ceased to run on schedule. Production at China’s huge Taching oil field, in Manchuria, dropped sharply when ten thousand student workers left for Beijing.⁹⁰Inevitably, the denunciations and humiliations, and ultimately the violence against intellectuals, bureaucrats, and even army officers, produced a backlash. Workers walked off their jobs in protest, and rural militias formed to fight the Red Guard. Mao, as one observer pointed out, despite his brilliance, was essentially a provincial. He had been out of China only twice, both times to the Soviet Union. What he seemed to want was perpetual revolution, which had as its principal goal his own glorification.⁹¹

What did the Cultural Revolution mean for the war in Vietnam? Why not take advantage of communist China’s distraction to press the war more vigorously in the north, even to the point of bombing Chinese supply lines? Still too risky. China might be weakened by its internal upheaval, the Johnson administration concluded, but it remained a military giant with a huge land army and nuclear weapons. Its very vulnerability made it dangerous. As all autocratic regime leaders did when threatened internally, Mao and his colleagues blamed outside forces for their domestic problems. Indeed, in an interview with journalist Simon Malley, Zhou Enlai insisted that there existed a tacit but increasingly strong antirevolutionary alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and that war between the People’s Republic and those two powers was probably inevitable.⁹²Even such an ardent advocate of bombing as Walt Rostow thought that it was far too risky to try to “close the funnel,” that is, blockade the North Vietnamese coast and bomb Chinese supply lines.⁹³Johnson continued to be haunted by the specter of a stray bomb that would escalate into a nuclear confrontation. Lynda would come in from a date and find him still up, he told senators and representatives at a congressional briefing. “ ‘Daddy, you look like you’re twenty years older. What’s the matter?’ And I said: ‘Well, we may wake up in World War III. Now, just sit down here and I’ll give you a little lesson in American history. Our planes are going into Hanoi and Haiphong tonight. And when they get in that harbor, that port, why some old Texas boy will be in the lead bomber and drop one right down a Russian smokestack. And we know what happened to the battleshipMaine , theLusitania , and a few things. And we might very well be in war in the morning. So it’s time to do some heavy thinking and deep praying.’ ”⁹⁴